Break Time Updates & Things I'm Liking (November 9, 2024)

Hey everyone!

As you probably don’t know, the site is on its regularly scheduled break. Basically every 10 posts, I take a month or so off to recharge, find new stuff, get other work done, sleep, etc. But I’ve always felt a little bad about it, especially for folks who sign up while I’m not posting, so I thought I’d throw together a little grab bag of thoughts, reminders, and links for you all.

First, a reminder: I don’t really send these out, but I’ve been scanning and uploading old Japanese movie pamphlets to the site! They’ve got their own little section and even if you don’t know a lick of Japanese, they’re just a ton of fun to flip through. I’ve got 10 up right now with more coming!  You can check them out here:

Tsundoku Diving (Page 1)

Tsundoku Diving

Little bonus, but if you catch the light right on the recent Dougram pamphlet I uploaded, you can see that whoever originally owned it used it to practice drawing robots. This is what it’s all about folks, this is why old stuff rules.

Lately most of my gaming has been sucked up by the new Romancing SaGa 2 remake. SaGa is in heavy contention for my favorite game series, and Romancing 2 is a real favorite among favorites, this wildly dense series of interlocking systems that synthesize into a profound non-linear exploration of myth, “progress,” history and our place within it.

Spoilers: I will be writing about it when I’m done (and double spoilers: it’ll halfway act as an excuse for me to talk about modern game remakes) so I’ll save most discussion for then…but it’s gotten me all emotional and misty eyed over the dumbest things, like seeing a goofy one-eyed alien blob sitting on a dock and staring out at sea, so safe to say it has me in its clutches.

I was messing with some absolutely GREAT non-Japanese games before SaGa took over my life (it does that a lot), though! Like The Legend of Lotus Spring, this Myst-like adventure game that all but excises puzzles for a gorgeously felt game-poem about memory and place. Truly stunning, already one of my very favorites…It also fully made me realize that the Myst style of slideshow movement (where you click forward and are teleported to a new, largely static, screen) is good actually. I think that what initially seems so old and constrained there secretly has something very real to say about the way we interact and understand the world. My apartment, for example, is less this continuous 3D space to me as it is a collection of smaller locations: I’m at my desk, I’m standing at the kitchen counter, I’m lying in bed, etc. Everything in-between is just transitional space.

Also been exploring Immemory, which arguably isn’t even a game, but is famed artist (and Second Life enthusiast) Chris Marker’s cd-rom memory box. A real oddball bit of software that’s sort of like having to sit through your grandparent’s photo slideshow…if your grandparent was a weirdo worldly intellectual multi-disciplinary artist. A madeleine in CD form, this increasingly swirling series of thoughts and digressions that build into not only a  compelling portrait of a person, but of memory itself. Incredible thing to dip in and out of, to let yourself get lost in the thoughts and life of someone who isn’t you.

Last games thing: I did a thread on Bluesky recently posting short thoughts on games I love. I thought I’d only have to talk about like 10 titles, but it ended up being over 80, so if you want some recs (I tried to stay in the lesser known hidden gem zone) give it a peek!

Actually speaking of, I’ve finally pretty much made the full transition away from The Worst Website Twitter to Bluesky! Feels like the social media equivalent of breathing for the first time in years. Give me a follow of there if you haven’t!

Baxter (@cosmicspooks.bsky.social)

he/him writes about Japanese art at: https://www.tsundokudiving.com/

Bluesky Social

And for movies, I mostly celebrated the Halloween season with some more Japanese found footage/mockumentary goodness, chief among them Ura Horror, which is my 20^th (?!) Koji Shiraishi flick! It’s pretty great, a collection of found footage flash fiction very much in the vein of the direct-to-video mockumentary style that emerged in Japan in the 90s and continues to dominate video shelves but stripped of all excess and directed by the guy who understands that style more than anyone else in the world ever has. You can see a ton of ideas and images that he’s revisited over the years in here.

The real cinematic winner recently though was finally watching Door 2. The first Door is a cult satirical horror thriller by Banmei Takahashi about a housewife being harassed by a door-to-door salesman who’s Had Enough. Clever, funny, tense, and packed with gonzo, jaw-dropping directional choices, it rocks obscenely hard. So what did Takahashi do for the sequel? Why, a pretty low-key drama about a sex worker of course! Deeply charming and empathetic, it ended up reminding me a ton of modern lit classic Convenience Store Woman in how it follows a character who doesn’t fit into the rigid contours of society with a kindness and emotional honesty that isn’t cloying or self-serving. Also the recent remaster is bonkers beautiful—the movie is drenched in blues and water and it sings like nothing else now. Really, really wonderful movie that I think has been unfairly labeled by many as just some horny, exploitation adjacent sex romp.

 (I also saw Door 3, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and written by my favorite conspiratorial weirdo who I can’t escape Chiaki J Konaka, and while it’s good and has some incredible extended moments, is also easily my least favorite of the three).

Last up: books. I’ve been smoking The Maze House Murders, the third book in Yukito Ayatsuji’s legendary mystery series that started with The Decagon House Murders. A mystery book in a mystery book about a group of writers writing mystery books and being killed in ways that resemble the mystery books they are writing, all while trapped in an underground labyrinth. In other words, it’s Ayatsuji through and through, the shin-honkaku master crafting another thesis disguised as meta-novel where writers of various styles debate genre theory and the story they exist in betrays expectations. Real close to being done, probably gonna finish the day this goes up but this book is so good…really reinforcing my increasing belief that mysteries are the ultimate form of genre fiction, at least for me.

Alright, I’ll get out of your hair now. Lemme know if you hate this kind of post! If not, I might start doing one or two during these break periods where I’m not posting essays (and I’ll find some spot on the site to hide ‘em away and keep them archived).

Talk to you again soon!