mathematicalghost

[mathematicalghost]

The Basting Stitch

Unfortunately I am going to talk about Supernatural (yes, 2005 TV Series) because the ride never ends, and it'll be Supernatural right up until the end of the year when we can collectively forget that the show ever existed, like a distant memory that could just have easily been a dream.

The reason I mention Supernatural is because I was trying to figure out the first year I attempted NaNoWriMo. My best guess is 2011, which is shortly after season six ended. I'd become attached to the show via Tumblr because I was in my early teens and that's basically what anyone on Tumblr in their early teens in the early 10's did. In my April school holiday I watched all six seasons (up to what was currently airing) on terrible quality streaming sites, and came away in a haze of having consumed far to much middle-quality urban fantasy television. My first project that November, had transformed from a light-hearted fantasy tale to something that could easily be ripped off from a season of Supernatural. The project was doomed to failure, and I finished my first NaNoWriMo attempt at somewhere in the 2,000 word region.

As a concept, NaNoWriMo always appeared to be entirely doable for every moment other than in November itself. I'd managed to hold up a streak of 380 days on Memrise once (before I lost it whilst going to Tokyo Disneyland), so writing each day for only 30 days had to be feasible, right? Then one skipped day lead to two, which lead to three, which lead to a fourth day of maybe only a paragraph, and then eventually it'd be January of the next year and I'd have maybe the best part of three chapters.

Then I'd spend all of the next year resolving to try again!

I wrote about it at the time, but 2017 was a weird year for me all in. Part of that year being weird included the fact I wrote a book in three months and finished it around three days before the start of November, another part of that year being weird is I instantly went on to write 30,000 ones in a project I no longer have any record of. I could spend a whole blog talking about how the year was weird in a million different pieces, but those two were reasonably significant.

My 2018 attempt was better, camping out in Pret-A-Manager stores around central London and spending my extremely limited student budget on 50p filter coffees to justify my presence on a table for the next four hours. In the end, I reached nearly 40,000 words. I wrote every day (not quite enough every day, but I wrote every day regardless). And it felt good! I could do it! I could get there! And in 2019, I wrote... under 2,500 words!

This year I figured that I could either start again with a new project, or try something else. My 2017 project (not the abandoned one, the one I wrote just before it) was sitting there, and I'd tried hard to edit it over the next three years. I knew it would take a lot of work - the seven chapters I'd already edited had all nearly doubled in size from their first draft, which was handwritten. So I figured that I may as well take that first draft and rewrite it as a NaNoWriMo project.

In sewing, there's a thing called a "basting stitch". It's used in hand sewing to essentially be a way to hold a fabric in roughly the position you'd like it to be in, before yanking it out later. The project I had in my hands was a basting stitch. Full scenes happened in a sentence. Character conversations were summarised into "and the x explained to y the situation". Entire locations compressed down into a reference to the colour and primary material. By the midpoint of Chapter Seven, I was technically half way through a manuscript with which the original draft didn't even qualify as a full NaNoWriMo win, which is how short it was. All I could do was start and hope I had 50,000 words stored away into the final half of the draft I already had (I won't leave you in suspense - I did).

Anyone who has tried, regardless of the result, a NaNoWriMo will probably be familiar with the moment that you run out of steam. Sometimes it's just the exhaustion of having to live your normal life and then somehow find at least an hour to sit down and write words in an assortment that vaguely makes sense, but usually there's just a moment where the "You Are Here" marker and the ever elusive point B are too far away to make them connect. Any other time I'd wander away, put the project down for a week (or month, or year) and then come back to it. But the pure pressure of time fixes you in your seat and forces you to write through it.

Normally this is the point when I give up. I'm not great at planning, usually I might write a few bullet point touchstones before I start, or I'll make a rough outline of chapter notes that give me enough wiggle room to change my mind later. More often than not, I'll start a project with most things as a placeholder and hope it'll come together eventually. I don't have the patience to think about something that's so nebulous in my mind as something as formal as a plan, so I don't. With the time pressure, the nebulous nature of a project never solidifies, and I give up.

Writing this barebones first draft avoided that problem, in many ways. There was still the bullet point outline, but then I wrote a first draft where my solution to not knowing much about a scene resolved as - okay, but what do I know about this scene? Suddenly I didn't need to get hung up on knowing exactly why my character decided to ask a Tough Question of another character, they just... asked it. It wasn't quite the NaNoWriMo level quality where a character rambles because I have five hundred more words to write today and zero ideas to fill it, but still a sense of placeholder of shoddy writing. There's a level of clarity to being concise with your words but taking great strides of plot in them. I don't need to spend a whole chapter slowly revealing a character's emotional state when I can just tell you that they're feeling sad in this draft and developing it into something you understand later. It's changing an idea from being nebulous to holding an outline you can see. It's holding together two pieces of fabric so you can roughly assemble the shape. It's a basting stitch.

I'm still riding the first NaNoWriMo win high, nine years after my first attempt, but I'm thinking I'll try again next year. But instead of spending eleven months telling myself I'll do better next time, I think I'm going to start on my terrible first draft now. Then we'll turn the basting stitch into a running stitch. And then eventually, we'll have clothes.

[mathematicalghost]

Every Other Game in 2019

It's the end of 2019! Wow! How did that happen!

I played a bunch of video games this year. More than, probably any other year previously. More than every other year combined? It’s possible. 2019 had a fatal combination of me briefly having “a lot of time” [I was ignoring my degree] and then having “a reliable income that one can survive on and also enjoy things with” [I got a job], which meant I bought a Switch in April (just before my third year exams, leave me alone), and an Xbox One in the November sales. I’ve been pretty good at keeping up with making a post for each game I’ve played this year, but this leaves a lot of unfinished games that I started this year that deserves some recognition.

So, here we go, Everything Else I Played In 2019:

Outer Wilds Played on PC, abandoned after 15(?) hours.

Like [checks notes] every other person with an Epic account, I too bought Outer Wilds and played it for… a not insignificant amount of time. It was a good podcast game, and I had a big backlog of Spring in Hieron to clear. So I’d sit down, put headphones on, and play a few hours of Outer Wilds.

Outer Wilds is probably the first time I’ve loved a game without a clear quest. It made exploration fun, and with the notes it kept on the ship, I didn’t feel bad about putting it down for one-two weeks as my final exams started up, as I could just fire up the story I’d built and choose a “There's more to explore here” node to follow. It let me build my own rabbit holes to fall down, and did it with very few movement/interaction mechanics to learn or perfect.

