Hi readers!

This is going to be my first paid newsletter—I know the month has turned over, but I don’t actually have much writing to update you all with and I have a lot of exciting things coming up later in the month. I’ll do a free round up of my work later to correspond with that.

Today, I woke up and immediately started thinking about Full Metal Alchemist and it drove me so insane that I had to jot down a couple of thoughts about it rather than just tweet about it endlessly. This is in part inspired by an article from Polygon that asserts that the original anime adaptation is better than Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood and also the manga. Put simply: I do not agree.

If you’ve never seen or read Full Metal Alchemist, I would highly encourage you to do so. It’s the story of Edward and Alphonse Elric, two brothers who lost their mother, and who then try to use the power of alchemy to bring her back to life. In the world of the series, alchemy is just 100% real, but also using it to revive dead people is forbidden. When they try to bring their mother back the Elric brothers learn why: their alchemical equation rebounds on them. Older brother Edward loses his arm and leg, and his younger brother Alphonse has his soul bound to a suit of armor. From there, the two brothers go on a quest to get their original bodies back by searching for the mythological Philosopher’s Stone.

I think that the original 2003 anime does a couple of very specific things better than Brotherhood, especially in the beginning. Brotherhood has a slow burn, and also mostly skips over the early chapters of the manga. The 2003 anime spends a lot of time lovingly rendering these early scenes which establish large parts of Ed and Al’s characterization. The 2003 anime also spends a lot more time with characters like Maes Hughes and Shou and Nina Tucker, making their eventual fates all the more heartwrenching. Because the original anime was being produced before the original manga ended, the production team had no choice but to tell their own story after those arcs, and it is in those later story beats that I think the whole thing kind of falls apart.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say that you like the story that the 2003 anime tells, or that it meant a lot to you as a viewer. The comparisons between the two adaptations are pretty moot once you accept that they are simply two radically different tales. The 2003 anime is fine for what it is, and some parts of it are really good. There’s a reason why it was such a smash hit at a time when watching anime was much harder than it is now.

Unfortunately, Hiromu Arakawa’s manga is one of the best stories ever written, and the 2003 anime pales in comparison to the scale and scope of what Arakawa accomplishes in her manga.

In order to really get into why, I have to talk about what happens to Shou and Nina Tucker, as well as spoil many other aspects of both series.

Read more

Hello readers!

What have I been up to recently? Well, I am getting married in late October and it is taking up simply every single second of my time. But more on that later.

Firstly, the big writing project that I’ve tackled last month was this review of Baldur’s Gate 3, which is also kind of a review of Dungeons and Dragons 5e. Despite my criticisms, I love this game a lot!

The fiddliness of positioning, sightlines, spell slots, and all the other rigmarole that you have to pay attention to in combat lies in stark contrast to the ease and delightfulness of the narrative gameplay. Especially when you’re just chitchatting with the other characters in your party — here, the game is not just fun, but a joyful expression of creativity. It’s here that Baldur’s Gate 3 really embraces what makes D&D so compelling: playing pretend. The characters often comment on the events of the plot, and also ask you, the player, what you think about things. As you react to the world, it fills in around you in your imagination, bolstered by the excellent character writing and voice acting from your companions. Astarion in particular is a delight, a vampire’s spawn that has embraced his newfound freedom so hard that he’s become Hedonism Bot from Futurama.

As I’ve told the story of my enormous, complicated wedding to people, they have had one simple question: why don’t you elope? I’m sure they’re asking me this because when I’m telling these stories, I am in a state of stress that does not feel survivable. Yes, eloping would take a load off my mind. It would also not resolve the problem I am continuously having in my wedding planning, which is everyone being mad at me, all the time.

I have been warned, repeatedly, that weddings are a load of bullshit. You barely remember the day; everything is ridiculously expensive; the emotional baggage of having a wedding makes all your relatives lose their minds. So far, all these things have come true for me. And yet, my husband to be and I see some value in having this celebration, despite the level of grief it’s giving us.

My soon to be husband, David, comes from a religious Jewish family. I come from a distinctly non-religious family, and a mixed family at that. I don’t know that we’ll ever completely gel, once we join our families together. My parents are complicated people, and both my parents and David’s parents made their lives very deliberately. Even though we clash, and keep clashing over almost every detail of the ceremony—the size of it, the level of religiosity, the expense—each new conflict only shows me how much we have in common.

As a kid, I always knew I wanted a Hindu wedding ceremony, and so far the path to getting there has been extremely complicated. My mother identifies as an atheist Hindu, enjoying a kind of secular existence that, to her, does not feel in conflict with celebrating the festivals she remembers from her youth. I wanted a Hindu wedding not because I am particularly religious—even at my most optimistic, the idea of an actual, for real, god seems too idealistic—but because of the way my mother’s face softens when she talks about her brief childhood in India. Religion, to me, is mostly about honoring the history I share with a vast network of blood relations; it’s what connects me to the story of my mother making lanterns for Deepavali out of dough, the scent of it still fresh in her nostrils as she passes out sweets to her American neighbors.

