lightofdaye | Reading

Back in 2008 the creators of Homestar Runner released a short escape-the-room Flash game starring Strong Bad's nebulously-defined private eye/crooked cop alter ego, Dangeresque. I played it, it was fun. Then in 2023 they revamped the original game and re-released it with two brand new episodes, so of course I bought that, and it sat in my Steam library for a year. Then they threw in a free DLC that added another episode, and it sat in my Steam library for two more years.

But this year I'm going to get my Steam backlog under control. This time for really real.

standing behind an office desk, dangeresque makes a sarcastic remark about really needing an unsolved stamp

standing behind an office desk, dangeresque makes a sarcastic remark about really needing an unsolved stamp

The first episode has Dangeresque trapped in his office until he can "solve" a cold case (i.e. fabricate evidence out of whatever's lying around). I think it's pretty close to the original Flash game, though I haven't played that in 18 years, so who knows. In the second episode, Dangeresque flees the scene but runs into car trouble (i.e. a bomb under the hood that he has to defuse). The trilogy wraps up with Dangeresque forced into an alliance with his gangster nemesis Perducci, whose other enemies are plotting to bump him off. Once you've beaten the three main episodes, you unlock the fourth, this time starring Homestar's alter ego Dangeresque Too as villanous goons have him trapped in an elevator. All told, it's about three hours of gameplay.

If you like Homestar Runner and you like point-and-click adventure games, you will like this. I do, and I did. The writing is funny, the puzzles are absurdist but fair, and if you blow yourself up the game just puts you right back where you were before you did the dumb thing you did. I would play ten more of these if they made them, though I can't guarantee I would play them within a punctual timeframe.

Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate is on Steam for $7.99 USD, and includes the free DLC.

pauraque

This is part four of my book club notes on The Black Fantastic. [Part 1, part 2, part 3.]

"The Final Flight of the Unicorn Girl" by Alex Smith (2018)

( Superheroes are co-opted into the system as tools of oppression, and younger superpowered people fight back. )

"Calendar Girls" by Justina Ireland (2019)

( In a misogynist dystopia, an illegal contraceptive dealer... well, it's hard to summarize. )

"Shape-ups at Delilah's" by Rion Amilcar Scott (2019)

( A curse causes all barbers to lose their hair-cutting abilities, except for one woman. )

"Habibi" by Tochi Onyebuchi (2020)

( Two young men in solitary confinement, one in California and one in Gaza, forge a magical connection. )

walgesang

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Current Mood: hopeful

selenak

In the former, Jane sees herself as Alice to Sinatra's Luther, while in the later, Sinatra is informed it all comes down to Vader and Luke.

( Spoilers are saying hello to.... )

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Munich

torino10154

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pauraque

This sequel to Maniac Mansion picks up the story five years later, when one of Dr. Fred's tentacle monster creations accidentally drinks toxic sludge that gives him super intelligence and an unquenchable thirst to take over the world. This brings Bernard (the nerdy kid from the first game) back to the mansion, this time with his college roommates Hoagie (a laid-back metalhead) and Laverne (an endearingly nutty medical student). Dr. Fred tries to send the trio back in time to prevent the catastrophe, but Hoagie ends up 200 years in the past with no electricity to power his time pod, and Laverne ends up 200 years in the future when tentacles reign and keep humans as their pets. As the player you control all three protagonists and guide them to ensure that the terrible, eponymous Day of the Tentacle never dawns.

nerdy kid with glasses stands in a hotel lobby with gum with a dime stuck in it highlighted

nerdy kid with glasses stands in a hotel lobby with gum with a dime stuck in it highlighted

This was one of my favorite games as a kid, but I hadn't played it since the remastered re-release came out, ten years ago today. When I was looking into it I noticed that it happens to be the #1 rated DOS title on MobyGames. Is this actually the best DOS game of all time? Let us investigate!

( Read more... )

Day of the Tentacle Remastered is available on various platforms for $14.99 USD, and on Steam it's currently on sale for $2.99 USD, so if you never got around to it, now's the time!

torino10154

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

pauraque

The other week we had a bunch of above-freezing days and made quite a bit of headway in melting the snow. There were even places where you could see the ground! At one point I was out walking and I wasn't even wearing a coat, and some guy walking past me who was certainly old enough to know better opened his arms expansively and announced in glee, "It's finally here!!" I just smiled and didn't disillusion him.