Six months on, I’ve had to accept that I’m not coming back to Outer Wilds. I’m still not quite ready to uninstall it from my laptop, but I doubt I’ll switch it back on. The anglerfish in the fog of a planet I won’t name (for spoilers/I forgot) terrified me to a core that I wasn’t quite expecting, and the dread I felt before coming back to it just rose too high to make the payoff of finishing the game worth it. I loved it, but it’s not for me anymore.

Hollow Knight Played on Switch, abandoned after 4 hours.

Hollow Knight is beautiful in so many ways. The visuals, the music, the tiny bits of story and plot woven deep into the map you run through. Hollow Knight was the first game I played on Switch, and for a few commutes to/from work it was deeply enjoyable.

And yet, I bounced off Hollow Knight fast. With less than two hours in, I was already lost enough to need to turn to walkthroughs. As much as I wanted to endlessly explore, minor enemies respawn every time you left an area, meaning I risked dying every time I wanted to investigate a new route. The lack of access to the map also meant I would repeatedly miss a small corridor I wanted to go down, and it meant a lot of going back on myself. Then I hit the second boss in, and I could not get into any kind of rhythm to even have a chance of defeating them. All round, a frustrating end to a game that’s wonderful in every other way. Absolutely one I’ll revisit as a walkthrough, or Twitch stream, one day.

Baba Is You Played on PC, still going after 11 hours.

I love my funky puzzle rabbit boy!! The mainstay of the Twitch streams I ran in February and March, Baba Is You is one of the best puzzle games I’ve come into contact with. It blends mechanics of movement and wordplay so well, and I never feel like the game is trying to catch me out - if a box is placed in x place, there’s a reason for it. Unfortunately life has got in the way of my one hour Baba streams (for now!), but I still love stealing away a quiet couple of hours to return to the number of puzzle routes I have available in the game.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 Played on PC, still(?) going after 10 hours.

It takes me multiple years to finish Final Fantasy games, as evident by my sample size of the one (1) other Final Fantasy game (FFXIII took me six years to finish). I hit a boss, don’t care on a core level, and then pick it back up again after four months. In June-ish, I picked up FFXIII-2, hit a boss fight six hours in, and then put it back down again. Recently, I rescued my Xbox 360 copy of FFXIII-2 from my hometown, so maybe I’ll start it from scratch and build those ten hours of gameplay back up in three years time. Maybe this time next decade I’ll be excitedly talking about starting Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns. We’ll see.

Risk of Rain 2 Played on PC, abandoned after 3 hours.

Risk of Rain 2 was gifted to me by a friend when I’d commented that it looked cool, without really knowing much about it. And yeah, it did look cool. It was also extremely hard to play single player. I tried to play it with a friend who’d practised the game, and they dragged me to the final level before finally having to screen share on my computer to finish it for me as I’d spent half an hour unable to make a single jump. So yeah, I didn’t really want to return to Risk of Rain 2.

The Outer Worlds Played on PC, abandoned after 1(?) hour.

It took me… multiple hours… to set up Xbox Game Pass for PC on my computer. Microsoft, without fail, love to design products that are near exclusively designed to be unusable by any person ever. So, after a full day wrangling to set it up, I installed The Outer Worlds. I built a fantastic character in their character gen, got twenty minutes into the game, and then decided I never wanted to play it ever again.

At least I got  my £1 refunded, thanks.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Played on Switch, still going(?) after 26 hours.

I played two and a half hours of this game earlier this week, exclusively working through the gameplay (so I didn’t restart fights or spend my time reorganising my inventory or whatever), and I still got no further through the plot than when I started. I’m post timeskip!! please just end this game already!! how are people playing multiple runthroughs of this!!

I’m too stubborn to quit this game, so I WILL finish the Black Eagles route even if it kills me, thanks.

Jedi: Fallen Order Played on Xbox One, still going after 15(?) hours.

Jedi: Fallen Order may involve big spiders (big spiders), but I refuse to give up on this game. My lightsabre looks cute and BD-1 is a Good Friend, so watch this space.

[mathematicalghost]

scorbunny is my son now

Listen, I pretend to know much more about pokemon than I actually do. I spent seven hours queuing for the Pokemon Center in London, but please do not ask me about pokemon. My entire ranking list for pokemon rests on “which pokemon would I most like as a pet?”. I’ve been asked what my favourite generation is (I don’t know), what my favourite region is (I don’t know), and what my favourite game is (I’ve only played Diamond, Blue Mystery Dungeon, and Yellow). In summary: I do not know anything about these funky little pocket monsters, I’m sorry.

Pokemon, as a concept, has always attracted my attention. Much like Animal Crossing and literally any MMO ever, I want to be the kind of person who likes these games. I want to feel that kind of joy that can only come from methodically catching [enter full Pokedex total here] funky little pocket monsters through a combination of catching funky little pocket monsters and giving stones to some of your favourite little funky pocket monsters. I want to be the person who likes Pokemon.

I really fucking hate grinding, and repetition, and “thinking”. So maybe Pokemon wasn’t for me.

I played Diamond the year it released. If you want to keep notes, I was nine years old. I wanted the monster on the box who was shiny, and blue, and nice and sharp. I also got my request in early when it came to Christmas of 2006, so I got a copy of Diamond and my stepbrother had to get a copy of Pearl.

Vaguely, my recollection of these games involved me being stuck in caves (Although, I played Blue Mystery Dungeon a few years after release but still before I hit the age of 13, so my memories of both games fade into one), being annoyed that I was stuck in caves, and losing all my pokemon repeatedly in wild grass. Pokemon, broadly, was a stressful experience and all I wanted was to play a digital version of the card game that I occasionally collected and even more occasionally played.

When Pokemon Sword and Shield came out I was positioned in the never-before seen position in that I:

Owned a current gen console

Had friends, and they would entertain a conversation about literally any interest

I had money that didn’t need to be spent on a bus fare

When the Pokemon Centre London was announced, and then later the concept that you’d be queuing from 2am to get even the slightest hope of entry was introduced, I was gripped with a need I’d last felt when I begged my father for a copy of Pokemon Diamond.

I want to be the kind of person who likes Pokemon.

So I did it. I got in line at 4;15am, and at approximately 11;30am I had been relieved of £95 in exchange for a few stickers, an umbrella, and a 30cm Scorbunny plushie.

