Life Is Strange (continued), but mostly a very console wars–esque observation about reading books in 2023
when "hm, I already have this on PC, I shouldn't get it on Switch too, right?" also describes your situation with books
One time when I was in high school, I remember a non-gamer at my lunch table was flabbergasted listening to the gamers at the table talking about PlayStation vs XBox vs Nintento, and just went “why isn’t every video game just on one thing?”, a naive bafflement foated at a bunch of hobbyists who have long been so used to the situation it was like someone asking why there’s also nitrogen in the air we breathe.
This was 2005, and since then I’ve noticed that, wildly, this isn’t a video game–exclusive issue anymore. TV shows and movies are constantly moved from one streaming platform to another, if not just disappeared from existence entirely when some CEO decides numbers must go up. Even books – the “pure” medium – are not immune from this. After my recent post trying to clean up my reading list, I realized I also had to take inventory of what I was currently reading, why that was taking so long, and, well, just consider how fragmented reading goddamn books is. I’m currently reading
Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy) in paperback. A physical copy. The OG. The straight dope. And the most annoying to travel with. It’s easier to slip a Kindle than a paperback in my guitar back when I’m going on the subway to band practice!
It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (ed. Joe Vallese) on my Kindle. Sort of the sweet spot in terms of ease of access. It fits into the smallest of bags, it holds hundreds of books, it’s backlit. It’s not even that hard to get books onto the thing without having to buy every single copy on Amazon, which I haven’t done since, idk, 2017, between the library, other digital stores, people doing the lord’s work with shit in the public domain, and various other dubious behaviors. But it doesn’t fit in my pocket, and if I’m only going to be on the subway for a just little bit and going somewhere where a bag is overkill for ~15 minutes of diversion…
Stone Butch Blues (Leslie Feinberg) on iBooks, on my phone. The worst reading option, but easily the most constantly within reach, which makes it hard to beat. Also, I had this as a PDF, which meant iBooks was realistically the only game in town.
I don’t think this is even a particularly niche scenario. I bet even the nongamers now have subconsciously accepted this very console exclusive sense of artificial scarcity around what platform their books are on by this point. It’s weird. It takes me forever to get through a book on my phone because, even though in theory I could open it up on my iPad at home for a slightly nicer experience, I’m never going to want to when I am in a place surrounded by physical books. I could sync the Kindle app on my phone to my Kindle and keep reading the books platformed there on the go (as opposed to the type of on-the-go reading already enabled by the Kindle in the first place), but this has weird issues too, like if the app is able to sync or download while I’m underground on the subway, which in my experience in New York for the past decade is a real 50-50 situation. It’s weirdly maddening, especially as someone who has put actual effort into focusing on doing one thing at a time, when technology has pushed even something as analogue as a book in the opposite direction.
This is to say I wonder if that girl from high school ever tried to continue reading a book that didn’t download and remembered thinking the boys at lunch were stupid for caring about who owned a GameCube vs a PlayStation 2 and then thought “ok but I was still right though”.
Speaking of high school girls, that’s today’s forced segue into a different topic as I went over to my friend’s to play more of the first Life is Strange, which continues to have Tommy Wiseau–tier writing:
I said basically the same thing last time, but it is shocking to me how much better the writing got in True Colors, which was merely often cheesey. I somehow forgot how bad the first entry in the series is, and how profoundly weird it is now to see a series evolved from mostly so-bad-it’s-good to mostly actually good.
I keep making fun of Life Is Strange as a prerequisite for talking about it at all because, honestly, this really is part of the charm. I’m glad I’m playing it with a friend and getting that bad movie night experience where the text becomes a medium for in-jokes. I am jokingly playing a narc run, since I told the principal about Nathan (he had A GUN) and later got admonished for it in-game by another character who asked me what I thought that was going to accomplish. This would have been fair, perhaps, if it weren’t followed up with her saying that the principal is an alcoholic who only cares about the school’s funding, which might have been useful information my character really should have known? (No, she SPECIFICALLY said “I can never tell what he’s thinking”, and that is NOT THE SAME.)
Standard plugs zone:
Over on Trash Garbage, I made a playlist for everyone else obsessed with the psychedelic drumming band warmup recap opening scene of the new spiderverse movie because it is all I’ve thought about for a month. gwen stacy’s spiderverse band vision board. Co-trash curator Sammie described it as “what Trash Garbage does best, which is get inspired by something and then create a whole vibe off it”, which is a shockingly concise explanation of what Trash Garbage is outside of “so it’s just spotify playlists?”
I’ve joined the team at Kissing Dynamite as a Book Reviews Editor! I write reviews of small press/self-published poetry books (the first one is now live), but I’ll also be editing other writers’ reviews of small press poetry books. So: hit me up if 1) you’re a poet with a book coming out, or 2) you’ve got a review of a poetry book you want to write!