Category: nonfiction

An Additional Problem With the Ubisoft Model

Discussion of worldbuilding principles, referencing Nioh, Elden Ring, and Ender Lilies. A lazy review of Nioh 3 included.

I recently dipped my toe into Nioh 3, and I’m sad to report that perhaps the nicest thing I have to say about it is that it is better than the previous two games in the series.  The writing and narrative might fairly be described as the My Immortal of Shogunate-era historical fanfic (“Fanfic of what?  You can’t write fanfic of history!”  The faux-fantasy Sengoku/Shogunate genre is so saturated it may as well be fanfic of all of them), the goddamned loot piñatas ensure you spend at least half your playtime managing your inventory instead of playing the game (having done my time in the ARPG casinos, I think I can say that randomized equipment stats don’t belong in any game, though Nioh is still one of the worst implementations out there), and the dialogue is cringe: poorly written, poorly localized, and overacted with an incomprehensible array of British Isles accents (NB: these characters are definitely Japanese).

The point of contention is obviously the combat, which one reviewer describes as “the best combat of any soulslike, past or present, end of story”.  To be clear, this is false, and the take is dumb and hypey.  Still, I’ll admit the combat is good.  At the end of the end of the day, this is an action RPG, and action RPGs do benefit from toolkits of flashy toys.  But after a point it starts to feel like a roadside family restaurant: 

This place has everything!  Burgers, breakfast, pasta, steak, sushi (huh?), parries, i-frames, magic on an ammo system, two sets of magic on a mana system, summon spells, fighting game combos, stance breaking, enemy stamina management (with bonus BAD zones!), and invincible devil trigger transformations!  After a couple of visits you get wise.  You realize that most of this shit is best left unordered, must have been dropped onto the menu by a chef with low standards after a weekend fixation–or by a tone-deaf manager hoping to project the appearance of repertoire.  Most of it isn’t all that good.  It probably shouldn’t be there.  But just like there’s a market of hooligans who think that the latest Call of Duty is the bleeding edge of FPS, there is apparently a conclave of plebeians who want their Dark Souls to be more like God of War or Diablo (or both, I guess).  Oh well.  There’s no accounting for taste.

What I really want to discuss, though, is the map.  I think Nioh 3 took the wrong lesson from Elden Ring.  But unlike the rest of my feedback (I think Nioh’s aesthetics are bad, but you don’t have to listen to me yucking your yum), I think there is actually a lesson to be learned here.

After Elden Ring’s release, there was much discourse on the contrast between its UI and the “Ubisoft model”.  The latter might reasonably be called the previous paradigm of open world game design, and though it goes way beyond Ubisoft, it was a Ubisoft dev that jumped on Twitter and called Elden Ring’s UI “bad”.  The memeing was accordingly relentless:

The larger story unfolded from there.  Since the mid-00’s, the argument goes, “readability” in games has come to be interpreted as “making sure the reviewer who gets assigned your game finishes it with no distractions and never, ever gets lost”.  This began as clear notations of an open world game’s “main path”, but over time, more and more studios began to take the MMO strategy (marking quests on the map) to its logical extreme, leading to a sort of implied guarantee in the UI in general–and the map in particular: If there is something to do in a location, it will be marked on your map.  This will help you not waste time.

Elden Ring’s insight, thus, was that people don’t actually like being force fed information on how they should be playing the game, and also they like exploring!  If everything they could find on the map is already marked, then they aren’t exploring–they’re navigating, which is much less fun.

Well, seems like Nioh 3 has proved this only half-right.  Putting aside that its map segmentation system is kind of a miss (exploring and doing stuff in region X, Y, or Z gives you stats and stuff; this is good in that it partially supplants worrying about the horrible loot system, but it’s bad in that it’s essentially still a sign that says GO HERE FOR REWARDS), it did make an attempt to move closer to not bombarding the player with information.

