Top Tens of 2017: #7s

Here are the seventh best podcast, film, album, TV show, and videogame of 2017 (there's spoilers):

#7 Podcast: Revolutionary Left Radio

In the year that gave us the Channel Zero Network, it seems like the question of a left-wing counterpart to AM radio - in the form of podcasts - was a central point of some organizing. For my money, Revolutionary Left Radio is the closest thing to that goal that exists. The host, Brett, conducts interviews with folks who tend toward an academic background on topics that are often focused on creating talking points for various leftist tendencies in order to bring them together. His role is generally to ask (clearly pre-written, which isn't a bad thing) questions and then follow up with something not unlike a soundbite.

I say all of this trying not to sound like I'm passing judgment; it's very much a podcast that I enjoy a lot, and one that I know a number of friends would probably dislike quite a bit. There are times where I'm not entirely sure why I enjoy it; I'm not in the organizing world, most of my actively political friends are anarchists who I rarely get into these kinds of discussions with (and even if I did, I wouldn't want to use talking points), and the kind of focus it presents is something I can appreciate but generally don't love. My podcast preferences tend toward long, rambly discussions that I can listen to in the background while I walk, commute, play video games, or work, rather than tight hours with specific takeaways.

The thing I generally come back to, of course, is that the podcast just leads to interesting discussions about leftism that take seriously historical background and theoretical developments. Which is the shit.

#7 Film: Raw

This cannibal/vampire/zombie horror film (I mean that in a good way I promise, I would also hate that description, it is meant as ambiguity not nerdish conflation) feels like a 2017 followup to Cursed or The Craft more than anything. It combines a story about family, featuring the love and conflict between sisters and the dissembling of parents, with a coming of age story about going full party girl, with a horror film about appetites, all set in a veterinary school. I described it at one point as "if Thirst was good" and I stand by that, even if I think Thirst is a pretty good movie on its own. It's just probably Park's weakest.

There's a scene in which our protagonist gets introduced at a party: the camera does a long, slow zoom through a red-tinted group of people dancing and making out and socializing. About a third of the way through the zoom we can see her sitting on some sort of table feeling herself. It's probably the best single scene in a movie this year.

#7 Album: The Autobiography by Vic Mensa

Mensa might be the best rapper out right now who doesn't have punchlines. "Mentally ill, fuck Dr. Phil / All these pills ain't Benadryl (Chiraq) / No oil but it's been a drill" is about the level, which isn't to say bad but, like, man. He makes up for it by telling politically-engaged and honest-feeling stories with a fascinating structure and a total lack of pretense.

Nothing here hits quite as hard as "16 Shots," but "Rollin Like A Stoner" still goes in. And the structure itself is reminiscent of To Pimp a Butterfly, albeit not quite as accomplished. The Autobiography focuses more on pulling out a single line or moment from one song and expanding it into a full narrative of its own in the subsequent, though, which works surprisingly well.

#7 TV Show: Land of the Lustrous (season 1)

Land of the Lustrous is, in many ways, the inverse of last year's Flip Flappers. Where that was a journey through psychoanalysis, this is the most straightforward single character arc of a season; where that was full of queerbaiting and fanservice, this is a straightforward story of a nonbinary society. Which is to say, in both good and bad ways. Ultimately, I had more problems with Flip Flappers but enjoyed what it did more; but I'd definitely recommend Land of the Lustrous more readily to anyone.

The big stumbling block is the animation. Land of the Lustrous is fully CGI, in a way that kind of ends up working but never isn't kind of unfortunate to watch. My suspicion is that the choice was made - if it was at all aesthetic, which I doubt - because of the ability of CG to render liquid dynamics better and easier than traditional animation. The problem, of course, is that CG liquid looks like shit.

If there's another parallel between this and another anime, it's Neon Genesis Evangelion. The monster of the week in both is celestial - here Lunarians, there Angels; the unsteady, vaguely queer-coded youth is called on against their will to serve; and more than anything else, both are shows that are fundamentally about loss. Both also pivot that from loss of an other to loss of self, and how that impacts a person. Neither are the most profound statements on it, but Eva at least has the benefit of being done, so it's easier to say that it tells its story well, given what it is going for, and experimentally in a way that reinforces it. Land of the Lustrous, on the other hand, may or may not go anywhere.