Two days later I remembered I should probably pre-order Pokemon Sword because I wanted that cool ass steelbook and also like, I just spent seven hours queueing for Pokemon and then went straight to work, and that should mean something.

My parcel arrived a day late, mostly due to Nintendo’s bizarre ideas about how big a box should be to post a video game in, but then I was stuck in. My mission to be Someone Who Likes Pokemon.

I chose Scorbunny as my starter, primarily because he looked cute and also I’d used 1 of my 5 item quotas to buy him as a plushie and I should honour that. From then, I crashed through the map, primarily not catching Pokemon as I’d forgotten that I was no longer 8 years old and much better at resource management now, and picking up Pokemon who were either cute, useful, a mix of both, or the Noctowl who was neither but always remained in my team for reasons I still can’t fully express. Most of my team were built through NPC trades or pure accident as opposed to any level of skill.

And it was… great fun? I never needed to try a gym a second time, and I only once lost all my Pokemon and had to restart at the previous town. Some of the rivals I came across on the path were harder than others, but never impossible. When I knew I’d truly fucked it, I simply set up camp and played ball with my Pokemon before healing up and moving on (using Potions are for fools/people smarter than me, I can’t tell). The routes were never particularly long - Route 8 stands out as a tough one, but I still crossed it without too much trouble. Each town had an NPC trade with a Pokemon who always came in handy for the next gym and eventually became part of my final approach team.

It took me 27 hours to run through the main story, including the brief deviations to level up my Pokemon to prepare for the next gym. In my final approach, I was under the level of my opponents, and I still ran through it with some nail biting moments and a lot of Full Revives. I played Sword, and so got to experience the Fighting gym and Rock gym - leading to the bizarre experience of being in the middle of a snowy town without leading into an Ice gym. Choosing an edition of Pokemon should technically involve considerations of which has the better exclusives and gyms as well as the legendary, but in predictable fashion I did what I imagine every other Sword player did. I saw a dog with a sword, and I wanted that for myself.

After finishing the Championship run, there is a second ending story that you can complete. Did I do it? Of course not. I wandered out to the Wild Area, camped out with my final team of Pokemon, and had a curry. And then I switched off the game.

Maybe I’m still not quite the kind of person who likes the concept of a Pokemon game, but I sure did enjoy Sword.

[mathematicalghost]

sayonara wild hearts is the best rhythm game that isn’t a rhythm game

For about five years, I owned an iPhone 3GS. I’d originally bought it for £40 off facebook as an emergency stopgap until I could get a reasonably new android phone, and then after that kept it around because my iPod was dead and I liked having the separate storage space for music and videos. At some point around 2015, I’d found a game that ran on iOS 6 that was free to play, easy to learn, and extremely addictive. And so started my love affair with LoveLive! School Idol Festival until eventually, iOS 6 support was dropped and my account was lost due to a mix up with saving my recovery code.

When my 3GS finally died from an inflated battery late last year, and I upgraded to a 4S, I created a new account but the thrill wasn’t the same (You can still see a record of my old account here). For one thing, the cherry blossom Maki I’d won in my very first event on the game was no longer in my collection and unlikely to ever be the same. Second, starting again was hard. The skill was there but my cards were too weak to actually get a decent score. I was just out of practise enough that Hard matches were too easy but Expert were wiping me out. The game remains installed for rare occasions, but broadly it remains ignored. Paradise Live still rocks though.

Despite the tragic end that my experience with LoveLive! found, it did however teach me a very core thing about the games I liked to play. I really, really liked rhythm games. There is something uniquely satisfying about learning a pattern and watching it work perfectly. About bouncing your head to a beat and getting into the perfect groove of a two minute experience. One of the first games I remember ever completing all the way through on my own was Guitar Hero 5, so this was maybe a realisation long overdue. Since picking up games again, one of the big pieces missing from my life was a really good rhythm game.

Sayonara Wild Hearts was… not that game. Instead it was something much better.

Going into SWH thinking it is strictly a rhythm game, which is what I had loosely heard, would set you up for an ultimately disappointing time. It's much closer to a sound-based racing experience. I use the dreamlike tunes of the Clair de Lune opening level to get me into a soft flow, guiding my bike through the road as it changes in a 3D space. The plot itself is loose, fighting through ghosts of our protagonist’s past as she fixes her broken heart. Each level is broken up into a minute or two of action, loosely based around a chase sequence. Occasionally there is fighting, and there are scenes through cityscapes just as often as there are surrealist movements through space. Whilst being able to move to the beat isn’t required in the same way that timing in LoveLive! is, there's value to being able to hear the music move you through the scene. It’s calming and stressful all at once.

But there are also moments of pure ingenuity. Part of what pushed me through SWH is not that each level allowed you to learn a specific skillset to dodge the obstacles, it’s that it switches the formula up every two to three levels. Two particular levels stood out to me specifically because they were so out of left field. After finding a deer in the forest, I come face to face with a team of biker girls with woodland animal masks. Before I’m allowed to progress on a bike to defeat this gang, I’m subjected to the Forest Dub level, the most surreal of these already abstract experiences. I need to chase them across an open expanse dotted with huge mushrooms that I can bounce between. The music drops as the scene shrinks and grows, and before I know it I’m rocking back and forth in time with the ebbs and flows of the screen as I try to land on the next mushroom to reach the bridge (and start of the next level). It’s absolutely a gimmick level and I could never play it for a full game, but the 45 seconds it gives me is just enough to hone my skill before moving on again.

And then there's Parallel Universes.

I could absolutely play a full game just with these two. I’m suddenly faced with a mysterious woman in a two toned mask. Our protagonist pulls out an anime-worthy sword, and splits her in two. She snaps her fingers, and the world around us changes. This is Parallel Universes, and the blocks I have to avoid in front of me change location with each snap of their fingers. Over the course of 01:24, I find myself moving in a graceful zigzag at the mercy of these parallel villains. The snaps come at a satisfyingly predictable pace so I can move just in time. It’s not nearly as stressful as Forest Dub, and not even close to the levels of difficulty I’m later faced with in Reverie. It’s still a gimmick level, but soothing enough that I could sit there for two hours on it.

The exact thing that made LoveLive! so playable was it’s repeatability. The mechanic never changed, only the music. Sayonara Wild Hearts resists this at every opportunity, forcing you to relearn the rules for each level as the bosses get more creative. The basic controls never change, and the music flows into each other, but I remained consistently impressed in how it used music to guide my protagonist back from a broken heart.

