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index 7068e33..c9272c4 100644
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"content/posts/2016-09-28 Women in a Sea of Men.md",
"content/posts/2024-08-28 what's this (and how it works).md",
@@ -213,7 +214,6 @@
"content/posts/2023-08-18 On Teaching.md",
"content/posts/2023-07-31 Old Woman Yells at the Cloud.md",
"content/posts/2024-01-01 my year in lists.md",
- "content/posts/2019-12-20 My Top Ten Albums from the 2010s.md",
"content/posts/2024-08-02 Moving to a rack mount setup.md",
"content/posts/2024-03-10 Moving my home server to a new chassis.md",
"content/posts/2023-07-30 Media Log (July 2023).md",
diff --git a/content/week-notes/025 unused.md b/content/drafts/025 unused.md
similarity index 100%
rename from content/week-notes/025 unused.md
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diff --git a/content/week-notes/031.md b/content/week-notes/031.md
index 21781b6..c5242d9 100644
--- a/content/week-notes/031.md
+++ b/content/week-notes/031.md
@@ -7,6 +7,9 @@ tags:
draft: true
---
## Doing
+I've backported the last of the posts from my old blog! These two were the most involved because they were long and involved creating some new shortcodes (particularly the games one).
+* [My Top Ten Video Games from the 2010s](/my-top-ten-video-games-from-the-2010s/) (2019-11-13)
+* [My Top Ten Albums from the 2010s](/my-top-ten-albums-from-the-2010s) (2019-12-20)[^1]
## Reading
@@ -14,4 +17,6 @@ draft: true
## Playing
-## Listening
\ No newline at end of file
+## Listening
+
+[^1]: *Kept* definitely benefited from recency bias; I was super into it when I wrote this post. I'd move *Swimming* up higher on the list today, but I think the intention of the post is to capture how I felt in that moment of time — not necessarily to create a perennial representation of my tastes.
diff --git a/hugo.toml b/hugo.toml
index b2d3188..2e7bc59 100644
--- a/hugo.toml
+++ b/hugo.toml
@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ enableRobotsTXT = true
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index 5aa3e46..8871301 100644
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@@ -149,12 +146,12 @@ nav ul {
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@@ -237,7 +234,7 @@ nav ul {
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new file mode 100644
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@@ -0,0 +1,130 @@
+
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+
+
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+
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+
+(week notes 25) | cassie.ink
+
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+
And Then? And Then? What Else? has become a slog, but I press on nonetheless. There’s little here to amuse or excite; even devout Lemony Snicket fans will be disappointed I think by the lack of new information or even commentary concerning the books. Handler confirms that the Baudelaires are named for the poet, that the melodrama of the books is inspired by Edvard Gorey, and that he openly disdains the film — hardly revelations by any means. Most egregiously, he seriously downplays the accusations of sexual inappropriateness against him and attempts to use his own childhood sexual assault as a shield against them.
+
I don’t think myself hostile to memoirs, but this book has struck me as meandering and self-aggrandizing. Selfishly, I’m also frustrated that he finds space to talk about the Snicket books (of course), Why We Broke Up, and The Basic Eight, but there is absolutely no mention of Adverbs. I’m pressing on with it because it is an easy (if plodding) read.
+
Watching
+
Playing
+
I started up Final Fantasy XIV again and finally reached First Serpent Lieutenant in my Grand Company, which means I’ll now be able to use my seals to get more mounts.
+
Listening
+
I listened to selections from Cerulean and all of Obsidian by Baths, both albums I’ve loved at points in my life; Guts is out and I wanted to refresh before listening to it.
+
+
+
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diff --git a/public/index.xml b/public/index.xml
index 77c6b39..0143e09 100644
--- a/public/index.xml
+++ b/public/index.xml
@@ -80,9 +80,9 @@
(week notes 25)
- http://localhost:1313/week-notes/025-unused/
+ http://localhost:1313/drafts/025-unused/
Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000
- http://localhost:1313/week-notes/025-unused/
+ http://localhost:1313/drafts/025-unused/<h1 id="doing">Doing</h1>
<h1 id="reading">Reading</h1>
<p><em>And Then? And Then? What Else?</em> has become a slog, but I press on nonetheless. There’s little here to amuse or excite; even devout Lemony Snicket fans will be disappointed I think by the lack of new information or even commentary concerning the books. Handler confirms that the Baudelaires are named for the poet, that the melodrama of the books is inspired by Edvard Gorey, and that he openly disdains the film — hardly revelations by any means. Most egregiously, he seriously downplays the accusations of sexual inappropriateness against him and attempts to use his own childhood sexual assault as a shield against them.</p>
<p>I don’t think myself hostile to memoirs, but this book has struck me as meandering and self-aggrandizing. Selfishly, I’m also frustrated that he finds space to talk about the Snicket books (of course), <em>Why We Broke Up,</em> and <em>The Basic Eight,</em> but there is absolutely no mention of <em>Adverbs.</em> I’m pressing on with it because it is an easy (if plodding) read.</p>
<h1 id="watching">Watching</h1>
<h1 id="playing">Playing</h1>
<p>I started up <em>Final Fantasy XIV</em> again and finally reached First Serpent Lieutenant in my Grand Company, which means I’ll now be able to use my seals to get more mounts.</p>
<h1 id="listening">Listening</h1>
<p>I listened to selections from <em>Cerulean</em> and all of <em>Obsidian</em> by Baths, both albums I’ve loved at points in my life; <em>Guts</em> is out and I wanted to refresh before listening to it.</p>
@@ -468,7 +468,7 @@
http://localhost:1313/my-top-ten-video-games-from-the-2010s/
Wed, 13 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000http://localhost:1313/my-top-ten-video-games-from-the-2010s/
- <p>Another decade in the book, another opportunity to represent my life in lists and data.</p>
<p>Looking retrospectively, this past decade defined my interest in games. It’s been a hobby of mine since I was a young child — I remember holing up in my mom’s basement, replaying the same minigames over and over in <em>Gus Goes to Cyberopolis</em>. My dad bought me a Gameboy Color for my fifth birthday, and I dedicated at least a decade of my life (regrettably) to the <em>Kingdom Hearts</em> series. But in 2010, I started my first job, and so I finally had some disposable income to spend on my hobbies; I didn’t have to beg for games as birthday or Christmas or whenever presents. And so I played a lot more games in these past ten years. I started to follow industry news beyond new releases. I became more thoughtful about and critical of the industry. And I shifted my hobby into professional inquiry: in 2018, I co-wrote a book chapter about how video games could be used in educational settings, and in 2019, I piloted a camp that empowered kids to create their own video games.</p>
<p>The games industry has shifted a lot in this decade, too. We’ve seen a renaissance of games that put character and narrative at their center, which has long been what I wanted to see out of the medium. Game designers continue to heighten the artistic potential of games, both in photo-realism and artistic expression. Put shortly, video games this decade have been <em>really</em>, <em>really</em> good.</p>
<p>Now, to offer a caveat to this list: I obviously didn’t play every game that came out in this decade. I didn’t even play <em>most</em> games this decade. I missed major, beloved titles like <em>Red Dead Redemption 2</em>, the <em>Uncharted</em> series, or any of the <em>Call of Duty</em> games. Some of this comes down to personal taste, others to time (and monetary) restrictions. This list therefore will be limited to games that I actually played this decade, rather than some kind of pseudo-objective ranking of every game that released in this time frame — and I reserve the right to amend this list when I finally get around to playing <em>Control</em>.</p>
<p>Editorially, I have also decided to omit remasters or re-releases from my consideration unless they dramatically transformed the content of the original game. I have also listed the platform(s) on which I played the games listed, as that may have affected my experience with them.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="10-the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild">#10. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/botwzelda.png" alt="Zelda alone in a pool of water"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2017</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">Nintendo Switch</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Nintendo</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Time Played</span>
<span class="value">105 hours</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>My feelings on <em>Breath of the Wild</em> are complicated, to say the least. I’m sure many folks out there would recoil at it only just making my list; I’m sure it will appear at the top of most critical and personal lists, lists assembled by folks who are far better informed and well-equipped to talk about it than me. But here it is, at #10, even though it’s one of the games I pumped the most hours into within this decade (and threw the most curses at).</p>
<p>I have a rocky history with <em>The Legend of Zelda</em>. Most of the games in the series that I’ve enjoyed and spent considerable time with — <em>Oracle of the Ages</em>, <em>Minish Cap</em>, and <em>Phantom Hourglass</em> — are either widely disliked or, at least, considered the lesser games in the series. I’ve tried a few times to play through some of the classics in the series, like <em>Majora’s Mask</em>, but something never quite clicked for me in them. Other series staples, like <em>Wind Waker</em> and <em>Twilight Princess</em>, were inaccessible to me because I never owned the appropriate console on which to play them.</p>
<p>But <em>Breath of the Wild</em> was something different, both for the series and for me. To begin with, I had access to it: my boyfriend got a Switch not long after it released, and <em>Breath of the Wild</em> was the driving force behind that decision for him. I later would get a Switch of my own, and the ability to play <em>Breath of the Wild</em> as both a handheld experience and and a traditional console game seemed to help me stick with it.</p>
<p><em>Breath of the Wild</em> was also an entirely new direction for the series. While past games have had open worlds and a focus on exploration and puzzles, <em>Breath of the Wild</em> did all that like no other. The simple act of traversing through the world works so, so well in <em>Breath of the Wild</em>, and the reason for that is that it never limits you in what you can do. You see a mountain, you can climb it — with the right gear, food, or stamina, of course — but <em>you can climb it</em>. The game never stands in your way when you are following your curiosity, and it rewards your wandering eye with breathtaking skylines, quirky characters, and new discoveries. Even after I had completed all the towers and unlocked fast travel points throughout the map, I would still choose to run great distances to an objective just to take in the splendor of the world, to enjoy the sparse yet powerful music, to meet other travelers along the road. This is why <em>Breath of the Wild</em> eked its way onto my list.</p>
<p>But as much as I loved my interactions with with world of <em>Breath of the Wild</em>, I hated just about everything surrounding it. The story, while competent, did not deviate too far from the <em>Zelda</em> formula: fight some mini-bosses (the corrupted Divine Beasts) to prepare you to fight the big bad (Ganondorf). While that’s a simple story structure that <em>most</em> games can be reduced to, <em>Breath of the Wild</em> does not add anything particularly innovating or exciting on top of it. And while Zelda is more of a compelling character in <em>Breath of the Wild</em> than she has been in some previous titles, she is still relegated to a damsel in distress role and is totally absent outside of the occasional flashback. I think the setup for her character is refreshing and interesting — a young woman attempting to discover her power and be worthy of the throne — but it’s still ancillary to the bulk of the game despite her name being in the title.</p>
<p><em>Breath of the Wild</em> also offers no incentive to participate in its combat; by a certain point in the game, I had plenty of resources and powerful weapons, so the random Bokoblins and Moblins were more of an annoyance than anything else because I would not gain any experience points from defeating them — and when you factor in the weapon durability system, I felt actively discouraged from engaging in combat at all because I only served to lose from it. On top of that, I often felt I was fighting against the controls; the systems design of <em>Breath of the Wild</em> simply felt too ambitious for the limited JoyCon, and while a Pro controller assuaged most of my control issues, it’s difficult to swallow that the game almost requires a $70 add-on.</p>
<p>And then there are the shrines. My boyfriend, Joe, will insist that I hate puzzles and that’s why I did not enjoy the shrines in <em>Breath of the Wild</em>, and maybe that’s true. I don’t seem to derive the same fulfillment others do from sitting stuck at a puzzle for hours until you work it out; I’d much rather just look up the solution online and continue on my way. Many shrines I found had clear solutions, but they would be so tedious to actually perform that I simply handed the controller over to Joe and asked him to save me the frustration. While there are multiple possible solutions to many of these puzzles, I found the shrines overall to be so disconnected from the magic of the world above them — like entirely separate teams and design philosophies had inspired them compared to the parts of the game I actually liked.</p>
<p>It probably doesn’t help that — for inexplicable reasons — the game’s developers placed <a href="https://zeldauniverse.net/guides/breath-of-the-wild/sidequests/shrines-of-trials/myahm-agana-shrine-myahm-agana-apparatus/">one of the most obtuse, irritating shrine puzzles</a> so close to the Great Plateau, almost guaranteeing that most players would discover it in their early hours with the game. I did, and it did not leave a good first impression.</p>
<p>Even with all these frustrations, I know in my heart of hearts that <em>Breath of the Wild</em> is a phenomenal accomplishment — that it belongs on this list, that I secretly like it, because it does an open world unlike any game before it. Every so often, the game comes together in a beautiful harmony — I feel free, untethered, unrestricted, and in awe of the beautiful world before me, and then all my criticisms of the game slip away. And then I go down an elevator to a shrine and the din begins anew. I’m torn between that discordance, but it belongs here.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="9-animal-crossing-new-leaf">#9. Animal Crossing: New Leaf</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/acnl.jpg" alt="Various characters from New Leaf"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2012</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">Nintendo 3DS</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Monolith Soft</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>My love affair with the <em>Animal Crossing</em> series started back on the Nintendo DS with <em>Animal Crossing: Wild World</em>. I spent many a hours in middle school decorating my player’s room, designing custom patterns, and visiting my the towns of my siblings and friends. I broached the 3DS library late, but when I picked mine up in 2015, I knew that <em>New Leaf</em> would be a must buy.</p>
<p>Now, I could talk about some of the more meaningful and enjoyable additions that <em>New Leaf</em> brought to the series, like Dream Towns, Public Works projects, and more options for character customization. I could croon on about Isabelle, who I inexplicably and wholeheartedly love. And I could enumerate all the hours I dumped into the Desert Island Escape mini-game hidden within <em>New Leaf</em>, but I would rather not realize my shame and addiction on a semi-permanent platform like my blog. (I have since learned that Desert Island Escape is playable in <em>Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival</em>, making me one of four people who purchased <em>Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival</em> for something other than the bundled amiibo.)</p>