The strangest thing, I think, is that I can't imagine this season being appealing to anyone who isn't already invested in anime as a form - it won't convert anyone, I don't think - while simultaneously feeling more like American television than most anime I've seen. Primarily in that anime is often released in short form, while American TV is almost uniformly expected to run for multiple seasons, if not indefinitely. It's a strange thing that I'm interested in seeing more of.

#7 Videogame: Post/Capitalism

Post/Capitalism is a pretty good use of videogames as straight up propaganda. It looks a little like a citybuilder, plays like a puzzle box. In short: you have a capitalist city. Clicking repeatedly on a piece of it transforms it from something predatory into something less so. Certain transformations trigger others to revert. Connecting them together reveals the underlying issue that causes this reversion; clicking the revelation changes it to allow them to coexist.

Ultimately, you connect these underlying issues together to reveal what causes them to come into conflict, resulting in four ultimate issues that can be dealt with. Once these are dealt with, the miniature city isn't exactly utopic, but it is a world that prioritizes things like the "collective ownership of the means of production," "labour [being] given from each according to their ability," "value [being] determined democratically," and "production being directed to satisfying human need."

Most games that get understood as propaganda are primarily literary; newsgames and the like that exist primarily to cause you to interact to look at some current event or data points. What Post/Capitalism does different is to primarily propagandize through systems. Obviously the meat of it is in the words that are associated with the systems, which is where this seems like it could be improved upon, but linking systemic abstractions together in a medium which is literally a collection of systemic abstractions is a good step forward.

Top Tens of 2017: #8s

Here are the eighth best podcast, film, album, TV show, and videogame of 2017:

#8 Podcast: The Adventure Zone

The Adventure Zone feels like it has to be on this list, although I kind of honestly think that calendar 2017 was the show's weakest year so far. Unfortunately I also started listening to it in that time, and completed two listens through the entire back catalog, so it's hard to separate in my mind. This year was largely the conclusion of their first "season," in which DM Griffin McElroy lead his two brothers and their father through a series of short arcs that lead to a big Final Fantasy-ass conclusion.

The final arc saw Griffin create a new ruleset based on the Powered by the Apocalypse engine to show the three heroes' prequel journey, and, to be entirely frank, I don't think his mod worked particularly well. Since the conclusion they have switched over to a series of "experimental arcs" where different members of the family run a short campaign in a different system. It has not been the most compelling thing in the world so far.

On the other hand, I did listen to three-ish years of biweekly content twice through, and some of it was very good. Plus, where the conclusion was often sappy or less interested in play than in wrap-up, it didn't do a bad job at the latter. And for the aspects of the experiments that I'm not quite gelling with, it's a genuinely exciting thing for them to do, and I found myself looking forward to the future of the show at the end of the year far more than I was at the beginning. That counts for something, I think.

#8 Film: Okja

Bong Joon-ho has, in my mind at least, long been a Korean director who makes films that are beautiful, engaging enough, and always worth seeing. They also happen to be, mostly, not super interesting in the long term. The only time I have had a good experience revisiting one of his movies is The Host, which mostly still works because it was his transitional film into Auteurdom. Especially because, for once, his broken character is a revolutionary rather than a detective. I suspect I'd find the same thing about Snowpiercer, though I haven't had a strong desire to revisit it just yet.

I expect to feel the same about Okja. It is a Netflix Original Feature that has a genetically engineered superpig for a title character (the CGI is very good). It's also a Jungle-esque critique of factory farming and a high school-esque explication of veganism. The ALF shows up in a decidedly liberal incarnation. On top of that, it has an embarrassing Jake Gyllenhaal performance, a pretty good Tilda Swinton performance, and a frankly wild performance by child actor Seo-hyun Ahn as the main character. All of which is to say, it's pretty enjoyable to watch.

#8 Album: All American Made by Margo Price

All American Made does a lot of good work with short songs that get in and out with a thought, and that show off Price's country range.

It also manages to present a fairly cohesive vision of a fragmented country, which sounds more grandiose than it plays. Songs reference the effects of neoliberalism in a critical way, including the fairly straightforward "Pay Gap" and a shoutout to the Iran-Contra scandal and the demonization of people on welfare on "All American Made," a truly strange and impressive closer to the record.