Ah, but it turns out there was another, worse thing the Ubisoft model was doing the whole time!  Calling it copypasting would be inaccurate–what it actually is is drawing a boundary around a particularly minute play pattern (say, killing a group of enemies in a location), calling that pattern a “system”, then littering the map with low-effort quests that trivially use that system.  Shoot the ferret balloons!  Chase the spherical cats!  Kill the 10 enemies in the “base”!  Kill the 10 enemies in staggered waves in the “crucible”!  I’m not saying Elden Ring didn’t have these play patterns, but it didn’t act like you were supposed to care.  In that game, if you kill a group of enemies, you get one of your refillable potions back.  Nice job not dying to that, kid.  Keep looking, maybe you’ll find something interesting around here.  What it definitely doesn’t do is track each of these stupid encounters you have and present you a checklist so that you can make sure to find and complete every single one.

But for Nioh 3, that’s the name of the game.  You go to the place, you kill the guys, you get a fucking loot piñata.  Unlike the Ubisoft model, I guess you don’t then open your map and find the next one, since the map is hidden until you complete enough checklist items.  I guess that’s better?  But it’s not much better, because while you get some of the fun of exploring, you’re still just trying to find all of the items on your scavenger hunt in each region, and none of the items are actually interesting.

The only “quests” Nioh gives you that don’t feel lazy are the field bosses (which start to feel lazy again when you encounter them as regular enemies, not in the late game, but literally the next zone over) and the “ghosts with unfinished business”, which aren’t lazy in the templating (it’s nice to have some unique experiences in the soup of what is otherwise the same shit over and over) but are lazy in the execution.  “Find out what happened here!”  Was…everyone killed by yokai?  Again?  Damn, that’s crazy.

So consider some advice in the affirmative.  If you are a game designer looking to fill out a map players may actually want to explore, consider having a map full of stories.  I don’t mean cutscenes or quests, I definitely don’t mean “lore tidbits” (to writers/designers: reading chunks of your unrelated prose is almost never the reward you want it to be–in order for that stuff to be interesting, it has to actually answer a question), and I’m not even particularly referring to the Dark Souls-esque fragmentary lore-in-item-descriptions.  I get that those have grown divisive, I know that some don’t want to deal with the sleuthing and reading in order to have an idea of what’s going on.  To be clear, what I’m saying has nothing to do with that argument–the merits and flaws of conventional exposition are orthogonal to the worldbuilding I’m getting at–but also: If you’re having trouble with context clues, Nioh 3 isn’t gonna make sense to you anyway, not because it relies on them overly so much as it doesn’t really make a lot of sense in the first place, and that isn’t gonna be kind to someone playing with less than a full deck.

Rather, what I’m referring to is stuff like Elden Ring’s first accessible cave dungeon, so early you’re liable to wander in before even meeting Melina.  It’s a little cave off the path, full of wolves, and in the boss room is a beastman of Farum Azula.  Farum Azula is notably an endgame area, but from a less gameist point of view, it is a shattered, floating tomb city suspended at the edge of a vortex in the middle of the sea.  What is the beastman doing here, far from home, with no clear method of transit between there and here?  You’ll never know.  The game doesn’t tell you, doesn’t even really hint at it.  But the situation is highly salient, there is a notably out of place enemy here, definite lore implications (even if what is implied is unclear), and I’d bet even money there exists at least a draft of this beastman’s story somewhere on a From Software hard drive.

That is the “system” you should be establishing across your map.  Every place of interest should have a story that explains how it got to be how it is.  If that story boring, change details until it isn’t, then change the place in-game to match.

And then throw the story away.  Don’t show the player any more than a dangling fragment, feel free to not even show that.  There are, of course, players who will gravitate to the fuzzy edges, interested in the mystery, but this isn’t only for them.  Even the most lore-disinterested player is going to notice when your world turns into a checklist, because while checklists are helpful, it’s no fun to play them.  The purpose of writing a story for all the unique pieces of your world is to create a world with actually unique pieces.  Players can engage with the underlying implications if they want, but whether or not it all feels same-y comes upstream of that engagement, and, unfortunately, Nioh 3, is a great example of how to do it wrong.