Subscribe now

On our last trip to Los Angeles, where we’re having the wedding, I asked David if he believes in God. He told me that Judaism for him isn’t about an exact, specific religious belief. It’s more about being a part of a wave of history, knowing that your family has observed these rituals for many hundreds of years, and that you honor their memory and their sacrifice by completing the same rituals as well. I’m sure to a lot of people, that feels like an undue level of responsibility. For me, it’s a comfort, knowing that my mother, and her mother, and her mother all looked towards the same stories, the same ideas, to give them a lifeline when the world was unfair to them.

In the worst moments of wedding planning, I wish I hadn’t done this at all. I don’t know how anyone survives this: all the people who seem to think that your wedding has to be all about them; the relatives who choose this time to air all their greivances with you; the sheer number of things that have to be done; chasing down addresses for people that are distantly related to you but will be extremely mad if they’re not invited only to discover, a month before the wedding, that you were given the wrong information; the lingering feeling that because you’re getting married, all of this is your fault. My parents got married at the Judge’s house, their only witnesses my aunt and her husband. My grandmother made my mom’s wedding dress, and they don’t wear wedding rings. Doing that would certainly be simpler.

But as my mom showed me the couple of pictures she has from her wedding, she shook her head. “I wish we had gotten married at the court house, at least,” she said. “We could at least visit it, then.”

I want to have wedding pictures to show my children, a wedding ring to wear, the shards from a glass that my husband will step on to keep forever. I want to be in that wave of history, to crest and crash on the shore, envoloping my family but also keeping them afloat.

I will have some things to announce… soon. That’s all I can say at the moment, but I promise that there is a boulder gaining momentum as it rolls downhill and that it will all result in something.

Thank you so much to all my readers, and especially to my paid subscribers. You’re truly keeping the lights on.

Best,

Gita

Hello readers!

This newsletter comes a little bit later in the month than I anticipated, due to no fault of my own. But more on that later. Firstly: here’s what I was up to last month.

Last month I wrote about the novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which is a wonderful book about the game industry that unfortunately mirrors some of the gender based issues of that industry.

The renowned developer Brenda Romero has taken issue with an early plot point in the book, which depicts Sadie making a game called Solution. The game bears a striking resemblance to Romero’s board game Train. Crucially, both games depend on a harrowing twist: The player does not know that they are working for the Nazis until their work is complete.

…

To say that Romero takes issue with these comments would be an understatement. In a Google Meet call, she seems flabbergasted by the publisher’s refusal to credit her work and resolute in her desire to see this rectified.

“Through a representative, I’m talking with their team,” Romero said. “I’ve let them know very clearly that I don't want any money. I’m not interested in any pieces of their pie. I strongly suggested that they donate money to a Holocaust charity. I just want acknowledgement.”

I also voice acted for an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark Universe, a very fun podcast that takes the very silly, canceled Universal Studios shared “Dark Universe” concept and takes it (kind of) seriously. I played Evelyn O’Connell — yes, the one from The Mummy — and I hope my english accent was at least okay. It’s available on all your podcast apps, and also on YouTube.

If everything goes the way I expect it to (it rarely does) this newsletter will be hitting your inboxes before my Baldur’s Gate 3 review goes live on Polygon. The reason for both the delay of my review and the delay of this newsletter is that my computer exploded.

Exploded is a pretty dramatic term, but it also feels the most accurate. When I finally got my Baldur’s Gate code, I loaded it up and made a character, only for my machine to overheat and shut off, and then not turn on again. I was forced to disassemble it in its entirety and then rebuild it. I’ve never done this kind of thing before because I am extremely lazy.

I like it when technology just works. My dad was a PC Specialist in the IT department of a college up until he retired a few years ago, and while I’ve followed in his footsteps in some ways, building computers never quite appealed to me. They are, in a word, extremely fiddly. I get bored easily, and also very frustrated when things don’t go my way. Building a computer involves at the very least becoming frustrated, and I prefer it when machines follow my commands without question. But without a computer—and being both broke and on deadline—I found myself without any other choice but to fix the machine myself.

Diagnosing the problem wasn’t a huge issue for me. My machine was hot enough that I could feel heat radiating out from it whenever I turned it on. After consulting with my brain trust (Tyler Colp from PC Gamer, mainly, but also Nico Deyo and Maddy Myers, who are all in a group chat with me), we all decided that it was extremely likely that my water cooled CPU cooler was probably not doing enough work to keep my machine running. What really frightened me was taking everything apart and then assembling everything in the correct order and hoping against hope that it would turn on when I pressed the power button.