<p><em>Animal Crossing</em> simply works in that it is one of the coziest experiences in gaming. While other titles focus on leveling up your character, meeting impossible combat challenges, or working out team strategies in cooperative settings, the joys of <em>Animal Crossing</em> are often found in solitude. Even if I have only twenty minutes to spare, I can load up my town and tackle whichever of <em>New Leaf</em>‘s numerous offerings best strike my fancy that day: I can catch fish, hunt for fossils, or design my house. I can build relationships with my townspeople or explore the towns other players have constructed. And even while some parts of the game can feel a bit tedious, like filling out the museum or raising enough bells to pay off a mortgage, the game never forces the player to complete any of it: all of these activities happen at the player’s pace, and the game encourages a sense of leisure. There’s certainly room to go hardcore in <em>Animal Crossing</em>, by time-traveling or hacking one’s game, but what I love most about <em>Animal Crossing</em> is how it respects my time and how it seems naturally designed for self-care. <em>Animal Crossing</em> is welcoming and playful in its art, music, and characters. It’s a game for taking a mental health day (or hour, or afternoon, or week), wrapping yourself in a warm blanket, and escaping to a world that is softer than our own.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="8-final-fantasy-xiv-a-realm-reborn">#8. Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/ffxivarr.jpg" alt="Key art from FFXIV showing Alphinaud, Alisaie, and the Warrior of Light"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2013</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PlayStation 4, PC</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Square-Enix</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>I have had a rocky few years with Square Enix. As a company, they have released some of the most important games and series to me — I count <em>Final Fantasy X</em>, <em>Final Fantasy XII</em>, and <em>Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced</em> among my all-time favorite games, and the <em>Kingdom Hearts</em> series was my entryway into gaming as a more serious hobby and gaming as a community. Square’s releases in the 2010-2019 span were not such easy allies; the company clearly struggled to meet both the new challenges of developing high definition games as well as match the innovations other developers had made. Quite simply, they no longer enjoyed their top dog status. They lost the trust and brand recognition that blockbusters like <em>Final Fantasy VII</em> and <em>Final Fantasy X</em> afforded them, and I was actively offended by <em>Final Fantasy XIII</em> series (!) and <em>Final Fantasy XV</em>.</p>
<p>I started in with <em>Final Fantasy XIV</em> on a whim. I had never played an MMORPG before, unless you count spending the better part of a day downloading <em>The Old Republic</em> and promptly uninstalling it after just a few minutes of gameplay. But I liked the <em>Final Fantasy</em> series, and it was free to sign up for the alpha. So I thought, <em>why not</em>?</p>
<p>I fell in love with <em>Final Fantasy XIV</em> quickly, even with the immense learning curve that any MMO would have. And I certainly had my ups and downs with the game; it is guilty of the infamously menial MMO quest design of fetch quests and killing squirrels to progress the story, of grinding out levels for hours just to access new content. Even so, I roped friends into playing with me, and part of my enjoyment of <em>Final Fantasy XIV</em> became the relationships and socialization that happened around it: I was able to maintain and reconnect friendships through <em>XIV</em>. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to keep up with Square’s active roadmap for the game or set aside enough time in my increasingly busy life to justify the subscription cost. I’ve yet to even finish the <em>Heavensward</em> expansion. But every time I come back to the game, I’m delighted by what I enjoyed the last time I played, and the new content only seems to get better and better.</p>
<p><em>Final Fantasy XIV</em> represents hope, then, that a game company can take a critical eye to their releases, do right by their customers, and deliver something fantastic. The game’s original launch was a different sort of debacle than their other contemporary releases, and certainly larger in scale in that the game was pulled off shelves and rebuilt from the ground up. But the team behind <em>A Realm Reborn</em> were able to raise the game from the ashes, and many critics agree that <em>XIV</em>‘s most recent expansion, <em>Shadowbringers</em>, is its most ambitious and powerful yet. And while I’m in one of my valleys with the game right now, distracted by the responsibilities of grad school, the opening notes of some Gridania’s field music are enough to wrap me in comfort and inspire me to return yet again to Eorzea.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="7-marvels-spider-man">#7. Marvel’s Spider-Man</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/spiderman.jpg" alt="Spider-Man perched atop the Empire State Building"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2018</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PlayStation 4</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Insomniac</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Trophies Earned</span>
<span class="value">100%</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>I’m not a big superhero fan, but I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Spider-Man. The Sam Raimi films came out when I was young, and they were exactly the type of popcorn blockbuster that I wanted at that age. I also played a whole bunch of the <em>Spider-Man 2</em> video game on my original Xbox; it was one of the first open world games that I played, and I would spend hours swinging around New York City or, my favorite, climbing to the top of the Empire State Building and seeing how close to the ground I could get before I had to swing off to safety.</p>
<p>So when Insomniac announced their new Spider-Man game for the PlayStation 4, I was excited to relive the joys of one of my favorite childhood games, in a more modern and varied open world. I made it a few weeks after <em>Spider-Man</em>‘s release before I cashed in some coupons and dove in. I played every night for a week, and it was the first (and only) game I ever platinumed on PlayStation.</p>
<p><em>Spider-Man</em> is simply a joy to play. The web swinging and traversal is fluid, allowing the player to zip around the city with ease and style. As entertaining as the fast travel cutscenes were, I rarely used the system simply because I loved travelling through the city so much. The game also has one of the best golden hours around; much of the action of the game takes place against golden sun rays and soft shadows. It’s a beautiful, beautiful game, and I appreciate any game with a cosmetic system as deep as <em>Spider-Man</em>‘s. I loved earning all the suits and cycling through them, especially the comic book suit.</p>
<p>The story in <em>Spider-Man</em> is better than it has any right to be for a superhero game. The twists and reveals are mostly predictable, but where the game shines is the relationships built between the characters. Peter and MJ have real chemistry, and the complications in their relationship are believable because MJ has an actual will in this version of the Spidey universe. She doesn’t want to stay away from the action and actively resists any damseling (and Peter’s attempts to protect her). Peter and Otto have a believeable mentorship, which makes his shift to Doc Ock more tragic. <em>Spider-Man</em> cares about establishing and developing its characters, and it helps ground the superhero action in a human, emotional context.</p>
<p>By far my favorite portions of the game were the sections where Peter was allowed to be a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man: retrieving his homeless friend’s escaped pigeons, chasing down a garbage truck that took his trashed belongings after he was evicted, and collecting the backpacks he had scattered through the city offer a nice reprieve from the big action of the main story. Again, it helps to humanize the character and ground the story; there was a levity to <em>Spider-Man</em> that made it a joy to play.</p>
<p><em>Spider-Man</em> was a triumph in how to make a <em>good</em> superhero game — one that isn’t bogged down by a cinematic universe, one that doesn’t repeat the stories we’ve seen a dozen times on screen and in comics. Insomniac put their own fresh, original spin on the characters and the universe, making it accessible for folks like me who don’t know the character well while still being a satisfying homage to the character for superfans.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="6-horizon-zero-dawn">#6. Horizon Zero Dawn</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/hzd.jpg" alt="Aloy ziplining down from the top of a snowy mountain"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2017</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PlayStation 4</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Guerilla Games</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Time Played</span>
<span class="value">75 hours</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Trophies Earned</span>
<span class="value">100% (base game)</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>When <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em> was first shown at E3 2015, I was instantly interested: a new IP starring a badass, bow-wielding female character voiced by Ashly Burch? Sign me up. The setting looked unique, following our society’s fascination with post-apocalyptic societies but avoiding any cliches. <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em>‘s world is harsh for some, but there are thriving settlements and communities, diverse tribes with real identities, and, well, robot dinosaurs.</p>
<p>The way that <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em> contrasts its grounded tribal life with the high-tech machines makes for a visually splendid experience, often set against the backdrop of sweeping mountain ranges and decaying ruins. I found myself regularly pausing on mountaintops just to take in the beautiful, varied scenery of Aloy’s world, just as I did with <em>Breath of the Wild</em>. There’s a real sense that Aloy lives among the ruins of a world that once was, and the player discovers the story of that world’s downfall through some pretty incredible environmental storytelling.</p>
<p><em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em> also focuses on stories that we do not usually see outside of novels geared specifically toward young women. We have had a prolific history of games about fatherhood — <em>Final Fantasy X</em>, <em>Heavy Rain, God of War, The Last of Us</em>, <em>BioShock Infinite</em>, to name a few — and many of them craft compelling, meaningful narratives. And fatherhood is important in <em>Horizon</em>, certainly: Rost, Aloy’s father figure, is killed in the opening hours of the game, but his influence on Aloy looms large throughout Aloy’s internal narrative and the ways he taught her to survive in their harsh world. That is all well and good, but <em>Horizon</em> fills the comparative void that the industry has created for games about motherhood. <em>Horizon</em> therefore distinguishes itself in that it focuses not only on a woman’s story, but the story of a young woman discovering her connection to her mother through the game’s narrative and, on a broader scale, Mother Earth. It’s not a coincidence that the person responsible for destroying the world before the events of the game is a man and that the person who works to heal it is a woman — a woman who goes on to create a female-coded entity to care for the inhabitants that will follow long after her death. And without spoiling the ending or events of the game (you can <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQIqoTHY2MU">click on this link</a> if you want to do that for yourself), <em>Horizon</em> has a powerful final message: for women to nurture their daughters to be curious, brave, and compassionate women who can nurture the world under that ethos.</p>
<p>In terms of gameplay, <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em> offers a varied experience; Aloy has many different bows, slings, traps, and other tools at her disposal, which the player can select according to their playstyle and the demands of the combat encounter ahead of them. I found myself favoring the Sharpshot Bow for stealthy, high-precision shots and its tear ammo, which will shoot pieces of armor off of enemies. Enemy encounters were always varied, as the terrain would often shape one’s approach, and enemies of different types were present together, adding a heightened challenge.</p>
<p><em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em>‘s shortcomings are especially stark when you consider that it released just days before <em>Breath of the Wild</em>, and I think that led many to overlook it. <em>Breath of the Wild</em> very much follows the “if you can see it, you can climb it” philosophy, so long as the player has adequate stamina and it’s not raining. <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em> instead uses an <em>Uncharted</em>-style traversal system. It’s functional, but it lacks the fluidity and freedom of <em>Breath of the Wild</em>, which is jarring when the games are played soon after one another. <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em> also has a robust crafting and inventory system — in some ways, I prefer it to <em>Breath of the Wild</em>, as I can quickly craft some new arrows in <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em> as I need them, which gives me the freedom to use the weapons and tools I prefer in combat. But the gathering and inventory management in <em>Horizon</em> can feel clunky at times, as the player is always having to figure out which resources to keep and which to sell off.</p>
<p>All around, though, I have really enjoyed my time with <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em>. Its world is vast and visually delightful, its story is gripping, and even the side quests have a level of care and detail put into them that other open world games struggle to embed. More than anything, it tells a story that actively values and empowers women and mothers, which few if any games do or do as well. I’m excited to see Guerilla fine-tune some of the clunkier aspects of the game and evolve Aloy and her world.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="5-firewatch">#5. Firewatch</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/firewatch.jpg" alt="An empty firewatch tower at sunset"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2016</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PC</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Campo Santo</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Time Played</span>
<span class="value">3.5 hours</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Life Course</span>
<span class="value">Permanently Changed & Altered</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>From <em>Firewatch</em>‘s art, it’s easy to get the wrong impression of the game. Its now iconic design features flat mountains against the glowing backdrop of the setting sun, rich trees to lose oneself in, and a lone firetower set on spindly legs for your quiet contemplation. It seems, then, to follow the Emersonian ideal of transcendentalism — of communing with nature to discover truth and beauty and the meaning of all things. It seems to be about living deliberately, separated from the constant phone calls and text messages and push notifications. But <em>Firewatch</em>‘s realities are far from these <em>Walden</em>-esque projections.</p>
<p>Henry goes to the woods not to discover himself but to lose himself. <em>Firewatch</em> is a game about escapism — about running from what’s tough in life, using solitude as a hideout, constructing fantasies to keep you from hardship, and the people we wrap into our paranoia as we jump at the shadows, afraid to confront what actually looms within us. It’s a game about learning that reality eventually catches up with you. We can only live in the fictions we’ve built to protect ourselves for so long, and the more we try to cling to them, the further we’ll be driven to madness.</p>
<p>Part of what makes <em>Firewatch</em> such an accomplishment is the way it is able to build human relationships through a walkie-talkie. The voice performance of the actors behind Henry and Delilah is terrific and helps create an intimacy between two people who have never met in person. And that, too, becomes part of <em>Firewatch</em>‘s power — it forces the player to question how well we know other people when we only see the sides of themselves they have constructed. We are rapt as we watch their romance evolve, and we root for it even though we know it is doomed.</p>
