utilitymonstergirl

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I did not listen to anywhere near enough new albums to make any meaningful "Best of the Year" judgements, but here are some albums I enjoyed and have something to say about:

UNKILLABLE ANGEL (Ada Rook)

Discussed here.

Dead Channel Sky (clipping.)

clipping. is back on their sci-fi concept album bullshit, god bless. This album is a bit uneven for me, but at its best, it has some very sharp things to say about historical memory and lotus-eating and getting by in a world strangled by technocrats. Also, it's frequently grimly funny as hell, and Daveed is a great style-chameleon.

Favorite Track: The most fun track is Code, but the best artistic achievement is Welcome Home Warrior; Daveed and Aesop Rock as two delightful dorks chopping it up on one of the album's most guttingly bleak tracks. Why bother with the intractable problems outside when you can just play hero in a walled garden?

Stardust (Danny Brown et al.)

Discussed here.

try (DOOR EATER)

I'm glad that both Ada and Devi have kept busy with a bunch of other projects post-breakup, and this is a fascinating collab album between Ada and Lauren Bousfield. It doesn't have the seamless duet chemistry of Black Dresses, but it's not trying to; this isn't Run the Jewels, it's Scaring the Hoes, two subculturally-acclaimed weirdos playing off each other for a dozen-plus tracks. They've also made an eight-minute metal track with all the lyrics taken from Proust for the Castration Movie soundtrack; shine on, you baffling motherfuckers.

Favorite Track: I really dig laughter as a look as what a fairly accessible, danceable track looks like from this team, and it's still Like This.

SISTER (Frost Children)

Porter Robinson's digipop throwback SMILE! :D just wasn't working for me, and the reason clicked when he got absolutely washed by Frost Children's feature toward the end. Recession-pop resurrections work best when they have an edge of obnoxious fagginess that couldn't have been at the forefront in the early 2010s, and Porter just doesn't have the sauce. But Frost Children certainly does, and it's on full display in SISTER, an album displaced in time from my middle-school years now that I realize I'm not Too Good For This.

Favorite Track: WHAT IS FOREVER FOR is swinging for the God-damned fences and by golly, it works. Transsexual Ke$ha is all I really wanted, I suppose.

Constant Companions (Deluxe Edition) (Jamie Paige)

Jamie Paige is one of the best English-language vocaloid producers working today, and she's made a tour de force that freely flows between her voice, seven different vocaloids, and a stable collaborators. She has a great knack for lyrical flourishes that avoid being too-clever-by-half Nerd Songwriting, backed up with leitmotifs and humor and vulnerability. Also, shoutout to her work with FLAVOR FOLEY, her music circle with Vane and Ricedeity that has produced my second-favorite song about cannibalism.

Favorite Track: I love how ROT FOR CLOUT plays on Kasane Teto's indignant-failgirl reputation with some gutting emotional depth. i don’t like what’s at my core / pray to god to fix my soul / but i don't need god’s forgiveness— / i need yours.

Revengeseekerz and ♡ (Jane Remover)

God, this album fucks hard. it's a hell of a showcase of Jane's skill and energy while still preserving the DNA of their Dariacore projects. How are they seven years younger than me. Who authorized this.

Favorite Track: Jane came out as an unnanounced guest for Psychoboost at the emotional climax of the Stardust show I was at. It can't be anything else.

//

This R&B-inflected EP has a lot of juicy Themes around navigating heterosexuality as a semi-famous transfem. I feel like they'd have a lot to discuss with Sabrina Carpenter.

Favorite Track: I hooted and hollered at the Philadelphia Train Station jumpscare in Flash in the Pan. Wonderfully melancholy jam, too.

I Love My Computer (Ninajirachi)

I think that once you make a beautifully glossy pop song about wanting to fuck your computer, you become an honorary trans woman. It adds some nicely jarring texture to this set of nostalgia-jams, along with Infohazard's reminiscing about coming across snuff videos. She's already gotten Frost Children to remix the computer-fucking song; I have high hopes for her Chappell Roan-style skill of Trojan-horsing freak shit within approachable pop production.

Favorite Track: I am the perfect demographic mark for iPod Touch, and putting it right before Fuck My Computer is really damn funny.

Neighborhood Gods Unlimited (Open Mike Eagle)

I haven't yet delved much into Open Mike Eagle's back catalog, but this is a wonderfully weird set of reflections on alienation in all its forms. It's funny, bittersweet, cutting, dark, surreal, and pensive, often all in the space of one song.

Favorite Track: after half a decade straight of working retail, me and Aquil stealing stuff from work is a big fuckin' mood. I have had plenty of Wack Check Burgers in my time.

GOODNIGHT HYPNOPOMP (Stomach Book)

I didn't listen to this album in full until after I saw her perform live - hell of a show, full of joyous trans kids half my age who get to grow up with stuff that came out when I was in college or later. This is a great jam for when I'm in my chuuni theater-kid bag, and it's been a great jumping-off point into the Crash Blossoms Clique expanded universe. Shoutout to Rural Internet for making an album featuring both her and RXKNephew.

Favorite Track: BAMBI takes this title on the strength of a banger verse from zombAe, another great discovery I've made this year.

Love & Ponystep (Vylet Pony)

I liked Girls Who Are Wizards well enough, but this feels like the fully-evolved form of what it was reaching for. The sick wubz and recurring producer tags and Lore are all still here, plus so much more: copious Call of Duty samples, recession-pop pastiche and interpolation, Lenval Brown (the Disco Elysium narrator) talking with a pony named Top Five Videos. As the Nostalgia Threshold starts to absorb the 2010s, this is a beautifully earnest showcase of all its most glorious trash.

Favorite Track: I'd be disgracefully lying if I said anything other than Dual Headed Hydranoid. Who else is doing 2012 club-rap about curbstomping Rainbow Dash. Bouncing on that Betty / Tac insertion, hold me steady is a stunningly tight transbian sex/military hardware joke; I wish I could write Replaceable Parts gags that good.

If you think you're unworthy of life
If you're tired of just playing nice
If you're looking for one light of hope
Inside the last days of Rome
Well, you can come with us tonight
Maybe you can recognize
There's still some life inside these
Bones, dry bones, in American towns...

—Car Seat Headrest, The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)

While it's true that Danny Brown left so many sons behind, could fill a group home, they do have a noted tendency to become daughters. Some of the foremost among them have joined in on his Stardust tour: Underscores, Femtanyl, and perhaps an unannounced guest if you're lucky.

I saw the tour on its Chicago stop as my fourth concert this year, following Alice Longyu Gao/Tommy Fleece in May,¹ Femtanyl/Metaroom in June,² and Stomach Book/Girls Rituals in September.³ This had by far the best balance of enthusiasm for the openers and main event; calling them 'openers' even feels like selling them short, with a dynamic and energy closer to a festival lineup.

Femtanyl and Underscores make a great yin-yang pairing: the weird kid in the Machine Girl shirt who can command a stage with the best of them, and the puckish pop star who is not-so-secretly a huge dork. My first Femtanyl show was all-ages, which impressed on me how much of a landmark artist she's become for a lot of kids in such a short time. Even in a much bigger 18+ crowd, P3T and KATAMARI and GIRL HELL 1999 still went hard as hell;⁴ I see her on track for being a fixture at festivals while still preserving the energy of a grungy basement show.

Underscores⁵ is a master of pop songcraft, but like Girl Talk, this is because she loves the form as it is rather than trying to save it from itself. Her set opened with Locals (Girls like us), the cuntiest dysphoria jam since FACESHOPPING; hearing a whole crowd belt out STOP / ME IF / YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE: / GIRLS / LIKE US / ARE ROTTEN TO THE CORE dislodged something deep within my soul.

Danny's set began with no stage banter or buildup, just launching right into Starburst with infectious energy. After the first volley of Stardust tracks, the setlist took on a narrative arc about how working with weird fags will save your life. He played a run of hedonistic bangers from XXX and Old and Atrocity Exhibition, which now feel safely past-tense rather than an active crisis. Midway through is the inflection point, Ain't it Funny and Scaring the Hoes: confronting your own worst failings and the fear of others' disdain before any true growth is possible. We emerge from the katabasis with Psychoboost,⁶ featuring surprise guest Jane Remover. In my opinion, this is the best of Danny's recent collab tracks, and its energy was perfect for this point of the show. The crowd lost its goddamn mind; hollering WHOSE DICK YOU SUCK, NOW? at the emotional peak of the show felt phenomenal.

Hearing Stardust tracks live in a crowd is a fundamentally different beast from hearing them on headphones, or even playing them at work. Copycats and Starburst and so on go hard as singles, but a lot of tracks work much better within the flow and context of the album, and even better in a setlist that can pull from across his career. The songs from the darkest times in his life can now be approached as relics, and Stardust is an album striving to make itself a relic too: yearning for a world where bringing on a dozen queer collaborators for a major album is unremarkable, where the features here have evolved from up-and-comers to established icons. Not a passing of the torch - he's clearly got a lot more to say with his career - but spreading the flame tenfold.

It's been said that this turn towards experimental and electronic-dance sounds didn't come out of nowhere; Old had features from Purity Ring and Charli XCX back in 2013. Hell, Atrocity Exhibition was named after a Joy Division song. But I don't think the queer resonances came out of nowhere either.⁷ Danny's always been stubbornly weird, even losing a deal with G-Unit in 2010 due to his fondness for skinny jeans. He recognizes that same spirit in queer artists, as he's said outright:

Even now, thinking about who I wanted to work with on Stardust, I was seeing people like Jane Remover⁸ and Underscores and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get them to work with me. I was thinking, Why ain’t nobody else working with them, though? Is it because of all of this trans shit that people don’t wanna embrace them? That made me wanna fuck with them even harder, because I’ve always been about that. When I first came out, people were hardcore judging you based on what you look like instead of judging the fucking music. Those artists are making the sickest shit out, so that was my goal: to shed light on that scene.⁹

As slippery as the concept of "trans art" may be, I think that broader cultures beginning to take it seriously is inseparable from trans rights as an urgent political cause; transphobia as not just offensive but pathetically uncool. I've seen the claim that the birth of "poptimism" is inseparable from the mainstream acceptance of gay rights, since the bar for critically-lauded pop music often came down to "do the gays like it?" Poptimists of the 2000s re-evaluated the homophobic backlash to disco, and now trans artists are plundering the most critically-derided genres of that era and winning accolades for it.

In 2002, Pitchfork reviewed Kylie Minogue's Fever as a joke. In 2025, it gave Love & Ponystep a higher score than Let God Sort Em Out.

So, what now? A long rest after the marathon tour, for sure. But I hope that Danny follows the same trajectory as Denzel Curry: "I made my introspective concept album, now to call up all my friends for some fucking bangers."

1. I was delighted that the Stardust show's interlude playlist included Let's Hope Heteros Fail, Learn, and Retire.

2. I spotted a girl I briefly dated and a friend-of-a-friend I mainly know through furry cons, because we truly are just Like This.

3. I thought "oh, that girl setting up the merch table has tattoos that look like Devi McCallion's— wait a goddamn minute." (The other girl at the table was zombAe, which I didn't realize until she got onstage for BAMBI.)

4. Live Femtanyl shows are an interesting proposition because on their recordings, the vocals are glitched and bitcrushed and used as just another instrumental line, like a fucked-up and evil Nujabes. Thus, I know the flow of these songs by heart, but very few of the actual lyrics, so I'm just sort of hollering nonsense to the beat.

