doritos & fritos
New writing, new pods, new future
Hey what’s up,
So I reviewed Final Fantasy XVI and then someone emailed me to tell me to kill myself over it. As a result I’ve been a little hesitant to interact with my audience, but I have been doing things and writing things and if you’ve subscribed to this you probably want to know about those things.
Final Fantasy 16 is incredible when it doesn’t try to say anything meaningful
If every part of Final Fantasy 16 was as good as its boss fights, this would be one of the greatest games of all time. But the scripted story is, frankly, boring. It isn’t that the characters are unlikable — I grew to like Clive through his romance with Jill, and found Cid to be a welcome reprieve from a bleak and unforgiving narrative. A lot of the banter during missions also made the characters feel more whole. The world of Valisthea that these characters inhabit is the real issue, as is the narrative’s propensity to hurtle the characters from traumatic event to traumatic event with little rhyme or reason.
I also reviewed System Shock, a game I liked a whole hell of a lot more than FFXVI
The System Shock remake does something remarkable
You can now play the original System Shock, also thanks to Nightdive. The studio acquired the rights to the game in 2012 and re-released it as the Enhanced Edition in 2015. And you could go and play this remastered edition right now and enjoy it for its many pleasures, even if they don’t hit quite the same way 29 years on. The then-revolutionary physics engine, originally programmed by Seamus Blackley for Flight Unlimited, can’t leave the same impression on players in 2023 as it did in 1994; we have all seen too many physics engines that cribbed Blackley’s work in the meantime. If you don’t think you can play a game from 1994, then the System Shock remake does quite nicely. Sometimes, it even does something remarkable and original: It makes you truly understand the passage of time.
I wrote two blogs about Succession as well. If you follow me on any other platform, you’ll know how deeply infected with Succession brain worms I was and still am.
Shiv’s pregnancy is actually integral to her Succession story
For a character like that to end up pregnant by a man she loves and hates is not only delicious drama, but an encapsulation of what Siobhan Roy has been trying to navigate throughout the show. She wants to be more than just a woman; she wants to be considered on an equal playing field as her two brothers. But the phrase she uses when she learns that Tom has sabotaged her attempts to find a divorce lawyer says it all: she “got mommed.” For all the work she has done, she is being treated in the same way the men in her life always treat women: expendable, unimportant, unintelligent.
Why sad TV men are the internet’s ‘babygirls’
Nailing down exactly what makes a character a babygirl is a little bit persnickety. On its surface, the term “babygirl” is pretty easy to understand. These characters are emotionally sensitive in a feminized way — they wear their hearts on their sleeve, often openly weep on scenes in the show, and sometimes are victims of abuse by other men. But there’s also a smidgen of irony in how it’s applied. While Kendall Roy, Jesse Pinkman, and Lestat de Lioncourt are all characters who feel things deeply and are in a great deal of emotional pain, they are all also morally compromised: a capitalist, a meth dealer, and a vampire, respectively.
And here I was on Insert Credit talking about FFXVI with Ash Parrish and Giovanni Colantonio, two critics I really respect. I had an awesome time.
So now something should be extremely obvious: I am really bad at doing a monthly newsletter, and the more assignments I have, the less I want to write on my downtime. I refuse to apologize for not sending enough emails. It is what it is.
Given how much I wrote in May and June (there are two more articles I wrote that I can’t link to here yet—one hasn’t been published yet, and another will be published in a boutique print magazine only), I don’t feel the need to write too much additional stuff. I’ll just share a couple things I’ve been really into lately.
Chain Gang All-Stars is the debut novel from Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and I was so consumed while reading it that I stayed up until three in the morning one night to finish it while my partner was sleeping. I just couldn’t stop reading it. It’s a story about a version of America that’s not all that different from ours, but has the volume turned up on a couple particular issues. In specific, this is a version of our country where the incarcerated have the opportunity to participate in what’s called “hard action sports,” where two people fight to the death in a death match for a chance at freedom. If you survive for three years on the circuit, then you’re free. Most people do not survive. This is one of the best books I’ve read in years, it exploded my heart and then messily put it back together.
The album that 100 gecs put out this year is really fucking great. Just chaotic, hilarious jams. No one else is courageous enough to put out a song about finding a frog at a house party. I used to say that I feared I was too old to understand 100 gecs, and while they do truly belong to a generation younger than me, I too was once a mad, sad, hilarious queer kid that wanted excuses to scream into a microphone.
Peaches, the food. There’s a farmer’s market near me now and they had beautiful juicy peaches and I ate one over the sink, juice dripping down my arm, and I remembered why I love summer and wait all year to feel the sweat drip down my back.
This story by Merritt, a colleague and pal, really rips. I love horror fiction that underlines the inherent creepiness of the internet, and this one hit all my buttons. Neil Gaiman liked it, and if you can’t trust him, who can you trust?
There’s one more small thing I want to say: I will be turning on payment for this newsletter. I have been assured that people will see it more like a subscription to my continued existence rather than a payment for a product, and I encourage you to think about it that way if you elect to subscribe. To be frank: I just need the money. I do not know if you’ve seen the state of the media industry at this moment in time, but it isn’t great. So while I know that I’ll still be freelancing and working on other, non-journalism projects, I also have to maximize the amount of ways that I can earn money.
If I ever do more than one newsletter in a month, the second one will be paid. No guarantees, especially if I’m busy. But if you do end up supporting me: thank you. It means a lot.
Best,
Gita