<p><em>Firewatch</em>‘s anti-climax is perhaps <a href="https://quarterly.camposanto.com/the-end-of-firewatch-8a7d334a9586">one of the most divisive in gaming history</a>, and it brings those themes to a head. When you talk to anyone about the game, your conversation will probably — and circuitously — start with what you thought about the ending. Henry and Delilah’s relationship was always going to end this way, because it had to, but that doesn’t stop the player from desiring that catharsis — they’re simply looking for it in the wrong place. That density and room for debate is the mark of a great piece of story — we’re able to still talk about it and dissect it years after its release. <em>Firewatch</em> stakes out a place in your head and stays in there. It’s a work of art.</p>
<hr>
<hr>
<h2 id="4-mass-effect-2">#4. Mass Effect 2</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/me2.jpg" alt="Liara and Female Shep kiss in the Shadow Broker’s Lair"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2010</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PlayStation 3</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">BioWare</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Time Played</span>
<span class="value">55.5 hours</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Trophies Earned</span>
<span class="value">79%</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Life Course</span>
<span class="value">made me gay</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>I have been quoted as saying that <em>Mass Effect 2</em> is the “game of the century.”</p>
<p>Such an assertion is impossible to make given that we’re only nineteen years <em>into</em> this century; it’s obviously a hyperbole. But with <em>Mass Effect 2</em> releasing in January of 2010, I hold that it established an ethos that would guide the games that came after it — and that ethos is character.</p>
<p>The first <em>Mass Effect</em> game was a trailblazer in its own way, of course. The level of choice, consequence, and cinematic storytelling included within it was unprecedented at the time, and it received appropriate accolades. But while the story is an enjoyable space opera, it’s pretty by the books — you play as a noted military hero who assembles a team of soldiers and experts to fight an operative gone rogue. <em>Mass Effect</em> has its unique voice, and the story takes some exciting turns, but you’re still a hero who does heroic things (or, if you play Renegade, you’re a hero who does mostly heroic things with a sarcastic smirk and a willingness to line your own pockets in the process).</p>
<p><em>Mass Effect 2</em> asserts that it is going to do something different within the first five minutes of starting the game — when the player character, Commander Shepard, is abruptly killed, then reincarnated two years later by rogue paramilitary group for what they make clear will be a Suicide Mission.</p>
<p>From there, <em>Mass Effect 2</em> does not launch any big twists or surprises onto the player. You always know that things are headed for the Suicide Mission, and you have to prepare as best you can for it. While you had the backing of the intergalactic government, vast military resources, and a highly qualified crew in <em>Mass Effect</em>, <em>Mass Effect 2</em> sees you assemble a ragtag crew in a patchwork body; your crew consists of hackers, mad scientists, thieves, genetic experiments, and generally disturbed personalities. Even those characters who return from the first game are grizzled by time, with shifting moralities. Most of your assembled crew could give a damn about the fate of the galaxy or Cerberus’s interests, but <em>Mass Effect 2</em> lives and dies by these characters. As you sort through each of your squad member’s personal traumas and help them find the peace they need before they join you on your Suicide Mission, the game posits that the way to overcome impossible odds and save the universe is by loving and caring for the people around you — of building bonds that mean they will follow you to death’s door (and, hopefully, back).</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="3-life-is-strange">#3. Life is Strange</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/lis.jpg" alt="Max and Chloe lay on a bed together in their underwear"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2015</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PlayStation 4</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Dontnod Entertainment</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Trophies Earned</span>
<span class="value">60%</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Life Course</span>
<span class="value">made me gayer</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>When Dontnod released the first episode of <em>Life is Strange</em>, <a href="https://cassie.ink/life-is-strange-episode-1-chrysalis/">I shared effusive praise about it</a>. It was one of the few games that I felt represented me — that spoke to my experiences as a teenage girl, that did them justice, that felt authentic. I still feel that way. <em>Life is Strange</em> continued its exploration of difficult topics in its later episodes — suicide, drug use, sexual abuse, cyberbullying — but it was never exploitative, nor did it ever feel like an afterschool special. It conveyed these harsh realities with grace and mindfulness — realities that most games are either too afraid to include or woefully mishandle. And in that way, it did justice to the stories of many.</p>
<p>After I finished the fifth and final episode of <em>Life is Strange</em>, Polarized, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth: I didn’t feel that Dontnod delivered on its ambitious storytelling or tied up loose strings in its ending. I still haven’t quite made my peace with the game’s final choice, though learning about the time and resource crunch behind it softened it a little. But when I think about the game as a whole, I think about the good. I think about the incredibly deep and real and complicated and human characters that inhabit Arcadia Bay. I think about the way Dontnod masterfully uses licensed music to establish those characters and add an emotional weight to scenes. I think about the tension and twists in the narrative. And I think about how few games have been able to tell a story of this magnitude — a story that, by its nature, wraps the player in and doesn’t let go even after the credits roll.</p>
<p>And I think about how <em>Life is Strange</em> is unlike any other game. Sure, there are comparisons one can make across genre or mechanics, but what other game places a group so often excluded from and terrorized within gaming — teenage girls — at its center? What other game speaks to the ways that men victimize young women? What other game gives voice and power and agency to these young women, refusing to sideline or damsel them?</p>
<p>As much as it is easy to goof on <em>Life is Strange</em> for its, at times, cringe-inducing lines or its rampant <em>Twin Peaks</em> references, it has a clear mission to represent the social and emotional realities of young people. And it manages to mix its ambitions for social commentary with a deeply affecting, resonant story; it never becomes too didactic or wrapped up in making a message — it’s always grounded in the characters and the story. I think about Max and Chloe and Kate and Rachel and Nathan and Victoria on a regular basis, and I was in anguish as I watched tragedy unfold around them. It’s a rollercoaster I loved riding.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="2-the-last-of-us">#2. The Last of Us</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/tlou.jpg" alt="Ellie"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2013</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PlayStation 4</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Naughty Dog</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Trophies Earned</span>
<span class="value">3%</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>When I started exploring video games as literature, the first game I thought of was <em>The Last of Us</em>. There are some phenomenal, emotional, impactful stories to be found within games — and I’ve included many of them on my list, lauded them for just that. But <em>The Last of Us</em> is in a class all its own.</p>
<p>Nothing about <em>The Last of Us</em> would make one expect anything revolutionary. It’s a zombie game. It’s a big escort mission. The story, on paper, doesn’t seem like anything extraordinary or new for the genre. You’re Joel, a survivor twenty years into the zombie apocalypse who has lost his daughter and been tasked with escorting a 14-year-old girl across the country so that she can be studied for her immunity to the zombie virus.</p>
<p>Where <em>The Last of Us</em> distinguishes itself is in the extraordinary execution of that story. Joel and Ellie are made to be real by the complex motivations and ambitions and stories behind them. In the opening moments of the game, when the zombie virus first emerges, Joel loses his daughter Sarah <em>The Last of Us</em> is about finding small glimpses of humanity in a bleak, punishing world. There is no easy mortality to <em>The Last of Us</em>, no clear villain or hero — there’s a darkness behind every character, a guilt that they have for continuing to exist in a world filled with senseless loss. As much as I hate Joel for his actions throughout the journey, I understand them. I understand that he clings to his concept of surviving at any cost because it’s all he has left. I understand the ways that he has been broken and twisted by loss, the way that Ellie represents his final remaining connection to his humanity. In the final moments of the game, when Ellie at last sees Joel for what he is, we understand that the world could do the same to her.</p>
<p><em>The Last of Us</em> is a game about love because somehow, after all the traumatic blows that Joel, Ellie, and the player share, we still want to believe that love and humanity can endure. We want to prevail and do justice to the memory of the people we have lost along the way. We want to believe that our connections to the people we love can stop us from being swallowed by the harshness of the world. We want to look for the light — and the shreds of it that are found in <em>The Last of Us</em> are made profound by their rarity.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="1-stardew-valley">#1. Stardew Valley</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/tlou.jpg" alt="Ellie"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2016</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PC, Nintendo Switch</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">ConcernedApe</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Time Played</span>
<span class="value">160 hours</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>Depression has been my quiet struggle for many years. When I picked up <em>Stardew Valley</em>, I had just started on a new medication that left me an emotional mess: up and down, crying all morning, needy for Joe to come around and pick me up. I wasn’t in school, and my next steps in life were totally uncertain. It was a dark time for me, and <em>Stardew</em> was my light. The game was a good distraction; I could sink hours and hours into it at at time and never feel bored. And it made me feel like I was <em>accomplishing</em> something, working on making things better, even if that “better” was happening in the context of the game — like upgrading my sprinklers so I wouldn’t have to do as much watering or getting the town bus line reopened so that Pam would have her job back. <em>Stardew</em> gave me comfort; it became my game for self-care. And even when things aren’t so dire as my first months with the game, <em>Stardew Valley</em> is still like an old friend I can come back to whenever I need some solace or just to kill a little time.</p>
<p>It’s difficult to pitch <em>Stardew Valley</em> to people. There’s an immensely personal bond I have to it, but on the surface, it doesn’t sound too interesting: it’s a farming simulator like <em>Harvest Moon</em>, kind of, with shades of <em>Terraria</em> and <em>Animal Crossing</em>. But it’s more than that, too. And I think part of it has to be played and experienced to be understood.</p>
<p>To speak more broadly, though, I think the message <em>Stardew Valley</em> carries is something we all need to help get us through the state of the world in 2019. <em>Stardew Valley</em> is about community — about forming relationships with the people around us, about rekindling our connection to the earth and to family and to ourselves. <em>Stardew Valley</em> posits this message early on, through Grandpa’s Letter, which suggests that the “dire change” the player needs can be accomplished by rediscovering what really matters in life: “real connections with other people and nature.” That ethos becomes the reason for the gameplay loop: rebuilding the town’s community center and pushing out the capitalistic forces that seek to place us in endless, soul-crushing competition with one another. <em>Stardew Valley</em> carries an overwhelming hope that happiness is within reach if we work for it — that we can regain and rebuild our connections to the world through good, honest work, through communion with the land, through taking care of each other, through forming a sense of community in our increasingly separate, disconnected time. Sometimes I need reminders of that hope, and <em>Stardew Valley</em> makes it all seem achievable — even if we know it won’t be as easy as picking some leeks in the forest or growing some gold star quality parsnips. It’s within reach, if we’re willing to work for it.</p>
+ <p>Another decade in the book, another opportunity to represent my life in lists and data.</p>
<p>Looking retrospectively, this past decade defined my interest in games. It’s been a hobby of mine since I was a young child — I remember holing up in my mom’s basement, replaying the same minigames over and over in <em>Gus Goes to Cyberopolis</em>. My dad bought me a Gameboy Color for my fifth birthday, and I dedicated at least a decade of my life (regrettably) to the <em>Kingdom Hearts</em> series. But in 2010, I started my first job, and so I finally had some disposable income to spend on my hobbies; I didn’t have to beg for games as birthday or Christmas or whenever presents. And so I played a lot more games in these past ten years. I started to follow industry news beyond new releases. I became more thoughtful about and critical of the industry. And I shifted my hobby into professional inquiry: in 2018, I co-wrote a book chapter about how video games could be used in educational settings, and in 2019, I piloted a camp that empowered kids to create their own video games.</p>
<p>The games industry has shifted a lot in this decade, too. We’ve seen a renaissance of games that put character and narrative at their center, which has long been what I wanted to see out of the medium. Game designers continue to heighten the artistic potential of games, both in photo-realism and artistic expression. Put shortly, video games this decade have been <em>really</em>, <em>really</em> good.</p>
<p>Now, to offer a caveat to this list: I obviously didn’t play every game that came out in this decade. I didn’t even play <em>most</em> games this decade. I missed major, beloved titles like <em>Red Dead Redemption 2</em>, the <em>Uncharted</em> series, or any of the <em>Call of Duty</em> games. Some of this comes down to personal taste, others to time (and monetary) restrictions. This list therefore will be limited to games that I actually played this decade, rather than some kind of pseudo-objective ranking of every game that released in this time frame — and I reserve the right to amend this list when I finally get around to playing <em>Control</em>.</p>
<p>Editorially, I have also decided to omit remasters or re-releases from my consideration unless they dramatically transformed the content of the original game. I have also listed the platform(s) on which I played the games listed, as that may have affected my experience with them.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="10-the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild">#10. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/botwzelda.png" alt="Zelda alone in a pool of water"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2017</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">Nintendo Switch</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Nintendo</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Time Played</span>
