A Time for Giving

A Time for Giving by CobGoblin
https://cobgoblin.itch.io/a-time-for-giving

A Time for Giving is a short Game Boy horror game about being a human sacrifice. It takes about five to ten minutes to play, and it's divided into three main areas: Your protagonist's cozy family cabin, an isolated village preparing for its winter festival, and the snow-covered woods. The overworld graphics remind me of the cute rounded style of A Link to the Past, and the character artwork that appears during the dialog screens is delightfully eerie and upsetting. The dialog is well-written and communicates the themes of the game without pulling any punches.

A Time for Giving was created for a winter solstice-themed game jam, and the creator says that there's no sound because they ran out of time. I'm of the opinion that the lack of music is actually quite lovely, as it creates an environment reminiscent of a silent forest blanketed by snow so heavy that it muffles all sound.

A Time for Giving is very short and very simple, but the writing and visual style are exactly what I want from a homebrew Game Boy game. It's also a perfect combination of nostalgia and "what the fuck did I just play," which is what makes these games so fun.

I played A Time for Giving a few times and made different choices in an attempt to get a different ending, but alas. I wonder if there's a way for this poor kid to make it out of the forest...?

Costco Influencers

The Uncanny, Fluorescent World of the Costco Influencer
https://jezebel.com/the-uncanny-fluorescent-world-of-the-costco-influencer-1846775539

They are unlike almost any genre of Instagram account in that browsing them feels more or less exactly like the experience they represent, a literal depiction of shopping at Costco’s warehouse store with its mountains of product and fluorescent lights. The conventions of the influencer universe, with its flattering camera angles and fuzzy promises, don’t exist in this world. The Costco lifestyle is simple. It’s about shopping at Costco, a practice best suited to Americans with basements and large garages in which to store their indiscriminating hauls. The influencers who post every week from the bulk discount store must have underground bunkers for all that they buy.

This is a long and fascinating essay, and the main take-away point is that it can be very difficult to distinguish between an Instagram normie whose account just happened to get big and a paid corporate puppet account. The last paragraph expresses this point in the most powerful and eloquent way possible.

True story: Now that we have a house, my husband's family has been bugging him on WhatsApp to get a Costco card. In their eyes, Costco is the epitome of The American Dream. My husband finally caved in, and we made our first visit to a Costco across the river in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

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Re: Costco Influencers

The target market for Costco is probably people with multiple children who haven't yet become disillusioned with the trappings of the middle-class American lifestyle.

Okay in immediate retrospect this is unnecessarily judgmental.

"How about you start caring for two children and an elderly parent and check back in with yourself about how you feel about giant packs of discount diapers?"

"My parents never had enough to eat growing up, and I find it hard to fault them for finding security in having a freezer full of meat and vegetables and a basement full of corn flakes and canned tuna."

"I volunteer at a local community LGBTQ+ health center, and we go through one of those 500-count boxes of condoms every two weeks."

All that being said, there's still something about Costco that I find uncanny and depressing. It's probably a combination of the fluorescent lighting and the endless parking lot, which together put me in a Suburban Gothic headspace where I'm not entirely comfortable.