#8 TV Show: GLOW (season 1)

This dramatized version of the founding of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling takes forever to get going. The character work they do at the top of the show is largely gratuitous and sometimes outright boring. But after a handful of episodes, they actually get to the wrestling part. And then, it turns out, it gets kind of great. Who would have guessed that professional wrestling is a good vehicle for storytelling?

#8 Videogame: Vroom in the Night Sky

This Switch game is the best thing. It's a small group of low-res levels that you fly around on a motorcycle. You're a witch. You collect Stardust and go through circles and then you finish the level. You can shoot? Another witch shows up after a certain amount of time. I have no idea what she does other than have poorly-translated antagonistic/sweet conversations with you.

It might be the most solo-developer-ass game I played this year, and I played a lot for Playdate & the Podcast. It's a hassle to handle, its scoring is obscure as fuck, and you can unlock everything super easily. But the handful of hours I put in on my friend's system were always pleasant in a way that I really appreciated.

Top Tens of 2017: #9s

Here are the ninth best podcast, film, album, TV show, and videogame of 2017:

#9 Podcast: Switchblade Sisters

Switchblade Sisters is the first time I heard one of those terrible ads on the Maximum Fun Network and actually went ahead and checked out the podcast. It took me a few weeks, honestly, to stop regretting that I had done so; and even more to really feel like the show was getting into the swing of things. None of which is to say that the host, April Wolfe (formerly of LA Weekly (RIP)) or any of the guests were bad or uninteresting; the show has had a real professionalism from the jump, and with small exceptions there haven't been major changes in the format over time. Part of what's endeared me to it is accepting the self-imposed limitations; the rest is growing to enjoy what is there.

I've had the argument about the length of podcasts a number of times throughout this year; a few times with my co-host on the Playdate Podcast, and a few times in discussions with friends where I asked what they preferred. I appear to be one of the only people I know who doesn't give a fuck about the length, and might even prefer them to be longer. That comes partially out of the fact that I started listening to them when I had about three hours of commuting a day. But it's also, I think, because I have no qualms pausing and picking back up, whereas other people seem to.

Switchblade Sisters, I imagine you'll find it gratifying to learn, is about an hour long; less because it has the normal intro, outro, and ad breaks. For my money, that's the show's biggest weakness, but I can also accept that I'm the outlier here. Every time, though, I want there to be more; on the older movie under discussion; on the guest artist's process; or just in allowing the rapport to be developed a little more naturally. It's enough of a problem that I nearly dismissed the show a couple episodes in. An hour for a comedy show makes sense; an hour to juggle a critical appreciation of a film, an artist interview, and a shitload of bumpers is kind of a crime. The inverse suggestion, of course, would be to focus on one of the first two at the expense of the third, but that would make this a much worse show.

The real turning point for me was the discussion of Rosemary's Baby, in which Wolfe and guest Jessie Nickson-Lopez got into a discussion of why this movie so affects them without shrinking away from Polanski's shittiness as a human being. It leads to an interesting conversation about art, in the abstract and in particular, and to good responses from Nickson-Lopez that might otherwise have been very abstract or entirely missing. It's a cool thing, and I hope the show finds more ways to thread its particular needle as it develops.

#9 Film: Better Watch Out

I saw this, primarily, because it stars Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould, the kids who starred in M. Night Shyamalan's second to most recent film, The Visit. In that, they were brother and sister; here, she is a babysitter to Oxenbould's friend on a night when things go awry. If nothing else, this is worth watching after The Visit to see that Oxenbould isn't exclusively capable of playing a deeply annoying character, and to enjoy their chemistry again. There is else, of course, but not a whole ton of it.

If I can say another thing that might oversell this movie: it's a bit like a slightly watered-down version of You're Next. That movie is significantly better, of course, but both do interesting, often funny things while undermining the home invasion genre. Not just in the mechanics of the invasion, but even down to the final image, in a certain way. So if you're looking for something a little less fun than that with a couple of interesting aspects it doesn't hit, this is a cool little thing to enjoy.

#9 Album: Dedication 6 by Lil Wayne

Despite weak Nicki and Drake verses and a general lack of the kind of difficult joy he's been spitting for the last few years, there are still lines like "do I look like I'm playing? Kaepernick" that continue to solidify the fact that Wayne is, was, and remains the best at this shit. The chorus that goes "When I bust I yell Eureka!" is a pretty perfect example: it flows well, he sells the fuck out of it, and the repetition only gets funnier every time. These are his comfort zones and they are illustrated beautifully.