Shortly afterward, the temperatures plummeted back down to the teens Fahrenheit (single digits below zero C) and stayed there, and yesterday we got several inches of snow, so the ground is well covered again.

The birds, however, are certainly aware that winter will end eventually, and are continuing their preparations. The year-round residents are doing more singing and less quiet foraging, and the early migrators are starting to roll in. I've heard flocks of Canada Geese honking over the neighborhood and seen Turkey Vultures wheeling and teetering through the sky. (In the dead of winter we only see Black Vultures, which can find carrion by sight; Turkey Vultures need to smell it, so below-freezing temperatures are a problem for them.) Walking around town I saw the Common Grackles are back, and I heard the year's first Red-winged Blackbird call from the muddy fields near the grocery store. I spotted a Song Sparrow quietly hanging out with our usual Dark-eyed Junco group in the yard (looking a bit underdressed in his casual stripes next to the juncos' tuxedos), and the next day he was singing.

A lot of people associate American Robins with spring, but not all individuals migrate. Even in the coldest part of the winter I still see them occasionally out in the woods. But the ones who do migrate are definitely on their way in, and before it started snowing again there were even enough open lawns in the neighborhood for them to forage there. I always find it funny how they spread out equally spaced when they forage, almost in a grid.

Since my last bird update I also added Pine Siskin and European Starling to my year list. They've been around, I just hadn't seen them since New Year. Pine Siskins should actually be heading out soon, as they breed further north, in Canada. I love their buzzy little upward zipper call.

So that's 46 birds for my 2026 list so far. Soon the main migration wave will hit and it'll fill up faster!

pauraque

The Ainu are an indigenous people native to northern Japan and nearby parts of Russia. Kayano Shigeru (1926-2006) was a leading activist for Ainu rights in Japan, and eventually became the first Ainu member of the Japanese legislature. But his career in the Diet came after the publication of this book, which mixes memoir, history, and ethnography.

Kayano relates what he knows of his people's oppression in the 19th century, when the Japanese government pushed many Ainu groups onto marginal land and conscripted people for forced labor at minimal pay. This leads into his own childhood, when his family's generational poverty was exacerbated by his father's alcoholism. As a young man Kayano came to feel ashamed of being Ainu, culminating in a demeaning job at an Ainu-themed attraction, performing sacred dances five times a day for gawking tourists.

But the tourists' ignorant questions sparked Kayano's realization that there should be a real Ainu museum curated by actual Ainu people and fostering respect for their culture. He was inspired to travel the Ainu lands collecting one traditional tool or piece of clothing at a time (and always paying the people who made them) and eventually succeeded in opening the museum and renewing his own sense of pride in his heritage.

This short book highlights important issues, but I have to be honest—I found the presentation pretty dry. Maybe it's partly the translation? I also noticed that Ainu women weren't given much attention; Kayano has a wife, but her only character trait shown in the book is "supportive of her husband". But I'd say the book is still a good resource on a significant figure in global indigenous rights.

(As an aside: This book was on my TBR list for at least 15 years. This year I'm really trying to either read some of the long-time lingerers or admit I'm not going to read them, so having read this is a great success for me!)

pauraque

This Flash game by Argentine developer Daniel Benmergui presents a scene with a woman in a rowboat looking up at a man sitting on the moon. As the player you can snap photos of different portions of the scene and move them around, leading to different resolutions of the scenario.

*Is this some sort of romantic game that I'm too aro to understand?*

I do remember this game making the rounds in the late 2000s and being held up as evidence on the pro side of the burgeoning "can video games be art?" debate. Personally I have always found this debate tedious and misguided, proving nothing except that "art" is a poorly defined term which is used to arbitrarily judge elements of culture as worthy or unworthy. So that's probably why I never clicked any of the links to I Wish I Were the Moon.

