#this apparently is not the weekly event and is evidently the much larger event of things

[aceouttatime]

Short-Lived: .01 The Humdrums and the Noteworthy Next Chapter: .02 Dinner With Archie 2465 words TW: Mentions of alcoholism, alludes to depression

Synopsis:

Five months into the Gaelis case, I found an anonymous note on my desk; had I known at the time what damned rabbit hole I’d be led down, I would have given it more than a second thought. My price to pay may have been small in comparison, but my role in the case had become quite a bit larger.

The first thing people tended to notice about my crowded little office was this potent staleness in the air that I’d never found an issue with. Perhaps it’s the deteriorating binding of the tired books tucked away on their shelves. Maybe it’s this building itself–it hadn’t changed a bit in the few years I’d passed it. Either way, I’d given up keeping the windows open to air out the place. It’s too much of a hassle nowadays.

Still, it wasn’t as if the place was without cherish. The oversized double window across the way from the door was overtaken by a good few hanging and potted plants, most of which I kept healthy enough–healthier than myself, at least. What sort of man my age was already dealing with an achy back? It cracked as I pulled my shoulders back, eyeing the rest of the space. A big, oaken desk of drawers to my right greeted me with an array of utensils scattered across its surface. A worn, ruddy-patterned rug took up most of the middle of the room. A pull-out couch that looked old enough to have been in the office since it was built sagged warmly to my left.

Oh, yes, and the lamps. I had a thing for lamps. The overhead light was left abandoned if I could help it.

I took a great whiff of that dusty air as I shut the door behind me. The sun had already taken to casting a glare on my glasses. Late morning. The rest of it had been wasted in a weekly meeting with my colleagues on the Gaelis case–really, an email or two would’ve sufficed, considering the event itself consisted of little besides tense pleasantry.

The Gaelis case had been my primary source of investigation for a decent amount of time now. It was, put simply, the most severe and enigmatic case of disappearances the country had seen in the past decade: 34 missing in the past month investigated and over 200 in the past year. They were seemingly random disappearances spread throughout Brooklyn. The victims had little in common besides the general area they’d been last seen and their stage in life–almost half were college-age, attending one of the few nearby universities. That was about as far as conclusive evidence had gotten my unit.

Personally, I believed they were drugged somehow–Benzodiazepines, or something even stronger, like the rising Xyzlazine, could be at play. It wasn’t even entirely known if the orchestration was carried out by the same people or whether this was a case of multiple unrelated parties. My suspicions indicated the former, though a gut feeling wasn’t anything to go off of. Moreso, the lack of evidence as compared to other cases was what gave me that confidence.

It really was as if these people had disappeared into thin air.

I had initially been assigned solely to the case of Stanley Gaelis’ disappearance. However, as the connected cases arose, my partner and I were unwittingly promoted to head the investigation. Ah, yes, and that was without so much as mentioning the societal backlash to it all. My reputation was actively rusting.

“Young, academic prodigy promoted early from Officer to youngest-ever Lieutenant Detective after showing promise and prowess in the field.” Pish. Now I was nothing but a poor hire, according to the positively shortsighted Chief of Detectives.

The media was a hindrance and, frankly, made the lot of us investigators out to be fools. And our “apparent inaction” was scorned with more vigor than it ever had. It was bullshit. It got to me more than it should’ve. Possibly I was being harsh, but late nights began to stretch longer now, and my patience grew at a slower pace.

But, most importantly, people were still missing. And, without identifying and incarcerating the culprit, or more likely, culprits, the situation would only escalate. Families would lose parents, lovers would lose partners, and folks would lose lives.

It weighed on me heavily, that guilt. So I kept at it, nose to the grindstone. Planning dispersions of investigative teams, reviewing reports, and conducting my own research. And yet, despite it all, the missing persons allegations continued to pile up. It was maddening.

Even my partner, Lovelace, had seemed put out. And that woman had more ardor than most. My sister used to insist it was fate that we’d ended up stuck working together so often and that she balanced me out. Made up for me being a, may I quote, “string bean of a man with a stick up his arse.”  I’d yet to come up with a suitable response to that besides a scoff.

I thought about her too often these days.

I worked, and my paperwork blurred to monotonous gray.

…

“Okeanoú.”

The knock, expected as it was, didn’t spare me from the deep exhale that rattled through me post-flinch. I knew those three successive raps. The sun shone dimly on the swaying pothos. It took me a second to catch my breath.

“Sylvan, we need to talk.”

I wasn’t given the common courtesy of chosen privacy, the sharp click of heels and protesting wail of hinges grating my ears. Lovelace, while I held her dear to my heart, took our friendship to mean that my office was a shared space. It was not. I glanced over my shoulder, and she’d already found a place behind my chair to rest her elbows.

Lovelace was an open sort, a bit loud in her speech and bold in her stance. She was only just shorter than I with these dark, owlish eyes that bored into a person’s soul. Analyzing. It was unnerving, even after all these years, the way she stared. I’d never been one for eye contact. Or…whatever sort of close contact she was initiating now.

