Traverse Fantasy

I’m somewhat a connoisseur of cozy slop games. Ever since I played Harvest Moon (since renamed to Story of Seasons —don’t play games with me, kid) and Rune Factory via emulator in middle school, I’ve been trying to recapture the high of these Precious Moments looking baby farmer things. I followed Stardew Valley since long before it was published, and when it came out (though it was very impressive as a project and certainly fun) I wasn’t fully down with its aesthetic. Since it blew up, there have been so many takes on the formula that preteen me wouldn’t have had to download sketchy apps on my phone to scratch my itch, but a lot of them are lazy and sloppy and skirt by on there being now a massive audience for what have become known as “cozy games”. My favorite entry in the genre (far from being slop) is Fields of Mistria , but it’s in early access and PC-only, which means I can’t play it on my coral Switch Lite. So I was in the market and found a game which, though its premise doe...

Oh my God. That’s her. How about a double feature, baby? Black Athena It’s hard to explain to people how fucked the field of Classics is. There’s a guy who almost exclusively writes articles about how the Metamorphoses does not depict rape on the part of the gods and is actually about art and how it captures its object (uhh). There’s an article from I think 2015 which goes back and forth about whether we should see Greece/Rome as exceptional or not, because they obviously are (mhm), but it’s not woke to say that; and it’s written by a guy who argued that the Greek alphabet was invented (i.e., modified from Phoenician) specifically to record Homer’s poems. I was grateful to have had professors in college who weren’t freaks and saw that corner of the ancient world not as exceptional but as prototypical, and not because our “civilization” originates from them, but because they dealt with the same problems and questions as us—as did other people throughout the world at different points...

I’m considering this post to have been co-authored by my partner. She had seen the movie closer to when it had come out, and she told me it quite frustrated her because it felt like a movie gesturing towards a big statement—about school shootings in particular—without actually committing to a statement and doing something totally different instead by the end of it. All I had heard was that it involved children being turned into actual voudon-style zombies, and was surprised that what I thought was part and parcel with its premise was more like a twist out of left field. She didn’t spoil the whole thing in case I wanted to watch it later, but it took me a while because I am not super into horror movies (I would say except that now since horror has become the statement genre, but…), and I only just got around to it this weekend. Oh boy. So, it’s certainly trying to gesture towards school shootings, right? The narrator’s opening monologue clearly evokes the community trauma of a classroo...

Alright, my babies. We need to talk about Attack on Titan . I’m not an anime head but, in 2013, the same friends who showed me Sword Art Online also showed me Attack on Titan which was that year’s big anime. I watched it, and so did a lot of others—cultural phenomenon—and I feel like a lot of us forgot about it (or, like me, just don’t follow anime bullshit) when the second and third seasons came out years later from 2017 to 2019. Ruben Ferdinand, months before the premiere of the third season in 2018, published a blog post about the story’s fascist aesthetics , as if the author was drip-feeding Hitler particles to his audience. A lot of us took it at face value, in my case because I wasn’t watching the rest of the show and the first season was already fascist enough in hindsight, with or without the analysis submitted by Ferdinand. Polygon picked up the baton in 2019 and extended Ferdinand’s analysis to the twist ending of the third season : that Eren’s father Grisha is a neo-fascis...

Joseph B. Tyson argues in  Marcion and Luke–Acts: A Defining Struggle  that the canonical version of Luke's gospel and the heretical gospel of Marcion, which was supposed by some proto-orthodox writers to have been a mutilation of canonical Luke, in fact both derive from some earlier proto-gospel from which Marcion omitted some things and to which the author of canonical Luke–Acts added other things as a polemic against Marcionite theology. Based on the book, which I found mostly compelling and an interesting companion to James R. Edwards’  The Hebrew Gospel and the Development of the Synoptic Tradition  (which argues that Luke is based primarily on a now-lost gospel written in Hebrew, rather than being a synthesis of Mark and the hypothetical sayings compilation Q), I tried my hand at reconstructing what a draft n -1 of Luke's gospel might look like . It was a fun exercise and one which resulted in a very satisfying and thematically cohesive gospel narrative. I...

The vocabularies of certain Indo-European languages encode a memory of a social taboo against speaking the name of the bear. Germanic languages famously (although not quite accurately) are thought to refer to the bear as “the brown one”. Slavic languages seem to use a term derived from the phrase “honey-eater”. Baltic languages call them “hairy ones”. D&D retroclones operate on a similar principle. They avoided speaking the name of the devil (that is, whichever particular D&D edition is being emulated) for license reasons, but signal euphemistically to the reader which edition is being lifted. Old School Essentials in one printing refers to itself as being “styled after the beloved games of the 1970s and 1980s” but it’s very specifically a retroclone of the 1981 D&D Basic/Expert rules. My own Fantastic Medieval Campaigns is “a new version of the ruleset for fantasy wargaming campaigns, first published in 1974”—but “the” ruleset in question is the original 1974 D&D...

Alright, my babies. We’ve heard from the ‘orthodox’ Marxists from the DSA . We’ve heard from the crypto Marxist-Leninist party . Now let’s hear from the Maoist-tendency Marxist-Leninist party, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. I have a friend who had visited a meeting in his current city, and the main thing with which he walked out of there was that they on one hand are really into the Kingdom of Hawaii, and on the other hand think that American Indians (whether on a collective or tribal basis) haven’t yet developed a national consciousness with which they can act as a nation to bargain for self-determination. It was just my luck that he had told me about this after I had already bought their program—but having been spoiled, I was all the more excited to learn about how big of a deal this really was for the party and about what other weird hills they had to die on. How did the FRSO come about anyway? Freedom Road has a proud past. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a...

I had a dream a few nights ago. Maybe you can help me. I was taking someone to a childhood favorite bakery of mine—not a real place, just in the dream—and I was very excited. However, no matter where I stood at the counter, the workers there would either ignore or heckle me while serving others. Eventually, even the other customers became frustrated that I was standing there even though I obviously wasn't welcome there. Some time passed, but then someone I understood to be the owner came out and apologized to me. He said that they might not have what I originally wanted—it was so busy and they were running out of goods, I remember in particular slices of cookie cake and a fried sheet cake which they iced like a donut and sliced into long rectangles, none of this making any sense—but that he was going to give me a box and I could pick out anything I wanted. I woke up and felt melancholy. A dream is a dream, but I understood intuitively what my mind was trying to communicate through ...

One of my friends is also really into Euphoria , and she had sent me an audio message saying that if I missed Euphoria —don’t we all?—that I would also really like The Idol , another artistically curated show by Sam Levinson with Abel Tesfaye ( the Weeknd ) both substituting for Labrinth and casting himself as the antagonist, nightclub owner and cult freak Tedros, opposite Lily-Rose Depp as Jocelyn, a child actress turned pop star (think Britney or Miley). I hadn’t yet watched the show because I had only heard it received negatively since it first aired, but I trusted my friend’s good taste and then was almost immediately enraptured by the visuals, sound, and story. What were people complaining about? First, I have to give Levinson his flowers. His writing and direction have a certain effect on viewers to make them identify actors fully with their characters, for better or worse. Often when I talk about Euphoria , I attribute the depiction and development of characters fully to the a...