The computer I have now is a gift from a very generous friend who knew at the time I wouldn’t accept it unless he framed it as him loaning it to me (thank you Max!). At the time, in 2016, it was a pretty advanced machine. This was also a period where pre-built gaming PCs were more console-like black boxes rather than fancy rigs meant to be opened up and upgraded over time. To say that I was terrified of losing everything on my machine and fucking it up by accident would be an understatement. I never opened the case before—I wasn’t suppose to have to. But now that I’m thankfully on the other side, I’m grateful for the experience.

Being forced under pressure to fix my computer taught me so much more about my computer than watching a series of YouTube videos or reading blogs about it. Was it extremely scary? Yes. But I have gone from not knowing a single thing about my computer to being able to identify each component in my case. I know, for instance, that the pre-built my friend gave me has a ITX size X99 motherboard, a fact that caused me considerable frustration with my build because a very small number of CPU coolers actually fit on the thing. But troubleshooting these issues activated the same part of my brain that sighs in relief I’ve checked things off my to do list. In a post on Bluesky, my former colleague Jason Schreier called it “forbidden legos,” and that’s pretty much the vibe.

As I talked it over with my older brother, another computer nerd I called for a pep talk as I plugged all my components into my teeny tiny motherboard, I told him how satisfying it felt to have an opportunity to think in binary states. While there’s an infinite amount of things that can go wrong with your computer, it either works or it doesn’t. Once I felt that I had bought all the right parts and put them in the right places, it would either turn on or it wouldn’t turn on. There was a finite amount of things to try, and as I tried them all, I learned more about the pieces of machinery that allow me to talk to my friends and play video games. My brother assured me it wouldn’t work the first time I tried to turn it on, and he was right. I smiled, sweating profusely in my stuffy office. I felt like I finally understood a joke, and a funny one too.

Maddy is delighted that I am now, in her words, a PC gremlin now, and I am too. I know I’ve unlocked a massive, never ending project, but it also could be like chipping away at a short story over a couple of years. When you revise a draft, you learn more about what you’ve created.

Thank you for reading! Last month I was also working on a few podcast projects that haven’t debuted yet. I’m really excited about them both.

I also wanted to shout all the paid subscribers who joined since I turned on payments last month. I appreciate your patience in waiting for this newsletter, but I hope this is explanation enough.

Best,

Gita

Hello again, friends.

I wrote something new at The Verge, about the tricky user interface of Crusader Kings 3.

While the point of the game isn’t to nest tooltips within tooltips, it sometimes feels like a visualization of going down the rabbit hole that is Crusader Kings 3. It’s a game that will always have to ask its players to deal with a little bit of friction to understand it, but navigating that friction makes the payoff of finally knowing what everything means all the more satisfying. The deeper your understanding of how each element of the user interface works, the more powerful of a player you become. Still, smoothing out some of the rougher edges of the game’s user experience does broaden their audience and also helps the developers at Paradox keep this game as sophisticated as it’s always been.

I had lots of fun writing this one, and I really think Crusader Kings 3 is one of the greatest video games of all time. Play it, even if you think it might be too much for you. It’s easier than you think it is, and more accessible than ever.

Right now when I sit at my desk to do work, more likely than not I am watching Vanderpump Rules. It’s a reality show that I’ve described to my friends as a reminder that true human evil does actually exist in the world. Ostensibly about waiters in Los Angeles working for the restaurant SUR, which stands for Sexy Unique Restaurant, it’s actually chronicles the datings lives of perhaps the most selfish people on Earth. Especially in the early seasons, where cast members Stassi, Jax and Kristen had not yet been fired for racism, Vanderpump Rules is mostly a show about people who are dating each other but cannot stop cheating and lying about it. If these people were dying and offered a glass of water on the condition that they had to stop cheating on their spouses, they would all die of thirst.

My incredible partner, David Grossman, does not understand why I like Vanderpump Rules. When I try to tell him why I like watching a show about terrible people treating each other cruelly he looks at me as if I’ve suggested that he swallow a glass full of live wasps. Yet, I can’t look away. I know that Dave’s criticism of reality television, that it’s exploitative of its subjects and designed to cut writers out of the process of making televsion, are correct. And yet, I am already of the third of ten seasons of Vanderpump, texting David’s sister about all the Scandoval updates.

The only other television show that reaches the dramatic heights of Vanderpump Rules right now is, of course, the final season of Succession.

Succession is a show that came out right after the end of Game of Thrones, and is more or less Game of Thrones: Business Edition. It’s a succession crisis, but instead of taking place in a medieval pastiche, it’s a pastiche of the Murdoch family. In this show, the Roy family, led by patriarch Logan Roy, are an obscenely wealthy and dysfunctional group of people, and as Logan grows older, the children compete with each other to take over the family business. It’s a comdedy.

As one of the most popular and critically acclaimed television shows on the air right now it probably doesn’t need much introduction. Watching this show as it airs is always painful for me. I’m so anxious to see the twists and turns of the story, even as it careens through well worn emotional dynamics between the characters. What I’m finding, to my surprise, is that in between episodes, Vanderpump Rules scratches the Succession itch.