Of course, the problem for Nioh 3 specifically is more foundational than just that they didn’t do the writing homework.  Where Elden Ring and other games have robust vocabulary of enemy types as symbols for lore and factions, all interrelated and furtively gesturing, Nioh’s set pieces are way too neatly quadrifurcated into material (people, soldiers, historical Japan) and spiritual (kodama, yokai, guardian spirits, Buddhist…stuff) elements, each in turn divided clearly into the good guys and bad guys.  Since the setup is that the bad humans have summoned the bad demons everywhere to kill everyone, constructing a factional anomaly is close to impossible.  And since the yokai appear to have the agenda sophistication of the Hulk, their presence anywhere in particular says nothing.  It’s almost amazing how a game with this level of enemy variety manages to make them all feel narratively identical.  If this point is confusing, consider a comparison point other than Elden Ring.  Look at Ender Lilies, admittedly a game that is almost as Dark Souls as Dark Souls in its narrative setup–but if you want to see how you can do more with less, it’s your girl.

Ender Lilies is a game where every single enemy is a deranged zombie thrashing at everything around.  All of them were made this way by the same eldritch force, so with no agendas or intents, you’d think it would be just as homogenized as Nioh.  And yet, every single area prompts different questions that the game conveys (outside of lore tidbits) through enemy visuals, the architecture, the surrounding state of disrepair.  “Something happened here” is obvious, but it slowly becomes clear that “something” was much more delightfully twisted than “the bad stuff showed up and killed everyone”.  The problem with Nioh 3, thus, isn’t just that they opted for the dumbest possible backstory but also that they obliterated any of the language they might have used to convey that it was anything more.

I point all of this out not simply to rag on Team Ninja.  For their missteps here, I do feel they’ve exposed a lesson they and others can learn.  And to be clear, you don’t need to be on an open world game design team to make use of it.  Consider it if you’re a fiction writer, a tabletop GM, any other narrative architect.  Similar to Mark Rosewater’s venerable themed party planning advice (Rule 1: Have a theme), building an interesting world matters.  Whether you built it from interesting bones will be noticeable, regardless of whether your audience ever has access to the backstory, history, and planning that went into those bones.

Top image: Nioh 3 splash, from Team Ninja

Selected Chimera Footnote: Mulholland Drive

Rough but fun. I am intending for the Chimera to be a weird piece, combining fiction and nonfiction. I’m discovering how to write it as I write it, so bear with me, and don’t worry about what this is a footnote to.

Wow, what a coincidence, wonder what it means.  A plausible answer is forthcoming; perhaps there is no meaning at all, but I would direct the amateur critics on X/Twitter/Insta/methamphetamine/TikTok toward the age-old discourse on the connections between Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s experiences as a soldier, full of wrinkled noses and invectives usually employing the term “blunt allegory”.  

Alternatively, David Lynch has a zinger: “It’s better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted, or you’ll be too afraid to let things keep happening.”

Alt-alternatively: Eat shit.  You want to know what Mulholland Drive means?  Tell me what your breakfast means.  I’d chance it means little to you, but that doesn’t seem to stop you swallowing it.

But fine, here you go: Betty is a delusion confabulated by Rita after she survives the hit Diane paid for, and otherwise (aided by the wild unreliability of the film’s primary camera angle) you can probably just consider the chronology of events to be scrambled.  I wouldn’t bother trying to put them in the right order–you have a concussion, and some of the puzzle pieces are now from the next box over.

