Steam Releases and Other Recent Affairs

Greetings Internet! It’s been a crazy summer, and an especially crazy August, on this side of the keyboard. My thoughts are so fragmented today, following a weekend of sun, biking, and theater, that I’m having a hard time composing them into a single monolithic SuperPost of Ineluctable Justice.  Let’s go line-by-line.

Choice of the Deathless, my necromantic legal thriller, went live on Steam this Labor Day weekend, which is VERY EXCITING!  If you already own it, still click through the link so you can see the closest thing anyone’s ever made to a trailer for my books.  If you’re not a game-playing person, this may not mean much to you, but Steam is the main electronic distribution platform for computer games these days.  This means my demon lawyer interactive fiction is now available for purchase on the same service as big triple-A video games like the Mass Effect series.  We’re doing very well over there at the moment, which is great!  My favorite quote from a brief scan of the (overwhelmingly positive) reviews (not that I read my own reviews what are you implying):  “I helped a Goddess, encouraged a Demon to become an artist, died….ended up as a skeleton and still got the girl!”
NB, there’s a pretty broad range of romantic options in CotD, and you don’t need to romance anyone.  Just to be clear.
The Great Gatsby joins the long, long list of books I missed in high school that I think I appreciated much more upon ultimate reading as a result.  I skipped most of the American Lit curriculum in my youth by, basically, reading lots and lots of Shakespeare, which I think may have worked out for the best.  Going back to works like Huckleberry Finn and Gatsby, I’m impressed by their subtle viciousness.  I can think of a handful of sentences in Gatsby which don’t sit like a knife-blade in the palm.  Almost every statement drips with irony.  Having not read the book in high school I can’t say how I would have found it then, but I expect I would have arrived at the standard “American Dream” interpretation, which is not at all what I got out of this pass.  I read from a copy that had survived a charmingly gormless highschooler’s annotations—there’s a big WHY??? next to Tom breaking Myrtle’s nose.  More thoughts later.  For now: Nick definitely has sex with the photographer, the green light’s a cooler image in full context than when taken as a general stand-in for American Dreaminess, Jordan Baker is still the coolest (even if she cheats at golf, though we only hear allegations about that), & I’ll now start referring to all my Bay Area people as midwesterners.
Yes, I just read The Great Gatsby for the first time.
Honestly, you don’t have a classic of world literature which you haven’t read?
I’ll admit it’s kind of embarrassing I let it go this late, since it’s only a hundred eighty pages.  But what a hundred eighty pages.
Also read this year for the first time: Mrs. Dalloway!
On the literary analysis front, the latest Feminist Frequency video essay about feminism in video games is out, and makes for good watchin’ if you’re interested in the application of critical techniques to video games.  I’m glad the Games: ART??? debate’s dead enough that we can start treating games as art: transcending candy-like consumption to regard games as a focus for critical analysis, through which we can understand ourselves and our culture.  Ms. Sarkeesian’s punching hard, especially in this most recent essay, which focuses on video game representations of violence against women.  Hard is how you’re supposed to punch.  That’s why we call it punching, not acupressure.
One more piece of Guardians of the Galaxy thought: the Howard the Duck tag is a not-so-subtle nod that Disney’s doing the new Star Wars movies, isn’t it?  Howard the Duck, for those of you who don’t know, is a Marvel character.  His precise nature is not important for this argument.  He was, however, made into a famously horrifying movie which was, and here’s the kicker, produced by George Lucas.  In fact, Howard the Duck is Lucas’s first-live action producer credit after Return of the Jedi and Temple of Doom.  So, we have a big overwhelmingly cool space opera which, as Michael Underwood’s been saying on Twitter, is the best Star Wars film in thirty years.  And at the end, where Marvel / Disney typically leave their “next big film” tag, they’ve referenced a property famously associated with Lucas—and which Lucas has handled, um, let’s say less than perfectly.  They couldn’t put lightsabers in the tag without including them in the universe and inviting a call from Patton Oswalt’s lawyers, but Howard the Duck?  Easy.  I read Howard the Duck’s appearance as a sly note to the audience: “Hey, you guys like this film?  Think about what we can do with Star Wars.“
I may be overthinking that last bullet point.  But that’s practically my job, so, you know.
In divine necromancy news, it looks like Detroit’s bankruptcy is entering its final stages.
Whaling is deeply weird.  More on this at a later date.  In the meantime, I leave you with the notion that at one point not too long ago on a historical timescale, the global economy, and all forms of machinery, depended on human beings going out into the deep ocean in tiny boats for four years at a time to hunt things that looked like this, only TWICE AS BIG:

And that’s all for the moment!  More, deeper thoughts next week.  Maybe about Gatsby.  Or whales.  Or whatever strikes my fancy in the meantime.