I woke up, to the transient glimmer of the butterfly
stuttering in the gold and emerald of a summer morning.
The horror.

Why there be no sweet man-on-man action in mah' AAA games?

As I hear on Twitter, some people got their balls stuck between subway train doors over some lesbian stuff in The Last of Us 2, and somebody noticed that while there is some representation of female gay relationships in AAA gaming, there are barely any mandatory male gay relationships. And that there was absolutely no representation at E3.

While I understand that all people want their stories told, making a mandatory male gay romantic relationship for a protagonist in a AAA game is commercial suicide. Let’s break this down. AAA game. These games are expensive, and companies need to at least recoup the costs.

Anthony Bourdain is gone.

He was such a light in his TV programs, and he was a wonderful companion to anyone who travels and loves food and life. It is unfair that someone who was this alive is snatched from us by depression.

In the wake of his passing there has been a lot of talk about the need to reach out, both for those who find themselves trapped inside their minds and for their loved ones. I feel like all the right things have been said on the subject, so I won't add anything.

There are four types of fiction books as far their usefulness for my writing goes.

There are books that I am perfectly comfortable with. They don’t challenge me in any way, hit all the necessary tropes, and pass through my head and into oblivion without catching on anything. A Talent for War by Jack McDevit was the most recent one I read: comfortable science-fiction that has just enough spice to it to keep things exciting. These books are fun but useless: they don’t add anything to my style or stories.

Then there are books that I find boring. They aren’t always bad books, sometimes they are objectively genius: for example, A Song of Ice and Fire. I like two characters (Arya and Tyrion), but the rest can go to hell or take a vacation on Dragon Rock or go dance with the White Walkers. I simply don’t care, so I don’t read their chapters (sacrilege, I know). From the first day of school, everyone knows that boring learning materials are the worst if you want to take away something from the lessons. So those books are useless too.

To the Lighthouse is weird, or perhaps I am separated from it by too much time, born so long after it was written in 1927.

Virginia Woolf writes in a flowery language, and the thought runs like a brook in a forest: twisting its way around rocks and hiding from time to time only to emerge twenty feet farther jumping between characters when paragraphs end. It is a style we don’t see much anymore. It reminded me of Dostoevsky and a bit of Tolstoy (though they have the good manners to stick to one character throughout a chapter), and I can’t say that I enjoy reading either of those authors. But To the Lighthouse is a good book, and I like it.

Part of the reason for my liking it is that To the Lighthouse is of the rare slice of life genre. I don’t see it often in Western literature, whether contemporary or classic. It’s not a biography as such, and it has no plot. It’s just a story of a family—the Ramsays—and some things that happen to them and what they do over a dozen years. The story shows the importance of point of view, and captures brilliantly the wandering of human thought. It reminded me of the Japanese authors I love, and it was a pleasant discovery. I feel like this insight into the human mind is the only strong point of the book, but the intuition is deep and still relevant (despite some dated notions, especially about the sexes), and reading it has certainly taught me something I can’t express with words.