5. Underscores' current headphone-hair-dye style looks great on her and probably literally nobody else.

6. A song that literally opens with it feels like you a part of me, part of me, part of me...

7. Anecdotally, I first heard Danny in a Spotify playlist made by a friend in my queer youth group circa 2014.

8. He's also said that Jane inspired some of the production on Scaring the Hoes, especially Fentanyl Tester. I absolutely see it.

9. This reminds me of Nabokov's position of "segregation is bullshit, Pushkin was black and he's the best to ever do it."

women will go on a 1st date with a guy and things will be going well until the guy casually mentions that he's bi and she'll go home and start posting stuff like "we need to normalize being straight" and "whatever happened to beauty" and meanwhile the guy went home to play video games with a bunch of weird discord transsexuals and he named his character 'the grungler' and he keeps saying stuff like 'check it out guys, I'm the grungler'

—@bonkey_bong, 12/6/22

After a run of features with all the most exciting gay nerds in music today, Danny Brown has invited them all to his new album Stardust.¹ He's spoken about getting into 100 gecs during rehab, and quickly exploring the broader hyperpop-et-al scene as soon as he came home. He's lent his manic double-time energy to Psychoboost and M3 n MIN3,² been introspective about recovery on Bird W/O Nest, and meshed with throwback pop on G.I.R.L. and Shake It Like A. And now, on his first post-rehab album, he's doing all that and more at the same time.

//

The first three tracks lay out the interplay beautifully. Book of Daniel is a blindingly earnest ode to rekindling your love of life, with a soaring outro from Quadeca. If you're starting to worry that the album's going to be catastrophically schmaltzy, Starburst swoops in with a squealingly weird beat and the funniest bars on the album.³ It ends with the first of several poems from Angel Prost, which I'm still not quite sure what to make of. Next, Copycats is an airtight pop earworm of acidic self-loathing, with production and choruses from Underscores.⁴ She's already notched a remarkable career at 25: a buzzy bedroom-pop debut, a breakout genre-hopping concept album about the economic and spiritual hollowing-out of a fictional Michigan town, and now a turn toward relentlessly sleek Y2K-reconstruction pop.⁵ Her style dovetails beautifully with Danny, and it's very cool to see him interpolate some of Spoiled Little Brat.

I'd only heard of JOHNNASCUS through his verse on a FUKOUNA GIRL remix and a shoutout from zombAe, but he gives 1999 a jaggedness unlike anything else on the album, with an Angles Cut Me When I Try To Think-type beat. It's an interesting dip into techno-dystopianism, where even the braggadocious first verse has bars about the dot-com bubble and The Compulsory U2 Album. This track sets up the most oldhead (affectionate) stretch of the album; here Danny is a man out of time, an old-school purist but refusing to stagnate, referencing the Zoot Suit Riots and Kangols on a truly hoe-scaring beat.

Flowers is Danny at his most dad-jokey, with a whole verse of flower puns, but by God he makes it work. Lift You Up then provides the full oldhead package, a pristine 90s house beat with sage advice on how to stop being such a self-sabotaging loser. It doesn't fall into preachiness because he's clearly talking to his younger self, too:

Think you need to get your ass up off the couch
You ain't never outside, always in the house

And from XXX's title track:

I never leave the house, ain't slept in three days
Poppin' pills, writin', drinkin' and smokin' haze

But that's the thing, isn't it: even if you're trying your damnedest to Work Hard, if you have no sense of how to rest or nourish or engage with the rest of the world, you won't accomplish shit. Add in substance abuse, and things get dark fast. But anyway, pivoting right from this to another Angel poem starting with "essencemaxxing" just cracks me up.

Green Light is... a very sweet song about road head. Hm. It's a collab with Frost Children, who are all about channeling the sleaziest side of recession pop, but there's absolutely no irony or Freak Register. It reminds me of the Twerk/Mr. Blue Sky segment of All Day, a celebration of joyous, life-affirming horniness.

It clicks into place better with the next two tracks, forming a trio of love songs with drastically different tones. What You See is about the parallel tasks of getting sober and taking women seriously, tied together with Quadeca's wrenching chorus: I wanna know what you see in me / I wanna know what you need from me. Once you recognize your faults, you can't just spiral into useless shame over them; you need to trust in your moral judgement and capacity to improve, or else you'll just treat everyone as your confessional priest or worse.

Baby strikes the balance of horny and sentimental with another assist from Underscores. I've seen this called the least structurally-interesting track on the album, but I disagree: it's the control group, showing that this team could make normal-sounding pop and are choosing not to. It's pretty neat in its own right, too, with a delirious forward momentum that reminds me of Love Again and bars from new-to-me queer rapper Rodney Chrome.⁶ He gives it a delightful boost of libidinal fagginess, and Danny's more restrained lyrics still have some delightful vocal stims; I can't lose when you're on my TEAM will be echoing in my head for years.

If this album is an elegy for SOPHIE, then Whatever the Case is the fucked-up and evil twin of Yeah Right. The feature here is ISSBROKIE, among the best of the white gen-Z tgirl rappers, but I respect her more than I like her.⁷ While she has her⁸ share⁹ of bangers,¹⁰ I just don't click with the bulk of her work, but I am a decade removed from her target audience;¹¹ I would've been a huge fan (and probably had some Realizations earlier) if she'd been around when I was in high school. But I'm still very impressed with the network and audience she's built, and I have high hopes for her career.

Anyway, she does a great job here in the role of an up-and-comer who can be as crass and gonzo as Danny's ever been; a gen-Z tgirl Danny would open a verse with a Bad Dragon joke.¹² God willing, this can be her Nicki-Minaj-on-Monster-style breakout.¹³

1L0v3myL1f3! threw me off at first; this much joie de vivre on a Femtanyl beat is such a swerve from most of her usual themes. But that's the point, innit - Black American music and trans music are both just casually expected to perform pain and anguish on demand, and while that's a necessary thing to convey, sometimes you're just fuckin' happy for once. Femtanyl would've been right at home on Atrocity Exhibition, but she's just as equipped to kick off the cathartic climax of the album. (I appreciate the deranged vocal sample and guitar feedback at the end, too.)

NNAMDÏ adds some melancholy wistfulness to RIGHT FROM WRONG; even when you're proud of your recovery and basking in hard-won optimism, there's still the mourning of mistakes and lost time. The End maintains that tone,¹⁴ with the bluntest verses yet about his history of addiction and the jagged path out of it. And despite all this, he hasn't turned into a stiff unfunny moralizer because that would be its own type of surrender. as Angel puts it, can we enjoy something before we crest and sink into sleep forever?

Lastly, All4U has Jane Remover's production on the polar opposite of Revengeseekerz's finale. That track was a blast of caustic resentment for the pressures of their audience; Danny is profusely thankful for his. He's already made a searing statement on crowds guffawing at his worst suffering, but here his audience blends seamlessly with God. It's an extension of What You See - you have to trust that you're still capable of growth as both a person and an artist, and he ends this album by consecrating himself to both.

//

So that's Stardust! I've jokingly pitched it as “a concept album about sobriety and loving life and fatherly wisdom, but don’t worry, it's also got a bunch of weird faggots.” But the sobriety and the faggots are inseparable; digging into the most vivid, fascinating music of in any era will inevitably turn up a lot of them. With a new lease on life, doubling down on the craft and joy of music will quickly put you among them, and recoiling from them would be just another type of suicidal stagnation.

Stardust is not, explicitly, a Political Album. It doesn't have a Same Love or an Auntie Diaries¹⁵, but that's because it would make no sense - the queers aren't some distant Other, they're right here on both sides of the booth. The allyship is expressed by letting us fuckin' cook. And it worked - the reactions I've seen have been a delightful split of "holy shit, it's [feature]!" and "who the fuck is [feature], because I need to binge their discography right now."

And it's... this album won't save the world. I still stand by my messy feelings about the visibility of queer art. But it feels like something, a win on some scoreboard that matters, to have art this faggy be this well-built and well-received.

I have a ticket to see Danny and Underscores this Sunday. I'll report back on that soon.

//

1. Given the Kendrick and Earl features on Atrocity Exhibition (on one of the all-time-great Evil Faggot Beats, no less), this album does very funny things to the music industry's degrees-of-separation chart.

2. I am delighted that M3 n MIN3 proves that Danny is familiar with Ram Ranch.

3. It's a four-way tie between In Bruno Magli shoes, I'm leavin' tracks Orenthal; I'm lockin' up the game, like punishment from your mama; Punchlines weak, like puttin' water in ketchup; and So when I get up on 'em, I'm stealin' shit like Winona.

4. I first heard of her through Vylet Pony's praise of Wallsocket, and between that and the horseshoe cover art I briefly thought it was going to be another pony fandom concept album.¹⁶

5. As a trans woman utterly mortified at the thought of ever dancing in public, it's been very cool to see her dancing front-and-center in the video for Do It, even with a whole secondary video to teach the choreography.

6. Good lord can he make a music video.

7. SoundCloud-rap sex brags and dick jokes from a bi trans girl: A Fascinating Text On Gender^TM

8. I fucking adore this zoomer using a Dr. Strangelove sample as a producer tag.

9. The cover art to this one made me think Lil Darkie was transfem for a hot minute.

10. Given how three of these are collabs or posse cuts, I think she's at her best when she's playing off of other weirdos.

11. "If you can’t look at their names without getting annoyed, then they probably weren’t making music for you anyway, and I say that as one of the people who couldn’t look at their names without getting annoyed." —Tom Breihan

12. Though the flow is a bit overstuffed in places, the run from "bitch, you disgust me" to "feeling like Buffy" is immaculate.

13. Seems like people are broadly digging it, but it was very funny to see NME call it "marred by the casual flinging of the F-slur." Did You Not Get The Memo.

14. I love the audacity of having multiple verses in Polish and Ukrainian on the grand climax of your otherwise-completely-English concept album.

15. Though Danny wisely chose not to write an Ally Anthem, I would trust him to write a song about being horny for a trans woman, and a bar like "I got more dolls than Mattel" would be funny as fuck.

16. Vylet's on my wishlist of future Danny collabs, along with Backxwash, clipping., Devi McCallion, GODHANDUSA, Kneecap, RXKNephew, and zombAe. And while it was the right call for the pacing and focus to not have any posse cuts here, my God, he could arrange some bonkers lineups now.

All three times I've gone to Midwest Furfest, there's been a guy standing on the corner outside the venue. He's got tactical gear and a bunch of far-right flags and insignia (but no weapons that I've seen), trying to goad passers-by into starting shit. A few people heckle or argue, but by and large they roll their eyes and get on with the convention.

For at least three years, probably more, this man has made the decision to stand outside all day in Chicago winter just a stone's throw from over ten thousand people having a great time being cringey gay dorks. At any time, he could set down the flags, buy admission, and enjoy the con in good faith. Instead, he chooses over and over to lose the game on turn one.

I admit, I didn't have much exposure to Mr. Kirk's opinions, but I don't think I missed much. Baffling closet cases like Orson Scott Card aside, bigotry just isn't psychologically interesting. But what gets me is the consistency of it, how he made it his job for thirteen years to wake up every day, know the better, and choose the worse.

I have no reason to believe he would have ever changed that, but now that possibility is gone forever. I will grieve that there wasn't more to grieve.

