This semester in college has been kind of weird. My curriculum for a whole four months is just a research project. It was kind of a mess, at the beginning, especially since my professor has a habit of ghosting me and I'm too much of a wimp to ping him all the time, but now I have a pretty good idea of where this research is going and what I have to do and even though the deadline is in *check notes* two weeks, I think I can finish the research report in good time. And of course, we're still in the middle of the pandemic, Jakarta is still at 1000-ish new cases daily, the vaccine is rolling out slower than we need it to, so I'm still mostly stuck at home.
Not that being stuck at home is a problem for me. I've been working from home even before the pandemic hit March last year. There are weeks, months even, when I feel awful about the whole thing, but I think I'm managing it just fine by now. If anything, when the pandemic ends for real, probably sometime next year, I'll be more stressed out then. Change. Change is scary.
Anyway! I've been playing games! And reading books! And working on stuff!
Big Games
Genshin Impact
For the last month or so, I've been playing Genshin Impact almost every night. After all the work is done for the day, right before I go to bed, I always spare an hour or sometimes two to log into the game and just, well, mess around. Do the daily quests, fight some monsters, stumble into some lore, make ridiculous strategies, work towards building my various characters and weapons because I do so love seeing Numbers Go Up. It's been great fun. Playing it almost feel like coming home: it's something to look forward to after a long tiring day of work.
I genuinely think Genshin Impact is an excellent game, even barred by its gacha necessities. I can go on and on about how good it is, how it designed its environments, how it build its lore, the character design, the gameplay mechanics, even how they manage its monetization. It is also remarkable in that, it's the kind of game that's impossible to appear in any earlier time. It takes inspirations from so many games, so many genres, the whole history of video games, if you look. It learned from its predecessors and then went on to become its own thing.
But of course, it's not for everyone, and it definitely has its fair share of flaws and questionable design decisions. I still love it, though. and never before has a game feel so much like coming home.
I'll stop being obsessed with this game eventually, but for now there's a fun summer event going on where we travel to an archipelago and we got a boat to explore it with. Boat goes woosh!
Sunless Skies
Before the young man called Ajax became captain of the sky-locomotive he's come to call the Plucky, he was just one of its crew, a motley gang managed by Captain Anhari.
Anhari used to be a ship captain and an explorer of the Unterzee, at a time before London blasted its way out of the underground and into the skies. He went out of retirement after one of the boys he's taken to meet occasionally, a scholar named Nicodeme, died defending his sky-locomotive from one of the beasts of the skies. Perhaps it was guilt that drove the old captain to take over from him--Nicodeme, after all, wouldn't have become a skyfarer and met his end if not for the tales he's heard from the old captain--or perhaps he simply missed the thrill of exploration, of travelling to different cities across the deep dark Zee.
But the skies held different sorts of madness from the Zee. Whatever skill the captain had in convincing his sea-crew that he'd always bring them home, it did not translate well into the skies. Ajax was there when, after a long journey filled with more horror than one man could endure in his entire life, his fellow crewmates cornered the aged captain and threw him overboard into the cold sunless sky. He was there when they eventually went mad, one by one, leaving the locomotive adrift until he finally grit his teeth and beat the rest of the crew to fall in line. He refused to die like this, at the hands of madmen and fate. He would take this locomotive home, he would find a crew of his own, and then he would travel the skies in his own terms. When he die, if he died, it will not be before he make his mark on the world.
And, well, he seems poised to do that. I'm already past the midpoint of the game, I think, and I have a pretty good handle of it. I've explored half the whole world, I know how to get around and get the resources I need, have a dozen small storylines ongoing, and I like what personality I've made up for Ajax, a gentleman bastard who's no-nonsense, confrontational, and with, if not charm, then a fiery passion that makes other people listen to him. Or in technical terms, he's got high stats in Hearts and Iron.
I'm not sure how much of my enjoyment of Sunless Skies is thanks to the game itself or just my overactive imagination, but the former is pretty good at encouraging the latter. I enjoy the game a lot.
Arcaea for Nintendo Switch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olMkO-njvVQ
I wrote a review of the mobile version of Arcaea a long time ago on this blog, where I praised it as an excellent rhythm game barred by its weird, somewhat shady, monetization. The game is available for free, but the actual meat of it, the lore, the characters, the songs that are unique and absolutely fantastic to play, are put in packs that you have to buy. Despite being free-to-start it's actually a premium-priced sort of game but one that you can buy piece-by-piece.