Otherwise, honestly, Dedication 6 is in many ways my least favorite Weezy release in a minute. Which is okay. I suspect it's been better-received than most of what I actually fuck with. It feels like another step in the saga, and I'm still following along close.

None of which is to say, of course, that it's anything other than a very good listen. I don't genuinely consider Wayne the greatest of all time for no reason. Even when he misses, I value that over most artist's hits. Because he's extraordinarily enthusiastic about rapping, and very good at it, and willing to try things that alienate one aspect of his fanbase on one song and then the opposite aspect on the very next. And that doesn't just lead to him being all over the place, but to changing the game on a regular basis.

#9 TV Show: Slasher (season 2)

Someone who watched enough TV to actually fill out one of these lists would almost certainly not include this, but hey, here I am. It's the first Netflix original season of a show that originated on Canadian TV, which was turned into an anthology series during that transition. Or maybe that was the initial plan. I don't know; I watched the bulk of the first season before skipping over to the second, which is the one that came out in 2017.

This time around is the story of a group of camp counselors who return to their old stomping grounds five years after they sorta accidentally killed another counselor. They've heard that the land is being sold and are worried people will find the body they haphazardly hid. Since those events, an intentional community has sprouted in the area with a small handful of members. Once they get to the site (in the middle of winter), some masked & en-snowsuited entity starts taking them out one by one. The whole thing is kind of a mess, with characters that get a lot more screentime than they have development opportunity and a story to tell that isn't strong enough to support the runtime. This is somewhat helped by the fact that the setting itself is conceptually cool and prep work was done to make it feel interesting, although it too goes mostly uninterrogated because it's easier to just blanket it with snow and get mildly interesting shots.

Probably the most interesting thing is the way the season is structured; that whole plot is intercut with scenes from five years prior, developing the characters during the period in which the murder happened, and some in the interim. It more or less works out that whoever's backstory is being developed ultimately dies, which works especially well in the first episode. The person in question seems to be being set up as the final girl real hard. On the other hand, that kind of subversion definitely undermines the possibility of making a stronger story or developing characters to a great enough extent that they can draw you through the weak central mystery.

#9 Videogame: Night in the Woods

I'll be completely honest here: I originally wanted Universal Paperclips on this list, and up until the last moment it was. I think that game is very interesting, but I also couldn't put together a strong case for it in the way that I thought I could. It's a cool thing, though. Probably. On some level, I'd much rather Oikospiel, Book One be on here, but I also just couldn't get the words together for that. Or even Everything, which just didn't click with me at all. Hey: play Oikospiel. While I'm here: Moloch (Zero), The Tearoom, and LOCALHOST are all really cool small things that came out this year that I wish I had been able to figure out how to put on this list. Also Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp was a weirdly compelling thing that I nearly figured out how to talk about.

And, I'll be honest, the main reason I cut Night in the Woods initially was because I couldn't think of anything to say about it. It's a game about a young girl who drops out of college to return to her small postindustrial town and figure some shit out. She then spends time hanging out with her old friends and uncovering a mystery that begins with a severed arm and ends with some town cultists sacrificing precarious youth to the god of industrialism. Along the way, Mae (the aforementioned girl) comes to some soft conclusions about her own mental health, her attitude toward her hometown, and her relationship with her friends and parents.

My experience with Night in the Woods was basically cut in half. I played the first half (or so) around when I first got it; I enjoyed it enough, but I honestly spent more time in the 2D soulslike Demontower inside of Mae's laptop than in the game itself. I picked it up a bunch of months later and finally finished it when I was considering doing these lists, and what they might look like. That's when I initially cut this from the proceedings. The problem was basically that I enjoyed my time with it, and think it a pretty impressive thing, but that it never really hit me.

On the other hand, though, it has pretty incredible writing which hovers between being tumblr-esque while maintaining a naturalistic quality that shows up in both the dialogue and the characterization. One person who you meet with regularly (if you choose to) reads you cutesy poems; another hangs out on a roof and just wants to talk about horror movies. Both of them manage to ride those tropes while also suggesting a sense of interiority beneath. It's honestly impressive, although (for me) it often didn't extend beyond that.