It’s true that Succession is a show where where rich white folks argue and see who is going to get a kiss from Daddy. It’s about class, and also a very particular, elite echelon of class. While the Vanderpump cast members no longer pretend to be working as waiters, their level of celebrity and cultural power is nowhere near the level of the characters on Succession. Still, the emotional cycle of the cast members of Vanderpump feels incredibly familiar when I watch the show. What are they doing other than arguing with each other and then begging for a kiss from their mommy, Lisa Vanderpump?

In the third season, one cast member, James Kennedy, is actually fired from his job at the sexy unique restaurant. As firings go, this one is pretty deserved and also not something that would be difficult to bounce back from. Kennedy is already a DJ, there are many restaurants in Los Angeles, and he was only working as a bus boy. Yet, instead of applying to literally anywhere else, he writes Lisa Vanderpump a letter and begs for his bus boy job back. When Lisa actually asks him why he doesn’t just work somewhere else—his new girlfriend’s ex also works at SUR and it would just be less complicated to go elsewhere—he tells her there is nowhere else he wants to work. It has to be at SUR, even though SUR frequently makes him miserable.

Sometimes I tell David that both these shows feel like modern adaptations of Sartre’s play No Exit. The play tells the story of various people trapped in hell, and is the origin of the phrase “hell is other people.” The most interesting moment of the play to me is late in the show, where a door opens in the blank room where all the characters have been trapped. The characters regard it, but don’t leave. They could leave, but they also know that really, they can never leave. They need each other—need the ways that they make each other miserable.

What really makes me laugh in every episiode of Succesion is that all the kids need to do to be free from their father is give up his money. They all already have so much more wealth than they know what to do with. Connor, who doesn’t compete for the family business but still wants his father’s approval, has built an elaborate compound in New Mexico and is able to dump money into a frivolous presidential campaign and has only started to run out of money now, late into his life. Each of the children would just be happier without the scrutiny that being executives at WaystarRoyCo puts them under. Kendall could possibly get sober outside of the public eye, Roman would be free to explore his sexuality, and Shiv could create space in her life to be vulnerable. They could be fine—but they will never be able to give up the power and privilege the money gives them.

Vanderpump Rules contains much of that same kind of drama but within the much lower stakes of restaurant. Hell, it turns out, can be created anywhere.

Thanks for subscribing and reading my irregularly documented musings. I’ve got a few longer term projects in the pipeline, and I’m hoping to be able to devote more time to blogging in the future (newsletters are blogs). Right now I’m looking forward to the new Notes feature on Substack, you can also find me in a little Substack chat room, asking my subscribers how they’re doing.

Later,

Gita

Hello friends!

So many people have subscribed to this substack and I have felt guilty for not updating it more. Like many people in the world, I am experiencing the effects of the ADHD stimulant shortage and it is kicking my ass. In some ways, it’s nice to be able to let my wild and erratic brain do whatever it wants and just follow the flow of my thoughts. In other ways, I frequently walk into rooms with absolutely no idea what I’m doing there and I can’t follow a conversation.

I’ve been on a few podcasts this month if you’re looking for my work. I discussed my review of Hogwarts Legacy and the broader Harry Potter fandom on ICYMI, Slate’s internet culture podcast, and I think it was an excellent episode. I was also interviewed about my process for the Sunday Scroll, a new podcast from John Warren.

Today, all I really want to talk about is the excellent novel Vita Nostra, written by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko, a Ukranian science fiction writing couple. I just picked up the sequel, Assassin of Reality, and have been recommending the series to just about anyone who will listen. Vita Nostra can be understood as a kind of response to the magical school fantasy of works like Harry Potter, which has become its own kind of genre in the publishing world. What I like about this series is that it doesn’t just have a point of view on the fantasy of Potter and its limitations, but also the nature of schooling as a whole.

The Institute of Special Technologies that the characters attend is far from the whimsical, romantic castle of Hogwarts. It’s a cold, concrete building in a small town called Torpa, on 12 Sacco and Vanzetti Street. The building has few adornments and cinder block dorm rooms. The students are all there to learn how weild magic, but they aren’t really there by choice. In the case of the main character Sasha, while on vacation, a man told her to complete a difficult task—though he emphrasizes not impossible, he would never ask her to do the impossible—every night for a week. The first night she isn’t able to finish it, her mother’s new boyfriend has a heart attack. Sasha understands how these things are connected, how her failure has lead to her mother’s loss. This threat hangs over her head the entire time at the Institute.

Though learning at the academy is rewarding for Sasha, it also furstrates her beyond belief. Her professors tell her that she can’t just be told something. She has to experience it to understand it. As a first year, the students in the years above her seem tired, but also slightly unlocked from reality, blurry or moving unnaturaly quickly. They all assure her that everything will be fine. Her professors tell her ominously that fourth year and fifth year takes place in “another location.” As Sasha begins to excell in her studies, she feels more and more alienated by reality.