At time of writing, Silksong releases in about 36 hours. About a week ago I got a gamepad for my computer and, to make sure it worked, gave Hollow Knight another spin. I'm happy to say it does; I beat the main storyline with a moderate amount of side-goal fucking about, and along the way was reminded of how beautifully the game handles atmosphere and storytelling.

Much has been made of Hollow Knight's esoteric Lore, but I'd like to keep it to the things you can observe on a casual playthrough: the very first text in the game is this very Kipling-y poem:

In wilds beyond they speak your name with reverence and regret,
For none could tame our savage souls yet you the challenge met,
Under palest watch, you taught, we changed, base instincts were redeemed,
A world you gave to bug and beast as they had never dreamed.

After a brief tutorial, with message tablets addressed to "higher beings", you open the gate to "the last and only civilization, the eternal Kingdom, Hallownest." The first main area clearly lays out the imperial style: well-paved, industrialized, tasteful blue-gray.

The first boss is a tiny maggot puppeteering a massive suit of armor (hm.) After that, you learn your first spell from a snail shaman whose home is utterly unlike any architecture thus far. In the next area, imperial roads are quickly swallowed up by lush foliage, and tablets are full of wariness and hostility towards the kingdom - this land is under the protection of a different being, Unn.

After fighting one being who resembles you and looting the corpse of another, the game truly opens up. Down below, a warrior clan of mantises still honors their contract with the king, holding the line against deeper horrors. The capital city is still under quarantine, but once you find a way in, the royal splendor makes a strong case for itself. The most fascinating area within it is the Soul Sanctum, a cathedral-laboratory obsessively searching for a cure to the plague. The low-level enemies within it are called Mistakes and Follies, and the boss sits atop a deep pit of civilian corpses swarming with them.

Much later on, near the King's palace at the bottom of the world, you must fight a possessed corpse that resembles yourself. Lower still, past a gate that needs the King's personal seal to open, is a chasm full of many, many more of those corpses and their restless, resentful spirits. They are called Siblings.

God knows that this game does not present a robust theory of political economy, it's a Metroidvania that prioritizes tone and mood. But they clearly put thought into this, the push-and-pull of power centers and resource flows. I look forward to how Silksong evolves this theme, in a living kingdom with a protagonist who can talk.

"games are special.... because we... have stories to tell..."

*montage of third person combat in unreal engine 5*

—Tumblr user cdigoddess, 6/6/25

The two monologues that open Half-Life 2 are a brilliant pair of counterbalances: a surreal personal address from a man outside of time, and a recorded spiel from Earth's most spineless collaborator.

Control wants very badly to be Half-Life 2, just as much as it wants to be the SCP wiki and House of Leaves and Annihilation. We open with an overcooked monologue from the protagonist, then a fantastically sharp and clever in-universe document that never gets a satisfying followup. The tone is set early.

I originally had Roadside Picnic in that list, but I took it out when I realized that its absence is the problem - having clear inspirations is fine, but it's so incurious about what made them work or inspired them in turn. It doesn't care about Picnic's reflections on race-to-the-bottom exploitation. It doesn't have Half-Life 2's slow-burn atmosphere of an ecosystem ruined by both biological warfare and pure neglect. It gathers the vibes of a dozen better stories in a sleek midwit package that feels like a forgotten straight-to-Netflix show.

...I know this is a harsh opening, but the game was still compelling enough for me to finish it in under a day. There's a lot to like; I love how the only qualification to become the Bureau director is winning the approval of a supernatural shapeshifting gun only called 'the Service Weapon'. I love how being chosen by the Mandate-Of-Heaven Glock still doesn't actually give you any security clearances. I love how The Board's dialogue is only given in uncertain multiple-choice translations of wildly varying tone and implication. I love the decision to make the wise mystical janitor the most Finnish man of all time.

The above details sound like the bones of a great deadpan dark comedy, but it's held back by three central problems: the refusal to let anything funny, mechanically weird, or politically biting take center stage. There's a missed opportunity for a hat trick right at the start: as soon as you get the Service Weapon, painted portraits of you appear throughout the building. I thought this was setting up a thread about how the current director retroactively becomes the only director the Bureau has ever had, and you'd have to bluff your way through discussions of institutional lore while untangling the death of a man whose existence is known only to you. But no; the other staff accept your authority simply because they know how the succession process works, not out of any supernatural compulsion.

Scattered documents hint at a Dr. Strangelove-style farce about clinging to jargon and procedure and petty office politics at the end of the world, but none of the characters we speak to summon much of that feeling. The panopticon manager is kind of a schlub, Ahti the janitor is wizened comic relief, but that's about it. Our protagonist gets a few deadpan gags, like wondering to herself if Ahti is Swedish, and only remembering at the game's end what movie she was trying to recall in the opening monologue. The live-action clips of lead scientist Casper Darling have a charming goofball-science-teacher energy, but the premise of "Bill Nye being deeply complicit in black-ops atrocities" never gets developed much.

Speaking of, the game is shockingly apolitical for being set in a branch of the US government devoted to shady off-the-record shit in a world where Jungianism is objectively true. I don't need it to go as grim as The Department of Truth, plumbing all the most rancid implications of Alex Jones being a stakeholder in the fabric of reality, but I wish it did something with the Bureau being shaped from below and ruled from above by hateful paranoiacs. There's one slightly-kooky radio snippet, one genuinely-really-funny Havana Syndrome gag, but the main antagonist is an absolute nothing and the hints at the Bureau's own faults feel pretty toothless. The Bureau isn't good, but its failings don't feel like indictments of anything beyond itself.

The gameplay reaches new heights of Perfunctory; the firefights got quite tedious even with the "enemies all die in one hit" setting active. (And honestly, I feel that my Excalibur-Beretta should be able to one-shot anyone anyway.) You get showered with finicky little upgrade-baubles and crafting currencies at every step, like an online looter-shooter but single-player and with no microtransactions. I held out hope that this was part one of a brutal deadpan joke, that this unimaginative toolkit is completely unprepared to deal with the Oldest House, but the only mechanical swerve comes as too little, too late. In a sequence right before the finale, you're plunged into a personal Hell where you have to perform a few rounds of tedious gofer tasks as a disrespected intern, but then it's right back to gunplay for the final fight (and, as qntm pointed out, it isn't that much more tedious than some of the actual sidequests).

All in all, a game about the inscrutable never risks letting you be confused; much is made of the Oldest House being a shifting maze, but it never changes behind your back and the map screen remains perfectly accurate. The developers are so God-damned impressed with their multimedia storytelling no matter how clumsy it gets, and I suspect they'd be much better off making films or movies rather than letting thoroughly bland gameplay take up so much space. But I must commend them for this: Control's frustrations have burrowed deep enough in me that it's practically an infohazard.

Helloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Mr. Visa,

I could not help but notice that your "Tele-Phone" infrastructure has become utterly unusable as of late. Perhaps you are in need of more switchboard gals? I certainly hope you can resolve this before you are unable to help victims of, say, identity theft.

So thus, I am left with no choice but to "Snail-Mail" my concerns. In sum: I am joining the war on degenerate perversion on the side of degenerate perversion. Regardless of my opinion on any particular work of smut, I fail to see how it is any of your concern what pictures are bought or sold, unless they are, say, a private citizen's home address with an incitement to violence. You and "Master-Card" say you have conducted an audit and banned law-scoffing "Video-Games"; which laws have been broken, and by which games? I demand an itemized list and a fair trial in a court of law.

And even if you do permit individual bans to be appealed, it is not an artist's job to prepare a book report for a hostile jury; it is their job to speak truth, craft beauty, and, indeed, following the precedent of Diogenes, "Crank One's Hog" in the public square.

I know I am not alone in my concern. Many such civically-engaged perverts, along with friends and allies, have been contacting you and yours on this matter. All we ask is that you stop rolling over for extralegal censors, and to stop hand-wringing over your precious "Brand-Image"; if anything, it is worse now than before.

Speaking of image, it is curious that payment processors take no issue with a consumer electing to buy a copy of Ulysses, or a "Game-of-Thrones" "Box-Set" of "Digital-Video-Discs". From this, we can conclude that the verdict of "Irredeemable Porno-graphy" is rendered largely on the basis of aesthetics, or "vibes," if you will; any self-appointed judge who says "I know it when I see it" (Potter Stewart, 1964, Jacobellis v. Ohio) will be catastrophically wrong in both directions. Is Michelangelo Buonarotti's David not a bold expression of the sculptor's taste in men? Is Porpentine Charity Heartscape's Serious Weakness not a cutting portrait of the violence our world seeks to make invisible? Is Daleport996's "Sink-Dog" not a joyful tribute to the perversion inherent to domesticity, and vice-versa?

I assure you, I take no pleasure in talking your ear off like this. I would prefer to return to being an amiable scholar-pervert, just as I am sure you would prefer to return to matters of commerce. But so long as your industry forms an extrajudicial cartel with massive power to censor, it will from time to time be necessary to petition you for a redress of grievances.

I believe this petition has gone on long enough.

The next one may be longer.

-Alexi

The cool thing about having a lot of artist friends is getting to see a lot of unreleased or unfinished work being tossed around casually, as if it was just another average part of their life, since obviously for them it is. At the same time, though, even though these artists will share this stuff with you freely if you're, as they say, 'in the know', you get the feeling that they wouldn't want it to be seen this way to the larger audience they're creating for - as something that can be placed into the context of a life.

—Car Seat Headrest, Is This Dust Really From The Titanic?

I never thought UGLY DEATH would feel soothing and optimistic, but here we are.

Ada Rook released a new album, UNKILLABLE ANGEL, the day after the Grammys. It's her first solo album since 2023's God Cum Poltergeist, and her first since the breakup of Black Dresses the previous May.

To be clear, I have no desire to sift through this for Drama Lore. While several tracks of ANGEL are condemnations of people once close to her, they're much more Mr. Morale than Not Like Us. Taking sides in strangers' social schisms remains deeply distasteful and unhelpful, and I will discuss the album with as little reference to this context as I can.

Much of Rook's solo work involves the binary-star themes of raw vulnerability and "you don't know me and I'm not your friend." Taken alongside her porn career, there's an implicit message of "I'd rather you jack off to my tits than my trauma." Watching her videos is far less intrusive than trying to sleuth out every subliminal in her songs, and while I can't know if she feels totally unconflicted about making porn, hand-wringing moral anxiety over it is exactly the kind of presumptuousness she'd hate. Ultimately, it's just that music isn't uniquely authentic, and porn isn't uniquely exploitative.

Okay, onto the album.

We start off strong with cortisol_inside cortisol_explosion excessive_cortisol cortisol_everywhere, with a title riffing on e621 tags about cum. As harsh as it was, UGLY DEATH started with easing us into its soundscape; no such mercy here. The thesis statement is as blunt as ever, though, but brash and confident rather than withdrawn and spiteful: wanna fuck me up? wanna call it love? / you can do what you want cuz i know what im not. It lays out the soundscape of the album nicely, too: a similar palette to UGLY DEATH but faster, harsher, and bringing in some new vocal samples.