It's also a game that says 'fuck cops' early and - well, not often enough. That has really pleasant minigames, like Demontower or the Guitar Hero-lite that you play while Mae is at band practice. That takes seriously episodes of dissociation as both personal and political problem. And that tells an interesting story of someone who got stuck in a dead-end family business instead of going to college (I didn't go Gregg's route. He seemed super annoying). But more than anything, it's a game that does a ton of work to tell a story of the economic destruction of a small, midwestern town, and how that plays out in individual lives. Which I appreciate a lot.

This is why I cut it, though. I think what it does is cool. But I also just spent a lot of words saying just that. And I can't just say it, because I don't feel like that does it any justice. It's a weird thing that I also found pretty frustrating. Play it, or a bunch of the stuff I listed at the top. That's just my opinion though.

Top Tens of 2017: #10s

Here are the tenth best podcast, film, album, TV show, and videogame of 2017:

#10 Podcast: Don't Zap the Geek

There are some things about Don't Zap the Geek that are a bit rough: the audio quality can take Skype-induced dips, the hosts' familiarity with each other can sometimes obfuscate what's actually going on in an episode, that familiarity can lead to tangents that are often great but also can take away from discussions of other aspects of a particular episode, and the lack of a wrap-up episode is kind of a bummer. Despite all that, it's my favorite of the podcasts dedicated to recapping & discussing the third season of Twin Peaks (honorable mentions to Idle Thumbs' Twin Peaks Rewatch (which I appreciate for the discussion of cinematography especially) & Entertainment Weekly's A Twin Peaks Podcast, which has the opposite problems of this).

An example of why: at one point, the hosts talk about how David Lynch is a director who doesn't do antiheroes. He doesn't ask you to root for someone who is fundamentally doing bad. This is meant positively, and is contrasted with nearly all contemporary prestige television. As someone who is super not sold on Dale Cooper as the sweetheart of the century, it's something I don't know that I fully agree with. But it's also a strong theory of the work and the show that influenced my understanding of it in a way that more straightforward recap shows didn't manage.

Plus it has good jokes about John Justice Wheeler and serious reckonings with the show's violence and a totally baffling appreciation of Bobby Briggs that I absolutely can't get behind.

#10 Film: The Night is Short, Walk on Girl

I have what you might call a general rule. It is a bad one, but it is formed in reaction to many things, and it often serves me well (shouts out to Grant). Boiled down, it amounts to: the end of a movie (or narrative generally) is worthless. Endings suck. They pander or they tie together or they introduce useless obfuscation. They moralize or they idealize. There is no good or useful message to take from them, except that they turn the strange into the comprehensible, and render a product.

Given that criteria, The Night is Short, Walk on Girl might have been one of my favorite films of the year. It is, basically, a film pseudo-sequel to the 2010 anime series The Tatami Galaxy. They share a staff, and the same director - Masaaki Yuasa, who is almost certainly my favorite anime director - directed it. That series followed a high school boy as he attempted to choose a club that would suit him. Each episode, roughly speaking, saw him choose a club, live through it, fail, and revert back to the beginning. Yuasa is also the director of one of my favorite films of all time, also animated: Mind Game. In the past I've highly recommended it with the caveat that it opens with an upsetting scene of sexual assault.

The thing is that the bulk of The Night is Short does everything I love in his movies and shows. It combines the beautiful animation of Ping Pong with the delirious asides of Mind Game, the externalized politics of Kaiba, and the respect for spectacle of Kick-Heart. And, of course, the serious and ludicrous focus on character that defined The Tatami Galaxy. It tells the story of an endless night in which The Girl With Black Hair drinks, performs in a play, shops for a used book, visits ill friends, and diverts multiple kinds of divine judgment. There is also a dude who is convinced he's in love with her, despite the fact that all he has done is literally stalk her.

Which, I suppose, brings us to the issue. Our ostensible protagonist - literally Senpai - is some asshole who is real broken up about his inability to talk to this girl who he likes. And again, there is a lot there that, in the watching, seems fruitful; he is friends with a weirdly fascistic school events coordinator who is super queer coded; he is himself basically an MRA in waiting ready to be told off by this pretty great woman who should clearly be the lead of this film; there is a villain established early that is clearly paralleled to the dude in a way that seems like it is leading to a reckoning; and so on. You may have guessed that it isn't just the ending that disappoints, by now.