Well the Nintendo Switch version gets rid of all that pretense. For 40 USD you get the entire Arcaea experience containing almost every song from the mobile version up to that point. 40 USD is a high price to pay for what would usually be categorized as an "indie game", but you know what, they know their audience. They know they won't make a lot of sales, but they will make sales. And it's technically a bargain if you compare it with buying every included song in the mobile version. I like rhythm game and I like artcore music and what other game will let me play songs like the ever-brilliant Grievous Lady or Fracture Ray or Vicious Heroism? I've put off buying the song packs because I'm not a fan of playing on my mobile phone, but on my favorite console? Technically a bargain! This is my niche! It was made for me!
Anyway. Arcaea is a good game to just pick up and play for five minutes whenever. The breadth of songs to choose is excellent, at least for a fan of the featured genres (artcore, hardcore, other forms of electronica, 150 bpm minimum or bust). The visual design is a delight to see. It's a solid purchase if you're also trapped in this niche.
Small Games
Games that take less than an evening to play, not the sort that consume my thoughts for entire weeks (but consume it in different ways).
Four Horsemen
When I read the store page for this game it sounded too good to be true.
EMIGRATE TO WESTERN EUROPE.
MAKE CORNFLAKE NACHOS.
CONFRONT THE GHOSTS OF A DEAD INTERNET.
DIE FIGHTING FOR YOUR RIGHTS IN A BLAZE OF GLORY.
START OVER IN NORTH AFRICA.
WATCH LESS ANIME THIS TIME.
It's a visual novel about being four young immigrants in an alt-present day where the cultures is not entirely unlike the ones we have today. It's a delicate subject, but Four Horsemen tackled it with care, and also anger, a blaze of glory, a serving of attitude, and true lived-in understanding of what being an immigrant is. Or at least that's the feel I get. It's bold and brave and isn't afraid to be entirely what it wants to be. Everything they say in the store page is accurate, I'm not sure how to begin to even describe how good they are at it.
I'm not an immigrant, my people are only marginalized when set in the backdrop of the whole world, not within the land where I actually live. But this game helps me understand what that's like, to be both young and carrying the history of a whole people with you, but living somewhere else, where people judge you by what your ancestors did. Genuinely, I feel Four Horsemen is the sort of game that everyone has to play.
Four Horsemen was available in Itch's Bundle of Racial Justice in 2020 and the Bundle for Palestinian Aid in 2021, so if you've bought either of that, you already have the game! One playthrough is only about one to three hours, so give it a try.
Neo Cab
A visually polished visual novel taking place in a near-cyberpunk future where you are one of the last human cab drivers. It's near-cyberpunk in that, at least for me, I can clearly see where the lines go between the technology we have today to where it's going. Cyberpunk usually takes place at the end of technology, an exaggeration of all our fears of where things will go. Neo Cab helps you draw the line between the now and that dystopian future.
The game plays a bit like VA-11 Hall-A in that you're just doing your job and that job involves talking to different sorts of people. These conversations help shape your understanding of the world while also build up the characters themselves. There's an interwoven narrative about a super-powerful corporation and a not-entirely-good rebel group and you still have to make ends meet, so you're not just aimlessly picking up passengers.
The game is a good four-hours trip, though you'll have to play it twice if you want to catch all the conversations. A solid game for the genre with plenty of interesting characters and thought-provoking musings. Do pick it up if you're at all a fan of games filled with conversations.
... Heh. Is that a genre now? Conversation-em-up?
Subserial Network
The first thing Subserial Network asked me to do is change my desktop wallpaper. I ignored it, because surely that's just a fun little bonus thing, right? Not that it's actually essential to how I play the game?
And then the game opened three windows: an e-mail client, a music player, and a web browser, each looking like they were dragged from the 90s, an unpleasant contrast with the wallpaper I currently have.
… Ah.
Subserial Network is mostly what I'd call an epistolary game. You play by travelling between websites, following links and references and part of the puzzle is figuring out where to go. The websites have a very distinct 90s-early 2000s feel to it: the early days of the net, where everything looks handmade and unpolished, but also with a sense of community because there are so few of us there. Except, it became clear early on that the people who made those websites aren't humans at all, that humans as we know them have died long ago.
It also makes full use of its medium. Changing the desktop wallpaper isn't the only thing they're going to ask you to do (the other thing they want you to do is opening a PDF, a text file, and a copy of the game, so don't worry about it).