I joke with my partner that it’s a story about how college turns you into a pretty fucked up person for a while, and it is about that. But it’s also about the transphormative power of learning, of giving over your entire brain to it. I loved the long passages describing Sasha performing her exercises in class.

She placed a chair in the middle of the auditorium, steadied herself against its high back, and began.

“Imagine a sphere . . . mentally distort the sphere so that the external surface is on the inside, and the internal on the outside . . .”

Twice she lost her place. Once, while transitioning from number seven to number eight, and then on twelve, the trickiest one. Both times she stopped and started all over again. On her third try she finished the entire series without a single pause—like a song, or a dance. Like a tongue twister. Like a long balance beam exercise sequence. . . .

This isn’t a book for people who are eager for answers and explanations, but the way that Sasha’s education unfolds made my heart ache for her. There’s an ordinariness to her time at the Institute that the character savors. She goes to parties, has to wait in line to use the pay phone, laments the condition of her dowm with her classmates. She has a lovely near-miss romance with her classmate Kostya, both pining for each other but never ready to be vulnerable with each other at the same time. But also, Sasha learns to fly, and eventually does become unstuck from time like the upperclassmen. She becomes a different person because of what she’s gone through.

Pretty much the only other thing I am doing right now is asking ChatGPT to come up with small business ideas based on the lore of Dark Souls. ChatGPT will pretty much do exactly the thing you tell it to, in an extremely literal way. It’s like asking a toddler to describe something, where the general idea will be right, but the specifics will be wrong. When I asked ChatGPT to describe some supplements from a Dark Souls themed wellness lifestyle brand, it came up with the "Aldrich's Devourer" Digestive Enzyme Supplement.

“What really sets Aldrich's Devourer Digestive Enzyme Supplement apart is its connection to the lore and characters of Dark Souls,” the program wrote. “Our supplement is named after Aldrich, a powerful and terrifying boss who devours the gods of the game's world. Just as Aldrich consumes the gods, our supplement helps you consume and break down the food you eat, promoting healthy digestion and absorption of nutrients.”

See you later,

Gita

Well, I did it. I reviewed Hogwarts Legacy for Polygon. Personally I just don’t think it’s a very good video game. I know I am biased in that I particularly dislike open world action games, a genre which this game so tediously tries to wring for new experiences, but the world of Harry Potter is also uniquely unsuited for this kind of game.

It’s clear that Hogwarts Legacy is, in part, an attempt to position Harry Potter as a franchise that does not need direct involvement from Rowling. Like with Star Wars after it became a Disney property, Warner Bros. seems to see a great opportunity here to tell new stories and make boatloads of money doing it. But Rowling’s world-building isn’t strong enough to sustain anything outside of her original vision. A wizarding world without her reveals the awful truth of the Potter franchise: It has always been a house of cards, threatening to collapse if you remove just one pillar.

Here’s the link on Polygon! I also wrote something for them about The Menu in January.

Other than playing this very boring video game, I have been spending a lot of time playing Final Fantasy XIV, which is honestly very fun, though not without its problems. After a break of many months, I finally worked my way through the expansion Stormblood, where many of the problems I was having with the game originate from.

On the whole, Stormblood suffers from very bad storytelling. It’s the story of a revolution that the plot has been building to for years, but very little of the story actually takes place in the occupied nation that you’re meant to liberate. For reasons that are honestly pretty convoluted, you end up first freeing another occupied nation by… reinstating the emperor? Okay.

What’s remarkle about the failure of Stormblood is that it feels like a story about revolutionaries written by the oppressors. The depiction of colonized peoples is truly bizarre. So often when you meet people in the colonized cities and towns, they’re angry at you for even suggesting they rebel. The game goes out of its way to say that the children born under occupation are the ones most likely to comply, because they’ve never known a free nation. I can’t think of a single historical precedent for that notion—it feels like something someone just made up without bothering to look at the history of things like, I don’t know, slave revolts.

While I was playing Stormblood I was also watching Andor, which really made the issues with Stormblood all the more obvious. I have issues with Andor too, but they’re mostly structural. I have no idea how to rearrange the events of the first three episodes to make them less boring, but the pacing in the series often suffers from being overly slow. Getting through those first three episodes to the good shit was a trial, but I’m glad I did it. Everyone is right when they say that the prison break episodes are a real treat. I still do not think the show is anarchist agit-prop—Disney simply saw a growth market among mid-30s people who like Star Wars and identify with the rebels—but it’s political point of view is well researched and coherent.

Mostly what makes Andor stand out as good entertainment with comprehensible politics is that its portrayal of non-revolutionaries who just have to get by is both more judgemental and more empathetic than something like Stormblood. No one likes living under occupation, but they make do. They know how to protect their own, and they do have a breaking point, but at the beginning of Andor no one’s at the point of outright rebellion. Stormblood would tell you that they don’t want to—but the characters of Andor do want to, they just don’t know how. Stormblood paints it as totally natural to become a collaborator for the empire; Andor shows how narrow your perspective must be to link up with fascists. What I like most about Andor is that the show demonstrates how people get radicalized against fascism, the very gradual process that Cassian Andor goes through in the show.