If there’s any game worthy of the tagline “It’s not a game, it’s an experience”, it’s Sayonara Wild Hearts. In total I probably finished it in around two hours (replaying each level until I hit Silver Rank on my first run through), but at no point did I ever feel comfortable with the game in the way I got comfortable with using my skillset for increasingly elaborate puzzles in Katana Zero, or how I got faster with my thumbs to switch up to Expert on LoveLive!. It builds itself to be new each time you progress, and keeps you on your toes throughout.

[mathematicalghost]

4... 2... 8... let’s scramble!

Listen, I’m going to keep making the Tank! joke until you all laugh, so buckle in for it to be recycled forever.

I don’t play long games, ever. The most hours I’ve ever recorded in Steam (until now) is a solid 26 hours in Mini Metro. After a number of years, I finally racked up 60 hours of play in Final Fantasy XIII, and I’d managed to hit 16 hours of Mass Effect before calling it a day, but that’s probably my list. I’ll give you a couple of week’s worth of whatever free evenings I have and then I want to move on. So after buying 428: Shibuya Scramble (or, as Twitch registers it, 428: In The Blocked City) and noticing that most people recorded 20-30 hours in it, I was prepared to either give up on it or spend the next year playing it.

One weekend later and it was complete (albeit at 2am on a Tuesday, so a quick apology for any work colleague who had to interact with me on Wednesday morning).

The Shibuya crossing in Tokyo is a legend all of it’s own before you begin to even consider all the other landmarks surrounding it (Harajuku a stone’s throw away, the Hachiko statue right by, the endless shops that surround the area). As a nervous 18 year-old, visiting Japan by myself with no internet connection and even less innate sense of direction, I accidentally found myself in the crossing and probably consider it one of the top traumas of my youth. I went back eighteen months later with a bit more confidence and a much better sense of direction helped by Google Maps, and it was less scary but no less chaotic - visiting on Christmas day was no doubt a major influencer to that.

Right next to the Shibuya crossing on Christmas Day, 2017.

Based on my experiences of Shibuya, a game centered around the scramble itself should be no less than absolute chaos. And 428 Shibuya Scramble is… exactly that.

It centers around the lives of five people, the day after a woman (Maria Osawa) is kidnapped for a ransom. The game starts at 9am, and progresses hour by hour until an explosive finale at 8pm. You’re forced to play through each character’s storyline before moving to the next one hour block, and even though most of the characters don’t interact directly in the hours, their choices affect others. Like a puzzle, I have to decide if one character turning on a light will lead on to kill another character, if stopping to correctly dispose of some rubbish will go on to trap another in a store cupboard, if asking someone to answer their phone will get me arrested… and often, these puzzle pieces often only reveal themselves after the bad ends have come to light. Sometimes the hints after a character’s bad end will clue you in to where something went wrong, and other times you just have to methodically change each choice until the correct combination becomes clear. At one point, I found myself stuck at a bad end because I’d chosen the wrong offhand comment for a character. So it goes in Shibuya.

Let’s talk about characters. The cat mascot character who adorns the cover of the game, Tama, quickly became my firm favourite. Unlike most other stories, theirs was in first person, giving an incredible level of life and personality to every picture of an expressionless mascot. A single frame of Tama gives you everything you need to  infer their exact emotional state (usually panic and fear). Following up quickly behind was Minorikawa, the excitable journalist, who is excessive in every way. Minorikawa was very much a character who came alive in his short FMV snippets -he only has a couple, but I tried my best to rewatch them a few times.

Then you have Osawa, Achi, and Kano. Unlike Tama and Minorikawa, these three fall much deeper into the thick of the kidnapping storyline. I loved Achi, and his personality that is probably closest to a golden retriever. Achi isn’t exactly quick thinking, but he has a lot of heart and enthusiasm which kept up my interest as the story reached it’s close. And Kano and Osawa were… there, I guess? By far, the characters surrounding Kano and Osawa were far more interesting, which is unfortunate as they are the most central to the story.

As the storyline drifts further to the conclusion, characters’ plotlines wrap up and become unplayable. Tama and Minorikawa are the first to leave, and as they do it becomes clear how necessary they are to the story - if not for plot reasons, but at least to add some levity to the day. The early parts of 428 Shibuya Scramble don’t necessarily ask you to care about the kidnapping, and in return I absolutely did not care. If they released a whole sidestory of Tama and their entrepreneur/scammer boss (depending on how charitable you’re being), or Minorikawa chasing down story leads, I’d play it for days. Their lives are chaotic, funny, and often charming. This is what makes Shibuya Scramble so great.

And then there’s the whole kidnapping thing I guess. I did enjoy the later hours when the game was more focused on the kidnapping, where the need to keep track of which choices you’d made and where the functionality to switch between characters would become more and more crucial. But it was more of “I care about the puzzle the mechanics are presenting me” over “I care about the puzzle of the kidnapping”. Luckily I reached the end pretty fast, a lucky combination of the order I’d chosen to play characters in and paying attention to what unlocked specific routes. Osawa as a character was reasonably lifeless, I never got to an FMV scene with him and he spends his entire time moping. Without the extremely comedic detective in the house with him, I would’ve struggled to care enough about his route to ever complete it. Kano had some very good moments, but once his coworker stopped being as present in his storyline then he just became Detective Character #1. Achi kept me going through to the finale, even if the somewhat unnecessary romance angle regularly wore me down. I’m just super thankful for the auto advance feature, I guess.

Despite the ending, I loved 428. It was challenging, entertaining, and wonderfully chaotic. Just remember to care a little bit about the kidnapping.

[mathematicalghost]

Telling Lies isn’t quite sure how much of a game it wants to be.

part of the problem with taking so many notes is having to blank it all out when you want to share a screenshot

SPOILER WARNING: Although I don’t discuss any specifics of clip content, I do discuss the “ending” of the game.

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People refer to games as “podcast games” a lot - games they can play whilst they gnaw through their inevitably unwieldy podcast backlog (“I’m nearly there!” I insist as I pick up another 50-episode podcast). Recently, I’ve been looking for “scrapbook games” - games that have some play elements, but predominantly are hands-off so I can finish off making the millions of scrapbooks I’ve been meaning to get through. This broadly narrows my list down to visual novels, and Telling Lies’ release on Friday seemed like a perfect candidate for a scrapbook game. So if you’re wondering exactly where I come down on the “the clips are too long!!” debate, then remember that longer clips = more scrapbooking time.

