Rynling R&D

I’m still daydreaming about the Digital Terrarium magazine, and this is what I’m considering:

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Part of my motivation for creating a magazine like this is that, as someone with a female-coded name, it’s 99.99% impossible to get anyone to respond to my pitch emails, even when we’re mutuals on social media and I send them a direct message to ping them about the pitch.

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If there’s still to this day no real space for soft and queer (and vaguely female-coded?) voices in video game writing – and if there’s no space for someone like me specifically – then there needs to be more space. Simple as.

This is a mini-review that I wrote for WWAC but will not post, at least not in its current form:

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So I sympathize with Rui, whose every word is stolen from her by the men who conspire to confine her to a page of pulped paper. If she can’t speak in the language of the cultural elite, she’ll find another way of expressing herself, and the vast and mysterious array of life she produces is infinitely more vibrant than her husband’s formulaic literary fiction. Her husband has the privilege of publishing award-winning books made of dead wood, but she is the roots and the leaves and the flowers and the wind.

...I wrote this last night, and then this morning I got an email telling me that my application to the Philadelphia writer’s workshop was waitlisted. This is frustrating, obviously, to have the door closed in my face again. But then again, there’s a lot of space outside the house, and a lot more room to grow.

Barbie is a fun movie, I guess. Unfortunately, there aren't enough jokes. There's also too much preaching at the end. Like, way too much.

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Idk man. I went into this movie expecting an awkward sex scene where Barbie calls herself a "destroyer of worlds," and I was disappointed. Simu Liu does get two extended Broadway-style musical dance numbers, though, and I can't deny that I enjoyed both of them immensely.

Since I got into Elden Ring, I’ve been listening to what I call “the Dark Souls podcast,” which is actually called Bonfireside Chat. Most of the Elden Ring episodes are currently only available through Patreon, but the hosts’ non-current games podcast, Watch Out for Fireballs, is free and open to everyone.

I really like Watch Out for Fireballs, as I value the hosts’ opinions even when I don’t share them. To give an example, a few years ago they posted a 4.5-hour episode about Ocarina of Time, and I think it’s fair to say that they didn’t like the game. I love everything about Ocarina of Time and play it every summer, but I still really enjoyed the episode. It’s not that I agree or disagree with the hosts, but rather that I appreciate their perspective.

Anyway, their most recent episode is about Ender Lilies. I was excited to hear the hosts talk about Ender Lilies, but I had to turn off the episode after seven minutes.

They did not like Ender Lilies because you play as a girl.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course, but that particular opinion isn’t great. What the hosts said was more complicated than “I don’t like it that you play as a girl,” but not by much, and they only dug themselves deeper into a hole by trying to explain what they meant. I’ll write more about this later, but damn. Sometimes I forget that mainstream gaming culture is like that.

I reconsidered about Facebook. I think the reason I’ve become more tolerant of upsetting political opinions is because I’ve taken aggressive steps to be less exposed to them.

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Anyway. I was thinking I could turn my own stupid opinion into an actual essay, but then I remembered that I hate this sort of thing. Like I said, the less exposure, the better.

I didn't want to pay actual money for Haruki Murakami's book of essays about t-shirts, so I got it from the library.

Not ten pages in, Murakami talks about how much he loves America, and then he makes a joke about how fat Americans are. I guess, if you don't have the slim and sexually charged body of a preadolescent twelve-year-old girl, you have a weak character and there's something wrong with you.

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Idk, there are a lot of male film critics talking about how brilliant Everything Everywhere All at Once is, and there are a lot of women being very quiet. And that's how I feel about the Murakami t-shirt book, namely, that it's probably best not to talk about everything that's going on there.

To be be super honest and real, I'm not too keen on socialism or the unironic celebration of the concept of "community." Specifically, socialism only really works for people who fit neatly inside the community. If you don't fit in - or if you have no interest in fitting in - you're kind of fucked. And sometimes you just want to exchange legal tender for goods and services without having to do emotional labor or community volunteer work.

I feel like people who are seriously interested in socialism should spend a year working in a socialist country. I think a lot of them would be surprised by how xenophobic these countries are, and I think they would also be surprised to realize that they understand where this xenophobia is coming from. When close to 70% of your paycheck goes to taxes, it's difficult not to resent people who benefit from community resources without necessarily being a part of the community. Being an immigrant to a socialist country is an especially trashfire experience, as you feel this resentment at the same time that everyone else resents you. On top of that, co-op politics are an absurdist drama, which is fun to read about but not so fun when it determines whether you're going to be able to buy tampons and toilet paper when you go to the grocery store.

But like, look. Listen. Why does capitalism have to be so fucking awful?

This morning I read an article in The Atlantic written by someone talking about how no one who lives outside of cities is concerned about Covid. Based on the headline, I thought the author would be a normal and reasonable person, but I was wrong. This douchebag, a white homeowner in a wealthy suburban community who works as the head editor of a conservative Christian magazine, argues that Covid isn’t a problem, and that preventative measures like masks and booster shots are nothing more than virtue signals.

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I guess I understand how straight white male privilege can create a bizarre sort of sociopathic solipsism. What I can’t understand is why The Atlantic would want to publish something so offensive. I mean, I guess it’s clickbait, and here I am being baited, but still. This culture of manufactured outrage isn’t healthy, and it’s not cool that trying to read even left-leaning news outlets feels like running an obstacle course in avoiding shallow attempts to provoke engagement.

I also love that there's no gender essentialism on the podcast. It's not an issue because that type of discourse never even comes up. There's no "women are more intuitive" or "every woman knows xyz" bullshit, and I appreciate that.

And I think that, once you get to a stage where you can believe what women are saying without questioning their sanity, that's when you can get into legitimate "crazy" behavior. A "crazy" woman on this podcast is not someone who speaks a truth that doesn't fit into an accepted narrative. A "crazy" woman is not someone whose behavior seems slightly off-kilter because she's suffering from trauma. Rather, a "crazy" woman is someone who gets a license as an in-home caregiver in order to steal from elderly clients before killing them by setting their houses on fire, and is therefore wanted by the FBI. For example.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that, once you remove patriarchal prejudice from these stories, they have infinitely more nuance. And for me, this is groundbreaking because I've never heard stories like this told in this way. Never. Not even when they've happened to me.

I've read a fair share of criticism about true crime podcasts that uses My Favorite Murder as a scapegoat. I've only listened to a few episodes, but I don't think the source material justifies the vehemence of the critique. All things considered, it's actually fairly tame, and the hosts always take care to stay very far away from gory and ghoulish details. It's also not political, aside from a general leftist disdain for racism and corporate greed. If I had to guess, I'd say that what actually upsets people about this podcast is that its shift of the "true crime" narrative is so radical.

I saw this book referenced in an academic paper about urban legends, and I was like, “Sweet! An entire academic book about urban legends!” It was published in 1984, which I thought made it even more interesting. Like, what sort of shenanigans were people getting up to before the internet?

I’m about halfway through the book, and I think maybe it’s not for me.

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In conclusion, I guess it used to be way easier to get tenure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