Fukubukuro
I’m home with my family for Christmas and got the most world-famous coronavirus so I’m down in the dumps enough to poke at this blog I haven’t really nailed down what it’s doing, who it’s for, hosted on a platform that increasingly sucks.
I’ve begun poking away at Tim Rogers’s secret Patreon-exclusive-ish fukubukuro channel, in lieu of rewatching his reviews for the umpteenth time in the absense of a new review. I’ve enjoyed his Friday night Twitch streams (which I often watch in the background on Monday morning when I start work) and he’s reminded people that these videos exist when there are complaints about how his last review was over a year ago. The videos are just huge compilations of him recording 10 or so minutes of many different video games for B-roll for his main reviews, talking about the games a bit, joking around a bit; honestly a fine if not inessential Tim Rogers Experience Lite that doesn’t really have the magic the reviews have, largely via the structure-function of what they are and trying to do being quite different from scripted, edited reviews. It got me thinking a bit about what ReadOnly has to offer in contrast to, say, Bad Books Good Times, the Thing I did that had an actual audience that, honestly, yeah, I don’t see what ReadOnly in its current state would have to offer that crowd.
So, on that note, let’s lean a bit deeper into what’s maybe not the direction for this and cover a whole bunch of stuff I’ve read or been reading but don’t really have anything to say about as a point of focus. A fukubukuro post. “Fukubukuro” meaning “grab bag”, like a mystery bag of items that aren’t really gonna sell but maybe you’ll happen upon something cool! Related terms that I find oddly charming: fukōbukuro ("misfortune bags") and utsubukuro ("depressing bags").
An Ok 1950s Japanese Murder Mystery
My IRL book club read The Village of Eight Graves (Seishi Yokomizo, Bryan Karetnyk (Translator)) and it was deeply fine. It’s newly translated to English, although being originally written in the 1950s it arrives feeling dated. The attitudes about women are a bummer throughout, including a love interest so bland and single-minded in her attraction to the narrator it’s hard to guess if she’s the murderer playing dumb or if she just… is pretty dumb. The narrator is also a misfire: a just a normal guy writing his account of what happened, whose prose is filled with statements like “I can’t do this justive because I’m not a writer!” and “this all sounds like something out of a detective novel!”, which is a point I made on Bad Books Good Times frequently, that self-awareness doesn’t excuse quality. Pointing out the flaws of your work in the work doesn’t make those flaws go away.
It was fun to talk about with a group though. It was a breezy read. The crimes were convoluted enough to – if not exactly follow – have fun joking about. I’m not upset we read it by any means, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Immediately afterwards, my girlfriend found a 1960s Japanese murder mystery by a lesbian – The Lady Killer by Masako Togawa – which we probably should have read instead.
Snow Crash is Better Than Neuromancer, There, I Have Said It
I found Neuromancer so boring I didn’t write anything about it. I started Snow Crash and it is much more exactly what I want. It’s a little bit like comparing 1984 and Brave New World, in that they’ve got similar ideas going on but one is written so deeply in consumer language that it feels hauntingly prescient. The plot idk about quite yet, but the book gets goodwill from me because it’s funny, first of all. It’s funny in a way that’s also a bit unnerving, in that the prose somehow reads like SEO garbage Amazon listings, constantly describing brands and proprietary technologies of every little thing, in a way where primarily the point is that it washes over you, but you still get why it’s committed so hard to the bit.
“1-800-THE-COPS. ACCEPTS ALL MAJOR CREDIT CARDS.” is such a good joke jfc
Decided Persona 3 Is My Second Persona
A streamer I like played Persona 5, then 4, and while that put me in the mood to play 4 next, then she started playing 3 and loved it while another friend of mine told me 3 was the best one. And I figured, well, as long as my Retroid Pocket 2 still works, it does emulate PSP, let’s dive into a game that’s gonna take like 50–100 hours to complete.