Telling Lies has a strange effect in which you are both a player directly interacting with the clips, as well as playing a character who interacts with the clips. Her partially lit face is seen reflected in the darker shots, reminding you that she’s there when she turns her head slightly, as people speak to her in the background, as her phone buzzes. It creates an effect of two games being played at once - I’m playing the protagonist as she investigates these clips throughout the night, and unravelling the mystery of these four lives intertwined.

The protagonist pushes me forward to add a sense of urgency - each hour my ability to search and watch the clips pauses as her focus is taken away from the screen for a few seconds. Clips move the clock forward at a seemingly random pace - three clips won’t advance the timer, and then one crucial clip will catapult me forty minutes ahead. It reminded me that what I was doing was spying on these private lives, watching stolen intimate moments. This was most evident on my in-game notepad which I used to keep track of my searches, full of angry all-caps of my searches and fractured note-taking as I tried to figure out everybody’s name to understand these one-sided conversations.

Another effect of the timer influenced how I chose to play the game. Opening up the database for the first time includes the saved search of “Love”, with a convenient choice of clips (you only see five clips out of any search you do, forcing specificity) highlighting each of the four characters you can follow. Knowing in the back of my mind that I may not get the luxury of a methodical sweep of clips, I chose to dive straight into a rabbit hole, making my second search immediately after just watching one clip. I stuck with Logan Marshall-Green’s character as much as I could, slowly introducing other characters as it became clear their side of the story was necessary to follow anything he was saying at all.

This also, in some ways, became my downfall of enjoyment of the game. Early on, I came across a clip which I instantly connected as the “last” clip of the game. From there, in theory, it was a case of moving back through to figure out how he got there, but there were so many easily identifiable “buzzwords” in that simple three minute video that I calculated the whole plot reasonably easily. That’s not to say I didn’t still have some interesting points - I started the call girl’s clips so late that when I finally saw how she connected, it added an extra layer of doubt as to who the person on the other end of the line was in retrospective - but on the whole, I would know roughly what a search would bring up. The eight-minute videos that you had to manually scrub through were a joy at first, but by the end it became a waste of my time as I knew what the game wanted me to feel out of it.

That disappointment compounded when the timer moved ever closer to sunrise. On one turn of the hour, the protagonist gets a text and then is given the option to upload all the clips she has to a whistleblower site. I’d already accepted that I wanted to do a second run, at that point I hadn’t seen any of the call girl’s clips, so I didn’t upload the clips. I wanted to see how long I could push this timer - how much could I watch before the time ran out? What would happen then?

Well, the answer was as much as I liked. The clock reaches two minutes before sunrise and stops. I watched fifty clips in those two minutes and it didn’t move an inch. Eventually, I felt I’d got everything I wanted from the story and hit upload, at which point the story came to an end. After the credits the menu said “Continue” and brought me… straight back to two minutes before sunrise. I didn’t need a second playthrough, I can just go back and finish up the rest of the clips anytime. The single mechanic that had pushed me through the game actually didn’t mean much at all.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy Telling Lies. It took me a little under six hours to play, and looking through my notes I had been lead off on some interesting assumptions in my first few clips. It’s clear to see how carefully the dialogue was constructed, too - part of the excitement was finding a matching pair of clips, and when you try to listen out for keywords that make a pair it’s easy to see that these indicators have been scrubbed from their speech. A character will ask a question, and rather than help out the viewer by repeating the answer they’ll simply nod their head and move on. In many ways, the game forces you not just to listen out for clues in what they say to find out more, but to learn the characters themselves to understand their reactions. Part of the challenge of Telling Lies is not just to uncover the truth, but to uncover how they lie, too.

[mathematicalghost]

celeste, anxiety, and me

A couple of notable things happened this week:

I started 428 Shibuya Scramble on PC

I finally dusted off my Twitch account to stream for the first time in months

I finished Celeste

And, most frustratingly, I had an anxiety attack.

I don’t really talk about my anxiety all that much, or at least not nearly as much as I should. I got diagnosed with it in the height of my GCSE’s, so absolutely no prizes for guessing exactly what flared it up. I didn’t really do much about it in a medical sense - I never took medication, saw a therapist, or really had much interaction with a healthcare professional at all after a diagnoses. I just… lived with it. There were a whole list of very clear triggers for it, and I worked through them and figured out how to cope using mechanisms that were both good for me and uh, less good (if you’ve ever seen me at an all day event where I’m new to the building layout, I am almost definitely dehydrated). The laundry list got smaller, and I claimed I “stopped” having anxiety just before I went to university. Hrm. It didn’t quite work out that way.

Let me jump back to Celeste really quickly, because I’m not just unloading all my trauma onto an unsuspecting reader without a reason for it (I swear!). So, I really enjoyed Celeste - evident by the fact I bothered to actually finish it, a rare feat that is becoming increasingly less rare as my free time is now more predictable and less guilt-wracked from education. It took me a little under 18 hours to complete, although this doesn’t include any strawberry collecting, I don’t have all the B-sides (I haven’t played the B-sides levels yet either), the Crystal Hearts-based level is currently locked off to me, and includes the fact I made liberal use of the Assist Mode function. I’d imagine if you were any better at platformers than I am, it’d probably take 12 hours or so to do a single run, but equally if I went for an actual completion run I’d still have a good extra 30 hours left to me in this game. I’m still pretty new to short platformer games, spending my time caught up in RPGs that all my friends played and not realising how little I actually care for that style of gameplay, but Celeste was so addictive to me just because I could play in the stolen chunks of time I’d find on the bus to work. It definitely made me more alert when I’d get into the offices in the morning - nothing like a good bit of frustrating gameplay to get your brain going in the morning, I guess.

Celeste is such an easy game to recommend because there’s already so many people raving about it - I don’t need to rehash why the gameplay or music is so good when there's plenty of work out there already explaining it. I loved how the Strawberries held no actual mechanical weight to them other than “idk if you want to I guess”. I loved the mini rhythm levels to achieve the B-side cassettes. I loved the Assist Mode, where I could add an extra dash or switch on invincibility when my hand started to hurt and the thrill of the challenge was replaced by pure frustration. And, above all, it’s pinned by the most amazing story.

So, the basic premise is that Madeline decides to hike up Celeste Mountain. She’s not much of a mountain climber, or any kind of climber at all really, but the mountain calls to her in an inexplicable way. She has to prove herself, prove that she’s able to do something. Madeline is pretty open about the fact she has depression, and the Mountain exploits this to split the depression “Part of [Madeline]” into a ghoul. She looks like Madeline in every way except that she’s purple, floats, and is constantly trying to kill Madeline. At times, she’ll even sabotage Madeline’s relationship with other people, causing them to to turn on Madeline, too.