The point of Stormblood is that rebellions are lead by Leaders, and that everyone falls in line behind the Leader. It’s essentially the story of Lyse Hext, and her journey from a determined kid with low confidence to a real revolutionary leader. But her journey is obscured by the whole rigamaroll of having to free another occupied country—it mostly happens off screen. Cassian Andor’s gradual transition from guy who is in it for himself to someone willing to die for a cause has a lot to do with the people he meets. In fact, it’s in their spirit that he eventually offers to join the revolution fully. The revolution depicted in Andor is not lead by a Leader—it’s made up of the actions of people who might never meet each other, who might die before they see their mission completed.

The most poignent moment of the series for me was at the end of the prison break, when Andor turns to the fellow prisoner who helped him free all the men trapped with them. The prison itself is surrounded by water on all sides. The only way to make it to freedom is to jump and swim miles to land. Andor looks back at his friend and comrade as if to say, you first.

“I can’t swim,” he replies. Andor is pushed off the ledge and his comrade fades from view. That story is over now—it’s Andor’s role to carry that memory with him.

By the time that Lyse Hext has matured into role as Leader, she is walking through a battlefield musing about the “price” of the freedom they now enjoy. I do not know that she would die for it, as we all know Cassian Andor does. I don’t think Stormblood really understands that freedom is something you die for.

I have a little tiny bit of housekeeping and then I’ll let you go.

Firstly, I wanted to make this newsletter more regular, but I think the combination of ADHD and depression makes self managing a task like this a little too arduous for me. I am returning to the schedule of “whenever I feel like it.” If I have a big feature coming out I’ll definitely link it in here, so at the very least this won’t go fallow. Blogs like the one above will probably also go here, I am not sure that anyone would have paid me for an ice cold take about Final Fantasy XIV.

Secondly, a few of you have pledged money to this newsletter, which is so flattering. Thank you. I have not turned on payments for this newsletter because of the above timing and scheduling issues. I don’t want to ask for money for anything that I’m not producing consistently. That said, if I get enough feedback that y’all want a paid newsletter, I will think of how to do that in a way that works with my schedule and mental health needs.

All the best my loves,

Gita

Hello again dear readers,

Sorry for the delay—I caught the flu. In fact, I still have the flu and have not had solid food in days. That means I’m also stuck in New York and away from family for the holiday, which feels par for the course for a miserable fucking year.

Despite my personal misfortune, I have one more piece of writing to share: I wrote about the differences between Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld for Game Developer.

There are some things Rimworld excels at in comparison to Dwarf Fortress, and they’re all things that smooth the edges off the former. Rimworld has a much easier to understand UI, and you spend a lot less time hunting and searching for the features you want to use. It’s streamlined, with fewer options allowing players to really dive into the mechanics that are there. It’s a game that, through its simpler features, gives you greater control over outcomes. Combat, in particular, is much more comprehensive than in Dwarf Fortress, allowing you to individually select each colonist and place them in specific locations. In Dwarf Fortress, you can tell dwarves to attack things, but after that, all bets are off. Rimworld isn’t interested in giving you a simulation of an entire world and history; it wants to give you a very good video game, and it concentrates on that. 

If you’re a podcast listening type, I have also been on a few podcasts. I was on Three Moves Ahead to talk Dwarf Fortress, which was a blast. I was also on Fangs for the Memories, a Buffy rewatch podcast, discussing maybe my least episodes from the least favorite season (You know the one. The one with Parker). I love podcasting, which is basically like saying “I love talking” but it’s true. I do love talking.

I’m looking back on things, it being the end of the year and all. Although there were some very high highs for me, like getting engaged, the lows were equally low. I do not recommend getting laid off in an airport if you can avoid it. As much as I try to move onward and continue to persevere, there’s some unresolved pain that lingers for me. My partner lost his grandmother this year; we’ve both been under-employed; the economy is tanking and it feels like it’s taking our future with it. 

In a year where I could have really used good friends, I have lost them for reasons I still do not entirely understand. Most of these people I’ve known for over a decade. One of them was someone that is still on my notes app list of wedding invites to send. I haven’t had the heart to take them off. In my rational mind I know that all things end, and that logically these friendships have run their course. But there’s nothing quite as punishing as waking up one day and realizing that someone that just yesterday you were talking to cordially has abruptly cut you off.

I saw Martin McDonagh’s latest feature, The Banshees of Inisherin, before these friendships collapsed on themselves. At the time, I was able to watch it with a kind of critical distance. Now, it all feels up close, in my face, as if the film is gripping me by the lapels and screaming in my face. The smallest, weakest part of me still wants to know what I’ve done—but I haven’t done anything. These people just don’t like me anymore.