We’d been close for far longer than the duration of the case itself. In some ways, I acquiesced to the occasional prod that we were something of an old, married couple, bickering in the most strange of manners. In others, the metaphor of a married couple couldn’t be further from the truth. At least the thought was humorous.

Still, she was a warm presence otherwise. I could almost convince myself I minded the company but fell short. The look on my face must’ve been humorous, too, as a flash of a smile caught the edge of my vision.

“Tamia. To what do I owe the pleasure?” I tsked, flicking up my glasses a touch higher on my nose. “I can’t imagine you’ve anything left to add that wasn’t already discussed in excruciating detail this morning.” Part of that was an exaggeration. Part of it was entirely true.

Now that got an actual chuckle out of her. “And I thought you’d already used up all of your venom in that very same meeting. You never cease to surpass expectations, Syl.” Tamia gave my left shoulder a gentle flick, setting down a few manilla folders beside me. “I will say, though, I’d appreciate it if our colleagues weren’t so…long-winded. And, before you say it, I know, ‘that’s rich coming from me.’”

Her little dimples came out. I didn’t find it in me to laugh, but still, I relaxed back in my chair, eyeing up the stack of what I could only assume were more documents for me to go through. Scheduling, perhaps, or more likely, reports on investigations that had led to nil. Part of me missed the fieldwork.

“More paperwork, I’m assuming?”

Pursed lips smirked, but something about it was off. “Maybe. But don’t let yourself slog through that just yet.” She let out a loose sigh, shoulders sagging as she bent down a touch. My brow quirked, and I spun my chair. She caught my hand, hers dark and warm on my pale, ghostly own. “Do you have a minute?”

I didn’t care for the cushion in her voice. This had been coming. I just hoped it hadn’t.

“Sylvan. Hey, look at me, would you? Please?” She knelt, took my hand, and I didn’t have the heart to stop her. Begrudgingly, I complied. There were grooves above her brows, and I didn’t know how I’d missed it, but her eyes were marred by rose. “Are you alright?”

God, the way my body stiffened was not something I was proud of. Tamia made no tell of noticing.

“Lovelace-”

Her gaze hardened, sharp as tempered steel. “It’s been a year now, Sylvan; you’re still…you’re still quiet. You’re hungover. You’re skin and bones, and it’s- it’s not healthy, what you’re doing to yourself. Throwing yourself into your work like you’re some kind of…some kind of machine. You’re human, Syl. People grieve. People grow.” The empty shot glass on my desk was a suncatcher, dispersing prisms of yellowed rainbows on her blouse, her neck. They looked like healed-over scars and twinkled like harsh starlight, stale and serene and mocking. “I’m hurting too. I doubt the hurt will ever fade completely, but I’m trying to move past it.

“And I’m damn afraid that y- I’m worried for you.” Her voice broke a little, just at the tail end, clumsy. I felt a grimace pull my lips back. She took my other hand. She squeezed them both.

I closed my eyes. It was today, the twenty-first. Just past the equinox. There was still snow on the ground–the slushy, slurry kind of muck that poured down like heavy rain. It was cold enough that it had started to freeze again over the bridges but sat in dreary puddles in the ditches. I pulled my hands away and knit my fingers together. Lined up rows of cars. A drunk driver. An accident on the highway. My sister and I had been driving home from the hospital, her still in her scrubs, the ones with the lilac print like Mum’s. She’d been worried she was too exhausted after a double shift to drive home alone, and I was working a late night anyhow. I picked her up in the Accord. No warning, no reason, just chance.

“That’s enough.”

A few moments of sharp breath kept time between us, air electric and stale. My tongue was dry and heavy, and I didn’t have the will to lift it. Her expression was a false blank, lips pursed, thin, and strained.

“You don’t have to be alone tonight. My home is yours if you need it, Sylvan,” she breathed, each word slow and steady. “I respect you, and I want you to at least consider the fact that you have a friend if you need one.”

Pity. Oh, and what a pity it was she pitied me. Did she think I was some poor, depressed soul lingering on the memories of yesterday? I had moved past everything. I wasn’t a man who allowed sorrows to dig their talons into my side everlastingly. Perhaps I was colder now, but what Tamia implied was a grossly warped version of myself. She was projecting her own troubles. My scars, physical and mental, had healed over.

Hers? I wondered about hers. She spoke of hers more than I. That surely implied something.

“I appreciate the concern, but I am fine. If you need…support, just say the word, but I don’t need your sympathy,” I closed, pushing stray lengths of hair from the spots they’d taken in my vision. My brow furrowed. Still, I didn’t amend those words.

“I…okay.” When I said nothing, I heard her breathing dip. “I’m only ever a phone call away, Okeanoú.”

I gingerly plucked the first of the manilla folders from their haphazard stack on my desk.

“Thank you.” I fingered the lip of the opening, thumb catching on the paper in a way just so. If I’d pressed harder, I’d have given myself a papercut. “If that’s all, Lieutenant, I have work that needs doing.”

She knew I wouldn’t call. I avoided her shoulder-thrown glance on the way out, knuckles white on her grip on her shoulder bag. That was the final time Lieutenant Tamia Lovelace acknowledged me that morning.