Coming to it now, my strongest impression is that it doesn't demonstrate anything about art, but it does demonstrate (yet again) that I am extremely aromantic. The game is supposed to be a representation of a love triangle; I do know that. But it makes my brain do the thing that it's been doing my entire life, which is to interpret romantic scenarios that I don't understand as anything other than what they are intended to be. (My brain does this especially with songs, which tend to be worded vaguely enough that it's easy to do. This breakup song could be about a friendship turning sour! This passionate love ballad could be about any kind of love and it doesn't even have to be about a person! It could be about a city or a fandom or a celestial body!!)

So what is the moon in this game? It's something the man loves which is separating him from the woman in the rowboat. Who says it has to be a person? It could be his career or his faith or his family or just about anything! I guess you could argue that one of the essential qualities of art is that it's open to interpretation, but let's not and say we did.

The 2008 version of I Wish I Were the Moon is playable in a Flash emulator here. In 2022 the developer also offered a free remaster on his itch.io page here, but I have to say I think it lacks some of the charm of the original.

pauraque

I liked this book when it was a fantasy noir starring a biracial knife-throwing assassin with magic hands in 1940s New York who's trying to get out of the business but keeps getting pulled back in. But that book wraps up about a third of the way through the actual book. Then it turns into a completely different book where the assassin moves upstate with her boyfriend and the story becomes about slimy small town politics and the characters' profound guilt for their actions in the city, and I became increasingly confused about what the book was trying to do and decreasingly satisfied with my reading experience.

Part of the problem is that Dev (the boyfriend) kind of rubbed me the wrong way and I didn't feel invested in the romance between him and Phyllis (the assassin), so shifting the focus more to their relationship was not going to work well for me. I actually liked both characters less and less as the book went on, and by the end I was feeling pretty fed up with both of them. A late promotion to the group of main characters is Tamara, Dev's ex, who comes to have a close bond with Phyllis as well. There is some interesting complexity to the dynamic of this trio, but I ended up frustrated with the way it was handled.

relationship endgame spoilers

It seemed to me that this was going in a poly triad direction, and then backed off of it. And I mean... it's not not poly. Phyllis, Dev, and Tamara have a one-night threesome, and Tamara also has a boyfriend who's deployed overseas, and in general it is not a book that assumes people only love one person at a time. I did appreciate that. What specifically threw me was this passage in Tamara's POV:

Sure, she and Phyllis had kissed that night with Dev and even now, in certain light, she didn't mind the notion of touching Pea [Phyllis] until she came. But the love she felt wasn't really that kind—it was a blood love, a bone love, and it ricocheted off of her other loves at unexpected angles.

Maybe I'm misreading the author's intention in pushing away the idea that Tamara's love for Phyllis is "that kind", or maybe I'm misunderstanding what "that kind" is supposed to be. But to me it read like the poly dynamic was being held at arm's length, which was not the direction I'd hoped it would go. I guess the Tamara/Phyllis relationship is ambiguous and not clearly defined as (queer)platonic or romantic, which sometimes I like, but the way it was presented here didn't land for me.

I also didn't understand what we were supposed to take away from the reveal of how the magic in the book works.

worldbuilding and plot spoilers

Only certain rare people have magic, and only people of color. It's eventually shown that the magic is a gift from their ancestors, who intended for their descendants to use it to fight white oppression. But if the ancestors are displeased with how the magic is used, the magic can turn against its holder or disappear completely. This explains why Phyllis loses control of her hands—the ancestors wanted her to assassinate the sadistic mob boss Vic (who is white), but by that point Phyllis wanted to stop killing so she didn't do it. She spends the rest of the book trying to make amends for the murders she's committed, yet her hands continue to torment her for not killing Vic, and she eventually sickens and dies. Dev, who also has magic, does kill Vic, and is tortured by guilt for the rest of the book, and he also dies. Tamara has magic too, and also becomes consumed with guilt because even though she never hurt anyone directly, she worked for Vic and looked the other way; she tries to sacrifice herself to save Phyllis but doesn't succeed.

