started having an issue (dunno if it's mac specific or not) where it would stop responding to certain click interactions, preventing me from progressing - at first i was reloading from checkpoints to reset this but as this became increasingly frustrating during the puzzle across the last two screens i nearly abandoned the game right before the ending before thankfully managing to restore functionality without resetting progress by repeatedly toggling between fullscreen and windowed mode.

anyway it's another samorost.

How to fix this intolerable present of history with the naked eye? We have seen that in the moment of the emergence of capitalism the present could be intensified, and prepared for individual perception, by the construction of a historical past from which as a process it could be felt to issue slowly forth, like the growth of an organism. But today the past is dead, transformed into a packet of well-worn and thumbed glossy images. As for the future, which may still be alive in some small heroic collectivities on the Earth's surface, it is for us either irrelevant or unthinkable.
[…]
I would argue, however, that the most characteristic SF does not seriously attempt to imagine the "real" future of our social system. Rather, its multiple mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come. It is this present moment—unavailable to us for contemplation in its own right because the sheer quantitative immensity of objects and individual lives it comprises is untotalizable and hence unimaginable, and also because it is occluded by the density of our private fantasies as well as of the proliferating stereotypes of a media culture that penetrates every remote zone of our existence—that upon our return from the imaginary constructs of SF is offered to us in the form of some future world's remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively remembered.
- Fredric Jameson, "Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?"

There are certain directions in which you cannot go. Choose one in which you can and move as far as you want.
- Samuel R. Delany, "The Star Pit"

original version seems to be mostly abandoned by the creator (not that it demanded improvement but the site certificate was expired for a while) but https://redactle-unlimited.com not only works for daily/generating random ones but crucially adds multiplayer (the main way i play it, doing a few in a row with the group chat is a fun way to shoot the shit)

unlimited did recently add a feature that includes plurals/conjugations of guessed words (can be disabled in solo, always on in multiplayer) which i have mixed feelings on—it's def a nice quality of life feature but it can def work a little too well, giving related words you likely wouldn't have guessed otherwise (e.g. "wrought" from "work")

never actually had a copy of this to play from start to finish until the wii years but the official strategy guide my brother got with a nintendo power subscription was a formative literary work of my childhood

in first grade for a writing assignment i just started retelling the opening sequence of ocarina of time based on how often i had read it and my teacher was so impressed she had me come talk to her one on one to tell me how good of a story it was and how i should keep working on it. i never had the heart to break it to her

also continue to appreciate the guide's intro section where it laid out a (real-world) timeline of the preceding zelda games that treats them as a series of retellings & reinterpretations of myths and oral histories that are inherently not going to resolve into a cohesive whole rather than the ensuing years of "zelda timeline EXPLAINED" shit

Today, in the lemony light by your grave,
I recited Merrill: Why did I flinch? I loved you, then touched
the damp and swelling mud, blue hyacinths
your mother planted there—
ants were swarming the unfinished plot of earth
like the black text of an infinite alphabet. I couldn’t
read it. There was no epiphany, just dirt, the vast curtain
between this realm and the other. You never speak to me,
I thought, not even in dreams.
- excerpt from "Dirt and Light", Aria Aber

launched this back up today to see if it'd been long enough to finish the thing and stop guilting myself every time i looked at my steam library over not returning. the easy answer would be if i could say i'd dropped it specifically because she was gone but of course i know i'd put it down before then bc it's still there, when i go back through the chatlogs.

a piecemeal approach to the prosecution of enlightenment
it is very unsurprising, now, that you put down the longing
whereas i mainlined it until i found "the wonder"
and i think you might come out ahead, in the end

closing the book on this game has not led me to any great revelation, merely the continued knowledge that for external reasons i pretty much lost all desire to engage with/potential to get anything out of it a long time ago, even if by its very nature i was still 'playing along', in a way. an unsatisfying end, but what else is new.

🌫️

i saw two people i follow mark that they want to play this and figured it was worth adding a review to mention (esp. b/c of the hard-to-google title) that about a year ago its developer took all their games off itch and it's no longer available there.

which is a bummer, this had a neat vibe, it was the first bitsy 3d game i played where i really felt that framework worked for it, and still probably my favorite thing made with it. if i learn that it's resurfaced i'll pass the word on.

EDIT: hideous cave goblin has temporarily made several of their games, including this one, public again