PARTY TIME SEXY DISORDER is a grim reflection of 5H4D0W H34R7Z; we've gone from "freedom is meaningless if you can't crash the fuck out" to "what else would I even use it for?" I wanna be best friends and stupid sluts has become i wanna get fucked up / i wanna fill you with cum / i wanna lose the respect of everyone i love. And as raw as this is, there's still the reminder not to get overfamiliar:

everybody wants sympathetic light
traumacore doing numbers on spotify
everybody wants to be so hardcore
like you're real? that's great
i'm fake and it's tight

RAT KID LIFESTYLE feels akin to GRAVITY WEAPON, the track that'll go hardest at a rave. That SQUEAK SQUEAK audience bit will fuck tremendously.

ALL Tails Deaths Animations reminds me of The True Legend of Tails Prower from her friend/collaborator Porpentine, a harsh queer reimagining of Sonic lore with the immortal opening line i feel like if anyone gets called a brain slur in the Sonic universe it would be Tails. i think Tails has a learning disability. But here, we've flipped from transfem Tails to Tails being a more appealing option than being transfem: i guess i am a girl / but if i was miles prower / i'd detransition in a heartbeat. (The connections to Rook in a Sonic costume are left as an exercise for the reader.) It's got a wonderfully anthemic chorus that calls back to TRU U:

running screaming into the night
im over chasing the light
im gonna force my own way
you're a coward or youre out of your mind
and i dont wanna be right
cuz u will see me someday
something waking deep in ur heart as u stare
wish u could follow me u could never

//

THAT'S RIGHT, MOTHERFUCKER:
INSIDE YOU'RE LIKE ME!!
YOU SHINE SO BRIGHTLY
IN THE FREQUENCY THAT ONLY FREAKS LIKE ME CAN SEE
I CAN SEE YOU LIKE A DEER IN HI-BEAMS

You're no longer just in the gutter together; you wish you could climb into the gutter.

I don't have much insightful to say about RUINESS, but it's another banger with a hell of a chorus. It's apparently named after a Porpentine game that I haven't played yet, but neither has Rook.

CLOUT STRIFE parallels COWARD 2 COWARD, the bluntest frustration with parasocial fawning: as she's said elsewhere, When the pressure is on / All the attention looks the same. Niche subcultural fame can be just as crushing as A-list fame; being a big fish in a small pond gets suffocating fast.

The YOURSELF quartet is the most pointed and personal set of breakup songs, and so it's what I'm the least comfortable digging into. weed store kratom and holding your sleeping body... continue the theme with more introspection; the latter feels like an even more harrowing version of asphalt. I don't think I've listened to holding your sleeping body... in full more than once or twice. It feels like transgressing some boundary that should stay inviolate, but I suppose that's the point - if you want drama so bad, here's the most excruciating closeup of it possible.

sun's violent arc is the hard-earned happy ending. It might feel trite from somebody else, but it hits hard with its callbacks to songs like MY HEART BEATS OUT OF TIME and 666:

never found a place i belonged
always too weird, not weird enough
the cracks are deep
and i'm still falling it's just
a fact of life and of love
but i'm okay cuz you're falling with me

and i've caused so much pain
made so many mistakes
but when you're there
i am someone better
and though the haunted days
can never be erased
when i'm with you
they are only weather

I don't know who this is about. I have no business knowing that. But I have no doubt that she means every word.

This isn't a review; I can't pretend to be remotely objective about this. A week after this dropped, I had a great time listening to it front-to-back during a trans-Pacific flight to see Lum. It's been a lovely addition to my music library on trips through the city. I'm happy that Rook has gotten back into making music this year, what with naiad and DOOR EATER, even though she'd be fully justified in dropping off the face of the Earth forever.

What if Yorgos Lanthimos made What Happens Next. What if a Porpentine story got to become a feature film.

This movie gazes on human society like an ant farm; it is a world where actions have causes but not reasons. Everything flows from the edicts of Law and Capital and Conventional Wisdom, no matter how senseless or horrific. The ending feels like a pat cop-out until you think about all it implies. It's got a diegetic Ada Rook needle drop. It's fucking Kino.

Being cute was a mistake
Being likeable instead of insane:
A straight line to ruin.

—Black Dresses, earth worm

There's a decade-old post from Kontextmaschine, a fixture in Posting Valhalla*, that I think about a lot. It opens thus:

You know, I think a lot of modern internet culture war shit goes back to the ‘60s-‘70s (counter)cultural refoundation that both sides claim lineage from. ‘cause there’s a sense it was sold as something for everyone - women, racial, and gender/sexual minorities would get their civil rights and inclusionary movements recognized, in return straight white guys got the consensus that Cool People agree: sexualization is Correct, being offended is Incorrect. And there’s a growing sense (from all sides) that the terms have not been upheld.

[...]

You have Left Hand of Darkness, with LeGuin all “gender fluidity would be great; we could experience our true selves independent of mutilatory social structures, and it would give rise to meaningful new cultural practices oriented around the beauty of self-discovery and self-crafting”.

And then there’s Varley’s Eight Worlds, which is like “Just imagine, if perfect sex changes were consumer services like haircuts, you could experience banging-hot hetero sex from both sides!"

The term Something-For-Everyone Liberalism has been stuck in my head ever since. Uncharitably, you could call it "representation matters! :)" with an edgier coat of paint, and God knows that this is no substitute for serious materialist activism. But still, I think the term is gesturing at something real and worth fighting for.

Culture-war shitstirrers have used "DEI" as their all-purpose slur substitute for a reason: it's the most unsympathetic corporate-buzzword term for the concept of caring about other people. But I think that these folks can only imagine diversity as boring HR shit because they are absolutely not seeking out, let alone getting invited to, anything more interesting. There are a million things cooler than Pronouns 101, but nobody's gonna show you Porpentine when you haven't passed the "don't call people trannies" module.

But a lot of people who pass that test fail the next one. The casual, centrist bigot tends to think of demographics beyond their own as distant abstractions, rather than real people who can hear them. This can easily become a feedback loop where nobody from those groups wants to approach them, and so they never pick up on the subtler cues of cultures unlike their own, and their world stays small and homogenous and they keep complaining about Forced Diversity. But then a miracle happens, the loop breaks, and they realize that the [slur redacted]s ain't so bad after all. But they still haven't met very many of them, and so their support is for a largely imagined and unseen population.

I can tell when somebody is engaging with me as an avatar of a political battle rather than a human being. Whether I'm being treated as a cute endangered animal, the Virgin Mary, or a confessional priest, it fuckin' sucks and I generally say "please redirect this energy to brutalizing Ron DeSantis." I haven't encountered any in the wild yet, but the Protect the Dolls T-shirt is the perfect summation of this aesthetic. The slang-appropriation isn't great, but my main objection is that while I'd trust someone with this shirt not to hate-crime me, I would not trust them to take me intellectually seriously.

Okay, I have vented the piss and vinegar, time for a tonal beat switch.

One of my indulgent pleasures in The Current Era is reaction videos of people not especially tapped into queer art cultures being blown away by weird faggot music**. As they get acclimated, there's a delightful sense of queerphobia as not just offensive, but devastatingly uncool - they understand that you have to be able to fuck with queers to engage with a lot of the most interesting art being made today.

And good lord, there really is so much of it - every time I turn around, my friends are buzzing about another album or game or comic bubbling up from this scene. I love contributing and tending to it, and not just altruistically. After a day of being cluelessly misgendered or underestimated, it is vital that I can come home to an art culture with no interest in defending or explaining itself. Obtusely high-context, fearlessly transgressive, funny and angry and horny as hell.

But then, the catch. For all that I try to reject respectability politics, there's the deeper-rooted weed of exceptionalism politics. I may be proudly big and weird and clocky and championing queer art, but I still have the gnawing urge to be some artistically brilliant beacon for my community (and maybe some incidental outsiders). This is not unrelated to how I'm one of the oldest and longest-transitioning people in my regular social world, even though I'm not even 30.

If this tendency goes unchecked for too long, it can become a sort of photonegative respectability politics: "something for everyone" except myself, full of something to prove about our brilliance, devoid of any genuine connection to what I'm making. Even worse, it can slip into advertisements for being the cool, fun, edgy transsexuals you'd like to hang out with and thinking that outsiders' consumption is equal to love.

The best outcome of that arc is to become Florence***. Its iconic treasures were created as desperate defensive measures during the most hellish years of the Renaissance, shoring up both internal legitimacy and external prestige. It has been successful to a fault: the city has had a feedback loop of winning the self-promotion game, becoming a gravity well of preservation and scholarship and investment drawn away from the less-glamorous cities with just as much to teach. It was even treated astonishingly gently by all sides in World War II.

During the war, Mussolini made a point of showing off the Uffizi to Hitler.****

Well, sure, we can't control our legacies, and baby-proofing everything against bad-faith analysis makes for vastly worse art. And there are certainly worse fates than ending up like a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I've seen it with my husband, and I shared in his longstanding love of the city. But to be held in reverent incuriosity, failures and biases frozen in amber, is not the future I want for my culture.

And the outcomes can get much worse from there. Making acclaimed art is no guarantee of prosperity or safety for you or your community.*****

I don't have good answers for how to handle this on any structural level. All I know is that trying to morally shepherd the world sets my brain on fire, and I was greatly touched by the central theme of Lent, a superb historical fantasy set in Renaissance Florence: set down your Messiah complex and just reach out to your fellow damned.

///

*The Lore: Kontextmaschine was a guy who had some fascinating Takes as well as some generally repugnant might-makes-right politics. He claimed that getting COVID made him much more outgoing and also bisexual, then he described symptoms consistent with a brain tumor, then he didn't pursue any treatment for that and kept taking creatine until he died.

**Figure 1.

***This prolonged metaphor is based on Ada Palmer's book Inventing the Renaissance and various posts from her blog.

****In preparation for the visit, he also gave the city its unintentionally-funniest monument: big bay windows cut into the otherwise-assassin-proof Vasari Corridor, right above the very busy Ponte Vecchio.

*****Specific examples are left as an exercise for the reader.

Cosimo [de Medici] may not have the blood of Charlemagne, but he has busts of Caesars right beside the portraits of his sons, so our ambassador can feel the presence of a different nobility, which awes, intimidates, threatens (bronzesmiths don’t just make statues, they make cannons), a nobility which projects power and legitimacy but requires no blood, no title, only the ability to activate antiquity. The classical revival has turned antiquity into a language of power.

—Ada Palmer, Inventing The Renaissance

At the behest of my friends Pengy and Bee, I have finally played through Thecatamites' magnum opus Anthology of the Killer. It defies easy summary; I will make broad gestures and hope that they will suffice.

Cate Wurtz, Stanley Donwood, Life in Hell, Jed Haas, Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. A countercultural disgust with the crassness and stupidity of the evils bearing down on us, uninterested in either pat answers or cheap nihilism. Sharp contempt for the brutal oligarchs of today granting themselves prestige by evoking the brutal oligarchs of antiquity. A sincere love of kitsch that extends far beyond the usual reference pools of internet culture. A bonus zone in the hub area has a list of creative influences that has no overlap with what I was reminded of; I hadn't even heard of most of them.

The games themselves are fairly straightforward walking sims with some well-integrated chases. They flow well - I was never stuck on where to proceed for more than a minute or so. The plots themselves have a lot of sharp and funny details I won't spoil, but the details feel almost beside the point; they're delightfully surreal meditations on power and art and violence, editorial cartoons as tone poems.