McDonagh is pretty undeniably a genius writer, having been an accomplished playwright before his first feature In Bruges. I like all his work but I don’t always think it’s successful. Although it’s been years since I’ve seen Seven Psychopaths it felt half baked to me at the time, and the less we say about Three Billboards the better. Banshees doesn’t quite reach the same heights as In Bruges to me, but the way the two lead characters, Padraic and Colm, circle the drain has stuck with me since I first saw it.

Colm doesn’t want to be Padraic’s friend anymore. Padraic is kind, hasn’t done anything wrong, and at worst is just a little bit simple, but nonetheless Colm finds their friendship unfulfilling. On an island off the coast of Ireland, where there’s nothing much to do, Colm needs fulfillment. But Padraic needs, just like anyone else, company. Losing his closest friend through no fault of his own sends his simple mind into an existential funk.

There are many more elements to Banshees but the unsolvable nature of this problem is what I find most interesting. It’s hard to say that either character is right or wrong for how they feel. I’ve often felt like Colm, full of a deep melancholy that demands that something in my life change, and change drastically. I do also understand Padraic. I am lonely, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get over the fracture of bonds that were once so important to me. What are either of them supposed to do? Even if they didn’t descend into a feud, could they have overcome this, or at least co-existed peacefully? 

The fictional island of Inisherin is beautiful in the film and when I saw it in theaters I spent most of my time longing to be on that island and to feel the salt on my face. Characters often have deeply tragic conversations, and meet their tragic ends, in some of the most scenic vistas I have ever seen. The deep greenness of the meadows contrasted with the grey blue sea is so vibrants that it feels like another world entirely. I joked afterward to my fiance that despite the subject matter, I thought the movie sold me on visiting Ireland.

Colm’s deep misery in a place so beautiful seems to confound and frustrate him throughout Banshees. He talks about having a despair inside him that he cannot shake. His music is the only thing that makes him happy, but eventually the misery overtakes him there too. Because Padraic won’t leave him alone, Colm ends up cutting off his fingers and leaving him at Padraic’s door to make him stop talking to him. By the end of the movie, his left hand is full of bloody stumps.

But the misery never leaves Colm—and neither does Padraic. By the end of the film they are locked together in hatred rather than friendship. And Colm is still just the same, sad old man on a dead end island, only without his music, and without a friend. Not alone, but lonely still, lonely as he ever was, destined to die on a rock he hates.

I guess what lingers for me now is just, I can’t understand the point of that. There’s a slipperiness to Brendan Gleason’s performance as Colm; there’s another, unspoken feeling under his skin whenever he rises to anger. The gloom that he carries within him only ever bubbles to the surface occasionally. Padraic ends the film a much more complex character than he first seemed, having found a reserve of his own anger to feed on, but Colm's journey feels less clear to me. He’s a man who doesn’t seem to understand himself, but knows that he is unhappy. He’d rather just destroy himself from within.

But I suppose I wouldn’t understand Colm. Despite everything, I still want that friend at my wedding. I still want to know what I did wrong. Probably it won’t fix things, probably it would only make me hurt more. But to wake up one day knowing with so much surety that you are disliked by someone you still hold dear is not something I would wish on anyone. Eventually, you’d rather hate them.

Hopefully by next Tuesday I’ll be eating solid food again and this can become a more regular newsletter. For now, I will go back to sleep. Thanks for reading.

Best,

Gita

I wrote a few more things! I reviewed Dwarf Fortress for the Washington Post! It’s simply one of the most important games of all time (my editor wouldn’t let me say it’s the most important game of all time but I believe that).

I feel like if I played this game for an entire lifetime, I still wouldn’t be able to put together the hows and whys of dwarf psychology. It’s a level of character detail I’ve never seen so acutely in other games that simulate a world. If you mug a character in Grand Theft Auto, they won’t experience that as trauma and change their behaviors. In “Dwarf Fortress,” your dwarves will remember the loss of their friends and the birth of their children, and their understanding of the world will change because of those experiences.

If you’re interested, I also wrote some tips on how to get started. While the game is a lot easier to parse now, it’s still hard to get a handle on all its mechanics.

Now, for the fun stuff. I have a tendency to cycle through different hyperfixations when I’m bored or sad, and I’ve been bored and sad a lot lately. Luckily, Chainsaw Man is the best show on television right now and I can basically live my life waiting for Tuesdays, when the manga updates and there’s a new episode of the anime.

I’ve written about Chainsaw Man a couple of times at Motherboard, once about the manga and once about the anime. If you still need an introduction to what the series is about, I recommend either reading one of those posts or just watching the anime. I have a strong feeling that the show is just on the cusp of oversaturation if it’s not there already. The thing is, it’s actually that good. At the end of the day, it’s one of the best ongoing pieces of fiction I’m reading right now, it’s wildly creative, and it has a strong and political point of view I find fascinating.