The movie takes a turn when The Girl With The Black Hair confronts Ri Haku, the capitalist, and lets him know that he is Connected with everyone, and is in some sense responsible for the brilliant night she has had. This is true in the most saccharine way possible. It is also a clear betrayal of any exciting possibility, a capitulation to capital, and a boring fucking story. From then it only gets worse.

Here's the thing: it's much harder to simply ignore the ending when it turns into what more or less (more) amounts to MRA propaganda. Because there are versions of this movie that last another minute, or a minute less, that are entirely different in meaning. It's fucking frustrating. These versions leave it unclear whether a relationship begins, or cut to a month into it when things fall apart. They, in other words, give context to the ways in which this movie tells the story of a dude who is shitty in ways that aren't necessarily his fault, but which he does nothing to effect.

Is it clear that my frustration with this movie has made me incapable of talking about it in a coherent way? Because that's more or less how I feel. It comes so close to being something unbelievable, and fails in ways that it sets itself up to avoid. And those failures resonate back through to color everything else, and fill this wonderful thing with poison.

#10 Album: I Believe In You by Dolly Parton

Last year, Dolly Parton released an album that was genuinely challenging, exciting, and playful all in the same measure. I can't overstate how good Pure & Simple is. This year, she released another album.

I Believe In You is her first children's album, and that's a weird thing to say. There are so many awkward moments throughout it, and so many exciting ones as well. The main problem, though, is that it is very slight. Which isn't to say in a way that kids might find appealing. Though that could be true. In the end, it's just not the kind of album that makes a huge impression, whether melodically or thematically.

#10 TV Show: American Gods (season 1)

American Gods is a show obsessed with its style that desperately wants to have something to say. It doesn't. Sometimes the style works, though.

#10 Videogame: Doki Doki Literature Club

I came into Doki Doki Literature Club expecting to hate it. The particular virality reminded me a lot of a muted version of Undertale, particularly in how it was made clear that there was a spoilable turn and a metafictional element. Consider those warnings for this free game you may want to play.

Those elements are, in my opinion at least, the weakest parts of this game. What's more, they actively undermine the strongest elements, which is the part that takes the dating sim genre very seriously in a way that interrogates its tropes. They're also, of course, what gained this game its virality, and are entirely at fault for things like my own awareness of its existence. I'm somewhat plugged in to the Smash community, but certainly not enough to hear about a new free game that a creator of the 20XX Tournament mod or "one of the best Melee Links in Jersey" had created.

The basic pitch is that you play a guy who joins a literature club in high school, only to find out it is entirely attended by a variety of attractive girls. They are each drawn in broad strokes, and your player character is internally fairly straightforward with the fact that he's mostly trying to get laid by becoming a member. The central mechanical interaction (aside from clicking to advance text) is fairly neat: every night you are tasked with writing a poem, which you can (and are advised to) game towards the tastes of a particular club member. You do this by picking a word from a list; the cute young girl, Natsuki, enjoys words like "marshmallow" and "fluffy;" the more mature, literary girl, Yuri, prefers lengthy, uncommon, or imagistic words like "aura," "anxiety," or "raindrops;" and your long-suffering friend and people-pleaser, Sayori, prefers more emotional descriptions like "tears" or "sad." It manages to break up the flow of the game while simultaneously developing these girls' characters and testing your own knowledge and assumptions about who they are supposed to be. Plus, it leaves you with the possibility of a poem, rather than awkwardly trying to force you into generatively writing one, which is super smart.

Saying that the horror/metafictional elements detract is not as clean as all that. Without them I wouldn't have just missed the game entirely; it is incredibly unlikely that some of the choices that work so well wouldn't have been made at all. For instance: part of the dawning horror is the drip feed of (which isn't to say particularly nuanced) information that you get which indicates that each of these datable girls has very specific trauma or mental illness. I'm not qualified to speak on the specifics of anything particular about that in terms of representation, but it is all written in a way that feels intentional and sensitive. Which isn't to say unproblematic. (Speaking of which: the thing that kept me playing as I was flagging early on was the fact that the game's discussion of literature is actually pretty solid. It largely consists of fairly basic craft discussions and questions around the purpose or embededness of style, but done in a way that feels not dismissive and useful for the presumed ages of the characters.)

The problems that these characters are dealing with are the basis for its horror, but they're also genuinely interesting critiques of the tropes of the dating sim genre. Your bubbly, people-pleasing best friend, for instance, confesses her depression to you. She is fairly straightforward in saying that her ability to bring people together is related to how much self-loathing drives her away from close relationships and how much it simultaneously brings her joy to help bring other people together because she can then fade into the background. Like I said, I can't say, but it doesn't feel wrong.