<span class="value">105 hours</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>My feelings on <em>Breath of the Wild</em> are complicated, to say the least. I’m sure many folks out there would recoil at it only just making my list; I’m sure it will appear at the top of most critical and personal lists, lists assembled by folks who are far better informed and well-equipped to talk about it than me. But here it is, at #10, even though it’s one of the games I pumped the most hours into within this decade (and threw the most curses at).</p>
<p>I have a rocky history with <em>The Legend of Zelda</em>. Most of the games in the series that I’ve enjoyed and spent considerable time with — <em>Oracle of the Ages</em>, <em>Minish Cap</em>, and <em>Phantom Hourglass</em> — are either widely disliked or, at least, considered the lesser games in the series. I’ve tried a few times to play through some of the classics in the series, like <em>Majora’s Mask</em>, but something never quite clicked for me in them. Other series staples, like <em>Wind Waker</em> and <em>Twilight Princess</em>, were inaccessible to me because I never owned the appropriate console on which to play them.</p>
<p>But <em>Breath of the Wild</em> was something different, both for the series and for me. To begin with, I had access to it: my boyfriend got a Switch not long after it released, and <em>Breath of the Wild</em> was the driving force behind that decision for him. I later would get a Switch of my own, and the ability to play <em>Breath of the Wild</em> as both a handheld experience and and a traditional console game seemed to help me stick with it.</p>
<p><em>Breath of the Wild</em> was also an entirely new direction for the series. While past games have had open worlds and a focus on exploration and puzzles, <em>Breath of the Wild</em> did all that like no other. The simple act of traversing through the world works so, so well in <em>Breath of the Wild</em>, and the reason for that is that it never limits you in what you can do. You see a mountain, you can climb it — with the right gear, food, or stamina, of course — but <em>you can climb it</em>. The game never stands in your way when you are following your curiosity, and it rewards your wandering eye with breathtaking skylines, quirky characters, and new discoveries. Even after I had completed all the towers and unlocked fast travel points throughout the map, I would still choose to run great distances to an objective just to take in the splendor of the world, to enjoy the sparse yet powerful music, to meet other travelers along the road. This is why <em>Breath of the Wild</em> eked its way onto my list.</p>
<p>But as much as I loved my interactions with with world of <em>Breath of the Wild</em>, I hated just about everything surrounding it. The story, while competent, did not deviate too far from the <em>Zelda</em> formula: fight some mini-bosses (the corrupted Divine Beasts) to prepare you to fight the big bad (Ganondorf). While that’s a simple story structure that <em>most</em> games can be reduced to, <em>Breath of the Wild</em> does not add anything particularly innovating or exciting on top of it. And while Zelda is more of a compelling character in <em>Breath of the Wild</em> than she has been in some previous titles, she is still relegated to a damsel in distress role and is totally absent outside of the occasional flashback. I think the setup for her character is refreshing and interesting — a young woman attempting to discover her power and be worthy of the throne — but it’s still ancillary to the bulk of the game despite her name being in the title.</p>
<p><em>Breath of the Wild</em> also offers no incentive to participate in its combat; by a certain point in the game, I had plenty of resources and powerful weapons, so the random Bokoblins and Moblins were more of an annoyance than anything else because I would not gain any experience points from defeating them — and when you factor in the weapon durability system, I felt actively discouraged from engaging in combat at all because I only served to lose from it. On top of that, I often felt I was fighting against the controls; the systems design of <em>Breath of the Wild</em> simply felt too ambitious for the limited JoyCon, and while a Pro controller assuaged most of my control issues, it’s difficult to swallow that the game almost requires a $70 add-on.</p>
<p>And then there are the shrines. My boyfriend, Joe, will insist that I hate puzzles and that’s why I did not enjoy the shrines in <em>Breath of the Wild</em>, and maybe that’s true. I don’t seem to derive the same fulfillment others do from sitting stuck at a puzzle for hours until you work it out; I’d much rather just look up the solution online and continue on my way. Many shrines I found had clear solutions, but they would be so tedious to actually perform that I simply handed the controller over to Joe and asked him to save me the frustration. While there are multiple possible solutions to many of these puzzles, I found the shrines overall to be so disconnected from the magic of the world above them — like entirely separate teams and design philosophies had inspired them compared to the parts of the game I actually liked.</p>
<p>It probably doesn’t help that — for inexplicable reasons — the game’s developers placed <a href="https://zeldauniverse.net/guides/breath-of-the-wild/sidequests/shrines-of-trials/myahm-agana-shrine-myahm-agana-apparatus/">one of the most obtuse, irritating shrine puzzles</a> so close to the Great Plateau, almost guaranteeing that most players would discover it in their early hours with the game. I did, and it did not leave a good first impression.</p>
<p>Even with all these frustrations, I know in my heart of hearts that <em>Breath of the Wild</em> is a phenomenal accomplishment — that it belongs on this list, that I secretly like it, because it does an open world unlike any game before it. Every so often, the game comes together in a beautiful harmony — I feel free, untethered, unrestricted, and in awe of the beautiful world before me, and then all my criticisms of the game slip away. And then I go down an elevator to a shrine and the din begins anew. I’m torn between that discordance, but it belongs here.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="9-animal-crossing-new-leaf">#9. Animal Crossing: New Leaf</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/acnl.jpg" alt="Various characters from New Leaf"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2012</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">Nintendo 3DS</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Monolith Soft</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>My love affair with the <em>Animal Crossing</em> series started back on the Nintendo DS with <em>Animal Crossing: Wild World</em>. I spent many a hours in middle school decorating my player’s room, designing custom patterns, and visiting my the towns of my siblings and friends. I broached the 3DS library late, but when I picked mine up in 2015, I knew that <em>New Leaf</em> would be a must buy.</p>
<p>Now, I could talk about some of the more meaningful and enjoyable additions that <em>New Leaf</em> brought to the series, like Dream Towns, Public Works projects, and more options for character customization. I could croon on about Isabelle, who I inexplicably and wholeheartedly love. And I could enumerate all the hours I dumped into the Desert Island Escape mini-game hidden within <em>New Leaf</em>, but I would rather not realize my shame and addiction on a semi-permanent platform like my blog. (I have since learned that Desert Island Escape is playable in <em>Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival</em>, making me one of four people who purchased <em>Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival</em> for something other than the bundled amiibo.)</p>
<p><em>Animal Crossing</em> simply works in that it is one of the coziest experiences in gaming. While other titles focus on leveling up your character, meeting impossible combat challenges, or working out team strategies in cooperative settings, the joys of <em>Animal Crossing</em> are often found in solitude. Even if I have only twenty minutes to spare, I can load up my town and tackle whichever of <em>New Leaf</em>‘s numerous offerings best strike my fancy that day: I can catch fish, hunt for fossils, or design my house. I can build relationships with my townspeople or explore the towns other players have constructed. And even while some parts of the game can feel a bit tedious, like filling out the museum or raising enough bells to pay off a mortgage, the game never forces the player to complete any of it: all of these activities happen at the player’s pace, and the game encourages a sense of leisure. There’s certainly room to go hardcore in <em>Animal Crossing</em>, by time-traveling or hacking one’s game, but what I love most about <em>Animal Crossing</em> is how it respects my time and how it seems naturally designed for self-care. <em>Animal Crossing</em> is welcoming and playful in its art, music, and characters. It’s a game for taking a mental health day (or hour, or afternoon, or week), wrapping yourself in a warm blanket, and escaping to a world that is softer than our own.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="8-final-fantasy-xiv-a-realm-reborn">#8. Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/ffxivarr.jpg" alt="Key art from FFXIV showing Alphinaud, Alisaie, and the Warrior of Light"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2013</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PlayStation 4, PC</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Square-Enix</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>I have had a rocky few years with Square Enix. As a company, they have released some of the most important games and series to me — I count <em>Final Fantasy X</em>, <em>Final Fantasy XII</em>, and <em>Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced</em> among my all-time favorite games, and the <em>Kingdom Hearts</em> series was my entryway into gaming as a more serious hobby and gaming as a community. Square’s releases in the 2010-2019 span were not such easy allies; the company clearly struggled to meet both the new challenges of developing high definition games as well as match the innovations other developers had made. Quite simply, they no longer enjoyed their top dog status. They lost the trust and brand recognition that blockbusters like <em>Final Fantasy VII</em> and <em>Final Fantasy X</em> afforded them, and I was actively offended by <em>Final Fantasy XIII</em> series (!) and <em>Final Fantasy XV</em>.</p>
<p>I started in with <em>Final Fantasy XIV</em> on a whim. I had never played an MMORPG before, unless you count spending the better part of a day downloading <em>The Old Republic</em> and promptly uninstalling it after just a few minutes of gameplay. But I liked the <em>Final Fantasy</em> series, and it was free to sign up for the alpha. So I thought, <em>why not</em>?</p>
<p>I fell in love with <em>Final Fantasy XIV</em> quickly, even with the immense learning curve that any MMO would have. And I certainly had my ups and downs with the game; it is guilty of the infamously menial MMO quest design of fetch quests and killing squirrels to progress the story, of grinding out levels for hours just to access new content. Even so, I roped friends into playing with me, and part of my enjoyment of <em>Final Fantasy XIV</em> became the relationships and socialization that happened around it: I was able to maintain and reconnect friendships through <em>XIV</em>. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to keep up with Square’s active roadmap for the game or set aside enough time in my increasingly busy life to justify the subscription cost. I’ve yet to even finish the <em>Heavensward</em> expansion. But every time I come back to the game, I’m delighted by what I enjoyed the last time I played, and the new content only seems to get better and better.</p>
<p><em>Final Fantasy XIV</em> represents hope, then, that a game company can take a critical eye to their releases, do right by their customers, and deliver something fantastic. The game’s original launch was a different sort of debacle than their other contemporary releases, and certainly larger in scale in that the game was pulled off shelves and rebuilt from the ground up. But the team behind <em>A Realm Reborn</em> were able to raise the game from the ashes, and many critics agree that <em>XIV</em>‘s most recent expansion, <em>Shadowbringers</em>, is its most ambitious and powerful yet. And while I’m in one of my valleys with the game right now, distracted by the responsibilities of grad school, the opening notes of some Gridania’s field music are enough to wrap me in comfort and inspire me to return yet again to Eorzea.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="7-marvels-spider-man">#7. Marvel’s Spider-Man</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/spiderman.jpg" alt="Spider-Man perched atop the Empire State Building"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2018</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PlayStation 4</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Insomniac</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Trophies Earned</span>
<span class="value">100%</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>I’m not a big superhero fan, but I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Spider-Man. The Sam Raimi films came out when I was young, and they were exactly the type of popcorn blockbuster that I wanted at that age. I also played a whole bunch of the <em>Spider-Man 2</em> video game on my original Xbox; it was one of the first open world games that I played, and I would spend hours swinging around New York City or, my favorite, climbing to the top of the Empire State Building and seeing how close to the ground I could get before I had to swing off to safety.</p>
<p>So when Insomniac announced their new Spider-Man game for the PlayStation 4, I was excited to relive the joys of one of my favorite childhood games, in a more modern and varied open world. I made it a few weeks after <em>Spider-Man</em>‘s release before I cashed in some coupons and dove in. I played every night for a week, and it was the first (and only) game I ever platinumed on PlayStation.</p>
<p><em>Spider-Man</em> is simply a joy to play. The web swinging and traversal is fluid, allowing the player to zip around the city with ease and style. As entertaining as the fast travel cutscenes were, I rarely used the system simply because I loved travelling through the city so much. The game also has one of the best golden hours around; much of the action of the game takes place against golden sun rays and soft shadows. It’s a beautiful, beautiful game, and I appreciate any game with a cosmetic system as deep as <em>Spider-Man</em>‘s. I loved earning all the suits and cycling through them, especially the comic book suit.</p>
<p>The story in <em>Spider-Man</em> is better than it has any right to be for a superhero game. The twists and reveals are mostly predictable, but where the game shines is the relationships built between the characters. Peter and MJ have real chemistry, and the complications in their relationship are believable because MJ has an actual will in this version of the Spidey universe. She doesn’t want to stay away from the action and actively resists any damseling (and Peter’s attempts to protect her). Peter and Otto have a believeable mentorship, which makes his shift to Doc Ock more tragic. <em>Spider-Man</em> cares about establishing and developing its characters, and it helps ground the superhero action in a human, emotional context.</p>
<p>By far my favorite portions of the game were the sections where Peter was allowed to be a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man: retrieving his homeless friend’s escaped pigeons, chasing down a garbage truck that took his trashed belongings after he was evicted, and collecting the backpacks he had scattered through the city offer a nice reprieve from the big action of the main story. Again, it helps to humanize the character and ground the story; there was a levity to <em>Spider-Man</em> that made it a joy to play.</p>
<p><em>Spider-Man</em> was a triumph in how to make a <em>good</em> superhero game — one that isn’t bogged down by a cinematic universe, one that doesn’t repeat the stories we’ve seen a dozen times on screen and in comics. Insomniac put their own fresh, original spin on the characters and the universe, making it accessible for folks like me who don’t know the character well while still being a satisfying homage to the character for superfans.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="6-horizon-zero-dawn">#6. Horizon Zero Dawn</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/hzd.jpg" alt="Aloy ziplining down from the top of a snowy mountain"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2017</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PlayStation 4</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Guerilla Games</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Time Played</span>