At the end it's a story about figuring yourselves and how, for some of us, our bodies don't feel like they belong to us. It's the best sort that science fiction/speculative fiction has to offer: drastically change one thing in the world so that we can better understand what's left, what we always have. The epistolary style is definitely not for everyone, but it's definitely worth a go if you're interested in narrative games and the limits that they can go.
Books
Riot Baby
Riot Baby is like Mob Psycho 100--a child was born with incredible powers to bend the laws of physics to their will--but what if it's set in America instead, with all its racial inequality and police brutality, and also the child in question is black and from a poor family.
A lot of things are similar: how the powerful child learned to control her powers, how her brother is scared of her, even though he loved her, but so many things are different. Instead of learning to be a big fish in a small pond like Mob, Ella is a big fish in a pond where half the fish have guns, and those guns are so often pointed to the other half, who are Ella's friends and family. Ella has the powers to tear them apart with a thought, but how soon will that backfire, and wouldn't that make her as bad as they are? And other dilemmas.
The writing is rapid-fire and painfully black American. The story shift between different time and perspectives. Not an easy read, but it's an interesting look at the kind of lives that I don't have, and that's always worth a read.
Reopening Muslim Minds
I don't think I'm quite brave enough to put down all my thoughts about this book. As a muslim and someone who believes in diversity, as someone who will read every form of knowledge you can put in front of me, reading this book feels like finally hearing the thoughts I've always kind of have in my head but never quite put into words.
I'm only halfway through reading it, but so far it's mostly a history of Muslim thinkers, and how our civilization comes to be the way it is today. Frankly, it makes me angry, it makes seethe with rage at what we could have been. There's a better present-day for us, but it's squandered because of people vying for powers, because some people, people with power, are scared of the unknown. I believe mankind shouldn't be conceited enough that to believe we can figure everything out, but we sure as hell can try to figure a whole lot of things out. And there is never anything wrong with that search for knowledge.
I can tell that the author and I share this anger, and it's cathartic to figure that out, to see the basis for all this anger. We might not agree on everything, but the emotions we have come from the same place.
Maybe I'll find the courage to really write down all the thoughts I have after reading this book.
Projects
Research Thing
The hardest part of academic research is, apparently, not doing the research itself, but figuring out what to research. You're gonna spend the early months just reading, and reading, and reading. And the what won't coalesce until you're already neck-deep in your chosen topic, other people's thoughts and hypotheses and findings swirling in your head. Kick that old proposal down the stairs. You have new hypotheses now.
And that is actually what research is all about.
Or at least that's what I've learned these last few months. I'm doing a research on China's digital public diplomacy and I went back and forth with the topic until all of a sudden the deadline is a month away and I got nothing yet. But I have read whole stacks of academic papers and all of a sudden I figured something out, something with a scope just small enough that I can eke it out in a month.
This research involves opening Twitter, collecting tweets from specific accounts and analysing them, and trying my hardest not to get distracted by everything else that Twitter is. It's nothing remarkable but it's not like anyone gonna expect much from an undergraduate student. It's not even my final thesis. This will be fine.
My professor has been ghosting me, though, and it sucks, but whatever. I'll figure this out.
Writing Thing
I can't believe I'm in love with, of all the pretty boys that Fire Emblem have, with Sylvain Jose Gautier.
I can't believe that the first novella-length fiction I finish will be about him. My god. People are right. Getting obsessed with a single fictional character is one of the most powerful motivator in the world.
The one I'm writing is a sequel to a shorter fic I posted earlier this year, an AU where our redhead ran way from home at a young age to become a mercenary. He becomes a slightly different person from who he is in canon, someone free from the baggage that plagues his other self, even when some things still end up the same. But he doesn't know that, does he? The grass is always greener on the other side.
I've been on this story for months. I'm on the final stretch right now. Writing it has helped me discover myself as much as the story itself. I will finish it.
Afterwords
Hoo I didn't expect this blog post is going to be so long. This was just meant as a braindump for some of the thoughts I had after playing/reading some things. But you know, I discovered something writing this. Art is good. Diversity is good. Stories of different forms is always good.
Sometimes I feel bad about spending so much time reading books or playing games or watching movies or browsing through an artist's portfolio. But you know what, it's all good. Art is a way with which you get to know other people, people who can be wildly different from you. Stories build empathy. Read enough stories and you'll understand that no matter how different people can be from you, they're still people. They're no different from you.
So, yeah, uhh, read more stories. Play more games. Get to know other people. It's never a waste.