All of which is to say: while I came in expecting to feel negative, what I'm left with is mostly a sort of ambivalence that leans positive. Because the metafictional elements don't work in an especially literary way, despite the game's relative intelligence in those matters. Briefly(ish): the fourth girl in the club, Monika, is the president. She doesn't have a route. She ends up manipulating the game files. In the ordinary ending, she reveals that she has tried to subtly enhance the issues present in the other girls. After this goes bad, she ultimately deletes them and brings you to a room in a liminal space where she declares her love, happy that you - the player, not the player character - can exist together with her, alone and in love, forever. She does this because she has become self-aware as an entity within a game.

I say it doesn't work because it uses the metafiction as another kind of narrative abstraction, rather than a real break. The kindly friend being someone who suffers makes sense, and actively makes the player rethink the assumptions of the genre; the ignored character who undermines the game does the same thing, except with significantly less impact. In context, it kind of just doesn't work.

Some of my feelings about this game would be different if I didn't know games like We Know The Devil existed. Or Anatomy or Dust City, both by Kitty Horrorshow, which do the strategic restarts and 'local files' better, respectively. Or even Liz Ryerson's Problem Attic, which shares very little with this game except the way in which it integrates the horror of play into an interrogation of traumas much more holistically. But even without those, there's something deeply compelling about Doki Doki Literature Club, and there's also so many ways in which it doesn't quite get there.

Top Tens of 2017: Introduction

Over the next ten days, I'll be bringing you some top ten lists right here. Five of them, to be precise, all at once, from the bottom of the list to the top. It's an idea I had when I was putting them together and noticed some strange synchronicities lining up; it's an experiment that I'm expecting to fail, but that I want to try anyway.

The lists will cover Podcasts, Videogames, Albums, Films, and TV Shows. So tomorrow, on the first day, there will be a post that reveals what I consider the tenth best podcast, game, show, movie, and record from last year. The day after will be number 9, and so on. I think that makes sense? Some entries will be a couple sentences, others will be a full essay; it just depends on how I felt like talking about them. Themes will, hopefully, arise throughout the numbers alongside broader themes on the list (which is to say: beyond things that I liked or watched and had some shit to say about).

After it's over I'll try to collate it in a more readable form for those interested in one list in particular. Maybe. This has been an absurd amount of work for something that was basically a joke. On the other hand, though, I wrote less in 2017 than I have since I started this blog, probably, and felt bad about it. So if you forgot (like I did sometimes) that I'm a writer, here's too many words to the contrary.

Oh, and a bonus: I also did a list of Books (I Read) of 2017, but didn't feel like I could do justice writing them up, so here it is in full:

10. Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier (Mark Frost)
9. World, Chase Me Down (Andrew Hilleman)
8. The Boy in the Earth (Fuminori Nakamura)
7. Pirate Utopia (Bruce Sterling)
6. Crash Override (Zoe Quinn)
5. Prodigal Summer (Barbara Kingsolver)
4. Last Orders (Graham Swift)
3. Ninefox Gambit (Yoon Ha Lee)
2. The Familiar Volume 4: Hades (Mark Z. Danielewski)
1. The Familiar Volume 5: Redwood (Mark Z. Danielewski)

Valentine's Day Compilation 3: Extra

The theme for 2018's Fuck the Polis! Valentine's Day Compilation is Extra. Just send the file to uninterpretative at gmail to be included (or hit me up on Twitter or Facebook or wherever). Wav files preferred but whatever you output can be made to work. Any questions or clarifications or ideas you want to float are super welcome at the same.

2017 was Solidarity; 2016 was Pop. The themes are as loose as you want them to be; if you just have a thing, hit me up with it. But if you want to, this is a great opportunity to go ham, to push out some bullshit, to go in on an idea you had but that totally couldn't fit anywhere else. You don't have to write a song about doing Too Much, but you totally could. This is going to be a fucked year and we might as well start it off right. And if you have something but can't finish it, I'm happy to chat with you and help out on whatever you need. No promises as to quality, though.

There aren't any genre or style requirements, and your level of professionalism doesn't matter. Just whatever you're comfortable with doing, especially if it will push you a little bit into trying something you might not otherwise.