Part of what really struck me about Madeline’s story is the fact that the depression ghost didn’t actually hit her at first. She’s nervous, sure, but she actually gets part way up the summit before this ghost even appears. She doesn’t have her first panic attack until long after the ghost has established herself as a nuisance, and it crops up even when danger doesn’t seem to be around (such as at a campfire). It takes different forms at times, and affects people differently (Mr Oshiro and Theo both have times when their own demons affect them, and it’s not the same as Madeline’s ghoul). It mirrors my own experience with anxiety, especially as it moves to the final chapters.

So, back to me, I guess. If Madeline’s depression looks like a ghoul version of herself, floating menacingly and pushing through outbursts, then I’ve always described my anxiety as an overtired toddler. The main wave of anxiety has passed now (Anxiety attacks for me can last between three days and, during a particularly bad February of this year, three and a half weeks), but I think the main thing to trigger it was a stomach ache I had on Wednesday. If you’re thinking it doesn’t make sense, then try asking a screaming two year old why they’re crying and deciphering their nonsensical string of an answer. Maybe there was something deeper to the anxiety than a stomach ache, but that doesn’t mean I can articulate it to anybody else, least of all myself.

Anxiety attacks are slightly different to panic attacks in that they can last longer, and don’t always have an obvious external symptom like hyperventilating. For me, I was in a loop of nausea, irritability, fighting back the consistent urge to cry, and heart palpitations. I didn’t quite hyperventilate, but I was breathless at the height of it, manifesting as a cough as my body fought to breathe. All of these symptoms made me tired, which made me anxious, because I get anxious when I’m tired, which made me more tired, which made me anxious, and so on and so forth. Stomach pains and nausea make me anxious too, because I don’t know if I’ll be sick, which also in turn make me more anxious, and get me trapped into a building cycle of pure dread. Three and a half weeks of it wasn’t exactly the best way to spend my February of this year, and it certainly wasn’t my chosen method of experiencing the past week.

Madeline asks her ghoul at one point why she’s being attacked. Surely, if Madeline’s fear is that she’ll get hurt on the mountain, why is her ghoul trying to kill her? Much in the same way I wonder why I’m getting anxious over nausea if it’s only a symptom of the anxiety in the first place, the ghoul isn’t on the mountain to follow logical reasoning. Theo tells Madeline that she’ll only get hurt if she tries to help Mr Oshiro more, and that her existence on the mountain is already a proof of achievement. And yet, Madeline is determined to stay in the resort (to my Switch left joycon’s horror) to help him regardless of whether or not he is grateful. I do things to prove something to myself long after it’s necessary, even if I know I’ll pay the price with my mental health later. We do things that aren’t always objectively logical because ghouls, and toddlers, and crystals, and weird Mario-esque ghosts, aren’t always things you can objectively reason with.

Initially, Madeline tries to swallow her fears and just climb. To ignore the ghoul she saw in the cracked mirror. Further up Celeste Mountain, Madeline concludes that she needs to destroy her ghoul. She needs to get rid of the “Part of [Madeline]” that seeks to hurt her. Then later, finally, Madeline realises she needs to talk to the ghoul. To embrace it and utilise it.

I once was deep in an anxiety attack when I went to a fencing match. By mistake, I’d had too many coffees that morning and the combined caffeine and anxiety pretty much clipped me through the sky and into another plane of existence. We won the match, and in turn I figured out that if I move more in a match, I get more points. Was it healthy in the moment? Absolutely not. But I doubt jumping into an abyss and hoping your ghoul is going to throw you the rest of the way is that healthy either. But you can take from it and learn.

Ignoring my symptoms of anxiety didn’t help at all. Avoiding all sources of my triggers helped a little, but not that much either. Recognising when I’m having an anxiety attack, managing the symptoms, and letting it pass like a wave works so much better. It’s only my second anxiety attack of the year, but if I get a third one I know what I need to do to get through it.

I’m not going to climb a mountain to prove I can do this, but I’m glad I followed Madeline on her journey as she did.

[mathematicalghost]

heaven will be mine has the kind of love i want to have

I finished We Know the Devil recently, because it was on the Steam summer sale and I love spending all my money believing I’ve saved money. I bought Heaven Will Be Mine on sale too, during the Itch winter selection ($10 for like, five games! And all I lost was my playtime stats, which is most of the reason why I’ve stayed a Steam shill for so long), and honestly the more they both stay installed on my laptop, the more I feel the recurring call to play them through again.

Well, maybe just Heaven Will Be Mine. I liked We Know the Devil a lot, with the extra help that the full 100% completed story (all 4 endings, although I admittedly did use a guide for the fourth) only took me two hours. Or 2.1 hours, if we’re going by Steam’s calculation. It knows what story it wants to tell, and it pushes through in a haze of beautiful dialogue and an incredible soundtrack. I played it through four times (for each ending) - first playing depending on who I liked most, and then trying it all tactically to get each ending. It has a somewhat scary ending, and although I loved it I’m probably happy to move on to other games. And particularly, part of the reason I loved it stems from the clear path you can draw from it to Heaven Will Be Mine.

I’m not great at paying attention, or taking in large chunks of information all at once, especially when it’s not provided in the same explanatory context later down the line. Heaven Will Be Mine starts off with a collection of screens that lay the groundwork for the major factions in play, their history and their motivations. It’s given in the form of manifestos, meaning the information needs to be peeled away from the writing as you go through it. My first play through was done in a bit of a haze as I struggled to grasp exactly what was going on - except for the incessant flirting. The incessant flirting was very good.

There are many aspects to Heaven Will Be Mine that I deeply, deeply enjoyed. Unlike We Know The Devil, which requires you to keep a mental tally of who you’re including and who you’re leaving out, Heaven Will Be Mine tracks your percentage allegiance with each faction so I knew which ending I was likely to steer too. On a first play through, this wasn’t my first call, but helped a lot when it moved further on and I wasn’t necessarily playing in the same session. It’s also a lot more expanded in the content than Devil - alongside the main storyline, there were chat messages sent between your player character and side characters, emails sent about the pilots in the story, as well as the faction counter itself. The whole game was built to be bigger in scope - a world moving with or without the pilots. It was big, beautiful, and all I wanted to do was learn. The lore dump at the start pulled itself into focus as I read it over and over, understanding the context behind it as I watched it later.