To me it ended up reading like the characters were being punished for not living up to binding magical agreements that they never consented to or even knew about, which override their own agency and moral convictions. What are the ancestors trying to accomplish here? How does any of this help in the fight against racism? We're told that magic is getting rarer, but it's not really explained why. I know it's not because people of color in the 1940s don't need the help, and I can't imagine the author is saying it's because they're not worthy of it, but... what, then? Phyllis and Dev's daughter is supposed to have extraordinary powers, but I don't think that's explained either and I didn't have a clear sense of what she's expected to do. The whole cosmology of the book didn't make sense to me.

It sucks because I find Johnson's prose excellent, and the first third worked so well for me. I really didn't want to have to say I don't like this book! But alas, here we are.

selenak

Dark Winds, Season 3: continues to be both beautifully acted, thoughtfully and empathically written, and a visual feast. Also heartbreaking in the day it follows up on s2's conclusion for Joe Leaphorn and his wife Emma. ( Small spoilery remark. ) Also I was more grateful than ever that the show takes place in the 1970s and wasn't updated to the present because Bern's new job with border patrol would have felt very differently even before her subplot kicks in.

Young Sherlock: aka the one by Guy Ritchie which doesn't feel like a prequel to his Holmes movies and is the better for it. I mean, I didn't dislike his first Holmes movie, which was the only one I saw, but I wasn't crazy about it, either, and never felt the need to see it again. Also it was made at a time where all the various iterations of Sherlock Holmes seemed to lean into emphasizing his arrrogance. Now, this show is entertaining fluff with only the vaguest nods to when it's supposed to be set: female students galore in Oxford, 1870, for some reason a rich and high ranking visitor takes the carriage instead of the train to Oxford, while someone in the production team actually remembered the Paris Commune happened, they evidently forgot or ignored both the near starvation of the population part of that and that there was also the Franco-Prussian war going on, so everyone makes a trip to Paris for one episode with no armies in sight, but the Folies Bergeres being in business with dancing girls, etc., etc., etc. Not to mentiion ( something extremely plot spoilery ) But honestly, because the show doesn't pretend to be anything but fun fluff, I did not mind. What I do suspect is someone in the production team has watched at least some Smallville and thought, hm, that "Clark and Lex were bffs for a while when young before Lex went evil" premise is great, we should do that with Holmes and Moriarty". And proceeded to follow up on this idea. Young Sherlock, played by a member of the gifted Fiennes clan, and young James M, played by Mat (the second one) from Wheel of Time, have the necessary chemistry and homoerotic subtext, they hit it off famously, and at the same time the seeds for future supervillaindom in Moriarty are there. And the show does make it believable these are two young guys smarter than most others around them and on each other's level. Most importantly, though: this Sherlock Holmes is the first one in what feels like eons who is not introduced being a jerk to the people around him. (I love Elementary ! But while Elementary's Sherlock was never as extreme as Sherlock's Sherlock, he, too, started out being rude to his Watson and everyone else.) It might come with the much younger territory, but while he's cocky, he's not (yet?) abrasive, downright tender with his mother, and, lo and behold, civil to people who aren't awful to others in front of him. Otoh, it may also be that Guy Ritchie and his production team watched the last season of Sherlock and thought, hm, dysfunctional Holmes family drama, unexpected relations, we like it, we like it, but how about giving the women better parts? ( Spoilers were very entertained indeed by the result ) Oh, and absolutely no one gets raped or threatened with rape. Like I said, this fluffy show with a heavy emphasis on the bromance manages to do very well by its female characters. Anyway, whether nor not this gets another season - which it doesn't really need for the story it has told - I enjoyed myself.

Current Mood: chipper
Current Location: Munich

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Page generated Mar. 29th, 2026 06:48 am

The Light Of Daye

One fine day in the middle of the night...

Reading

Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate (2023)

The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, ed. andré m. carrington (2025) [part 4]

in the spring an old man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of birds

Paradise 2.06 + 2.07

FIC: Unfogging the Future, Teen, Harry/Parvati

Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle (1993/2016)

HP Pregnancy Fest Anon Master List

yes we've had one, but what about second winter?

Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir by Kayano Shigeru (1980)

I Wish I Were the Moon (2008/2022)

Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson (2020)

Of Navajo cops and future arch nemesis

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March 2026

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