The world is as full of serial killers as the most paranoid tabloids would have you believe, but they all have the same passively self-serving rhetoric as the industrial-scale murderers. It's a good gag, and rather than get stale it keeps entwining with the violence and hypocrisy in every other facet of society. Even the final episode, the most bluntly textual about the series' themes, feels like a natural culmination rather than a heavy-handed spelling-out.

By now, I think you'll know whether or not you'll want to play this. I was worried it would hit too close to my genuine black holes of political dread, but I'm happy to say that it stayed propulsive and weird enough not to make me shut down, without ever feeling like it was mincing words.

Even if a collection of nine games sounds daunting, each one is about a half-hour at most, well-suited for a quick liveblog session with friends. There were times when I felt the need to screenshot every other speech bubble, and comparing notes on the cultural deep cuts we noticed enriched it for everyone. If you want something weird, funny, cerebral, pitch-black but still brimming with life, I highly recommend it.

Terrans tend to feel they've got to get ahead, make progress. The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One, feel that progress is less important than presence.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

It's been rare, these past few months, for me to be up for playing any game more cognitively demanding than Balatro. I broke free of the gravity well with Tactical Breach Wizards a few weeks back, and I just rolled credits on Sable, albeit with plenty of sidequests still undone.

Right away, the game wears its influences on its sleeves - Breath of the Wild, Wind Waker, Shadow of the Colossus, Journey, the art of Moebius. They're brought together in a sleek, restrained package that's very deliberate with what it leaves out: combat (or any way to die at all), gratuitous UI elements, dense lore drops, and the overall constant key-jingling of so many other open-world games. Sable trusts that slow-burn exploration and atmosphere will be enough of a draw; a derelict spaceship on the horizon needs no overexplanation.

I'm reminded of what mu suwi has written about pacing in games:

upy has been showing me ult‍rakill this past week... its so cool! though making me kinda overwhelmed/overstimulated at times, i get this feeling sometimes lately where a game is so desperate to be fun and instantly responsive and keep my attention at all times that i feel condescended to

you can't turn off the feature where if you press mouse 1 at the death screen it instantly respawns you and puts you back in full control within 1 frame of you dying and it's so disorienting. can you not bear to punish me with 30 frames of inactivity between attempts, game?? is that really too much?

i feel so insane for framing instant responsiveness like a bad thing but i don't want games to "respect my time" as much as i want them to respect my attention span

The existing mechanics are fine-tuned for this feeling too: this world is vast, and even an upgraded hoverbike will take a while to traverse it. Movement on foot is a little slow and clunky in a world not meant for your convenience. There is only one type of collectible doodad with a direct mechanical benefit, and it's up to you to find where to cash them in. The slow pace of the tutorial village feels like an homage to Wind Waker, but once the world opens up, the story and mechanics start to mesh beautifully.

History is over, more or less. There is nothing metaphysically special about you; you are going on a perfectly normal coming-of-age journey. (This is also a brilliant way to justify the "pursue the main questline or just fuck about for however long, up to you" nature of an open-world game.) There are still joys and sorrows on a personal scale, but nobody ever talks about repairing the broken spaceships strewn across the desert. A colossal statue on a bridge commemorates a grave betrayal, but it's hard to fathom anything that dramatic happening here again. The largest settlement around is just a few city blocks in size, and even its citizens are sick of the constant hustle.

Exploring the crashed ships reveals a bit of this world's backstory, but only a few fragments; I would like to have learned more, but I get that having a much deeper story would have required a completely different game prone to nightmarish scope creep. Besides, this is just our first coming-of-age trip; our dissertation can come later. Even the planet's name, Midden, is a grim joke with gravitas: an archaeologically-fascinating trash heap.

I'm impressed at the balancing act that went into making "indie Breath of the Wild" feel neither overstretched nor desperate to impress. This is a knockout first game from Shedworks, and I can't wait to see what else they make.

Machinery, Catharsis, Technology,
Ragtag, Transcendent, Slapstick...

—Underscores, Locals (Girls like us) [with gabby start]

I've been painting clothes and accessories on and off for a while now, but have recently stepped it up and offered them for sale to the general public rather than just for myself, friends, or giveaways at cons.

My artistic North Star here is to capture the feeling of furry and anime conventions, whether on the approach as you see more and more people clearly dressed for it, or the radius around it where there are people at Chipotle or whatever in full cosplay. You could call the style "chuuni formalwear," not literal cosplay but definitely playful costuming. I've stacked my own wardrobe in this direction over the past few years, and have felt much more myself for it. It also helps me be less rattled when I have to be around people wearing noxious political symbols - sure, some guy in the deli's got a MAGA hat, but I think my gay-club-flyer collage shirt wins the matchup.

Key Inspirations:

Yinka Shonibare does excellent work with textiles and fashion, with a signature theme of "headless mannequins doing ridiculous shit while wearing classical European fashions cut from Dutch wax." Those fabrics - English and Dutch imitations of Indonesian textiles that are now staples of West African and Black-diaspora fashion - are a versatile metaphor for the messiness of credit and culpability in a globalized age. I especially value how his work is often funny in ways other than "tastefully dry," a rarity in fine art; I love the materials list of Revolution Kid (Fox), and how sheer petty bitchiness is both the joke and the horror of Scramble for Africa.

Helvetica Blanc has a delightful style of "Occult Corporate Memphis," which has influenced a lot of the tone of my "occult-industrial" pieces. The numinous-yet-mundane, the garb of technicians jaded to otherworldly forces.

Nomad Complex is a brand that's ubiquitous at furry cons - the only places they set up physical storefronts - but which I don't think I've ever spotted being worn anywhere else. I have mixed feelings about their homogenizing effect on con fashion, but I can't deny that it's a well-earned success, or that I've taken stylistic cues from them too. (I finally caved a while back and got their Rise 'n Grind tank, but I want to balance the scales by wearing it anywhere but cons.)

Dustrial has carved a niche of tongue-in-cheek cyberpunk/industrial style, some of which is eye-rolling but a lot of which genuinely fucks. They've influenced my use of "visual technobabble," glitch effects, and recreating digital imagery in physical media across the board.

There are too many other inspirations to name, but one of the most important ones is just paying attention to peoples' fashions day-to-day and keeping an eye out for the glow of someone wearing their favorite outfit.

Some Core Principles:

It Should Fuck Hard At A Glance: I have a signature-glyph I've started using on every piece, but it carries no cultural weight and I don't expect it to. I can't get away with charging $50 for a sweatshirt with just that logo, so I want it to always take a backseat to whatever else the focus of the piece is.

I've also found a frustrating trend in researching streetwear brands, where the womens' section is often both smaller and has less interesting graphic design. As a woman with a tricky-to-clothe body who likes the gonzo shit, I want to rectify this in whatever small ways I can.

The Radical Acceptance Of Taking Some Ls: Every piece has either a willful choice I would've done differently now, or an outright mistake. Sometimes a stray drop of paint can be corralled into a happy accident, sometimes not, but working by hand in an irreversible medium requires you to accept a certain amount of imperfection. Honestly, it's been good for me to internalize this even when I do have access to Ctrl-Z.

Thematic Balance: When laying out design elements, there's a spectrum from "belaboring the point" to "throwing random shit together" that can be tricky to navigate. CJ the X's video with the Menswear Guy helped me realize why my un-cohesive designs fell apart: "dress is not an art project" in the sense that fashion is a series of social languages, and even if you're working in a very niche dialect it should still say something. (For context, right now I am wearing a Replaceable Parts-themed overshirt; I do not expect anybody to ever get the reference, but I had fun working in the design language of high-end Gamer Merch.)

So, I want each piece to have a clear throughline that still invites some playful ambiguity; two or three motifs orbiting each other, each adding something to the conversation without becoming a shouting match or talking past each other.

Orientation: I try to only put text running along a sleeve on the right side, so that it reads right-side-up and moving away from the body when the arm is extended. (Since starting this, I've noticed a lot of famous brands that put text upside-down on the left sleeve and it tilts the fuck out of me. Looking at you, Calvin Klein.)

However, there's some fun potential I haven't explored yet with putting left-to-right text on the right sleeve and right-to-left text on the right; maybe I'd start with mirror-flipped English, since I don't trust myself to do accurate-enough Arabic, Hebrew, or Japanese.

Speaking Of Languages: A friend who plans to permanently move to Japan offered me a very nice Machine Girl shirt because she knows she'd be endlessly clowned if she wore something with that much nonsensical Japanese around millions of native speakers. My work doesn't have that problem, because the language I use on my designs is the ancient, undeciphered Linear A. Its glyphs range from "elegantly simple" to "what the fuck"; it feels both primordially human and strikingly alien; it is language as pure aesthetic playfulness. It is my liturgical language for my love of the eternal conversation of art, each piece a prayer that this will be re-deciphered someday and we can all laugh at how silly my text turned out to be. (It also lacks the Orientalism of extant Asian writing systems and the many political landmines of Norse runes.)

On the industrial pieces, I like the gag of very urgent warnings in an unreadable language. On the webcore ones, they can summon the dread of literally-undecipherable error messages or the joy of a whole new world of data. I like the lil' fish-guy I've adopted as a signature/logo, especially how it vaguely looks like an Icthys while being a strange, jagged creature that predates Christ by a millennium and a half.

This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender: As I said above, my body can be tricky to clothe in the styles I want. I'm 6'4" with broad shoulders and tits that cannot bear anything form-fitting. I've got size-13 feet with wide fronts and high, asymmetrical arches and insteps. I like accessories like scarves and bracelets that can fit on pretty much any size, but those only go so far for establishing a style. Bit by bit, I've found pieces that flatter my figure and have designs I like, but it's often been slow going.

These projects have also stirred up thoughts about the slipperiness of the term "visibly queer." Whether or not I count as such is almost entirely down to what I'm wearing that day and what the people around me are equipped to pick up on. (I'm not terribly interested in overt pride symbols, I'd rather just have outfits that there is no cisgender explanation for, but even that can fall flat to a lot of people.) I'm uninterested in performing most feminine social scripts, I have a very low bar for when trying to pass feels like apologizing for existing at all, and so I guess I'm de facto "boymoding" unless I'm literally wearing a skirt (and even that often isn't enough.)

So fuck it, if I'm no good at performing "woman" then I can at least perform "Stand user" or "spaceport engineer." If I'm speaking a language nobody understands, let me make that literal and have some fun with it.

What Next: I've done some independent tabling at parks nearby, but this Sunday is my first actual market event for this. I'm excited; I've got a good inventory on hand already, and some WIPs ranging from "sketch phase" to "nearly done." I hope to connect with more local artists too, since this has been good so far for internalizing a sense of "people seem to like me and my work, I should do something with that."

I have no plans to become an entrepreneur for this; I want to make art objects with a minimum of getting bogged down in bureaucratic backends. Maybe I'll end up working for someone else, keep an eye out if streetwear starts to feature more esoteric glyphs in the future.

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body.

—Studs Terkel, Working

I finally played the indie horror sensation Mouthwashing, and I think I would've liked it more if its scope was either a little smaller or much bigger.

To be clear, there's a lot to like about Mouthwashing as-is: the blend of lowpoly models and dithering requires you to get uncomfortably close to make out fine details. It's neat to see retrofuturistic sci-fi that evokes the 70s, albeit mostly by way of The Shining and Alien. It's got wonderfully striking setpieces in isolation — the trouble is the game's identity crisis about how theatrical it wants to be.