<span class="value">75 hours</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Trophies Earned</span>
<span class="value">100% (base game)</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>When <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em> was first shown at E3 2015, I was instantly interested: a new IP starring a badass, bow-wielding female character voiced by Ashly Burch? Sign me up. The setting looked unique, following our society’s fascination with post-apocalyptic societies but avoiding any cliches. <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em>‘s world is harsh for some, but there are thriving settlements and communities, diverse tribes with real identities, and, well, robot dinosaurs.</p>
<p>The way that <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em> contrasts its grounded tribal life with the high-tech machines makes for a visually splendid experience, often set against the backdrop of sweeping mountain ranges and decaying ruins. I found myself regularly pausing on mountaintops just to take in the beautiful, varied scenery of Aloy’s world, just as I did with <em>Breath of the Wild</em>. There’s a real sense that Aloy lives among the ruins of a world that once was, and the player discovers the story of that world’s downfall through some pretty incredible environmental storytelling.</p>
<p><em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em> also focuses on stories that we do not usually see outside of novels geared specifically toward young women. We have had a prolific history of games about fatherhood — <em>Final Fantasy X</em>, <em>Heavy Rain, God of War, The Last of Us</em>, <em>BioShock Infinite</em>, to name a few — and many of them craft compelling, meaningful narratives. And fatherhood is important in <em>Horizon</em>, certainly: Rost, Aloy’s father figure, is killed in the opening hours of the game, but his influence on Aloy looms large throughout Aloy’s internal narrative and the ways he taught her to survive in their harsh world. That is all well and good, but <em>Horizon</em> fills the comparative void that the industry has created for games about motherhood. <em>Horizon</em> therefore distinguishes itself in that it focuses not only on a woman’s story, but the story of a young woman discovering her connection to her mother through the game’s narrative and, on a broader scale, Mother Earth. It’s not a coincidence that the person responsible for destroying the world before the events of the game is a man and that the person who works to heal it is a woman — a woman who goes on to create a female-coded entity to care for the inhabitants that will follow long after her death. And without spoiling the ending or events of the game (you can <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQIqoTHY2MU">click on this link</a> if you want to do that for yourself), <em>Horizon</em> has a powerful final message: for women to nurture their daughters to be curious, brave, and compassionate women who can nurture the world under that ethos.</p>
<p>In terms of gameplay, <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em> offers a varied experience; Aloy has many different bows, slings, traps, and other tools at her disposal, which the player can select according to their playstyle and the demands of the combat encounter ahead of them. I found myself favoring the Sharpshot Bow for stealthy, high-precision shots and its tear ammo, which will shoot pieces of armor off of enemies. Enemy encounters were always varied, as the terrain would often shape one’s approach, and enemies of different types were present together, adding a heightened challenge.</p>
<p><em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em>‘s shortcomings are especially stark when you consider that it released just days before <em>Breath of the Wild</em>, and I think that led many to overlook it. <em>Breath of the Wild</em> very much follows the “if you can see it, you can climb it” philosophy, so long as the player has adequate stamina and it’s not raining. <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em> instead uses an <em>Uncharted</em>-style traversal system. It’s functional, but it lacks the fluidity and freedom of <em>Breath of the Wild</em>, which is jarring when the games are played soon after one another. <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em> also has a robust crafting and inventory system — in some ways, I prefer it to <em>Breath of the Wild</em>, as I can quickly craft some new arrows in <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em> as I need them, which gives me the freedom to use the weapons and tools I prefer in combat. But the gathering and inventory management in <em>Horizon</em> can feel clunky at times, as the player is always having to figure out which resources to keep and which to sell off.</p>
<p>All around, though, I have really enjoyed my time with <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em>. Its world is vast and visually delightful, its story is gripping, and even the side quests have a level of care and detail put into them that other open world games struggle to embed. More than anything, it tells a story that actively values and empowers women and mothers, which few if any games do or do as well. I’m excited to see Guerilla fine-tune some of the clunkier aspects of the game and evolve Aloy and her world.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="5-firewatch">#5. Firewatch</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/firewatch.jpg" alt="An empty firewatch tower at sunset"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2016</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PC</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Campo Santo</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Time Played</span>
<span class="value">3.5 hours</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Life Course</span>
<span class="value">Permanently Changed & Altered</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>From <em>Firewatch</em>‘s art, it’s easy to get the wrong impression of the game. Its now iconic design features flat mountains against the glowing backdrop of the setting sun, rich trees to lose oneself in, and a lone firetower set on spindly legs for your quiet contemplation. It seems, then, to follow the Emersonian ideal of transcendentalism — of communing with nature to discover truth and beauty and the meaning of all things. It seems to be about living deliberately, separated from the constant phone calls and text messages and push notifications. But <em>Firewatch</em>‘s realities are far from these <em>Walden</em>-esque projections.</p>
<p>Henry goes to the woods not to discover himself but to lose himself. <em>Firewatch</em> is a game about escapism — about running from what’s tough in life, using solitude as a hideout, constructing fantasies to keep you from hardship, and the people we wrap into our paranoia as we jump at the shadows, afraid to confront what actually looms within us. It’s a game about learning that reality eventually catches up with you. We can only live in the fictions we’ve built to protect ourselves for so long, and the more we try to cling to them, the further we’ll be driven to madness.</p>
<p>Part of what makes <em>Firewatch</em> such an accomplishment is the way it is able to build human relationships through a walkie-talkie. The voice performance of the actors behind Henry and Delilah is terrific and helps create an intimacy between two people who have never met in person. And that, too, becomes part of <em>Firewatch</em>‘s power — it forces the player to question how well we know other people when we only see the sides of themselves they have constructed. We are rapt as we watch their romance evolve, and we root for it even though we know it is doomed.</p>
<p><em>Firewatch</em>‘s anti-climax is perhaps <a href="https://quarterly.camposanto.com/the-end-of-firewatch-8a7d334a9586">one of the most divisive in gaming history</a>, and it brings those themes to a head. When you talk to anyone about the game, your conversation will probably — and circuitously — start with what you thought about the ending. Henry and Delilah’s relationship was always going to end this way, because it had to, but that doesn’t stop the player from desiring that catharsis — they’re simply looking for it in the wrong place. That density and room for debate is the mark of a great piece of story — we’re able to still talk about it and dissect it years after its release. <em>Firewatch</em> stakes out a place in your head and stays in there. It’s a work of art.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="4-mass-effect-2">#4. Mass Effect 2</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/me2.jpg" alt="Liara and Female Shep kiss in the Shadow Broker’s Lair"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2010</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PlayStation 3</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">BioWare</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Time Played</span>
<span class="value">55.5 hours</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Trophies Earned</span>
<span class="value">79%</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Life Course</span>
<span class="value">made me gay</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>I have been quoted as saying that <em>Mass Effect 2</em> is the “game of the century.”</p>
<p>Such an assertion is impossible to make given that we’re only nineteen years <em>into</em> this century; it’s obviously a hyperbole. But with <em>Mass Effect 2</em> releasing in January of 2010, I hold that it established an ethos that would guide the games that came after it — and that ethos is character.</p>
<p>The first <em>Mass Effect</em> game was a trailblazer in its own way, of course. The level of choice, consequence, and cinematic storytelling included within it was unprecedented at the time, and it received appropriate accolades. But while the story is an enjoyable space opera, it’s pretty by the books — you play as a noted military hero who assembles a team of soldiers and experts to fight an operative gone rogue. <em>Mass Effect</em> has its unique voice, and the story takes some exciting turns, but you’re still a hero who does heroic things (or, if you play Renegade, you’re a hero who does mostly heroic things with a sarcastic smirk and a willingness to line your own pockets in the process).</p>
<p><em>Mass Effect 2</em> asserts that it is going to do something different within the first five minutes of starting the game — when the player character, Commander Shepard, is abruptly killed, then reincarnated two years later by rogue paramilitary group for what they make clear will be a Suicide Mission.</p>
<p>From there, <em>Mass Effect 2</em> does not launch any big twists or surprises onto the player. You always know that things are headed for the Suicide Mission, and you have to prepare as best you can for it. While you had the backing of the intergalactic government, vast military resources, and a highly qualified crew in <em>Mass Effect</em>, <em>Mass Effect 2</em> sees you assemble a ragtag crew in a patchwork body; your crew consists of hackers, mad scientists, thieves, genetic experiments, and generally disturbed personalities. Even those characters who return from the first game are grizzled by time, with shifting moralities. Most of your assembled crew could give a damn about the fate of the galaxy or Cerberus’s interests, but <em>Mass Effect 2</em> lives and dies by these characters. As you sort through each of your squad member’s personal traumas and help them find the peace they need before they join you on your Suicide Mission, the game posits that the way to overcome impossible odds and save the universe is by loving and caring for the people around you — of building bonds that mean they will follow you to death’s door (and, hopefully, back).</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="3-life-is-strange">#3. Life is Strange</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/lis.jpg" alt="Max and Chloe lay on a bed together in their underwear"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2015</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PlayStation 4</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Dontnod Entertainment</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Trophies Earned</span>
<span class="value">60%</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Life Course</span>
<span class="value">made me gayer</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>When Dontnod released the first episode of <em>Life is Strange</em>, <a href="https://cassie.ink/life-is-strange-episode-1-chrysalis/">I shared effusive praise about it</a>. It was one of the few games that I felt represented me — that spoke to my experiences as a teenage girl, that did them justice, that felt authentic. I still feel that way. <em>Life is Strange</em> continued its exploration of difficult topics in its later episodes — suicide, drug use, sexual abuse, cyberbullying — but it was never exploitative, nor did it ever feel like an afterschool special. It conveyed these harsh realities with grace and mindfulness — realities that most games are either too afraid to include or woefully mishandle. And in that way, it did justice to the stories of many.</p>
<p>After I finished the fifth and final episode of <em>Life is Strange</em>, Polarized, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth: I didn’t feel that Dontnod delivered on its ambitious storytelling or tied up loose strings in its ending. I still haven’t quite made my peace with the game’s final choice, though learning about the time and resource crunch behind it softened it a little. But when I think about the game as a whole, I think about the good. I think about the incredibly deep and real and complicated and human characters that inhabit Arcadia Bay. I think about the way Dontnod masterfully uses licensed music to establish those characters and add an emotional weight to scenes. I think about the tension and twists in the narrative. And I think about how few games have been able to tell a story of this magnitude — a story that, by its nature, wraps the player in and doesn’t let go even after the credits roll.</p>
<p>And I think about how <em>Life is Strange</em> is unlike any other game. Sure, there are comparisons one can make across genre or mechanics, but what other game places a group so often excluded from and terrorized within gaming — teenage girls — at its center? What other game speaks to the ways that men victimize young women? What other game gives voice and power and agency to these young women, refusing to sideline or damsel them?</p>
<p>As much as it is easy to goof on <em>Life is Strange</em> for its, at times, cringe-inducing lines or its rampant <em>Twin Peaks</em> references, it has a clear mission to represent the social and emotional realities of young people. And it manages to mix its ambitions for social commentary with a deeply affecting, resonant story; it never becomes too didactic or wrapped up in making a message — it’s always grounded in the characters and the story. I think about Max and Chloe and Kate and Rachel and Nathan and Victoria on a regular basis, and I was in anguish as I watched tragedy unfold around them. It’s a rollercoaster I loved riding.</p>
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<h2 id="2-the-last-of-us">#2. The Last of Us</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/tlou.jpg" alt="Ellie"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2013</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PlayStation 4</span>
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<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">Naughty Dog</span>
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<div class="box">
<span class="label">Trophies Earned</span>
<span class="value">3%</span>
</div>
</div>
<p>When I started exploring video games as literature, the first game I thought of was <em>The Last of Us</em>. There are some phenomenal, emotional, impactful stories to be found within games — and I’ve included many of them on my list, lauded them for just that. But <em>The Last of Us</em> is in a class all its own.</p>
<p>Nothing about <em>The Last of Us</em> would make one expect anything revolutionary. It’s a zombie game. It’s a big escort mission. The story, on paper, doesn’t seem like anything extraordinary or new for the genre. You’re Joel, a survivor twenty years into the zombie apocalypse who has lost his daughter and been tasked with escorting a 14-year-old girl across the country so that she can be studied for her immunity to the zombie virus.</p>
