Welcome to cassie.land, the latest (as of writing this) web project that I’ve started and may promptly abandon.
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).
As the year closes, naturally I must compile experiences and interests from the period into data and statistics.
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.
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.