Theater is an underdiscussed influence of these narrative-heavy, mechanics-light games. Both mediums are well-suited to playing with what is and isn't diegetic, and can tell stories with a vividness unavailable to film or prose. But like the songs in a musical, the gameplay in such a game needs to tightly complement the story and themes or else it's a pace-killing slog.

1000xRESIST was made by a multimedia theater troupe that pivoted to gamedev during lockdown, and the influence shows. Frequent changes in presentation, both diegetic and not, are all in service of a story about everything that never loses sight of why it all matters to the cast. It is a ten-hour tour de force about diaspora, memory, motherhood, and the refusal of history to end. It is Sleep No More set in a posthuman selfcestuous micronation that cannot escape the shadow of Hong Kong.

By contrast, The Beginner's Guide is a short, intimate one-man show. In an hour and a half, you tour a series of microgames as the narrator tells the tale of violating their (fictional) creator's trust and boundaries. In one sense, it's clearly "about" Davey Wreden's emotional rollercoaster following the success of The Stanley Parable; he voices the trespasser and created the works of the trespassed-against. It inverts the Parable by being linear, achingly sincere, and focused on the impact of transgressing against a person rather than a game. But The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe Edition also handles this catharsis by sharply asking what you'd even want out of a sequel. Without any knowledge of Wreden's other work, the Guide can be enjoyed as a gut-wrenching story of suffocating love.

The broadest strokes of Mouthwashing are suited to a similarly small scale: five characters stuck in close quarters, with an outside world that only exists impressionistically. Much of it has a structure like Perfect Blue, a tightening spiral of the same motifs in increasingly grotesque combinations, and those parts are the highlights.

The problems arrive with the setpieces that are more on the scale of 1000xRESIST. Being chased by a monstrous vision of your company's mascot is especially jarring - the company is thinly-sketched enough for the scenes to kill the pacing for little benefit. It's a generically callous shipping company that isn't as funny, nuanced, or truly heinous as its inspirations, so the nightmares don't do much to characterize it. A year-long journey with a cargo of nothing but mouthwash would be a great bleak, surreal joke with zero context, or a magnificently deadpan joke if the game unfolded the full economic context behind it, but we're stuck in the lurch between them.

Even the more plot-relevant vignettes can suffer from the same problem Pengy described in OMORI, with big wallops of "would that be fucked up or what" rather than quietly unfolding the more insidious horrors. Rearranging someone's guts (no, not like that) is already self-evidently gross and awful, but I want more of the restraint that Funny Games showed when it made a golf ball rolling into frame utterly bone-chilling.

I'm glad that Mouthwashing exists, and I'm optimistic that its creators will go on to make things that I feel more willing to praise. Given the stark, uncompromising vision on display already, I trust them to use the attention and resources well - either to make the over-the-top extravaganza of their dreams, or to polish a smaller experience to a mirror shine.

check your BREAK

3-4: You had to do it. You keep telling yourself that. You will bide your time. You won’t forget what she made you do. Their faces flash across your mind and you shake with terror and rage.
5-6: You cry in the corner of the vehicle. You can still see their faces. She says something but you can’t understand. You curl up and turn away.
7+: You are totally broken. you don’t remember your name or who you were. it seems like a dream. You follow numbly, absorbing everything she puts into you.

—Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Game Where She Forces You To Kill Everyone On Your Squad

Field Stripping, the collection of bonuses and B-sides for Replaceable Parts, is now available for download!

Cover: The title for this zine came to me midway through making Replaceable Parts, since it's both a fun gag and disassembly-without-tools is a vital part of the story.

Boys 0: Serious Weakness But With Girls is the blueprint for this, a highlight-reel retelling of the novel that plays with the different types of violence shown: Insul poisons the school cafeteria instead of shooting it up, for instance.

Boys 1: Starting off with a direct parallel, and the gag of mirror-flipping the architecture. (Note that I hadn't settled on the bristling-spire motif for the backgrounds yet.) I struggled for what the tooltip should be this time around, but the idea came hand-in-hand with the epigraph.

Boys 2: I like the trick of establishing how something works once and then shortcutting it as necessary. I did it with plenty of gameplay mechanics in the first story, and now I'm doing it with the story itself! I'm happy with how I introduced this method of corpsefucking, and with gradually teasing the new design for Sulfur. (The facial hair was a late addition but I think it does great work tying the design together.)

Boys 3: And here's Copper, with the extra gag of his eyepatch and bandolier being mirror-flipped. I took a while settling on his weapon, but a crossbow felt like a weird skill-tester in a different way than the bolt-action rifle.

Boys 4: Copper's still affectionately teasing Sulfur, but with a bit of a meaner, hornier edge. I'm glad I could establish a brocon dynamic even in this compressed retelling.

Boys 5: Sulfur doth protest too much.

Boys 6: The first line here took a while to come up with; I'm so glad that modern English enabled this gag.

Boys 7: Here we go, finally quoting one of the key source texts for this whole project! Bullet Wife is a short-story addendum to Serious Weakness, looking at what Insul's school-shooter utopia would actually feel like to live through. This is also where I settle on the bristling-spire motif, which I had used earlier in Solipschism.

Boys 8-10: The first big change in the story flow, killing a teammate rather than coming across their corpse. It felt like a good instance of petty masculine cruelty, and having an achievement for it is a fun bit of worldbuilding. Sure, achievements are often used as subtle tutorials, and this is a game where teamkilling can be the correct play, but Carbon's corpse is too far away to eat or loot - though he's also teamkilled Copper at some point in the past. Sometimes cycles of violence are upheld by grim necessity, sometimes it's just for completion's sake.

Also, I like going a bit wild with the designs for short-lived characters, both because I don't need to redraw the details a dozen times and to give them a sense of coming from their own equally-complex storyline.

Boys 11: I wanted this base to feel like a mead-hall awkwardly kitbashed out of blocky assets, and once I settled on that, I had to do the Beowulf homage of the arm hanging from the rafter. The epigraph comes from one of the most harrowing scenes in Serious Weakness, though seeing someone write to the author about how much it meant to them had a big impact on how I think about transgressive art. (The letter can be found here, it's the one starting with "I appreciate the anal sadism in ur work".)

Boys 12-14: Sulfur isn't just a witness in this encounter with the boss, he's made to take part in the initiation/hazing process himself. As in real life, joining a group built on violence tends to require committing some irreversible transgression.

Boys 15: I like making a morbid joke out of the inability to ever admit weakness.

Boys 16: I thought about drawing a panting, gore-soaked Sulfur, but the absence felt thematically stronger.

Boys 17-19: I had a lot of fun designing the genderswapped Uranium and Polonium, as described in the Behind the Scenes pages.

Boys 20-22: To differentiate this scene from the original, it's a real teamkill and not a disguised assassination, and building on the achievement theme to be paid off later.

Boys 23: I had considered this epigraph for this section in the original story, but it fit better here with the crossbow-bolt wounds (and the pussy joke).

Boys 24: Similar to the mead-hall at the base, I wanted this to feel like an oil rig kitbashed from chunky game assets in a semi-amateurish style. (Also taking inspiration from an oil rig being one of the settings in Game Where She Forces You To Kill Everyone On Your Squad.)

Boys 25-27: For this version of Copper's death, having him be murdered rather than accidentally die felt like a no-brainer, but the context around it took some work. The achievement gag reaches its rule-of-threes moment, but now it's just incidental to a fratricide committed for its own reasons.

Boys 28-30: As before, the payoff for Chekhov's Starting Melee Weapon. This time around, Sulfur even finds the words to say aloud! (I thought about having him spit on the head, to invert the cum spilling out of Copper's head last time, but it just didn't fit.)

Boys 31: Thanks to my friend Mal for suggesting Fictionpress as a deeper, sharper cut than Fanfiction.net. I had fun going for an atmosphere of "huddled close in the Computer Room" rather than "two gamers on a couch"; however, note that the design of The Egg hasn't changed at all. (Also, I didn't doctor that screenshot at all, beyond making it grayscale; there really were 17 results, albeit all false positives.)

Boys 32-35: This suicide-loop sequence was one of my ideas for the ending of the main story, but it felt a bit too drawn-out rather than ending on a strong single note. But here, it fit well with the theme of Sulfur exercising more agency while failing to break out of any of these cycles. It also plays nicely with the question of whether this retelling is fate, coincidence, or a deliberate reenactment. (My official stance on that question is "resounding silence.")

Boys 36-37: I'm very happy with the pile-of-corpses visual, and using the same sound effect for removing a clip as detaching a limb. Using this shorthand for the item-buying process also keeps the pacing of the scene tight (or maybe this Sulfur has mastered the shop's hotkeys.)

Boys 38: I knew there had to be some game mechanic to forbid infinite suicide loops, but I puzzled over how it'd eject you from the spawn room. Removing the floor seemed fittingly both inescapable and goofy.

Boys 39: The spires are now inverted! New map, new timeline, or what? (Also, more fun with Procreate's toolbox of glitch effects.)

Boys 40-41: Now it's Sulfur's turn to be a one-shotted Tutorial Corpse! This was also a fun chance to give the enemy team some more interiority, show them going through their own arc in which our viewpoint characters are the cannon fodder. I tried to give them sufficiently weird designs to match, with their own flavor of mentor-and-mentee.

Boys 42-43: I'm just really proud of that lip-licking panel. And while I considered a whole tableau for the final page, taking the same route as page 16 felt stronger, ending on "aw shit, here we go again" with no distractions.

About the Author: I really do have a magenta phlogiston-symbol tattoo on my sternum, which predates the first stirrings of Replaceable Parts by about half a year. I like the symbolism of an obsolete element in an obsolete system that were both important on the path to modern science, which also looks like some weird gender symbol and evokes the ACT UP triangle (and "flaming" jokes.)

I got my orchiectomy about a month and a half into starting the main story, and started testosterone to counterbalance some hormone troubles while drawing But With Boys. Mutilation-as-liberation, weird biochemistry, and genderfuckery were on my mind a lot throughout 2024.

The price gun is a gag about my retail job, and a plausibly weird weapon for a shooter like this; note that it never says anything about hitting enemies, if you want to turn a surplus of health (or teammates) into cash.

Behind the Scenes: I'm very grateful to everyone who egged me on from day one to make this project worse. And indeed, the change from the armory to the point-buy system was for the sake of having this world be unfair in the sense of "winners stay winning," rather than "you can walk out of the spawn room with napalm at the start of the game."

Strange Gaming Diary: Honestly, Pengy does brilliant game writing and you owe it to yourself to check out more than my flippant parody. But anyway, this was a fun opportunity to flesh out some of the metanarrative of the game without burdening the story itself with too much Lore; like Pengy, I think that it can be prone to bogging down art analysis with trivialities. I trust that the comic sufficiently conveys the mood of "edgy abandonware shooter propped up by weird perverts who imprinted on it years ago," and this essay just embellishes that for devoted readers.

Ultimately, this is me speaking to camera that you can only make good art based on tacky juvenile bullshit if you take its appeal seriously and are willing to put your stamp on it. Regardless of how in-on-the-joke the original devs were, the author is dead and we're fucking their corpse in every hole.

