WIHFL: Until they think warm days will never cease

What I'm having fun with lately, 8/15/2024

Holy cannoli, we’re almost at the end of a very long week. I missed out on a chocolate banana cake because god exploded my tire, and every hour or so I’m getting up from my desk to go kill ants in the kitchen for, I don’t know, an hour.

Which is why I’m extra thankful to everyone who shared what they’re having fun with! Here’s those, with some of my own recs mixed in:

1. OST Composing Jam #7. My incredible friend Nate (aka Lovecrow) submitted a sonic story in Worlds Collide, give it a listen. The second act and finale gave me a strong Toby Fox influence. Also called to mind a great piece that ran in Polygon this week about how composers keep game music from getting repetitive — composing for games is a different beast, so good work!

2. “The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games” by Super Eyepatch Wolf. I’ve been super interested in fake games lately — games for which art exists (including soundtracks!!) but no actual game. This videoasks why anyone would go through the effort of making a game that can never be played. (Although Vermis I, my favorite fake game of last year, does now have a fan game in production!)

3. Dance Moms compilations. Kim expressed their ardent love for trashy TV. Having never really exposed myself to this world, I poked around to see what I could see. What stuck out to me: Since the show is about the adults, and the kids are having fun and living out their youth in the background, it makes the drama surprisingly… political? It’s very tense. Also the dances themselves are sort of experimental??

4. Torture via Zillow. Bri copped to Zillowing (is this a verb? is the online real estate community so linguistically advanced??) beyond any real person’s price point. And in defense of this practice, I think it’s the same as, like, reading sci-fi! Very expensive things are the same as fiction, and both explore dystopian themes!

5. Transitional periods. Nicholas described this season as a nurturing time, and man, I feel that. This time of year always feels like it’s in preparation for something. John Keats wrote that fall conspires “to set budding more, and still more, later flowers for the bees, until they think warm days will never cease.” Dude was spitting.

6. Pronouncing “doing” like doyng in your head every time you type it. I don’t have anything else to add except that it’s a mind virus and I want to replicate it.

7. What I’m playing:

   • SteamWorld Heist II is reeeeally scratching my itch for tactics games. The pitch: 2D XCOM but it’s all skill shots and the characters are all unique — both in terms of personality, which this game exudes, and bc you can mix and match class features. Highly highly recommend you play this.

   • GodLaser. OK so actually I’ve been playing lots of Slay the Spire, but in the course of reporting I ended up contributing this Flash game — the first project from the duo that would create Slay the Spire — for archival! It’s a neat 20 minute game if you can load it on your browser, otherwise it’s on Flashpoint.

Thanks for reading!

DR

BONUS: Nate also shared with me this week a “space shanty.” It’s quirky, and dorky on the face of it obvs, but I only say this to set up the fact that it almost made me cry? Your guess is as good as mine. I think I was born to be on a boat, or similar vessel.