It is wild how, in contrast to the breezy, youthful Persona 5, Persona 3 goes hard into near-horror vibes. There’s a spooky clock taking over the screen. The world is replaced with graveyards and weird tall structures of incongruous architecture, and even the normal classmates you meet are acting ominous as hell before you get filled in on what’s going on. I kind of love it.
I Read A Book About Marriage and It Made Me Think About My Band
To get deeply personal here, I read Heather Havrilesky’s Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage because I don’t know if I want kids and I have begun to think hm maybe I can read more stuff that’ll offer perspective on this. Havrilesky’s memoir about marriage, family, and children as a sort of opt-in combination of deep frustration offering deeper satisfaction, as a constant demand from others who sometimes give you more than you ever knew you wanted but often have to pull teeth to get the same basics again and again… sort of just reminded me of my band. So it didn’t not give me a revelation about whether I want kids or not. It did make me think about fulfillment and feel less insane for being like “oh I am constantly livid with any given person in my band and I’m the only one with good taste… no I wouldn’t quit why would you think that?”
Incidentally, band’s first show at long last is at The Broadway in Bushwick on January 9.
This Is The Sexy One If You’re Just Scrolling Through
I’m not quite halfway through Big Swiss (Jen Beagin), and impulse read from the library because a book with the synopsis “about a sex therapist’s transcriptionist who falls in love with a client while listening to her sessions” sounded like a winner. It hasn’t exactly clicked with me yet. The sex therapist is more so a fraud in the unlicensed life coach vein, which conceptually irks me. The main character is a bit more of a mess than totally clicks with me, although I do like that now that she has encountered said client accidentally in the dog park that she decides the most ethical thing to do is maybe to lie about her name and be as off-putting as possible, which does not work and now she’s in too deep. Maybe it’ll pick up once we spend more time on this deeply weird relationship than on the main character’s deeply weird living situation in a house that’s falling apart.
IRL Book Club Is Torturing Ourselves With The Odyssey Now
We’re now reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. So far my favorite part is the translators’ notes about choices and rationale in translating the work, in particular not using stuffy Old Englishe language which, when you think about it, doesn’t even make sense. The very first book in my freshman year of high school’s lit class curriculum was The Odyssey, which was very much a translation in stuffy Old Englishe, and was so hard to read I basically kicked off high school wondering, oh no, am I stupid. So kinda nice to have this shot at redemption now.
It’s also nice rereading this and having that satisfaction of Parts Of A Classic coming back to me, like “oh yeah, it’s in media res” and “oh yeah, the son is a whole character and he might be more interesting than Odysseus” and “oh yeah, a goddess is just chilling there helping out Telemacus turning into birds and this mic drop does not get old”. Haven’t even gotten to Odysseus and his weird journeys on weird island with weird creatures (is that even what happens in The Odyssey? idk this is the book that made me think I might be stupid)
Inexplicably Christmasy Video Games Not About Christmas
Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve replayed Final Fantasy Tactics Advance at Christmas. I played this game in middle school and now revisiting it, appreciating the Game Boy Advance snow in a cute little town, however briefly this setting actually appears in the game, is delightful. I’ve also had the nagging Gamer Brain that, you know, I’ve never played the original Final Fantasy Tactics on the PlayStation. This Christmas I decided lol time for the tradition to evolve.
I’ve heard great things about the story, so I’m excited for this one, although it is very very very early days and honestly I’ve not yet figured out what the characters, affiliations, and conflict all are yet. I’m excited for it to start falling into place though, given the themes I’ve seen so far, where the first few scenes of the game seem to have something to do with nobles fighting about lineage, but I’ve now gotten to normal-ass people who have a thing or two to say about what the nobility has put them through.
It is also delightfully a text in that sweet spot where there was the money to translate this, but there weren’t quite the resources or technology to do a particularly good job translating this. Sure, there are typos, but that’s nowhere near as interesting as how sometimes there are lines where it’s hard to tell if this is a weird translation or if it truly just Goes That Hard.
I mean, that slaps.