Fashion Week: I had this idea kicking around since the start of the zine, but it took several months after finishing the Strange Gaming Diary to actually execute it. This was partially due to being busy with other projects and Life Stuff, but I just didn't have a very compelling angle on it until I started caring more about my own outfits (and, secondarily, got back into playing TF2). I approach fashion like character design, assembling specific builds of color, silhouette, and tone depending on context - and I've tried to skew more towards dressing like I'm going to a furry convention.

These designs converged when I thought about dressing them in diegetic cosmetic items with goofy names, each outfit conveying a specific tone: the Sulfurs as bewildered noobs, the Uraniums as different types of jock, Phosphorus with a Cold War tfit to contrast Polonium's spec-ops style (and the tie works as a reference to strangulation.) I enjoyed making the Antimonies sexy in very different ways, and I just like golf clubs as a symbol of genteel phallic violence.

Terrible Comic Week: I really enjoyed this holiday created by Pseudonym Jones, and sketched this during a slow period at work. I wonder if Abridged Series are due for a nostalgic comeback soon.

Rotten to the Core: This is a reference to Locals (Girls like us) by Underscores, the song that showed me that I quite like puckish gen-Z girlpop if it's transgender. Wallsocket, the whole album it's from, is a masterful concept album about a hollowed-out Midwest town, which I highly recommend in full.

Back Cover: The Wizard War meme lives in my head rent-free and I'm glad I could adapt it here.

Shit man, this wizard war is fucked. I just saw a guy clap his hands together and say "the ten hells" or some similar shit, and every one around him turned inside out, had their tibia explode and then disappeared. The camera didn't even go onto him, that's how common shit like this is. My ass is casting frostbite and level 2 poison. I think I just heard "power word:scrunch" two groups over. I gotta get the fuck outta here.
—@devious-buffoon

...And that's Field Stripping! I'm glad I could finally get it over the finish line, and while I may play around in this setting some more in the future, I'm thrilled that the central body of work is now complete. But I've got more projects brewing, don't worry......

History has failed us, but no matter.

—Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

1000xRESIST is a brilliant, beautiful game, and has a specific moment where it went from merely admirable to gut-punchingly good. Discussing it will require spoiling a lot around the midpoint of the game, which is not the ideal state in which to play it.( If you have any temptation to do so, act on it now. )

Um, shoutout to Big Freedia,
New Orleans bounce music,
Every bitch track ever made for NYC drag balls in the 90s before RuPaul made being gay uncool,

—Black Dresses, GAY UGLY AND HARD TO UNDERSTAND

“Genius" and "auteur" and similar labels frustrate me for a range of reasons: they shut off serious engagement with art, they enable the worst abuses of superstardom, and they obscure all the close and distant collaborators that make art what it is. However, it's hard to push back on this without a good understanding of those partners, so I'd like to recommend some books that give great context on a range of art cultures.

Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, The Hip-Hop Producer who Reinvented Rhythm (Dan Charnas)

In many artist biographies, The Public is some vast inscrutable force that makes and breaks careers semi-randomly. This is an interesting change of pace, because while J Dilla worked with plenty of huge stars, he himself was mostly known to other musicians and music-production nerds during his lifetime. Thus, the book can spend plenty of time on his circle of non-famous friends and family (and some in the middle; Eminem is briefly mentioned as just another guy in the Detroit music scene, and Dilla is cagey with his girlfriend about the details of his job until she demands to know why he has a voicemail from Q-Tip.)

Honestly, Dilla's music that I've heard hasn't sounded that rhythmically strange to me, and I'm not sure if that's because I just don't have a trained enough ear for this or because I've lived my whole life in the era shaped by his production style. Regardless, the book has helpful graphs to lay out his innovations in microrhythm, along with technical details of how he achieved them. I appreciate how it rejects the easy narrative of Dilla ~soulfully transcending technology~; his machines' capabilities are inseparable from his own innovations.

From the Streets of Shaolin: The Wu-Tang Saga (S. H. Fernando Jr.)

We open with the socioeconomic history of New York, various Nation of Islam splinter groups, and everyone's childhoods before getting to any of the Wu-Tang's actual music. Yes, they're clearly huge nerds about martial-arts movies; it is also crucial that they're huge nerds about Nation of Islam-derived numerology. There are great accounts of the creation of their first wave of albums - the Shogun Assassin samples on Liquid Swords were a last-minute addition, and RZA insisted on watching the whole movie in the studio to find the most fitting lines.

This is also a fascinating look at the state of music promotion right before the internet, when it was crucial to get physical media into the right peoples' hands. In addition to electronics nerds, wordplay nerds, music-history nerds, and so on, I love the recognition of how hip-hop has depended on business nerds to end-run traditional channels of sales and advertising.

It's Life As I See It: Black Cartoonists In Chicago, 1940-1980 (Dan Nadel et al.)

This book can directly showcase its subject matter in a way the others can't, and it highlights artists across a range of genres: editorial cartoons, slice-of-life, gag strips, sci-fi serials, Afrofuturist sagas. Each artist is also given a writeup of how they entered the job, the publications they worked for, their clashes with editors. Some of them are even still drawing today!

Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical (Laurie Winer)

Hammerstein was active in the theater world from 1920 to 1960, spanning massive changes in the politics, culture, and economics of show business. The book demonstrates well how cultural ethics are a moving target - it has even-handed descriptions of his plays that were groundbreaking at the time, but require very different staging to be remotely palatable in the 21st century. (Or even to make sense at all; there's plenty to criticize in Carousel's gender politics, and Billy's striped shirt and neckerchief stopped conveying raw working-class masculinity pretty fast.)

I like how well the book shows the volatility of theater, where a show is only as good as the people who have to bring it to life night after night. Hammerstein had plenty of flops even during his most acclaimed years, but his work has endured on the strength of his note-perfect earnestness. (The author also has a delightful pet theory as to why The Sound of Music became such a classic even as his style fell out of favor, which I won't spoil.)

We Had A Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy (Kliph Nesteroff)

I love the spiral structure of this book, returning to the same people and locations years apart to track a century of influence and collaboration. It spans from Will Rogers' family history to the 1491s mocking Twilight, with plenty of artists frequently quoted at length.

Much like It's Life As I See It, the comedy ranges from community in-jokes to searing indictments to generally fucking around. It pushes back on ideas of who can make 'universal' art and whose work is always tied to their identities, inviting the reader to engage with these works as more than Very Special Episodes.

Honorable Mentions:

A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance (Hanif Abdurraqib)

This is far more personal than the more systematic books above, but it's a gorgeous set of reflections on a wide range of topics: how both World Wars shaped Josephine Baker's career, regional variations of Spades, the life of Sun Ra, grimacing through the homophobia of the only decent barber in town. Even beyond the poetic interludes, Abdurraqib's prose is clearly the work of a poet. I finished this in a day and return to it often.

Major Labels: A History Of Popular Music In Seven Genres (Kelefa Sanneh)

A delightful tour of the schisms, identity crises, and exploitations that made music what it is today. There's just the right amount of autobiography woven through it, grounding all the industry lore in the lifetime of a passionate music nerd. I've only ever lived in the era when litigating "real rock and roll" feels patently absurd, and I'm glad to have this guide to the era when that could make or break careers.

(With apologies to Princess Pengy.)

I know this is an odd case, since replaceable parts was a hyped-up mainstream game once upon a time. but while the franchise has sputtered out, unable to chart culture-war riptides, the original game has been Ship of Theseus’d into something worthy of this blog.

if you haven’t had the pleasure, replaceable parts is a team shooter in which naked trans avatars eat and fuck each others’ corpses to heal and level up. if this sounds like edgy controversy-bait, it’s not not that, but for a game from 200X it handles this all surprisingly well. the characters are nude in the same way that ancient statues are nude; their chalk-white skin with neon hair and guts evokes both the austerity of pop-culture antiquity and the tacky-ass truth. it's mechanically relevant, too - you have no storage space by default and must scrounge for every belt and bandolier.

the cannibalism and necrophilia get the same consideration. There are always tense tradeoffs - how long can I immobilize myself? can I afford the refractory cooldown? how much should I press my luck in the thrusting minigame? when's the right time to teamkill?

it all comes together into a taut gameplay loop (once you've adjusted to the era's design sensibilities) where deaths come quickly and often (just like you) but rarely feel unfair. explore the terrain, get a different gun, learn the timing windows, and you'll quite literally nab 'em with their pants down. fun, for sure, but once you adjust to the aesthetic it's not that far off from the rest of its genre.

now we fast-forward twenty years. the Dudes Rock expansion is a hit. Replaceable Parts: Sloppy Seconds has twice the rendering power and half the ideas. Ménage à Trois is an improvement, but faces both hand-wringing respectability politics and naked bigotry. the IP becomes radioactive in the public eye. the studio gets bought out, downsized, and unceremoniously dissolved.

but throughout all this, the playerbase of the first game grows up. they have some important personal realizations. they learn game design and computer science. they grow tired of modern trends in gaming and queer discourse. they dust off a game that gave them funny feelings once upon a time.

I missed the boat on the game's first heyday, and went into this not knowing much about the modding scene beyond "it exists and gets weird.” my first few minutes were unassuming enough; beyond some modern loading-screen quotes and quality-of-life tweaks, it felt pretty faithful to its 2000s origins.

then I got recruited as a guard for a local warlord. then I had to help cook the warlord’s books to dodge onerous tribute payments to her patron. then we invited a rival warlord for a feast and killed her at the dessert course. I hadn't fired more than a dozen shots in an hour.

see, through a combination of mods and byzantine social norms, the remaining servers are more akin to mmo roleplay groups or baffling gmod games than arena-shooter matches. the game I joined was technically capture-the-flag, but I think it was rigged to be unwinnable - from what I gathered, the game only "ends" once a month or so as a sort of debt jubilee.

the server I joined took care to welcome me as a newbie, and we shared plenty of online-queer-nerd reference points, but it was still clear that there were twenty years of inside jokes and drama and patch notes that I just wasn't there for. the player counts seem stable, though, so the community must be either good at onboarding or remarkably devoted.

but even if I'm an outsider and unlikely to change that, I'm happy just knowing that the fandom exists. how malleable should a game's rules be? how much can social norms enable or restrain our worst impulses? what are the limits of cultural reclamation? I don't know, but I'm glad we pulled these questions from the corpse of such a rancid little game.

An album's opening song should be a loud and all-consuming stretch of madness. The thing that drags the listener to the edge of a cliff, holds them over, and asks them to choose what they think is safer: the unknown of floating to the bottom of some endless height, or the known chaos of solid ground. I like my albums to start by asking me what I think I can stand.

—Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil In America

Ada Rook's UGLY DEATH NO REDEMPTION ANGEL CURSE I LOVE YOU is a dialup modem bellowing the wrath of God. Her voice can already turn on a dime from whispers to screams, so when it frays into digital distortion I have trouble accepting it as post-processing. When you’re this good at conveying the painfully human through the painfully synthetic, I assume you just unlock FL Studio in your vocal cords.

Rook has spoken about not wanting to be pigeonholed as a Transgender Artist making Transgender Art. She’s also said of UGLY DEATH, “I hate narratives, messages, and themes, so this album is completely hollow. There is absolutely nothing inside of it.” I respect these views, though while I won’t reductively boil it down to identity, I’ll have to go death-of-the-author to have any analysis at all. I see it as a successor to the post-breakup Black Dresses albums, tackling the exhaustion of both acclaim and harassment, yearning for a freestanding sense of self.

