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.
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.
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.