And most importantly, it was filled to the brink with lesbians.

My relationship with lesbian media has always been tricky. I’d only really be motivated to delve into the depths of slightly less than legal and virus-adjacent corners of the internet to find films and television that filled my genre interests of science fiction, which doesn’t have a whole lot of lesbians in the explicit text.  It left me with what was easily accessible: The L Word (good, but not incredible), Blue Is The Warmest Colour (badbadbadbadbadbad), and… that’s it, I guess? LGBT cinema in general always likes to have a twinge of pain to it, specifically the societal kind. No matter how much I enjoy the surrounding content, it wears me down to consume fiction that has a consistent undercurrent of hey, just remember, there’ll always be people who hate you because you like girls.

Heaven Will Be Mine isn’t strictly a happy love story. It’s about three messy people with messy lives and messy emotions and messy ways of communicating. It’s about three women who love or did love or will love each other, often all of the above and all at the same time. Their tragedy and pain comes from their own selves, their own inability to manage their affection and desire with the crushing pressure of everyone around them. Nobody cares that these three disaster pilots are all lesbians, who desire and are desired by people of their same gender. Their love - their type of love - isn’t the issue here. It’s that Saturn won’t follow a single order and Luna Terra has inconsistent loyalties and Pluto wants to just do it all at once. It's not that they want to kiss a girl - it’s that they’re thinking about kissing while there’s a goddamn war on, please stop flirting and just punch them out the sky already. Playing Heaven Will Be Mine gave me the slightest of glimpses into a world where there was no shame in lesbian desire. There was no embarrassment, no implicit bravery in announcing that hey, I want to kiss and be kissed by a girl. I want her to love to consume me whole. I want to desire and be desired, to touch and be touched, to love and be loved.

I watch films like Carol (and like, if I have to be The Carol Disliker then I’ll take one for the team and be The Carol Disliker) and know that the second Therese and Carol lock eyes that the film is going to be built around their hidden desires bubbling over. I watch Halt And Catch Fire and once Joe meets with his old flame, I put the pieces together of It’s A Gay Man In The 80’s and instantly have to brace myself for a tragic ending. I watch Disobedience and watch them talk in hushed tones, darting around the word lesbian as Esti opens herself up to Ronit. Stories build themselves not just around their characters, but into the society that doesn’t want them to flourish. I remember that every day, I consciously work to ensure that I’m direct and clear when I say I’m a lesbian, that I fit into society as a lesbian, that I read and write and watch and play as a lesbian. It feels like a ‘fuck you’ in so many ways, a representation that I fight against my own internalised homophobia I worked hard to beat, that I will defend my identity despite those who hate it.

But it’s tiring. I just want to have crushes, and flirt, and talk about girls sometimes. Heaven Will Be Mine lets me have that. You can be messy, conflicted, and a poor communicator. But you can also be passionate, determined, and deeply empathetic. And you can also be a woman who deeply, romantically, sexually, loves other women.

[mathematicalghost]

katana zero lets me bounce a bullet off a katana back onto a security guard and I just think that’s rad

Splashing out and treating myself to a Nintendo Switch (which I did three weeks before my final year university exams, if you’d ever like to know how I handle impending stress) seemed like an excellent idea until I realised you also have to splash out and treat yourself on the games for them. So I quickly shelved a lot of my initial game purchase plans and instead picked up Katana ZERO, which I knew very little about except “looks cool” and “has at least some plot”.

Glad to report it does look cool and has at least some plot!

Katana ZERO is a platform game which requires you to kill every single enemy on the screen before you can progress, putting a real spanner in the works of my usual tactic of “moving quickly and not engaging” that I really like to play with. It also meant I regularly fell into a snag of missing at least one guard at the start of the level, almost progressing, and then have the last bastard finish me off. It’d restart the whole level and then I’d have to try it all over again.

I regularly forgot how technically violent the game was until I gleefully explained to my flatmate how I figured out how to kill about six guards at once and she just gave me a look that translated into mild concern. But it’s fine! It’s fine… because there’s actually a story alongside it which I won’t go into too much detail of, a short but intriguing story about why insta-kill is a mechanic within the game. It’s episodic, and just short enough to break into the final run before I got bored. The learning curve was never frustrating, and there's a level which introduces a new and very cool mechanic that’s never addressed again because like, sure, okay.

And it’s on Switch! It’s available elsewhere, sure, but there was something unbelievably fun about having it on handheld, pulling the screen close to my face as I tried not to be killed for the fiftieth time. It was fun, short, and cheap enough for me to purchase post the sting of a Switch. And also really violent to explain to your flatmate who doesn’t play games.

[mathematicalghost]

tacoma is what i talk about when i talk about legacy

(rejected titles: tacoma is really good and i liked it a lot thanks)

Tacoma had been a game I had thought about getting for a long time when it finally appeared for free on Humble Bundle. If there's any opportune time to get a game, it’s when the drm version of the game is free if you sign up to some newsletter that you just unsubscribe from in the next week. They later did the same for Gone Home, which was annoying as I’d loved Tacoma so much I just straight up bought Gone Home immediately after. Enjoy your £3, Fullbright. Go buy a pint on me.

Something that gets me really excited in any forms of media is the idea of legacy. When you lose control of a narrative you construct of yourselves - what gets left behind? How does your story get told? What do people know about you, when you’re not around to tell the story? I cannot stress enough how much I’m miming air guitar actions when I come across these themes, truly.

Tacoma is a pretty short game, which in my time translates to around a month (I think it would be a three-four hour session if you don’t do it in sporadic half hour chunks like I did). You wander through a space station, collecting the data of the crew who left. As you collect it, clips recorded from the on-board cameras play, allowing you to experience a period of around two minutes from the perspective of each of the crew members of Tacoma station. Alongside that, you can look through their personal effects.

At first, I thought there was a point to being able to pick up each book - I couldn’t get over the idea that everything would be important later. I knew what colour towel was in their locker, what brand instant noodles was on their table, what wall art was hanging on the wall. And I thought it was important! I thought it was foreshadowing for something bigger.

