The bulk of my hobby time for the past six months or so has been spent not playing video games, nor yet creating them, but autopsying them. Layer by layer I peel them apart, examining every cartilaginous connection and noting down how each muscle pulls on the bone structure beneath. I am building on the work of those who came before me, a great berth of knowledge at my back and many fine tools at my hands without which my task would be too overwhelming to contemplate. I give back to this world by crystallizing the knowledge I find into forms that may be re-used and built upon long into the future.

In plainer terms, I've been spending a lot of time reverse-engineering From Software games.

2023: Dipping my Toes

A couple years ago, my friends and I learned about Archipelago, a system of interconnected game mods and related tooling which supports what they call a "multiworld randomizer". You may already be familiar with the concept of randomizer mods, in which the items within a game are shuffled about at random while still tracking enough game logic to ensure that the game can be completed. They're popular as ways to bring fresh life to games one has already played many times over, and can be particularly fun to play in a racing context where the strategy around figuring out how to proceed can be more complex than even the game mechanics themselves.

A multiworld randomizer takes this concept and expands it beyond the boundaries of a single game. Archipelago is able to randomize items across many games and connect them all through the internet, so that a Hollow Knight player in Minneapolis can find bombs for a Link to the Past player in Seattle, which lets them blast through a wall and find a Super Mario World player's ability to run. The possibilities are limited only by the imaginations and hacking abilities of a community of volunteer developers.

My little group quickly decided we wanted to give this a try. Looking through the list of available games, much shorter then than it is now, the one that appealed to me most was Dark Souls III. I consider the From Software oeuvre to be largely masterpieces, and while DS3 isn't my favorite^[1], it was the one that was available at the time.

The Old Mod

Unfortunately, the implementation of the game was not very good. No shade on the dev—modding with these games is difficult, as I was soon to discover. They use a totally idiosyncratic game engine that was originally built for Demon's Souls and has haphazardly accrued new features ever since; the whole thing is a mass of many different custom file formats all held together with difficult-to-decompile (and in some cases intentionally obscured) C++ code. But the player experience was not so great.

The core problem was this: because it was so difficult to figure out how to do anything at runtime in these…

I bought an art from Missing and it's amazing! They do such great work, everyone reading this should commission them to make the cool wizards of your dreams!

when asked to explain the whole of Capital while standing on one foot, Marx replied "the rate of profit tends to fall. the rest is commentary; go and study"

I've been having migraines on and off for over a week now, which is a very upsetting change of pace from the one migraine I'd usually get every three to six months, but if there's a silver lining it's that I'm reading a lot of audiobooks while I more or less can't use my eyes

rotating in my mind the concept of getting a womb tat that's a medical diagram of a uterus

This weekend, a few friends embarked on a voyage of romance, adventure, and discovery all from the comfort of our computer rooms. We came together to achieve something that, to my knowledge^[1], has never been achieved before. We experienced the MCCONAUGHAUPS: a two-day marathon of every 00s romantic comedy that starred Matthew McConaughey.

The germ of the idea formed when I read somewhere that Matthew McConaughey, today known for his dramatic roles on the big and small screen, had spent his early stardom almost exclusively in chick flicks. It was, in fact, a conscious attempt to flee this typecasting that led him to refuse further roles as romantic leads beginning around 2010 and eventually through force of will mold his career into what we know today.

Now, I have no particular affection for the man. I would say I hadn't thought about him much at all prior to this event. But I do consider myself quite a fan of the rom-com genre, and having watched only a single one starring him my curiosity was piqued. What does it look like for a man to spend a decade in a genre, and what does it take for him to swear it off completely afterwards? I had to know.

I managed to talk a few friends into joining me, and together we trekked into the unstoppable flood of affable grins and light Texan drawls that was the MCCONAUGHAUPS. And now that it has come to a close, please allow me to present you with the fruits of our excursion: a thoroughly-researched ranking of all six of Matthew McConaughey's 00s rom-com feature films.

1. Tiptoes. A film whose existence is baffling, but not as baffling as the choices that went into making it. This only barely counts as a rom-com to begin with; only the first third of the film and the unwelcome sprinkling of fart jokes through the rest of it are at all comedic, and the rest is a dour drama about a man (McConaughey) who hates himself and his family. Glad I watched this with friends because it would have been unbearable alone.

2. Failure to Launch. A deeply stupid film where one of the running gags is that various animals bite Tripp (McConaughey) and then visibly chuckle to themselves about it because he hasn't yet achieved inner harmony. Portrays him as a layabout loser only to reveal halfway through the film that he was engaged but his fiancée died six years ago(!) and he's been helping to raise her son(!!) ever since. Dragged into watchability by Zooey Deschanel and Kathy Bates moving mountains as secondary characters.

3. Fool's Gold. Barely a rom-com, this is more of an adventure movie with light rom-com elements. Anodyne, overlong, and suffers tremendously from every black character being a rapper-slash-murderer. Other than that, though, it's decent enough.

4. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Silly, schlocky, but at the end of the day pretty fun. Connor (McConaughey) is a huge asshole in a way…

I feel a little less dire about the films of 2025 than I do about the games, but only a little. There are no films I found outright repulsive, which is a win I suppose, although I do feel like I'm still inhabiting the hater spirit in being relatively cool on films that sent people at large into raptures. Sinners was undeniably cool, but it was also unfocused, lacking in the clarity of purpose that's necessary to make a truly excellent film about supernatural horrors. One Battle After Another is principled in a shockingly impressive direction, but doesn't quite land the plane on its ambitions. Wake Up Dead Man is an excellent whodunit, but the writing and characterization around that ends up cartoonish as often as it is profound.

The other sad fact of this year is that there's no film from it that hit me hard enough that I have given it a full five stars. I do try to be conservative about giving out my highest possible rating, but despite that I've watched multiple five-star films each year all the way back through 2021. Worse still, looking back through the films that came out this year and my friends' reactions to them, I don't know if there's anything that's even plausible that I would love wholeheartedly.

This has been a grim year in a lot of ways, and an infertile media landscape is hardly the worst of it. But it's also hard to say that the two are unrelated. How can you separate the systematic evisceration of life through genocide and culture through LLMs from the faltering of art itself? I suppose, if there's a silver lining to be had, it's that this ignites in me the fire to create things of beauty myself. And I can only hope I'm not the the only one.

Film of 2025: Frankenstein

I'm not universally a fan of Guillermo del Toro's work, although I'm always a fan of the way he thinks about and articulates his relationship to art. Frankenstein, though, hit for me in a way that nothing he's made has since Pacific Rim. It thoroughly embodies his philosophies of creation, perhaps because it's about creation. I also can't deny the influence on me from the large volume of quotes and making-of shots that I saw on Tumblr—getting into the artist's head doesn't always help make the art more compelling, but in this case it worked wonders.

The other thing that boosts this to the top spot, of course, is the lack of competition. The only other film that I gave the same rating was Naked Gun, which I do heartily appreciate as a proper comedy that refuses the tyranny of the deadpan. But ultimately the craftsmanship of Frankenstein won out for me over the exuberance of Naked Gun.

It's not lost on me that these two are an adaptation and a remake, as I was bemoaning in my post on games as well. Wake…

This year, I think I'm going to split up my oaties post into two, one for games and one for films. I don't want the posts to be massive, especially since I'm going to continue the tradition I established last year of updating my all-time of-the-year lists along with choosing individual years.

I'll be honest: I'm not feeling great about the state of video games in 2025. I certainly missed some games that might change my opinion here—notable games I didn't get around to that I think I stand a shot of really loving include PEAK, Shadow Labyrinth, Of the Devil, and Kinophobia. I'll mention Despelote as well as a game I watched Eden play most of and thought very highly of. But on the whole, this year leaves a bad taste in my mouth and makes me feel like a hater.

I always try to muster precise and thoughtful critiques of games I don't like, especially when I know other people feel differently, and that often means I'm putting myself in the position of thinking as much about the games I don't like as I do about my favorites. This year, though, it felt like I was endlessly pouring out criticism with only brief intermissions for auditions.

Many people, including numerous friends of mine, loved Blue Prince, Donkey Kong Bananza, and Hades II. I found all three of these flawed in ways that were actively repugnant to my design sensibilities. That's not to say I didn't enjoy them, but the fun I had felt like digesting content, that increasingly refined slurry of choose-three mechanics and the steady drip-drip-drip of unlocks. The failures, on the other hand, were born of deep misunderstandings of the player's perspective-in-the-moment—the very experience whose careful shepherding is what I find most compelling about the very best game design.

I was looking forward to Civilization VII so eagerly I took time off work to play it with Liz. It was so disappointing we abandoned it after two days. Even games I broadly quite liked, like Q-Up and Demonschool, were marred by notable design flaws.

That's not to say there weren't games I enjoyed this year, but looking back at them I'm faced with the horrifying realization that everything I really loved this year was a sequel or a spinoff. Fish Fear Me, Monster Train 2, Elden Ring: Nightreign, Death Stranding 2, and Hollow Knight: Silksong all remix or reinvent their source material to some degree, and I think they're all excellent. But the knowledge that none of them (nor Hades II nor Civilization VII) is fully original haunts me.

Game of 2025: Hollow Knight: Silksong

This is kind of a shoo-in choice, if I'm being honest. There are only three games I gave five stars this year. Nightreign is certainly my most played of the three, and (similar to my reasoning for picking Elden Ring as my game of 2022) exploring…

I'm a bit late to the party, but I was just linked Anthony Moser's poetic and impassioned evisceration of LLMs today and I think anyone who hasn't yet read it should do so. I cosign it as an articulation not just of my position on the subject, but of my emotional stance towards it as well. The techno-cultural nexus that we have recently taken to calling "artificial intelligence" is deeply corrosive, and we must not tolerate it. We must not give it air to breathe. When this all falls to an ignominious end, we must dance on its grave that it may never rise again.