As I've said previously, thanks a bunch for even considering? I do a bunch of weird bullshit and this is another one of those things and I very much appreciate y'all. I'm gearing up for this year to be a fucking trainwreck, personally and politically, and what better way to do that than by getting a little extra.

Charlie Chaplin and Anti-Comedy

Colin Spacetwinks has been sharing some of their old comedy writing/theory on Twitter recently, and one of the pieces that came up was this post about Too Many Cooks. They relate it specifically to the Space Ghost: Coast to Coast episode "Fire Ant" to talk about the technique of "dragging the joke out," and specifically to position it in the sort of "anti-comedy" popularized by Adult Swim. It's a good post, and its resurfacing is weirdly timely for me.

The Castro Theater just had a double feature of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and Fritz Lang's Metropolis. I'd seen the latter a handful of times, though no more recently than a decade ago. The former I hadn't seen. It was, in fact, my first Chaplin movie period, I think. That's despite spending literal full weekends in college scheduling my sleep around what TCM was playing. I had a lot of fun in college.

The programming of that double feature was smart as hell in ways I did not anticipate. Even not having seen Modern Times, I knew the broad strokes made sense together. The short version is: they're both films about labor, featuring broad, iconic images of industrial machinery. The particulars were what I wasn't ready for. I didn't realize that, for instance, the opening shots are nearly identical.

Both films open on the face of the clock. They also both move from this into scenes of undifferentiated laborers moving to work. The main difference is a generic one: in Modern Times, the shift to the laborers is prefaced by a shot of sheep being driven forward. It sets up a parallel with the workers we are about to see. In Metropolis, the laborers move into the space of an elevator rather than directly into a factory. A title card then describes them as going 'deep below.' It's as concise a visual argument for the definition of genres -- comedy and science fiction -- as I've maybe ever seen. There's a whole essay there, but I want to talk a little more about Modern Times' comedy.

I bring up Spacetwinks' essay because one of the most striking aspects of Modern Times, to me, was how close it came to that kind of anti-humor. Plenty of it was the sort of humor I expected of Chaplin through cultural osmosis -- vaudevillian slapstick and mugging, underdog character work, &c. -- but the execution was surprising.

An early joke involves the boss testing out a machine that can feed laborers while they work. It's sold to him as a way to reduce the wasteful lunch break, and so he decides to have Chaplin give it a go. The scene is structured about how you would expect: everything goes well until it doesn't. Once it doesn't, it starts going worse and worse, quickly.

The thing, though, is that it isn't all that quickly. The scene itself lasts for, I'd guess, nearly ten full minutes. It's a funny scene, and it isn't structured like a Tim & Eric bit or anything; instead of languishing, it continuously escalates toward the conclusion. Even still, the scene itself struck me in a way much closer to that sort of anti-comedy than to a lot of the other jokes even within the film itself.

Another tangent that I'll note without diving into: I don't know that I've ever seen comedy theorized in a way that was anything but ahistorical. Comedians themselves are the worst about this, of course. But the rhythms of comedy change over time, and according to knowledge.

There is one other major scene that I read as anti-comedy in Modern Times. It comes near the end. Chaplin has been in and out of prison and work throughout the film. He is finally trying to make good by his ward, who has secured him an audition as a member of the waitstaff at a restaurant of Singing Waiters. Before the obvious joke, though, he has to actually wait on tables; in particular, on a gentleman who is furious that he has had to wait an hour for his roast duck.

About two thirds of the way through the bit, Chaplin is nearly at his table with the meal. The band strikes up, and he is immediately surrounded by dancers. He gets caught in their twirling and seething. The only part of him left visible his upstretched hand holding the plate of food. He does a full rotation of the floor, begins to walk forward, and gets caught up again. This is funny in its flouting of expectations. The scene seems to have played itself out, but it continues. It's when he gets caught again for the third time that it borders on the kind of comedy where "dragging out the joke" is itself the joke.

Unlike the automatic feeder, this sequence doesn't really structure itself by escalation. The thing that ultimately happens could have easily have happened the first time around with no great loss; the escalations are secondary to the act of languishing on the act of watching. At the time of the film's release, both scenes were, presumably, uproarious. They are not played like they are meant in some way as ironic commentary on comedy. But it's nearly a century on, and they feel that way now. To me at least.