<p>Where <em>The Last of Us</em> distinguishes itself is in the extraordinary execution of that story. Joel and Ellie are made to be real by the complex motivations and ambitions and stories behind them. In the opening moments of the game, when the zombie virus first emerges, Joel loses his daughter Sarah <em>The Last of Us</em> is about finding small glimpses of humanity in a bleak, punishing world. There is no easy mortality to <em>The Last of Us</em>, no clear villain or hero — there’s a darkness behind every character, a guilt that they have for continuing to exist in a world filled with senseless loss. As much as I hate Joel for his actions throughout the journey, I understand them. I understand that he clings to his concept of surviving at any cost because it’s all he has left. I understand the ways that he has been broken and twisted by loss, the way that Ellie represents his final remaining connection to his humanity. In the final moments of the game, when Ellie at last sees Joel for what he is, we understand that the world could do the same to her.</p>
<p><em>The Last of Us</em> is a game about love because somehow, after all the traumatic blows that Joel, Ellie, and the player share, we still want to believe that love and humanity can endure. We want to prevail and do justice to the memory of the people we have lost along the way. We want to believe that our connections to the people we love can stop us from being swallowed by the harshness of the world. We want to look for the light — and the shreds of it that are found in <em>The Last of Us</em> are made profound by their rarity.</p>
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<h2 id="1-stardew-valley">#1. Stardew Valley</h2>
<p><img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/sdv.png" alt="Community Center"></p>
<div class="boxes">
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Released</span>
<span class="value">2016</span>
</div>
<div class="box">
<span class="label">Platform</span>
<span class="value">PC, Nintendo Switch</span>
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<div class="box">
<span class="label">Developer</span>
<span class="value">ConcernedApe</span>
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<span class="label">Time Played</span>
<span class="value">160 hours</span>
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<p>Depression has been my quiet struggle for many years. When I picked up <em>Stardew Valley</em>, I had just started on a new medication that left me an emotional mess: up and down, crying all morning, needy for Joe to come around and pick me up. I wasn’t in school, and my next steps in life were totally uncertain. It was a dark time for me, and <em>Stardew</em> was my light. The game was a good distraction; I could sink hours and hours into it at at time and never feel bored. And it made me feel like I was <em>accomplishing</em> something, working on making things better, even if that “better” was happening in the context of the game — like upgrading my sprinklers so I wouldn’t have to do as much watering or getting the town bus line reopened so that Pam would have her job back. <em>Stardew</em> gave me comfort; it became my game for self-care. And even when things aren’t so dire as my first months with the game, <em>Stardew Valley</em> is still like an old friend I can come back to whenever I need some solace or just to kill a little time.</p>
<p>It’s difficult to pitch <em>Stardew Valley</em> to people. There’s an immensely personal bond I have to it, but on the surface, it doesn’t sound too interesting: it’s a farming simulator like <em>Harvest Moon</em>, kind of, with shades of <em>Terraria</em> and <em>Animal Crossing</em>. But it’s more than that, too. And I think part of it has to be played and experienced to be understood.</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2019/krobus.png" alt="Please, don't be alarmed. I am different from the others." width="600" />
<figcaption>Krobus has some of the best dialogue in the game.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To speak more broadly, though, I think the message <em>Stardew Valley</em> carries is something we all need to help get us through the state of the world in 2019. <em>Stardew Valley</em> is about community — about forming relationships with the people around us, about rekindling our connection to the earth and to family and to ourselves. <em>Stardew Valley</em> posits this message early on, through Grandpa’s Letter, which suggests that the “dire change” the player needs can be accomplished by rediscovering what really matters in life: “real connections with other people and nature.” That ethos becomes the reason for the gameplay loop: rebuilding the town’s community center and pushing out the capitalistic forces that seek to place us in endless, soul-crushing competition with one another. <em>Stardew Valley</em> carries an overwhelming hope that happiness is within reach if we work for it — that we can regain and rebuild our connections to the world through good, honest work, through communion with the land, through taking care of each other, through forming a sense of community in our increasingly separate, disconnected time. Sometimes I need reminders of that hope, and <em>Stardew Valley</em> makes it all seem achievable — even if we know it won’t be as easy as picking some leeks in the forest or growing some gold star quality parsnips. It’s within reach, if we’re willing to work for it.</p>
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<h2 id="honorable-mentions">Honorable Mentions</h2>
<p><strong>Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.</strong> I played a lot of <em>Shadow of Mordor</em> these past few years, and yet I somehow haven’t managed to finish it. <em>Mordor</em> does not do much in terms of compelling narrative or world-building — which is shocking considering it takes place in the Tolkien legendarium — but what it does do phenomenally well is the Nemesis system. I hope to see more games implement similar systems within them — though the game has been out for five years now, and nobody has really delivered there yet. It made for some fun antics in what would otherwise be a pretty humdrum game.</p>
<p><strong>The Order 1886.</strong> Those who know me will know I was incredibly hyped for <em>The Order</em>, and it was one of my biggest gaming disappointments. I liked what was there, but it needed more to it. I still think that the setting and characters are incredibly compelling, and I hope — against odds — that Ready at Dawn will have another chance to give the IP the second shot it deserves.</p>
<p><strong>Tomb Raider.</strong> I had never played a <em>Tomb Raider</em> game prior to playing <em>Tomb Raider</em>, the 2013 reboot by Crystal Dynamics. I had also never played an <em>Uncharted</em> game, which I am told is very similar to playing <em>Tomb Raider</em>. This game was surprisingly gay and surprisingly good; what I expected to be a fun action romp actually had an enjoyable story and gave some solid development to Lara Croft. It was a commendable way to breathe life into an old, aged franchise.</p>
<p><strong>The Sims 4.</strong> I am a <em>Sims 4</em> convert. I clung to <em>The Sims 3</em> for a long time, lamenting the loss of the Create-A-Style system (and toddlers, and pools, and other things). <em>Sims 4</em> recovered from a rocky launch and has turned into a streamlined version of <em>The Sims</em> that I didn’t know I wanted. I can’t imagine going back to <em>TS3</em> now — even if I did like the live neighborhoods. I’ve sunk a heck of a lot of time into <em>The Sims 4</em>, and I think the team behind it deserves recognition for bringing more equitable and diverse gender options to a game series that has previously been quite binary.</p>
<p><strong>Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna).</strong> I want there to be more games like <em>Never Alone</em>. <em>Never Alone</em> was created in partnership with Alaskan native peoples to represent their stories, their heritage, and who they are now. While the gameplay and story are relatively simple, they gave me exposure to a culture that I would probably otherwise know or see very little about. I enjoyed unlocking all the little documentary-style clips, which I found incredibly well-done, and the educational potential of <em>Never Alone</em> excites me as both a gamer and a teacher.</p>
<p><strong>Pokemon Sun & Moon.</strong> This <em>Pokemon</em> game let me dress up my character, which is really all I ever needed out of a <em>Pokemon</em> game. But it also streamlined a lot of things about the series, making it accessible again for me, someone who has flagged on it. Not having to deal with HMs alone was a huge difference from previous titles, and I don’t care what anyone says — experience share saves me time and makes it so I can actually finish these games.</p>
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<p><em>I commissioned the phenomenal header image for this post from</em> <a href="https://naxdraws.com/"><em>Nax Yoder</em></a><em>.</em> <em>Follow the link through to see more of their work.</em></p>
Women in a Sea of Men: The Representation of Women in The Curse of the Black Pearl
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12 August 2025
I’ve been podcasting on and off for over ten years now — all shows that I’ve since abandoned1, either intentionally or due to time — but I’ve kept websites for them up and running for archival purposes. Originally, the sites were powered by WordPress and podcasting plugins (PowerPress and then Podlove). I didn’t want to continue paying to host the sites nor maintain a WordPress install2. I could, of course, use one of the many podcast hosting services out there — but just like I believe in owning your own space on the internet, I believe you should own and control your podcast feed (and not have to pay a company $15/mo in perpetuity). I use Hugo (which I then deploy with Cloudflare Pages) to generate the sites and feeds; I chose Hugo because I understand how to use it. I’m sure you could make this work with other static site generators. There’s an 11ty plugin out there, for example, which is far more advanced than what I’ve set up. But I built this myself. It works. It does not require me to endlessly fiddle or update (unless I want to).
Once upon a time ago (and a time, and a time), I had a podcast. I miss podcasting dearly and think about going back often — otherwise, what am I to do with a partial, flawed understanding of normalizing to a target loudness and editing around the disgusting noises my mouth makes? Well, share it with others, of course.1
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In case it was not clear, I am not a professional. I am a blockhead who likes to tinker and who has watched a lot of YouTube videos. These are the FX chains I use for my voice, which may or may not be helpful to other people who do not have my voice. This is also not an exhaustive audio guide or overview of how I edit my audio. Maybe another time.
Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring released in 2001 when I was seven years old. At the time, my media diet consisted mostly of The Powerpuff Girls and obsessively reading and re-reading the first four Harry Potter books.1 I would like to say that my father was thoughtful and felt that I would have enjoyed another fantasy series with wizards and magic but knew that a three-plus-hour theater experience was tall ask for a seven year old. Unfortunately, I know him, and I think it more likely that he is cheap and thought the movie looked cool, so when Fellowship released on home media, we trucked to the neighborhood knock-off and rented it on VHS. That night, I crowded with my two older siblings around a (by today’s standards) laughably small tube TV. We tucked in with no expectations or understanding of what the movie would be about.
This blog started on bearblog.dev as cassie.land. Bearblog is a great platform, but I wanted a challenge in my life, I guess, so I taught myself to use Hugo and moved to esotericbullshit.net (cassie.land was repurposed for my NAS). I love the esotericbullshit moniker and URL — it makes me laugh — but as it turns out, it’s kind of hard to share your link when it contains profanity.1 Perhaps that’s copium for a growing domain purchasing addiction, but I intend to make this one stick.
Since I moved this site to Hugo, I’ve been using an app called GitJournal to post from my phone. I have a beautiful desk setup with a clacky mechanical keyboard that’s a joy to write on, but the simple fact is that I’m a lazy shit and want to update my blog from the couch. It’s all mostly worked fine, with some headaches. I originally intended to use GitJournal to store my Github repo to my phone’s filesystem and then point an Obsidian1 vault at that.
2016 was the first year I was eligible to vote in a presidential election. I was away at college, so I completed an absentee ballot, and, like most, felt confident in what I thought would be the result. I was no big fan of Clinton’s — I voted for Bernie in the primaries — but the other option was laughable: I couldn’t believe that a major political party put such a clown up as their candidate, and I thought the electorate was smart enough to see him for the fraud (and fascist) he was.
Automattic recently launched their Write Brief AI assistant for folks using Jetpack with WordPress.1 It is automatically available to anyone using wordpress.com, which I verified by logging into my 14-year-old account.
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I decided to test it out on my recent post about The Basic Eight. I chose this because it’s one of my more recent posts that isn’t #week-notes . I pasted it directly into the Gutenberg editor with all of the AI settings toggled on.
Welcome to cassie.ink, the new home of my blog and web stuff.
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Previously, this blog was hosted at bearblog under the domain cassie.land. Now, I’m using the SSG Hugo to create the site, which deploys to Github Pages for hosting.
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So why the move? I love bearblog and recommend it to just about anyone who wants to get into blogging and the small web — it’s dead simple for folks with no web expertise, it has an awesome community, and the discover page allows you to share your content and connect with folks also using the platform. Unfortunately, I am, at heart, a tinkerer — bearblog felt a little too easy, and a little limiting for some of the visions I have. And, ultimately, I just want to own my content and embrace new technologies and challenges.
The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler. Handler’s Adverbs is often what I cite when folks ask what my favorite book is, and I loved Watch Your Mouth, too. I need light reprieves from The Odyssey, too, so this seemed an excellent time to round out my reading of Handler’s bibliography. I’m about halfway through and enraptured by the narrative voice. It’s pretentious, as a story narrated by a precocious high school senior should be, without being cloying, and with Handler’s charming humor throughout. I love it so far and have faith that the feeling will continue. I normally hate books set in high school, but this one takes me back to my high school self — somehow, in a good way, which I don’t think I’ve ever felt before.
Write a blog post about words of wisdom your younger self would have appreciated hearing.
-(via blogprompts)1
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I’m trying out doing blog prompts in an effort to populate this blog with more than just weekly round-ups and to get more comfortable writing about personal things.2
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I’m going to select two quotes — both song lyrics — that have resonated for me.
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The first is from “Banshee Beat” by Animal Collective, which I first heard in my late teens (maybe 16?) and still consider one of my favorite songs.
I wrote a post a few months ago cataloguing moving my home server from the old NZXT case I had leftover from my old PC into a Rosewill chassis that would let me, eventually, move to a proper rack setup. This past Prime Day, I purchased a Riveco 15U rack and then some sliding rails to go along with it, with the hope of finally moving the loud and hot NAS into the basement where it belongs.
Last time I updated this blog, I wrote about silences in my professional career. These past few weeks, I feel I am doing the work to break mine.
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I am the faculty advisor for my middle school’s GSA. I have been for years now, and it’s something I’m very proud of, but this year especially I feel I have a great crop of kids that I’m really connecting with. At my town’s Pride festival in early June, my club had a booth selling crafts the kids had made to raise funds. The kids filtered in and out to help sell goods, but mostly I think they just valued having a “home base” at the event. For me, it was a long, socially draining day, but speaking to them afterward about the experience and hearing them tell me how at home they felt at the festival, how comfortable they felt being themselves, was so gratifying.