And it wasn’t, because that’s not the point of Tacoma. I didn’t need to know what wall art was hanging on the wall, but it displayed something about the person. It formed a legacy around the person I would never meet. I learn who they are in the old recording of a guitar playing. I learn through the way they send chat messages, the emails they write, the pictures they hang on the world to define themselves. At any point, I thought I would be tested - if I didn’t search for every last scrap, it would count against me later. And it doesn’t, because Tacoma doesn’t care if you know everything or nothing about the crew members. They have lives that they had in the past tense and will have in the future tense. You have a mission, which doesn’t relate to the crew at all. But still, you flick through every last scrap of the crew because they’re not there to tell you their story, their legacy is instead. It displays something about them in a way their own narrative never could. It gives you both a deeply subjective and objective experience in one.

Tacoma shows you what a life looks like when they’re not around to explain it, and I guess it makes me wonder - what kind of story will I leave behind, when I’m not there to tell it?

[screenshot credit]

[mathematicalghost]

(Posted on Facebook, 30th November 2018)

Last year, I wrote a book. It was the first piece of creative writing I'd done in at least five years. It filled the long and quiet summer I had to spend back in my hometown, and the handwritten nature gave it a journal feel. It showed, too, as the end result was less the story I wanted to tell and more my heart on the page. I started it on 3rd August 2017 and finished it on 29th October that same year. It was exhilarating, and I'm still editing it to something considered half wat decent. And it fueled me - I decided to try NaNoWriMo, the first time since a half hearted attempt aged 13. And between exam revision, a weekend away in Seoul, millions of deadlines, shooting a film, and the general tourism that comes with studying abroad, I somehow managed to push myself to 31,000 words.

But I knew I could do better. And so this year, I tried again. My time was filled up with a similar laundry list of obligations - night classes, essay deadlines, QMTV coordination, dissertation meetings, work shifts. And even though sometimes it was only ten minutes, sometimes it was only 100 words, but I wrote every day. I updated my word count every single day. Sure, I didn't hit 50k, but I made a good show of it. 37,000 words on planning, a play, and (most) of the pilot episode for an audio drama. Part of that written just now - I broke a personal best for a single day of writing with 5,962 words from 6-11pm (whew!).

Is it good? Oh man, oh no. These first drafts will never see the light of day. Is it better than where I was 30 days ago? You betcha.

Now if you'll all excuse me, I've been long overdue some sleep.

[mathematicalghost]

a rare selfie to commemorate the last time i’ll ever sit under a board for hong kong… taken in tokyo on the evening on christmas day. There’s definitely something poetic to be said there.

[mathematicalghost]

Day 3/8

My last day in Seattle! Because I’m tight, instead of heading up the Space Needle, I saved $10 by instead visiting the Smith Tower, south of downtown. I expected it to be a short lift ride and nothing else, but they have around two floors of an interactive history museum to start with. The viewing platform itself used to be styled as “traditional Chinese”, but is now a bar. The ceiling decor remains, however. Yesterday, a passerby mentioned a new section of Pike Place Market opened today, so I returned to find a much more jovial atmosphere as people celebrated it’s opening. It’s hard to capture atmosphere in a photo!

[mathematicalghost]

Day 2

My only full day in Helsinki wasn’t technically in Helsinki at all! I took the ferry out to the nearby island of Suomenlinna (which, as I discovered, is not pronounced “semolina” in a finnish accent) - the “Sea Fortress”. It’s a beautiful little island, and has a rich history that spans around two hundred years. It has loads of museums, of which I visited a few, but what was most interesting was how it maintained permanent residents. It reminded me of my time in Naoshima - although it’s overrun with tourists as the whole island is an attraction, there are people moving around on their daily lives, which gives it a strange personal feeling as you walk through. I found a little cafe called Valimo to have lunch in, and the 19€ price tag certainly reminded me why my time here is so short! I chose a potato and meat hash, which was nice but I’m still not entirely sure what was in it? All I can say for certain is that I wasn’t allergic to anything in it, thankfully! I had hoped to visit Helsinki city museum after, but unfortunately it was closed due to water damage, although after visiting four museums on Suomenlinna I can’t say I was particularly starved of museums today! Tomorrow is my final day before I leave for Stockholm on the night ferry, it’s all over before really starting!

One of the museums I visited was the customs museum, involving the fact that somebody tried to import a stuffed bear. At least it’s having a good time.

[mathematicalghost]

Day 9

Harajuku! Went the wrong direction on the JR Yamanote Line (which is a big circular line, you go clockwise or anti-clockwise), do my journey took around 20mins longer than it should have. Visited the Meiji-Jingu shrine, which was huge and probably not the best place to go when you’re wearing two jackets yet still cold. Harajuku is really best known for it’s shopping, and maybe I went the wrong way but I found it a little boring - especially when GAP only stocks jeans up to a 29" waist and you’re 31" (1,995¥ sale jeans, I’ll never forget you!). Not to worry, I went off to the Nezu Museum, which more than made up for it. I wasn’t allowed to take pictures inside, but they had a huge exhibition on about the history of Buddhism and where it intersected with Shinto, as well as a display of a playset commissioned by a regal family for their daughter, which was so beautiful. The best part about Nezu was the magnificent garden behind it (where I was allowed to take pictures) - it was so peaceful I could have spent hours there exploring if it wasn’t so cold! Finished the day wandering down to Shibuya, where I probably didn’t find the famed Shibuya Crossing but as it was around evening rush hour every crossing I made definitely felt like a scramble!

Full disclosure - I actually DID go the wrong and never saw Harajuku. I arrived at the station, following a crowd of people, and everything looked really Cool and Hip and Just Like Harajuku. And then, I stopped to use the loos, came out a bit disorientated, crossed the road, and went probably the completely wrong way instead. And that’s the story of how I had a terrible image of Harajuku for MONTHS until I came across an article that mentioned there’s a second shopping street in Harajuku and I realised that’s the exact one I walked down.

Don’t get lost, folks.

[mathematicalghost]

on the 2nd March, I posted this with the facebook caption:

Pictured: me, in low quality, in a plane somewhere over russia, being very smug about having both the aisle and window seat for 12 hours

I was absolutely exhausted by this point. I’d had to take a bus and three trains just to reach the airport, which I arrived at so early the baggage drop hadn’t even opened, as a massive ball of anxiety. I’d taken a flight from gatwick to Istanbul and had to take my first-ever connecting flight (more anxiety), and then was on the 13 hour flight to Tokyo. Although I’m less adverse to it now, I was also pretty scared of flying at this point.

I was pretty smug about getting the aisle and window seat, but I was also shit scared about everything.

But it’s not like I could stop the plane and turn around, could I? I had three weeks in Japan to spend.