“No, obviously Rita is being imagined by Betty!”  Kind of a weird take, considering Betty doesn’t exist.  “But Rita doesn’t exist either!”  ‘Rita’, again, has a concussion.  She may have access to her–Camilla’s–distorted memories, she may be a hypothetical imagined by Diane–but in that case Betty is neither an image of Diane nor her memory but a fantasy, brought forward in time, that Diane imagines working with Camilla to solve her attempted murder and Diane’s suicide.  And the vision of that Ourobouros is so revolting that upon beholding it, all Diane can do is flail for the exit, which takes the convenient form of the pistol in her bedside table.  You know what?  Nevermind, that slaps.

“Wait, so you don’t know what it means?”

Why would I know what it means to you?  There you go, querying Legion again, as you breeze past at least three examples of what Mulholland Drive is really about.

It’s actually almost magical how effectively Sadly, Porn’s opening question repels readers despite being excellently written and frankly fascinating.  “Who decides what porn is?”  Note that this is a separate question from what it is.  You use it to not act, yes, but why not throw in another interrogative: Why does it work?

If the fantasies you’re masturbating to were your own, that would prompt action or change, hence all the Freudian repression hoodoo.  They aren’t.  They are someone else’s dream, and dreams as wish fulfillment doesn’t really work if neither is yours.  Changing your dream is a matter of changing your wish–of changing your self.  Not easy by any means, for some that’s a line of life and death, perhaps that is the case for Diane.  But changing someone else’s dream is impossible.  It is there in the world, and however you came upon it, you have no power over it.  Consider how many times the film depicts this lesson being taught: Adam learns it, Diane learns it twice over, and in the end/beginning, Camilla learns it too.

In some ways it’s obvious–it’s a movie about movies and moviestars, both of which are dreams wholly unowned by their participants–but since you don’t have dreams of your own, you disavow the inevitable conclusion.  Inevitable for Camilla, inevitable for Adam (count the cowboys), and of course, inevitable for Diane.

It’s precisely for this disavowal that everyone’s pick for most inscrutable scene in the film is the one at the beginning at Winkie’s diner, where a man recounts his dream of sitting in the diner (NB: where Diane later sits to pay for her lover’s assassination), only to step outside and find a fucking orc, which he then finds in real life too.

“So is he in Diane’s dream, or is she in his?”  What’s your encounter rate on phantasmal orcs behind dumpsters?  Mine’s pretty low, and the diner guy does seem rather surprised as well.  “So he’s in hers?”  ‘He’ being ‘Dan’?  The guy who doesn’t appear in the film after that scene?  If I were trying to help you, I’d ask you what that would imply–the void has a way of focusing the flailing–but you don’t have the time, and I don’t believe in it.  The answer is neither.  They’re both in someone else’s dream, and while I’m sure you’re curious as to whose, I want you to know it really, really doesn’t matter.  Hollywood is a slurry of nameless aspirations, and the rest of your society isn’t much different.  The only way out is to wake up.  

Alternatively, Deleuze has a zinger: “If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.”

Living the Dream

In spite/because of my vaguely barren posting schedule, I did want to wish all of you a happy new year (and belated holidays, whichever you celebrate), with the exception of the decidedly persistent scammer who keeps emailing me from Nigeria with an AI-generated profile pic and email pitch. My holiday message for you is more complex:

  • I do not want to purchase access to your botnet, no matter how many fake reviews it will generate for me.
  • I am perfectly capable of Googling the various generically American names you have emailed me under (and finding thereof that no one with that name is in this line of work).
  • Your messages are now routing to my spam folder. Please move on. If you are given to self-reflection, please consider a career in which you commit less fraud.

For everyone else, despite appearances, my December has actually been rather productive, and once I figure out how to collate my output, it will start appearing here again (I had a professional engagement that ate up most of my October/November). I hope you all have been well, and I will see you soon, under a new calendrical quantum.

Praise for $20,000 Under the Sea

This is a little bit of a thank you and a little bit of an ad heads-up, but while my own efforts to promote $20,000 Under the Sea have been proceeding anemically, the book has received some positive critical reception that I’m grateful for. I wanted to highlight some of it:

  • Self-Publishing Review: “An exceptional high-stakes drama on the high seas that brims with encroaching horror, $20,000 Under the Sea by Sam Locrian is a timely historical commentary and a masterclass in psychological suspense”
  • Indie Reader: “a fun, action-packed addition to the corpus of transformative works in the Lovecraft mythos”
  • The Hemlock Journal: “a mix of thrill and fantasy”

Thank you to these reviewers as well as others who have taken the time to read and review the book.