I’ve talked before on this blog about being a teacher and how passionate I am about my work; the time I spend with my students — which should be paramount and where all my energy goes — comes naturally. I often remark that I feel like I’m doing a stand-up comedy routine1 while teaching because my goal is not only to instruct but to develop joy in learning, in reading, in writing.
I have a home server (running Unraid) that I use to backup computers, as media storage, and to run various apps. It’s mostly been cobbled together from used parts I found for cheap, and it generally followed Serverbuild’s NAS Killer 4 guide. It runs like a dream, and putting it together is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. More recently, with streaming sites like Netflix, Hulu, etc. cracking down on password sharing, it has become my pathway to shedding some monthly subscriptions and owning my own media.
No cheating - your Quietus style Bakers Dozen. 13 albums (off the top of your head) to know you by. Not looking for a perfect list, looking for a list that you instantly regret posting because you then remember something else.
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I approached my response largely as a list of albums that have meant something to me in my life — not necessarily what I’m actively listening to at the moment. Many of these albums I’ve not listened to much in years, but I consider them pivotal, essential listening for me.1
I read a thread online recently about bisexuality: folks were discussing use of the label compared to something like pansexual. Many folks within the LGBTQ+ umbrella argue that pansexual is a more inclusive label than bisexual, as bi- upholds a binary view of gender.
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My relationship with my bisexuality has been fraught. I can pinpoint in specificity where I feel it started: in the sixth grade (for me, 2005 or 2006), reading the sex ed chapter in my science textbook, I was presented with the three sexualities — heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. I had, by that point, already started puberty and experienced low-level attraction. I’d been confused that that attraction never seemed to have a distinct target: I liked boys and I liked girls. I remember an immediate sense of comfort and belonging in the term. That’s allowed?, I thought. Reading it in a textbook made it seem so simple. Then surely that’s the way to be.
I downloaded Pokémon: Unbound the other day to play alongside my partner. We are both big Pokémon fans — like buy the new games every year fans — though my interest has waned over the last few years (I loved Legends Arceus and generally felt that Scarlet/Violet were slaps in the face1). I have fond memories of the classic games, and I’ve read a lot of positive buzz about Unbound.
One Tree Hill, season six and seven - I’ve been marathoning One Tree Hill on a friend’s recommendation. By this season, we are well passed the “good” seasons, but it’s still entertaining enough to watch — if only to count how many more car crashes the writers will introduce as plot lines. I think the early (1-4) seasons are a decent watch, but at this point, I’m really just seeing it through to the end. Season seven has a novelty in seeing how a show pivots after losing its main character. I don’t think OTH did so gracefully; they elevated some, generously, background characters into the main act and lumped on bunch of new ones at that. Some work better than others, but at least I’m almost at the end.
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Kitchen Nightmares (2023) - Years ago, I once came home to find my partner watching Kitchen Nightmares on YouTube. He’s generally not a fan of reality or competition shows, so I asked him why he was watching it. He giggled and said, “He [Gordon] just gets so mad.” That led to me also watching a bunch of the show. This month I watched a gabi belle video in which she talked about the reboot, so I dipped in too. Gordon does indeed still get mad. When watching Kitchen Nightmares, I am always thinking of how much fun the show must be to edit. The editors make liberal use of the most unhinged sound effects imaginable. It’s junk food TV, and who doesn’t love junk food?
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Schitt’s Creek - I’ve been casually rewatching as my background noise / take a nap on the couch TV. Still hilarious and as good as the first time.
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The Bachelor - Two of my friends are big fans, so I’m watching the current season with them. I’ve never seen any Bachelor properties before this; I’m mostly along for the ride. The show has yet to hit the reality TV highs that keep me looped in to shows like America’s Next Top Model or Survivor, and the whole concept still feels quite skeezy to me.
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Music
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III, The Lumineers - I have liked some of The Lumineers’ hits for years, but a friend really loves them, so I thought I’d give III a shot. I understand it’s a concept album with stories and characters; I really haven’t delved into that. I’m unsure if that’s because I haven’t found it compelling or because I am trying to focus more on the sound rather than just the words (I’ve always been more for the latter). III sounds great; it reminds me of how much I love the piano. It’s the focal point of many songs on the album but also beautifully interspersed as a twinkly highlight or backdrop. Particular favorites are “Donna” and “My Cell.”
I was born and raised on Long Island in a hamlet that rests along the Great South Bay.1 Known to most as a ferry town, this charming suburb lives and breathes the ocean. Most every resident has access to some kind of boat, whether through personal ownership or advantageous friendship. In the 90s, the town was voted the “friendliest town in America,” a slogan that still adorns the sign as you drive into town, by a mysterious group that awards such superlatives. That accolade, along with our yacht clubs, country clubs, lack of racial diversity, and generalized fear of anything outside the norm makes the town the near picture of 1950s suburban ideal.
I’m not a New Years Resolution person; listening to a lot of “My Year in Lists” by Los Campesinos! as a teen made me quite cynical about the whole thing.
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However, I am a very goal-oriented, reflective person. In late 2022, after years of gaining weight and developing some really negative patterns of self-talk around my body image, I decided to join a gym. Of course I’d like to see the number on the scale go down, but the main goal was just to get healthier and develop healthier habits. I started running, because that’s what I used to do (not well), and eventually convinced a friend to join with me. Together, we set the goal of running a 5K, and we did our first in May of 2023, in about 41 minutes (in our defense, it was an extremely hilly course, but also progress, progress1). We ran three more as the year went by; my most recent was November, where I finished in around 36 minutes.
A friend of mine is a big fan of Florence + the Machine. I confessed to only really knowing (but liking) her hits, “Dog Days” and “Cosmic Love.” I asked which album she would recommend I listen to; she said How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (2015),1 and I texted her about some of the songs on it. She asked if I was listening to the whole thing given the back to back messages; I said yes, and I started to consider how I like to consume music.
The lives of many literary greats remain a relative mystery; literary critics and historians are often left to piece together details from letters, documentation, and, sometimes controversially, the author’s work read for repeated motifs. They then draw what conclusions they can about the authors’ lives. One of the most prolific female poets in the English literary canon, Emily Dickinson’s life is preserved in letters and artifacts from her life. When examined as a body of work, Dickinson’s poetry reveals a pattern of focus on women’s interior lives and relationships that may be regarded as queer, especially with the added dimension of her close relationship with her sister-in-law. This essay examines a selection of her poems through a queer lens, highlighting the poems’ relationships to female love and Dickinson’s life and arguing against established patterns of erasing Dickinson’s queer identity.
In the beginning of Chapter VIII in the third section of To the Lighthouse, pages 186-187, Virginia Woolf’s unique approach to perspective and introspection create a subjective presentation of reality and relationships, supported by extended metaphors of fluidity and stillness. On a boat trip mandated by Mr. Ramsay to the titular lighthouse, Cam and James anatomize and unfold their feelings towards their father. Cam evolves as the boat moves across the sea while James’s unflinching rage and violence towards the patriarch repeat in this section as the sailboat halts and space contracts to exacerbate his indignation. Woolf thus frames and explores the figure of Mr. Ramsay and the nominal motif of a journey through individual introspection and excurses. 1
Barbie - I was underwhelmed. There’s been lots of chatter, and I loved Lady Bird, but Barbie didn’t hit for me; too much Ken (to be the hundredth person to whine about it) and the ending felt unearned and thematically confused. This was more of an homage to Barbie as a product than it was an homage to womanhood, but it pretended to be the latter.
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Games
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Vampire Survivors - I originally played Vampire Survivors for my video game podcast, Pitch & Play (on hiatus but will come back!); my friend and co-host Ross recommended it to me. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I got into it given that I don’t really have nostalgia for this sort of game, but I played several hours of it and then became distracted by life. While moving this month, I was without internet for quite a while and had not hooked up my consoles (or my PC, still). To kill some time while my body recovered from lifting boxes and scrubbing surfaces, I downloaded Vampire Survivors onto my phone and went deep into it. It’s a fantastic game that I’ll come to associate with my early days in the house.
This September marks the start of my fourth year teaching.
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When I was a kid, I was always interested in teaching; my grandparents had an unfinished basement that, for some reason, had a little chalkboard and table. My siblings and I would play school down there, and I loved to play the role of teacher – despite being considerably younger than them.1 I loved school, too. I loved most every subject (especially grammar – I’m one of the few children who absolutely rejoiced when asked to take out my grammar workbook) and was, at the risk of conceit, good at academics. I also read voraciously in elementary school.
I don’t have that much stuff. I don’t think packing is going to be that hard this time. I’ve already boxed up my books – how much more could I need to do?
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Stage 2: Coping / Bargaining
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Okay, there is actually a lot to do, but it’s not so bad. I can just drop everything in the garage and focus on cleaning the apartment.
I recently listened to an episode of Never Been a Better Podcast in which Austin Walker, referencing a Twitter thread by @v21, posited that we are moving into a new era of the internet where content is generated by machines rather than people; where once the internet was used by people to access large bodies of information and to connect with other people, we now use it to connect with machines that regurgitate photocopies of photocopies of information.
Part of my resolution to blog more is to start a media consumption log for the year where I record what I’m reading, watching, and listening to. I’m going to do it monthly; expect a finalized list on the last day of each month (possibly backdated).
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Movies
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The Fast and the Furious - a rewatch of a movie I watched way too much as a child and therefore have an unreasonable fondness and attachment towards. The dialogue in this movie is positively absurd (“I like the tuna here," “Welcome to Race Wars”), the homoerotic undertones bordering on overtones, and everyone in this movie (except Vince but including Jesse) is blisteringly hot. I was edified by the friend I had watched the film (not movie) with, who had never seen it, as she remarked at the end, “I get it now.” I could have done without the oil scene, however.
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2 Fast 2 Furious – well, now it’s a marathon. 2 Fast 2 Furious has, historically and controversially, been both my favorite sequel naming schema and overall entry in the Fast saga. I love the first, but this movie embraces the stupidity and over-the-top action that would go on to define the series. It manages to succeed without Vin Diesel (or any of the “family,” except for Brian, though it introduces future members) and contains some iconic (to me) scenes (Ejecto seato and everything involving Suki). I smile constantly while watching this movie. I love it and I think it loves me back. Except for the rat scene. I could do without the rat scene.
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The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift – I would like to say that I came to my second viewing of this movie with an open mind (I didn’t), hoping to understand the cultural revisionism of some Fast fans who claim that this is actually one of the best in the series (it isn’t). Somehow this movie makes drifting boring. Han is the only interesting character. There’s a character who everyone refers to as “DK” (short for “Drift King”) throughout the film and yet he is as bland and forgettable as the rest. Sean is the worst, and it is a miracle the series managed to rebound from this low. Tokyo Drift is the ugly step-cousin of the Fast series. At least the theme song slaps.
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Fast & Furious – viewed right after Tokyo Drift to cleanse my palate and remind me what a good movie feels like. The opening scene immediately reminds one of the highs of the Fast saga, and while the rest of the movie is far from the best, it is miles ahead of Tokyo Drift, if only because it reunites the Fast family and sets the pieces in place for the highs of the series to come.
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Fast Five – a truly thrilling movie start to finish and perhaps the best of the series. Everything about this movie is fun — no rat or oil scenes to be found. Instead, just action sequences that constantly raise the stakes and delight — and, of course, the reunion of the family (sans-Letty).
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Fast & Furious 6 – a middling sequel to the high point of the Fast series and my last rewatch; from here on out, it is all new to me. This one is watchable and certainly ranks as one of the better Fast movies. It chases the ragtag quality that the family had in the last movie but doesn’t hit the same notes. The movie shines when it focuses on Dom and Letty’s relationship, and the bridge scene is one of the best stupid stunts in the series.
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Furious 7 – a mostly forgettable setup and plot offset by some truly ridiculous moments that make the film, overall, enjoyable. This was a classy send-off for Paul Walker that I’m sure was emotional in the moment but is today soured by him being kind of a creep. I wish to wed the individual who came up with the Rock breaking his cast off and entering the action, the skyscraper scene, Dom running over Shaw’s car, and, most of all, the rwrench fight. I say individual because I like to believe there is a single person responsible for this lunacy.
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TV
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Andor, season one – interesting in broad strokes, but I found it deeply problematic on an episode-to-episode basis. This felt like a movie trilogy that decided to be a television show, and it does not work as either. It may not be fair for me to levy my frustrations with cinematic universes against Andor (Fast obsession notwithstanding), but I spent much of my time with the show questioning its necessity (even as a Star Wars lover and a particular fan of Rogue One). Much of Andor felt like it was undercutting Rogue One and Jyn’s significance to the Alliance. Andor has compelling ideas and is competently shot and acted, with occasionally strong moments every few episodes, but it ultimately didn’t win me over. I will give a second season a try, but Andor disappointed me, especially given the high expectations others’ reactions gave me.
