Rant

Video Game Reflections of 2025

~ Eric ~ Leave a comment

This is an unusual topic for me – I’m not usually one for the “end of year retrospective” type of post. But 2025 has been astonishingly rich in great video games. In particular, this year even the “mainstream” has been flooded with games that I’ve liked. You can see this just by contrasting how my playlist overlapped with The Game Awards nominees last year (2 total, and they’re both way down there) to this year (10 total, including 4 of the 6 Game of the Year nominees). And there are several other nominees for this year that I still plan to get around to.

Part of this has to do with the release of the Switch 2, since that’s where I played 3 of the GotY nominees, but it’s also a tribute to the massive strength of indie releases this year. Seriously, the second half of 2025 was just one indie smash after another, and I am still trying to catch up.

Continue reading →

A May Revolution in Song

~ Eric ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I’ve done a song-a-day project, and the last few started to lean more into musical conversation than topical discussion. But with everything happening, I decided it’s high time to get topical again.

For the month of May, 2025, I am diving deep into some of the strongest musical statements I can find. I expect these songs to be in various degrees challenging, inspiring, surprising, and appalling. I want to warn you right now that I am not pulling any punches on this one – there will be explicit language, explicit content, and abrasive opinions. I will post relevant content warnings on every selection, but it’s also completely understandable if you choose to nope out of the whole playlist. I’m also going to be less picky about making sure every song has a video or a live performance. Most of them do, but not all. So sometimes you’ll be staring at album covers or reading lyric videos, but that’s because the songs are important enough that they need to be there anyway.

Continue reading →

Luigi Wins by Doing Nothing

~ Eric ~ Leave a comment

In the discourse following the violent actions that ended the life of a health insurance CEO, one trend I found particularly alarming was the assertion that this event somehow proved that violence was the only effective means of systemic change. Amidst the absolutely justified anger surrounding the US healthcare system and the profit focus of its C-suite executive class, there was also an underlying frustration that nonviolent action had failed to bring about any change.

The comments I saw displaying this frustration typically showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the uses of both nonviolent and violent actions. More importantly, they too often veered into post hoc defenses of inaction, which has led us to a new type of online poster: the pro-violence slacktivist.

Continue reading →

Resistance Triage

~ Eric ~ Leave a comment

Well, here we are again. Yes, the irony is not lost on me that I wrote a literal Cassandra post before the election, yet afterwards everyone keeps finger-pointing and talking about the 2024 election as if it is an isolated incident and not the result of 40 years or more of long-term degradation of the US electoral process.

Anyway, we can’t think long-term right now. We are stuck in the moment, and we’re about to have another wave of intentional crises – a veritable Gish Gallop of oppression – that is designed to overwhelm our ability to fight against any of the individual pieces. It happened during Trump’s first administration, and it’s only going to get worse this time. While we don’t know exactly what will happen and when, there’s a lot of panic and anticipation about all the things that could happen.

Continue reading →

“Superhero Fatigue” Isn’t Actually That

~ Eric ~ 1 Comment

Is superhero fatigue killing movies? Don’t the terrible numbers of 2023 show that there’s superhero fatigue? And if so, why does it exist? Is it because there’s too much to watch? Because it’s bad? Because it’s too “woke?” (Not even those scare quotes can convey the sarcasm I type that with.) Because Millennials are too old? Because Gen Z won’t go out to the movies? Most importantly, how can we make money again? WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE MONEY?

Everyone from Screen Rant to Forbes talks about this trend as if it’s a given, but no one can seem to agree on what it is and why it’s so pervasive. If you read the industry-focused analyses, the clear indicator is the rapidly declining success of the superhero movie as the box office juggernaut it was throughout the 2010s. If you read the fansite analyses, the clear indicator is the rapidly declining reviews both from critics and audiences (and from non-audience review bombers). But both of these are symptoms with no single clear cause, so anyone can project their own assumptions onto them. And that’s what’s happening, because these analyses are part of the actual real problem. They are themselves a symptom that is indicative of a totally different problem: the addiction to canon.

Continue reading →

Done With the 101

~ Eric ~ 2 Comments

or Why some media other people find deep feels so shallow

You ever watch a movie or a series that everyone else is gushing about, and you just can’t help but wonder…why? So then you try to find review sites you respect to explain what everyone’s getting out of it, and you find these effusive reviews about how complex and insightful the show is? And you read all those reviews and the examples that keep coming up are ridiculously simple things like, “Did you notice that Verna is an anagram of RAVEN?”

Well, it happens to me a lot. In particular, it has happened with every single thing I have watched from “horror auteur” Mike Flanagan. (Yes, people call him that. No, I do not agree.) And while it is tempting for me to just have a rant about how I think Flanagan is overrated, I wanted to glean something more broadly applicable from this experience. So I am using this opportunity to talk about why reasonable people can have different views about the depth of the same work.

I call it “the 101 effect.”

Continue reading →

Yes, This Is Art

~ Eric ~ Leave a comment

Every once in a while when I’m hanging around my social media feeds, I see someone who I normally think of as educated, open to new ideas, etc., posting another meme or complaint about “modern art.” Sometimes it’s abstract, sometimes an installation piece, sometimes pop art, but inevitably the question becomes “how is this art?” (Sometimes the conversation focuses on “why is this worth so much?” which is a different but related question.)

Because I always try to hit the same points when I’m replying to these discussions, it was kind of inevitable that this would end up a blog post that I can just link to in the future. So here we are – a discussion of modern and contemporary art and why it is indeed art. Yes, even that banana.

Continue reading →

A Great Story Told Poorly

~ Eric ~ 2 Comments

Many of my friends know me to have strange tastes in media – often eclectic, sometimes contrarian – and they know that I am always happy to explain my tastes. In discussing things I do and don’t like, I have long been interested in why I differ from other people who I consider to have perfectly valid viewpoints.

Some of that certainly speaks to differences of experience – my life experiences have affected me in particular ways that I recognize are not always the norm – but I also like looking for common threads. (For instance, I have an extended theory of comedy that explains why I don’t care for Seinfeld or the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest.) One of the things that I like to say to people is that I would rather have a great story told poorly than a poor story told excellently. And while that sounds simple enough, and I know what I mean, it needs a bit of explanation.

Continue reading →

Redefining Masculinity in Gaming

~ Eric ~ 1 Comment

It’s another Metatopia-inspired post!

There’s something about the rich offerings at this convention – both in terms of design and discussion – that inspire me to examine gaps of experience and conversation in the overall gaming community. Sometimes, as with last year’s extensive 4–part rant, those gaps are noticeable even at Metatopia itself. This year, I noticed once again that there was something missing in the conversation, and it’s missing everywhere.*

(*Almost everywhere. Brie Sheldon’s fantastic ‘zine Behind the Masc is one of the few exceptions I’ve seen, and very much an inspiration for this post.)

Continue reading →

In the Absence of Virtue

~ Eric ~ Leave a comment

As I expected, I caught a fair amount of disagreement with my last post, but I was happy to hear it. I had a few really good conversations where people explained to me the positives of loyalty, and they definitely brought up some things I hadn’t considered. But ultimately they did not change my mind about loyalty being inherently virtuous.

That’s not because (as some people took it) I hate loyalty specifically, but rather that I don’t think any character trait is inherently virtuous. I was picking on loyalty last time mostly because it was on my mind, and it’s one I don’t think we question enough. But I’m happy to question the virtue of every supposedly positive character trait, including my own.

So now I will need to break that down and then talk about how we can behave in the absence of virtue.

Continue reading →