Additionally, this last month, I was able to have my first in-person event in quite awhile. Thank you to PH Coffee, my favorite writing spot in the Kansas City area, for hosting me for a book signing on August 9th! For others in the Kansas City area, perhaps I will see you at a future event!

Top Image: The Mask

Brace for Impact

Uh oh.

Just in case you were checking out old posts and came upon a curious vacancy, let me confirm for you: All of the “Whom Emperors Have Served” posts have been relegated to hidden/password protected status. This, as the above picture might suggest, is because they have been compiled, edited, and bundled into a book which you will soon be able to buy.

This is partially for (obvious) economic reasons, but part of it is contractual (one of my publishing partners does stipulate that the book’s content may not be available for free online). So sorry, I guess. I’ll keep you apprised of any giveaways.

For those of you who have avoided my unedited detritus (or who were otherwise excited to see the finished product), get hyped. A stupid submarine is about to hit your metaphorical boat.

Shitpost (feat. Sir Vilhelm)

I’m not dead as it turns out. To be clear, the below is written in-character. This is practice for a weird piece I’m working on that may or may not ever see the light of day.

In Dark Souls 3, Sir Vilhelm, loyal knight and right hand of Lady Elfriede of Londor, finally having had enough of your shit, declares to you:

“I’ve seen your kind, time and time again.  Every fleeing man must be caught.  Every secret must be unearthed.  Such is the conceit of the self-proclaimed seeker of truth.  But in the end, you lack the stomach for the agony you’ll bring upon yourself.”

Hardcore, truly, especially as he proceeds to embody that agony by lighting his sword on fire and introducing it to your (lack of) stomach.  It’s very tempting to take it as a pat on the back: This is Dark Souls!  This bastard thinks you can’t take it, and true–his sword is scary (though hardly as scary as his liegelady’s eyeless stare and akimbo scythes)–but press on!  Through persistence, you will prevail!  But try taking it at face value first, and you can’t help but stumble.  To start, want to tell me who he’s talking to?

These words, directed at the Unkindled (the player character), make deceptively little sense.  Technically, the Unkindled has the choice to fuck off entirely, but beyond that, he is simply proceeding linearly to the castle’s backdoor.  And insofar as he doesn’t fuck off, he is here for two things, neither of which is the truth.  First, same as anywhere else on the journey to the Kiln of the First Flame, he’s here to take souls (=power) from the inhabitants of the painted world, the fragile order of Elfriede’s frozen, rotting kingdom be damned.  Second, he has a task from Slave Knight Gael: someone must show his lady flame.  Assuming the Unkindled cares about that, he’s going to show (=give) some lady somewhere in this awful place some fire, said fragile order be thrice-damned.

Neither of these even remotely resembles truth-seeking unless you accept, pretty much wholesale, the Nietzschean allegory of the Fire as Truth, meaning the souls you’re harvesting are fragments of Truth and that Vilhelm knows that if you have your way, you’re about to slurp the Truth right out of his armor and wear what’s left as a cape (he has a cool cape).  So okay, that makes sense, but why “self-proclaimed”?

Again, the Unkindled isn’t proclaiming anything to anyone.  He’s showing up, mostly taking things, sometimes giving them.  It’s certainly a nuisance if you’re trying to maintain a status quo (or a slow degradation into rot, same difference), but there’s no proclamation, no fanfare–for those in his warpath, these interactions are coincidental.  Consider the circumstances of the Unkindled’s confrontations with the other Lords of Cinder: The Watchers are killing each other, Aldrich is munching on Gwyndolin, Yhorm is just chilling deep underground where no one in their right mind would bother to bother him.  To them, the Unkindled showing up is completely unexplained–they don’t even know who this guy is.  To you, the narrative, what it all means, is constructed after the fact by the Fire Maden, by Ludleth and Yuria and the Painter Girl, by others.  Sort of like the Peloponnesian War.  Or Jesus Christ.