The first words of the opener, im cis, make this clear:

“FUCK IT / I’M NOT SICK I’M NOT GAY I’M NOT TRANS I’M NOT TRAUMATIZED”

She disavows her last traumadump album, 2,020 Knives, as she commences something half as long and twice as angry (the perfect length and tone for decompressing on the bus home from downtown.) Next up, 999999999 IN A DREAM, introduces samples from the trashy OVA Ice that wind through the tracklist like Shaw Brothers samples on a Wu-Tang album. Its punishing, apocalyptic beats are counterbalanced nicely by the brass on PURGATOR3Y MODULATION ENGINE, then TRU U splits the difference with bouncy synths around a crackling howl of rage. (The live version is spectacular, and I continue to be surprised that she can't actually bitcrush her voice in realtime.)

GRAVITY WEAPON is a rave-ready banger, setting up COWARD 2 COWARD's accusatory gut-punches:

"I will become whatever you think of me / I will be nothingness or disgusting dreams"

"If you look up to me, I'll find you / and I will fucking end your life"

This is the Rook of Forget Your Own Face:

"Being cute was a mistake / Being likeable instead of insane: / A straight line to ruin."

UNDERNEATH IT ALL brings in Ash Nerve as the only guest vocalist, whose pop vocals next to Rook's shrieks are a delight; they've got the same "virtuoso singer/Just Some Guy" chemistry as Dengue Fever. (Angel Electronics, their collaboration on Ash's home turf, is also excellent.)

VANISH/DOOM is another song of condemnation, aiming less at parasocial fans than at the whole structure of unaccountable social exile. I won't speculate on any specific things it might be based on, but I don't need to - we can all name a dozen accounts of this exact playbook. She knows that overbearing fandom is a key part of the machine, holding stars to an absurd moral standard and level of scrutiny that cannot end well. Fame always sucks, but far more when it's uncoupled from wealth and power.

XANAFALGUE is one of the harshest tracks, and the one it took me the longest to warm up to. I still can't say I fully get it, but I trust it's the default track on the Bandcamp page for a reason. The (mostly) gentle outro flows well into the gentle reprieve of night in a secret world. In an intimate soundscape, Rook promises:

"We'll shed our agony and anxiety, obsessions / And the remnants of the light of goodness / Choking out our hearts."

The merciless angels of VANISH/DOOM are dispelled, if not beaten, and in this enclave we can return to being our honest, problematic selves.

5H4D0W H34R7Z is the perfect closer. It's a thunderous ode to being a messy bitch who'll still get hurt, but in novel and cathartic ways. Partying, hooking up, oversharing - it's an adolescent view of freedom, but freedom is meaningless if you can't fuck yourself over with it. Rook was even considerate enough to highlight the thesis in the lyrics:

*** I WANNA LOOK AT YOU / AND SAY THE THINGS / THAT I'M TOO EMBARRASSED TO WRITE ***

I strive for the same thing, making raw and honest art while knowing what to hold back for my personal friends. I wish her well on the quest for that balance.

//

ADDENDUM: THE COVER ART

I love the open-ended koan of "what does a piece of music look like?", but in this case, there is one right answer and Porpentine nailed it. It's juvenile in the most playful and off-putting ways, it's neon-green and pitch-black, it's the intimate warmth of a stab wound. It's the shards in your brain forged into a razor-sharp mall katana. It promises exactly what the music delivers, channeling one's ugliest impulses with artisanal precision. Truly, a perfect wrapper for a master class in estrogen dick music.

Continued from here! Follow along in the comic here.

act iii - act iii (2): The metatextual loading screens and game interfaces have become fairly normalized by now, so I felt the time was right to have them jarringly stand out again. The error message was taken from this article, where it was used as an example of how not to write error messages. (I don’t know much about compsci, but I'm glad it seems to be appropriately severe.)

The “report abuse” button on the menu is there in the sense that even hardcore kink scenes have boundaries and expectations, and there are unsexy types of hacking and griefing, but it is also kind of a joke.

The Jenny Holzer quote was originally going to be SOMEONE WANTS TO CUT A HOLE IN YOU AND FUCK YOU THROUGH IT, BUDDY, but I'm glad I found one a bit more obscure and better-suited.

3.1: One of the key inspirations for this chapter was how in games like Portal and The Stanley Parable, the mysterious out-of-bounds areas are still carefully-crafted parts of the intended experience, but in stories based on games like Foreach, the metaphysics can get much more slippery: diegetic logic, game logic, and storytelling logic all collide in a tangled snarl.

3.2: I knew going in that either Sulfur or Copper would die by the end, and it felt more fitting for Sulfur’s mentor to die and leave her to face the finale alone. That death is first teased here, with the green-stained antennae that blend in with the glitchy panel frame.

3.3: I had planned for a while that the finale would bring the skybox structures to the forefront, but the surrounding landscape changed from desert to sea as I was sketching these pages. It felt more desolate and unforgiving this way, and more of a sharp break from the landscapes up to now.

3.4: I realize this is kind of an insane thing to draw and then never bring back again, but I needed a sufficiently dramatic fakeout when the story was still being coy about Copper’s death. Besides, only appearing once meant I could go wild with detail. Maybe this was the intended questline if Copper had survived, maybe Sulfur could have still theoretically reached it - who knows, the game itself is cracked open by now.

3.5 - 3.6: No war story feels complete to me without a sharp understanding that people live and die for very stupid reasons.

3.7: Believe it or not, I had no plans for this scene when I first introduced the spear, but I’m glad it finally paid off.

3.8 - 3.10: I wanted each chapter’s foremost eating scene to have its own context: learning the game rules, a social power play, and now a private act of grief. This was inspired by my love of subculturally-specific grieving rituals (which I wanted to use as a page title somewhere but couldn’t fit anywhere).

3.11 - 3.12: Following a bizarre, disgusting expression of grief with a painfully universal one, and also reprising the chat interface bit; I came up with this usage of it first, and wanted to introduce it in a much sillier way.

3.13: Reprising the blood-graffiti as well, with more Longinus imagery.

3.14: Maybe this was built into the game, maybe it's being improvised when the critical path is broken beyond repair. I like the velvety-black texture I found for this, darker than anything in the comic up to now and with a softer texture that fits the next part's gentle surrealism.

3.15: Some good ol' Cartooning, establishing the look and feel of this new realm with a weapon-destroying field a la Portal or the ending of Half-Life 2. That final sequence was one of the inspirations for this scene, with the tour through the Citadel and very different gameplay.

3.16 - 3.19: This area's look and feel was decided very close to making it. I had considered riffing on smeary AI-art artifacts, a factory for avatars and weapons, a general psychedelic landscape, but I'm happy with what I settled on. It's peaceful but strange enough that you can never fully settle in, you just wait for the other shoe to drop.

3.20 - 3.22: I love a good inexplicable doorframe, and couldn’t resist another Source Engine gag with the missing-texture checkerboard. This is where the Foreach influence is especially clear, but with just one game looping back on itself.

3.23 - 3.24: Since all the way back in You Can’t Make An Omelette…, I’ve used “messy hair and sweatshirt” as visual shorthand for a repressed queer kid. It served me well for this scene, the bluntest expression of the 2000s and 2020s sharing a close bond. Even before we see the date on the magazine, I liked coding this as the 2000s with the CRT-shaped screen and the compositional homage to gamers-on-a-couch webcomics.

3.25: I have no interest in laying out firm metafictional lore about Replaceable-Parts-The-Game, and this was meant primarily as a “hey, what the fuck?” moment. But still, I wanted to imply that the original game is now superseded if not abandonware, kept alive by a modding scene full of queer perverts who imprinted on it at a crucial time in their lives. As for the other games, my idea was that Hominidae is a Spore-style overambitious mess about the history of civilization, Bodies in the Tiber is a detective RPG set in the most gruesome parts of Renaissance Rome, and Battle-Damage Purgatory Hellworld Princess is a frenetic indie brawler. (It's also a reference to DAMAGE SUPPRESSOR by Black Dresses; we are now fully outside of time, bridging the 2000s and 2020s on one magazine cover.) Any Foreach-style loop among these games is left as an exercise for the reader.

3.26: The ad, sourced from here, is from one of the most memorably weird ad campaigns of my childhood. I liked it here as a deep-cut bit of nostalgia, as well as sincerely asking, "well, are you real or not? is your body fundamentally a weapon?"

3.27: I never planned on revealing what the game interface actually looks like from the outside, both because that ruins the ambiguous mystique and to emphasize that we don’t know who they’re playing as. Sulfur’s also opening up a bit more; it’s unclear (for now) if she’s still confined to stock phrases, but she’s more vocal and proactive.

3.28: A reference to the seminal furry porn comic Cross Platform.

3.29: This is the first time I’ve used that mouth shape in this comic in a context other than cannibalism.

3.30: This isn’t an intentional riff on the cover of The Fault In Our Stars, but the parallel didn’t escape me.

3.31 - 3.35: I like differentiating each environment in the comic by texture: the main world's cloudy skybox, the sea's harsh glitchy white, the underworld's velvety black, and now the dream's childish scrawling.

3.36 - 3.37: This sequence owes a lot to this page of Foreach.

3.38: In the opening, these machines were coded as a womb and vagina, now intestines and an anus. We end the story with shitting and vomiting, the two opposites of eating.

3.39: The vomit was a late addition as I finalized how this scene would go. I like the parallels of both Sulfur and the world having digestive systems acting incorrectly, and the implications of her having alarmingly-detailed internal anatomy.

3.40: When I was getting over pharyngitis in March, at one point I coughed up phlegm for long enough that it felt like reciting every grudge in an ancient, hateful blood feud. That's the feeling I drew on for panel 2. I also like how the vomit is vivid enough to briefly distract from the pink hair, until it fully sinks in with the third panel.

3.41 - 3.46: I knew for a while I wanted to end on that panel, with the game being both broken and willfully fucking with her. The bite was a later addition, a holdover from a brief plan where she'd buy a cheap weapon and kill herself over and over until the room was stacked with corpses. I rejected that as too drawn-out and tonally silly, but I'm glad I still had this as the final act of consumption: the food chain has tightened to one person, where eating is self-harm rather than sustenance.

Back Cover - Ad Insert: And now we snap back from heady shit to the outermost layer of the story. I love writing in this style, especially with the question of whether the marketing team is in on the joke or not.

CLOSING THOUGHTS:

I wanted to make something that resists tidy summaries of what it's "about" - or, like, you can give one that's only accurate in the sense of blind men evaluating an elephant.

The neurodivergence lens: it's about having to hastily figure out which atrocities are rewarded by the laws and customs of a baffling culture.

The feminist lens: it's about queers getting rewarded for brutalizing each other over pointless bullshit, and the system will not be denied even if you run to the ends of the earth. (And it doesn't even care which side you're on as long as you keep hurting people.)

The queer-adolescence lens: it's about how juvenile filth can inspire great art and personal growth if you take its appeal seriously.

The artist's-oeuvre lens: it's about combining the austere-megastructure sci-fi of Palatial and Solipschism with the gross queer slapstick of Isidore.

The art-history lens: it's about 2000s edgy gamer culture through the lens of artists who grew up with it and have mixed feelings. Going by the loading screens, it's about modern queer artists as the successors of 80s conceptual art.

I'm honored that this story has resonated with so many people, and I'd love to hear about what lenses you all brought to it. Let me know in the comments!

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utilitymonstergirl

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