Free Association
I've been struggling to write one of these because every time I find a topic, I end up getting too far in the weeds with it and by the time it comes to sit down and type it out, I'm bored of the subject. I'm a firm believer that you shouldn't subject other people to things you wouldn't read yourself, so I've been procrastinating and now it's been weeks since I last sent one of these, which also doesn't feel great, so here is a scattershot approach that won't wear too heavily on either of us, and we can get back to a more conventional newsletter next week.
Back From The Dead
There's a "new" Michael Crichton book which is actually just an older, unpublished mystery novel he wrote in the early 70s and feels mostly like he had some experiences while filming Westworld that annoyed him, and he decided to settle some scores by writing a murder mystery. The Hollywood/Old Tucson Studios stuff is kinda fun, but the solution to the mystery justifies his decision to keep it a trunk novel and not really dabble in that genre much for the rest of his career
Video Game Discourse Exhausting
I played Mixtape, a fun kind of hybrid videogame/period piece teen movie, and in between finishing it and trying to write about it, it blew up into an online kerfuffle over what counts as a game, how much nostalgia is too much, and whether or not a 90s teenager would put any of the music from the soundtrack on an actual mixtape. I have mixed feelings, but cannot wholly hate a game that includes a long skateboarding sequence set to Lush's "Monochrome" and a melancholy float-along to BJ Thomas's "Most of All."
Future-Retroism
Almost none of my music consumption this year has relied on streaming or algorithmic discovery beyond a couple things that have shown up in my YouTube suggestions after going on a bender of watching a truly embarrassing number of 80s videos. Likewise, most of my new music purchases have been through different artists' or labels' Bandcamp pages, and I've tried to make my listening more mindful by listening to physical records or throwing higher quality audio files on a weird miniature device I picked up last year called the Snowsky Echo Mini. This is part of a larger effort to slow down my feeding at the buffet of endless content, which has not been totally successful, but I have enjoyed discovering real alternatives to what seems like a truly dire and AI-filled future of always-online playing/listening/watching.
The post-script to that last item is that when we moved into the new place, I managed to set up many of my older gaming consoles alongside the current ones, so I now have 3 Playstation generations and 3 Nintendo systems hooked up to our living room television. There's a good possibility that over the next few years the labor conditions required to produce most major video games will make them economically unsustainable without drastically raising the price of hardware and software and/or exploiting workers in that industry to a degree that I won't be able to countenance. I'm prepping for this eventuality by making sure I have a comfortable catalogue of classics at the ready. Now if I could only figure out the correct sequence of upscalers and cable connectors to make sure they all function on our late model TV...
