my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

OK, here we go — the final 2025 bookpost! And it's, uh, well, it's certainly something.

Daniel M. Ingram — Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (2nd ed.)

Feb. 25

Readable online. There’s also a pdf on the site, but I ended up downloading the html version and scrunching it into an epub. Here's that, if you want it. (Hopefully the author won't mind a little light format-shifting in the name of spreading information. If you meet the Buddha on the road, right-click him and save as.)

This one's been sitting unreviewed because there's a whole big context around it that is going to be kind of annoying to explain. I'll probably make a mess of it, but let's try.

A while back, right before the demise of Cohost, I read this all-time banger of a post by Matthew Seiji Burns. I want you to read it yourself, but basically:

Feeling better is possible. I mean in a baseline, day to day, non-temporary way. [...]

[...] I am going to describe a kind of meditation with a goal to make a specific “thing” happen, because the thing I’m about to describe was the single best improvement to my mental health that I ever experienced. I think it’s important for more people to know about. It is totally achievable— not exactly easy, but not ridiculously hard either. It employs meditation not as an open-ended and never-ending practice, but as a specific, targeted activity. Perhaps surprisingly, you do not need to keep meditating afterward to continue to have the benefit it confers.

And then he gives you the recipe.

( This goes on for a little while, and maybe not everyone wants to hear about my adventures in, uh, let's say "experimental philosophy," so better throw in a cut tag. )

Alison Bechdel — The Secret to Superhuman Strength (comics)

Dec. 25

And then there's the last two reviews of the year, which, due to their content, are somewhat easier to write now that I've written all that context just north of here.

As coincidence would have it, Alison Bechdel's most recent book is all about her lifelong hunger to escape the illusory prison of the self. The framing lens this time around is that she's writing about "exercise," but you know how it goes with these weird spiral-shaped memoirs of hers: she's actually writing about more or less everything, and rummaging through literary history in search of signposts and cairns from people who might have been on this trail before her.

I really like this loose trilogy of autobiographies. Bechdel has this sort of frantic, vibrating intelligence, and these books feel like spending a series of pleasant late nights with her during some period where she's almost-but-not-quite gotten her train of thought under control and can spin out the entire spirograph mandala shape for someone who happens to be on her wavelength. Powerful ADHD friends energy, basically.

Anyway, a recurring thread through this one, both explicitly discussed and arising from things she just depicts happening, is that she very much is on the same hunt as I've found myself: the quest to dissolve some boundaries between the self and the universe, and also to stop fucking hitting yourself with these goddamn illusions.

She also, and I wasn't expecting this, made a case that I should go back and read The Dharma Bums, even though I figured I was done with Kerouac. I'm not sure I'll be able to see what she saw in it; it seems likely situational. But maybe worth a try.

Bonus Level: Slay the Princess

Nov. ??

(Content warning: horror game with lots of murder and some gore.)

I'm still cleaning up some of the weirder inner routes that I haven't seen yet, but I think I've done enough full loops and endings that I can say I've played this game. And: it rules.

As I think I've mentioned before, I've had a kind of standoffish relationship with the video game genre called "visual novels". The default point of view for a very large swath of the format seems to be the blank-slate "self-insert" character (this is very much a legacy of the dominant "dating sim" sub-genre of VNs), and somehow something about that kind of repels me? Like, it's meant to be "me," but my agency is constrained to often prevent doing what "I" would actually do? And also, deliberately choosing things foreign to what I would do feels much weirder and grosser with a self-insert stand-in. We always kind of half-inhabit characters in a story, that's much of the point, but I prefer having a more depicted personality as an initial scaffold to hang my imaginings on; even in a CRPG with a blank slate protagonist, you usually go through a formal scaffolding process of building out their appearance and history and capabilities, which goes a long way toward making a more usable vessel for imagined choices.

This is very much an inconsistent reaction; I'm sure you wouldn't have to look hard to find something I like a lot that gives the lie to that as a general principle. But nevertheless, there it is! It's meant I've always held the genre at arms-length a bit, and despite having enjoyed several VNs in the past, I've still been kind of waiting to "get it."

I think Slay the Princess has helped me get VNs a little more! To start with, it quickly becomes clear that the protagonist is extremely separate from the player (and in many ways separate from their own self, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here), so that gets my aforementioned self-insert gag reflex out of the way.

For another thing: the actual gameplay of a VN consists of exploring what is ultimately a static tree structure, and since the branchings are one-way gates, this requires repeated runs. StP weaves these repetitions into the story itself, with two layers of epicyclic repetitions on top of the non-diegetic new-game repetitions. (The innermost loop starts when you're on a path in the woods, and the middle loop ends when you [REDACTED] a vessel to [REDACTED].) This isn't a generalizable technique, it really only works for this specific story, but that's a big part of why the game is so good — the balanced harmony of a story and a gameplay structure that feel made for each other. And the nested repetitions give this illusion of dynamism to the tree structure — your next pass on the innermost loop is profoundly affected by what you did on the last one, with the Princess's protean nature drastically mutated to match the protagonist's revealed personality. Anyway — that harmony helped make the VN tree-traversal gameplay fun for me in a way it hadn't really been before.

The other big part of why the game is so good is just that the art and writing are stellar. Abby Howard is an outstanding cartoonist; I know she's a good writer as well, so it's harder to pick out precisely what her husband Tony contributed, but I consider this a cut above her solo work, so he's doing something in there. There's some killer lines in this that continue to live in my head rent-free. (Solitary lights in an empty city...)

I kind of want to be careful about saying too much about the story, because it's one of those ones where the joy of discovery plays a big part. But: since I already knew the gimmick was a powerful one, I went in prepared for it to be more gimmicky than heartfelt. It was not. There's genuinely a lot going on in here, thematically and dramatically. Including, well... I guess, once you get to the late-game outermost loop scene where the narrator finally plays fair with you, you'll see why I'm lumping this game into this batch of reviews. (And if you traverse to the weird "happily ever after" inner-loop path, you'll see it even more.)