What I have on offer today is a playlist. A Chainsaw Man playlist on Tidal, of songs that I think about between episodes of Chainsaw Man and new chapters of the manga. Unsurprisingly there’s a lot of punk and hardcore in there. I thought I’d break down some of the song choices. A few of them are, I feel, self explanatory (“Baby” by Charli XCX is just a song about Makima, I’m so surprised that there hasn’t been a fan animation of her doing the dance from the video yet). But Chainsaw Man’s aesthetic is so finely tuned and something I fuck with so much that I want to break it down a little.

I’m not going to explain every song because there are like 22 songs on it, but here’s a selection of Chainsaw Man vibes.

Turnstile — Underwater Boi

Simply put, Chainsaw Man’s main character Denji is that boy underwater. And he really does have a long way to go to understand himself, to be a better person, and to recover from the trauma he’s experienced. Chainsaw Man reminds me so much of Turnstile, not just because the manga and anime are generally grungy and deal with dirtbags and the dregs of society. Turnstile is a band that generates some extreme devotion, even from me. I saw them recently, completely waterlogged at an early October outdoor venue where it rained all night. It was incredible, I felt so close to everyone there, the mosh pit just a writhing mass of human beings. There’s an honesty and a melancholy even in their hardest tracks that makes me think about how Chainsaw Man puncuates it’s ultraviolence with quiet moments of its characters just living their lives.

Pissed Jeans — Bathroom Laughter

Someone on Twitter described this song as like, the entire vibe of the Denji/Aki/Power friendship trio, and I completely agree. When Denji finally gets friends and comrades, he gets so excited that it leads to him acting like a total buffoon—and eventually throwing up. Like the song says, bathroom laughter leads to kitchen crying, don’t make me say I told you so.

Wu-Tang Clan — Protect Ya Neck

Part of it is just that I can so strongly imagine Denji listening to this song. I bet he loves The 36 Chambers, and knows all the skits by heart (and then I just keep feeding him, and feeding him!). It’s also that Denji has a lot in common with these young men. It struck me how young they are watching this video last night, how wildly creative they are, how much talent they have pooled together, partially just because they were bored kids without much else to do. Denji also schemes and scams and hustles to survive. He also just wants to do hoodrat things with his friends!

Fear — I Love Livin In The City

Denji relates to every lyric of this song, but unironically. Also—this live version is kind of incredible. Pretend it’s this one on the playlist and that it opens up with telling any A&R reps present to die and also that “it’s great to be gay and be here.” It is great to be gay and be here!

T.S.O.L. — Abolish Government/Silent Majority

The thing that makes Chainsaw Man more interesting to me than most shonen manga and anime is the Gun Devil. In the world of Chainsaw Man, humanity’s fears are anthropormorphized as devils, and the greater the fear, the more powerful the devil is. The Gun Devil is the most powerful devil in the world, and it came from America. If you’ve caught up with the anime so far, you know that Denji’s mission is to find and kill the gun devil as a tool of the state. If you’re nervous, having read the manga, I feel like Chainsaw Man does pay off on the ideas that it’s playing with, and it does have a point of view on the role of the state, state sanctioned violence, and how that affects regular, average people who are caught in its wake.

IDLES — Danny Nedelko

One thing that I also really love about Chainsaw Man is that while it’s very dark, it’s not nihilistic. Despite everything that happens to Denji, he still wants to live. He wants to experience life, even the hard parts, because friendship and solidarity have given him so much.

Raekwan — Ice Cream

Denji also loves beautiful women.

Amyl and the Sniffers — Guided By Angels

Amyl and the Sniffers a rowdy pub rock band from Australia, and their songs are meant to be played with a lot of energy, as loud as possible. This song is just so wild and ferocious, but also so weird and almost alienating. The frontwoman, Amy Taylor, does seem like she’s being taken over by something when she sings, like there’s something inside her, under her skin, that she’s trying to either contain or let out.

Ethel Cain — A House In Nebraska

Denji is a teenager who feels his teenage feelings so intensley. Remember feeling like if the person you liked in high school didn’t like you back, you’d die? Or your first heartbreak, which felt so hard that you thought it might kill you? This song is just so beautiful, and Ethel Cain has such a beautiful voice, and the intense melodrama of the song reminds me of the deep well of sadness that’s just under the surface with Denji.

The playlist lives here, on Tidal, beacuse I don’t use Spotify. I am extremely happy that Tidal now allows playlist sharing because it’s something I just love to do!

Now for some house cleaning. I’m thinking about introducing a paid tier of this newsletter, at or around $5 a month, for one additional post a week. I’m loathe to promise too much of my time because I know myself, but I miss blogging and want to write. I’m not exactly sure what the structure of this would be, but the paid posts would also be more consistent than the free ones. I truly am just treating this newsletter like a blog, which it basically is.

If you have ideas or suggestions, I’m open to feedback. I can’t say that I’ll do any and everything—I have zero interest in managing a discord, for instance—but I do wonder what kinds of things people would like to see here.

All the best,

Gita