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Music
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22, a Million, Bon Iver – I do not have much experience with Bon Iver outside of “Skinny Love” (which is fine), but I vaguely recall my sister playing me a song, “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄”, from_ 22, a Million_ around when it came out. Sparked by a recent conversation with her and stumbling across an article that I now cannot find about some of the controversy around the album’s release, I’ve been listening to it a fair amount. It’s an abstract, exciting album; none of the songs particularly stand out to me as Playlist Material, but that is perhaps the intention of the album: it is to be listened to in sittings, full through, not in the vacuum we have become accustomed to of random shuffles and algorithmic picks. I admire any artist that experiments with their releases and does not rest on the laurels of their hits, so initial impressions are strong, but I get the sense that this is an album that begs for the listener to reflect and decode.
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Never Hungover Again, Joyce Manor – discovered through a Front Bottoms shuffle with “Heart Tattoo,” which is a highlight of the album for me. Never Hungover Again is a breezy listen: ten tracks, most falling between one and two minutes. I found the first five tracks mostly discardable, but the second half was much stronger with the aforementioned “Heart Tattoo,” “In the Army Now,” and “Catalina Fight Song.” Emo revival works best for me in The Front Bottoms style: catchy riffs and earnest lyrics that read like teenage LiveJournal entries.
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Games
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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - I played a metric ton of Breath of the Wild and emerged with feelings ranging from ambivalent to frustrated. There was so much I loved about it and so much that just never came together (or actively frustrated me). Tears of the Kingdom, however, has brought me nothing but joy; it corrects every complaint I had with Breath of the Wild and improves upon it wholesale. I’m far from done with the game – I think I will be playing it for some time – but so far, it is remarkable.
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Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza - played with friends but I had the eerie suspicion I’ve played it before but cannot place it. Fine in a group but mostly forgettable. I wouldn’t seek it out again.
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Carcassonne - my love, my liege. Carcassonne is a bastion in our household. I love it every time I play, except when I lose, which is often.
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The Busy Bistro, Magic Puzzle Company - a friend spotted this on Tik Tok and invited me over to work on it with her. Reader, I was there until three in the morning. A fantastic puzzle with charming art, done in good company.
Welcome to cassie.land, the latest (as of writing this) web project that I’ve started and may promptly abandon.
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Here’s the truth: These past few months have shown me the impermanence of online platforms. I have quit reddit with the third-party API shutdowns, and while I am probably better off for it, it does feel like losing one of the bastions of the internet I once knew. I regret to inform that I am officially an old person on the internet; I yearn for the days of hyper-specific Geocities pages with incredibly useful information written by a thirteen year old screaming into the void (and for the days where our search engines actually directed us to that information rather than some circuitous tripe written by AI that packs in every SEO keyword without actually saying anything).
This past year has emphasized to me the impermanence of online platforms. I have quit reddit with the third-party API shutdowns, and while I am probably better off for it, it does feel like losing one of the bastions of the internet I once knew. I regret to inform that I am officially an old person on the internet; I yearn for the days of hyper-specific Geocities pages with incredibly useful information written by a thirteen year old screaming into the void (and for the days where our search engines actually directed us to that information rather than some circuitous tripe written by AI that packs in every SEO keyword without actually saying anything).
It feels like most of my blog posts end up being about music. I’d like to pretend that this post is a piece of an annual tradition in which I review and analyze my listening patterns from the past year, but truth be told, I’ve only done this once before, in 2015, and then kind of early in 2020, when I reviewed my favorite albums from the last ten years. Truth is, I’d like this to be a tradition, a habit I develop, but I’ve had about as much success with that as I have with my resolution to exercise more regularly.
That I’m a big ol’ music weirdo should come as no surprise to anyone who has read some of my previous writing about it. I have tracked just about all of my music listening to last.fm since 2014, both to maintain a record and gather minute statistics about myself.
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I turned 16 in 2010, and my 25th birthday was this past November. The latter half of my adolescent identity formation therefore took place during this past decade, and the music I listened to during those years acted as a score, a signpost, a catharsis, a reflection. I’ve come to mark events in my life with the music I was listening to at the time. And having spent my teen years sitting in front of a computer listening to music at pretty much all times, I developed a pretty large collection.
Another decade in the book, another opportunity to represent my life in lists and data.
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Looking retrospectively, this past decade defined my interest in games. It’s been a hobby of mine since I was a young child — I remember holing up in my mom’s basement, replaying the same minigames over and over in Gus Goes to Cyberopolis. My dad bought me a Gameboy Color for my fifth birthday, and I dedicated at least a decade of my life (regrettably) to the Kingdom Hearts series. But in 2010, I started my first job, and so I finally had some disposable income to spend on my hobbies; I didn’t have to beg for games as birthday or Christmas or whenever presents. And so I played a lot more games in these past ten years. I started to follow industry news beyond new releases. I became more thoughtful about and critical of the industry. And I shifted my hobby into professional inquiry: in 2018, I co-wrote a book chapter about how video games could be used in educational settings, and in 2019, I piloted a camp that empowered kids to create their own video games.
Recently, my boyfriend and I decided to revisit a childhood classic: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the film that jump-started what would prove to be an extremely lucrative and much beloved franchise for Disney. I first watched it not long after its 2003 release, making me 8 or 9 at the time, and enjoyed it, like most other children at the time. It brims with swashbuckling adventure and humor while maintaining Disney’s family-friendly directive. Unfortunately, with my older, more world-weary eyes saw through the dust of nostalgia, dismayed as the film makes no effort to pass the Bechdel-Wallace Test, which stands as an absolute bare minimum requirement for a creative endeavor’s portrayal of women.
As the year closes, naturally I must compile experiences and interests from the period into data and statistics.
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Okay, maybe I’m not being quite that heartless, but last.fm sure makes it easy to indulge that desire. I scrobble (almost) all of my music to last.fm as I enjoy having a record of my listening habits for both reference and analysis. This year I finally found a solid app to do so from my phone, too, though my scrobbles lack what I listen to at work, which is a lot, as well as about half the year of listening on my phone. Therefore, as we head into 2016, I’d like to look back on what I listened to the most in 2015 (not necessarily my favorite releases from the year — my musical discovery process is best described as stumbling across things years after release).
Let’s start by making something perfectly clear: I love Star Wars. I live and breathe Star Wars. They’re some of my favorite movies, games, and comics; I’ve read more than my fair share of Star Wars fanfiction and have, over the years, spent a ludicrous amount of money on merchandise and other paraphernalia.
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When someone, tasked with buying me a gift, asks for ideas, I give them one instruction: if it has Star Wars on it, I’ll like it.
The harrowing process of puberty hit me in 2005, around the midpoint between my 10th and 11th birthday. I blame whatever weird hormones we feed kids these days, and that I probably continue to consume today, for its early onset, or perhaps I can deflect the blame to my parents and chalk it up to genetics — but whichever way, suddenly I found hair creeping up where it had never been before, dried blood on bargain brand, butterfly-clad underwear. Under oversized tee shirts, burgeoning breasts lumped together, hardly noticeable, but they would surely be big one day, I told myself with equal parts dread and wonder — after all, I had already donned my first bra, one of the first in my class, but certainly not the first to worry whether these new marks of my sex would throw my jump shot, bar me from swimming pools for twelve weeks out of the year, and shepherd me into the “girl’s section” of clothing stores where I’d exchange cargo shorts and sneakers for dresses and romances. I’d worry about entering middle school, about finding my locker and my classrooms, about making friends and who my future self would be, whether she’d look anything like the girl I saw reflected in the mirror.
Set in the fictional town of Arcadia Bay, Life is Strange follows Max, the recently minted 18-year-old photography nerd, attending the elite Blackwall Academy. In the trend of episodic games, Life is Strange centers around player choice, the butterfly effect being both a literal and figurative force in the game. It manages, however, to distinguish itself from not only Telltale Games — with its unique center and focus on two teenage girls, as well as its gorgeous, indie-film presentation — but also from just about everything else we’re seeing in gaming today.
I’ve picked up House of Leaves again, Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut novel and veritable puzzle of a book. I previously abandoned it because, as a horror novel, I was having some trouble sleeping after reading it, but I’ve wanted to read it for years and the new year seems like a good time to conquer my fears.
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There’s plenty of discussion around the internet regarding the book, and plenty more people who, I’m sure, have decoded the book’s many coded messages. But I’m a stingy sort who likes to do things on my own, and I thought I’d log some of it here! The first of my challenges was a letter from Appendix II-E, sent to Johnny Truant from his mother; she suspects that the director of the Whalestoe Institute, where she is institutionalized, is intercepting her letters. She is able to send a private letter to Johnny via an attendant, telling him the key to her next letter: take only the first letter of each word, separate those letters into something coherent, and find her true message (the letter itself is pure nonsense). Therefore, it’s no significant discovery on my part, but more of a fun first challenge. Warning that this is a book of psychological horror, and the contents below may be troubling or triggering (esp. for rape victims).
In the music industry, and in the folk genre particular, breakup songs are not exactly uncommon, and for every chart-topping artist crooning over the radio about the throes of love, there are thousands of disconsolate teens pouring over their guitars. For her 2009 Edward EP, England-based singer-songwriter Emma-Lee Moss (stage name Emmy the Great) visits the genre herself; the four included songs are among Emmy’s earliest, though they contain her usual balance of charm and poignancy, more often than not accompanied only by an acoustic strum.
It’s only natural that the first post on my shiny new blog should be about these two, isn’t it?
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Let me preface this post by saying that I love Princess Bubblegum and Marceline and Bubbline and Sugarless Gum, all of that — whatever you’d like to call it, I ship it. Hard. I may not be a long-time Adventure Time fan; I have not experienced firsthand the “What Was Missing” controversy, the joy delivered when Sky Witch premiered, and so on. I jumped on-board late, binge-watched my way to this pairing, which washed over me with all its fluffy, tumultuous grace. I was vaguely aware that it was a popular ship as I made my way up to “What Was Missing”; I transcended as I witnessed Marceline’s impromptu, angst-ridden love ballad to Peebles; I immediately rewatched “Go With Me”, eager to see the pair’s first on-screen interaction; I stormed ahead to “Sky Witch”. I filled my tumblr with all the lovely fanart in existence for the couple, bemusing my followers who already taunted me for my FemShep/Liara obsession; I formed headcanons, all of it.
diff --git a/public/tags/week-notes/index.xml b/public/tags/week-notes/index.xml
index 3f82ee7..54af6b3 100644
--- a/public/tags/week-notes/index.xml
+++ b/public/tags/week-notes/index.xml
@@ -52,9 +52,9 @@
(week notes 25)
- http://localhost:1313/week-notes/025-unused/
+ http://localhost:1313/drafts/025-unused/
Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000
- http://localhost:1313/week-notes/025-unused/
+ http://localhost:1313/drafts/025-unused/<h1 id="doing">Doing</h1>
<h1 id="reading">Reading</h1>
<p><em>And Then? And Then? What Else?</em> has become a slog, but I press on nonetheless. There’s little here to amuse or excite; even devout Lemony Snicket fans will be disappointed I think by the lack of new information or even commentary concerning the books. Handler confirms that the Baudelaires are named for the poet, that the melodrama of the books is inspired by Edvard Gorey, and that he openly disdains the film — hardly revelations by any means. Most egregiously, he seriously downplays the accusations of sexual inappropriateness against him and attempts to use his own childhood sexual assault as a shield against them.</p>
diff --git a/public/week-notes/index.xml b/public/week-notes/index.xml
index ede74a2..0200cc5 100644
--- a/public/week-notes/index.xml
+++ b/public/week-notes/index.xml
@@ -50,13 +50,6 @@
http://localhost:1313/week-notes/025/<h2 id="doing">Doing</h2>
<p>Joe and I visited some of his family with a lake house this week where my farmer’s tan became more and more pronounced. I also “worked” two days this week: I had committee meetings on Thursday and then a joint meeting to coordinate middle school/high school/college GSAs in my area. I also went to a concert (more about that in the music section) with a friend who moved away a year ago and who I missed a lot!</p>
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- (week notes 25)
- http://localhost:1313/week-notes/025-unused/
- Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000
- http://localhost:1313/week-notes/025-unused/
- <h1 id="doing">Doing</h1>
<h1 id="reading">Reading</h1>
<p><em>And Then? And Then? What Else?</em> has become a slog, but I press on nonetheless. There’s little here to amuse or excite; even devout Lemony Snicket fans will be disappointed I think by the lack of new information or even commentary concerning the books. Handler confirms that the Baudelaires are named for the poet, that the melodrama of the books is inspired by Edvard Gorey, and that he openly disdains the film — hardly revelations by any means. Most egregiously, he seriously downplays the accusations of sexual inappropriateness against him and attempts to use his own childhood sexual assault as a shield against them.</p>
- listen to my story (week notes 24)
http://localhost:1313/week-notes/024/
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-.home article time, .page time, .section article time {
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diff --git a/themes/neverhungoveragain/layouts/section.html b/themes/neverhungoveragain/layouts/section.html
index aaf5514..094366d 100644
--- a/themes/neverhungoveragain/layouts/section.html
+++ b/themes/neverhungoveragain/layouts/section.html
@@ -8,14 +8,6 @@
{{ .PublishDate.Format "2 January 2006" }}