On the topic of both, Edward Teach M.D. throws out a particularly hot theological take in Sadly, Porn:

“Your God must be omnipotent so he won’t be omniscient, open your Bibles to the Gospel of the Television Christian, Mark 13:6, and let’s see what today’s reader wants out of a translation:

‘Many will come in my name, saying ‘I am he!’ and many will be lead astray’

You can read it again and again, it’s obviously a clear warning about being fooled by imposters and false Christs, which, curiously, there are no examples of anywhere in the New Testament or indeed in the history of Christianity.  Huh.  So much for omniscience.

A couple of things about this sentence.  First, in the original Greek(s) there are no punctuation marks.  Second, the word ‘he’, the predicate nominative of ‘I am’, is not there; the translator, whom they executed for being a translator and then plagiarized his work, just added it, along with all the thees, thys, hasts, and forsakens that effectively inform us that Jesus was a Stewart, all this being especially ironic as King James knew Greek even better than the translators, and probably Mark.  Third, I guess to balance the ledger, the translator then omits the Greek word that comes after ‘saying’, and that word is ‘what’.  So the actual line, translated using no psychoanalysis or literary deconstruction or collapsing the wave function–simply copying down the words–is:

‘many will come in my name saying what I am and many will be led astray’”

I will both echo and paraphrase Teach’s following sentiment: Your worldview is built on writhing mist and shadow, best acclimate.  I know, quotes within quotes, metaphors within metaphors, it’s easy to get lost.  You can pretend you’re Theseus, if only to pretend you’re not Orpheus, but either way you’re stuck in a maze.  Better pay attention if you want out.

Anyway, to balance his heterodoxy against the millennia of interpretation disagreeing with it, Teach provides a buttress:

“...the most contextually appropriate reading here is the literal one: that people will claim Jesus is something else.  Do you know why?  Because that is what the Gospel of Mark is.  That’s what happens over and over in the Gospel of Mark, no one else claims to be Christ, and almost no one doubts he is Christ; but everyone, Pharisees, Romans, disciples, Tusken raiders, everyone wants him to be something else.”

Take inventory of the pieces: You have Jesus, an actor, you have the clear desire(s) to (re)interpret his action, all repressed, distorted into the desire to imitate, to impersonate him.  Recall that by Fire as Truth, Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, is an allegory for…Jesus.  This would make the Unkindled, following in Gwyn’s footsteps, attempting–according to the Fire Maiden, et al–to link the Fire, a copycat.

That would imply, then, that many are deceived, not by the meaning of the Unkindled’s quest for Truth, but by the notion that the Unkindled is seeking Truth, is attempting to link the Fire at all.  Do not misunderstand: He may in fact link the Fire, but the notion that his action is compelled by this question, that you know what this force wants is the distortion which hides what you’ve repressed.

Except the repressed always returns.  When Sir Vilhelm rebukes the Unkindled, he is of course not speaking to the Unkindled, not even literally.  He is only speaking to you.  But it isn’t a commendation.  The Unkindled seeks Truth for its power.  You seek truth to defend against your powerlessness, and you will self-proclaim your quest to anyone who can’t get out of listening as long as it makes you think they think you aren’t doing what you’re really doing, which is nothing.  Seeking truth, after all, means you aren’t finding it.  

Sir Vilhelm sees you, just like I see you, but unlike me, he is easy to misinterpret, and in case he isn’t, he’s omniscient, which means he isn’t omnipotent, so you can always kill him to shut him up.  But if you want out of here, don’t misinterpret him, don’t you dare think that “the agony you’ll bring upon yourself” means “Dark Souls is hard”, spare me your incompetent lies.  Dark Souls is a work of entertainment, and anyway, anyone unsuited to its “agony” would never have reached Sir Vilhelm in the first place.  Your agony is the never ending hunger, the seeking of truth you will never find because it will never satisfy, at the expense of anything and everything that might.  “Lack[ing] the stomach” is intentional, you see.  It keeps us hungry down here in the dark.

Top Image: Screenshot from Dark Souls 3

Mandatory Vacation in Dimly-Lit Locales

The other day I made the mistake of visiting FextraLife’s Elden Ring lore speculation page, only to recoil, wailing, from the bilingual Time Cube that resides therein. While I try to refrain creating content based primarily on being mean to people, there are only so many claims like “House Hoslow is descended from the Nox because their armor has silver in it” that I can read before I push my fingers so far into my temples that brain pulp begins extruding from my nose.

While it wasn’t surprising, I was pleased to find that Shadow of the Erdtree added substantially to the Elden Ring analytical picture. I hope to write a more substantial post about it, ideally something between the structure of my previous Elden Ring post and the Dark Noon series. It’ll involve fingers, Jesus, and really disgusting jars. But this is not that post. This is mainly to remind/assure you all that I’m alive and that all of the previously in-progress efforts are in the same, slow, grinding motion they’ve been in for months. Beta reading for $20,000 Under the Sea is coming to a close. I’ve found a real editor to take a look at it, so that’s still ongoing, still with a projected release date of this year (I’m looking at 12/20 at this point). And of course, all the Rale-universe work (“The Apiarist”, the Crossroads sequel) is still going. You can, of course, still find updates here. On my website.

Top Image: Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree promotional image

Broken

Apologies for the slow cadence of posts lately. I’ve had a number of things cooking, but they are all in such a way that none is quite ready to post here. And then I went to the hospital this last weekend, which threw a wrench in most of my plans. I will have something new up in a few days. It’ll be a little weird–but hopefully pleasantly so.

Partial Eclipse of My Writing Schedule

Posting since it’s been a minute since my previous spree of relatively high-frequency updates. Everything is still underway–a new Apiarist excerpt is forthcoming (hopefully within the week), and editing for $20,000 Under the Sea is hopefully nearing its conclusion. However, travel to see the recent eclipse, while absolutely worthwhile, has put a kink in my content pipeline that I’m only now beginning to sort out. I hope you all are well and that you spent an appropriate minimum of time staring directly into the sun in the past week and a half.

Kindness, Revisited

Not all opinions are equal. But some are, and whereof one cannot speak…

My bandwidth for ancillary writing has tanked recently, but amid the ongoing trek of editing $20,000 Under the Sea, a trend has emerged in my media intake that is explicable in the way a full-length review is not.  It’s particularly convenient to blog about because I’ve blogged about it before–five years ago.  Back then, I was reminiscing about the increased weight Nabokov’s (admittedly abrasive) instructions had taken on in my evaluation of media.  More recently, I’ve seen a good clip of amateur reviews run across my newsfeed, and boy, would you know it, all that shit is still relevant.

If you’re in the habit of writing reviews, especially if you are an amateur reviewer (which we mostly are here on WordPress), you would do well to read it.  Too long?  You’re a dirty liar, but fine, whatever, I’ll give you a highlight:

In your capacity as a critic, check your damn ego.  Be kind.  Lean on mainstream takes before you pan something.  Don’t trust them, of course–the mainstream is often very stupid–but at least take it mathematically: Is it more likely that you saw through the marketing and vacuous acclaim of the idiot masses, or…did you maybe miss something?  Was the draw simply something that wasn’t for you?  Did you let the fact that you didn’t care for a book’s main character shade your interpretation of all the rest?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s fine to dislike anything for just about whatever reason.  The problems only come when it’s time to square perspectives with everyone else. And though I don’t care for a lot of people, I very pointedly do not throw rocks at (most of) their houses.