…

The day passed heavily. It got to be drizzly beyond the safety of my office, the skies a nasty shade of slate and rumbling like a bobcat giving thunderous warning. I had worked my way into the late afternoon, exhaustion pulling at my tired wrists and foggy mind. Part of me was grateful. Part of me wished not to think.

The other felt terribly useless, utterly small.

The meeting still weighed on my mind. Some of my colleagues had been unnecessarily harsh, but more importantly, none had much to contribute regarding new findings. Just yesterday, Bennet and Jacobs investigated the site we suspected the latest victim was abducted. Ms. Verity Jones was her name. She was a college student and undergraduate at Kingsborough and hadn’t been heard from in just under a week before being reported missing.

In the case of my work and the Gaelis disappearances, this disappearance, along with all others attributed, were long-term missing persons cases. This meant our evidence and follow-ups were not done until over 60 days subsequent the person was reported missing. Unfortunately, this left a good amount of time for details to become misremembered when either myself or my colleagues began our own investigations.

I hadn’t personally spoken to her parents and roommate; it was a rarity nowadays with how much else I had on my plate. I had papers, but God, the report gave a disappointing lack of insight. Or, really, even anything remotely interesting.

Except for the note.

I was surprised neither of the officers had mentioned the note. I hadn’t a clue where it originated, but it had been stuffed in the folder with everything else. I’d missed it at first glance, actually, only noticing the way the adhesive had stuck it to the inside flap of one of the papers after I’d come back from a short break.

It was a simple post-it written in hasty, dark ink, but for the life of me, I couldn’t determine what it said. There was some gibberish near the top, but what really got me was the little flower that had been practically crushed into the paper. It would’ve almost reminded me of a love note had I not known better. An illegible one, at that, but a love note, nonetheless.

Holding the little slip in my hands, I ran my finger over the little indentation, finding some kind of powder flaking off and onto my desk. Normally, I’d be upset with the mess. Normally, I would contact Bennet or Jamison about it or call someone from forensics to look at it.

But something compelled me to pocket the little thing.

So I did.

And when I left to drown my thoughts in liquor that night, I’d forgotten about it.

[trollbreak]

*starts writing a thing and it goes a vastly different direction than intended*

[constantlyirksome]

With Lucifer’s Fourth Season, The Devils in the Lack of Detail, (Spoiler Review.)

As a diehard DeckerStar fan, the end of Lucifer season three was as devastating to me as anybody, and the thought of never knowing if Chloe would ever accept Lucifer with his devil face hounded me. Did she run away in fear? Did she go in for a make-out on his crispy face? When the news hit that Lucifer was coming to Netflix I like all the other fans let out a sigh of relief. After episode one, I immediately take that relieved sigh back!

Spoil

The opening, Lucifer doing Radiohead’s Creep, alone in his nightclub every night for months, getting more and more disheveled with time was a brilliant way to lay out Lucifers angst on the table, along with some context on how long Chloe fled the country from, which is what she did. Now as an avid fan and a shipper this might seem like madness, but Linda went practically catatonic when she saw the Devil Face, Chloe earned some thinking time, she had the devils tongue in her mouth that’s cause for retrospection. We got no solid relief the whole episode as she avoided Luci’s prodding gaze and questions, insisting she was fine. But she wasn’t, and the end of episode’s twist, that she was plotting Lucifer’s descent back to hell with a priest hit like a semi-trailer to the stomach.

How dare she! I cried, but again, context is important, she had just figured out she knew the devil, she has a kid she needs to protect but it was still a dick move. After this, however not a lot interesting happens for a while. Now arguably on a streaming platform where people are likely to devour the whole season in a weekend, which I did, so not every episode needs a huge climax like a regular weekly serial. However, the points between this betrayal, Lucifer finding out and swiftly dealing with the problem, and the arrival of Eve are muddied. The murder of the week format has lost some of its charms, even with zany crimes and scenes, like the set of a survivor type reality show, do little to jazz up some very uninteresting murders. I found throughout the ten episodes I was able to follow and enjoy maybe three of the cases, the other’s were either convoluted or very dull. The nudist colony murder was a very good opportunity to get a close look on the peach fuzz on Tom Eliss’ butt. The cases that bring Lucifer’s fall (second fall) from grace, where he begins to punish and beat the murderers he catches for a while serve only as plot devices and little else.

So ultimately there was very little connecting the major plot points, the priest goes to jail randomly, Eve shows up with little investigation into how she escaped heaven, Lucifer is into two women, then the priest shows back up but he’s a demon now.

Now a lot of these individual pieces of narrative worked on their own. Lucifer’s obsession with self hatred and punishment, visually represented by his ever-changing devil form, was thematically sound, torn between the man he was in the garden of Eden, to who he is now solving crimes.

All of this comes to a head when he comes to the cheery realization, “I hate myself!” He’s skirted around his self-hatred, his guilt and resentment as his identity is wrapped up in everyone else’s sins, with Linda in therapy and it’s an incredibly interesting plot line to tug at, that Tom Ellis has risen to really well. What could be considered over the top at the shows conception now works in his favor.

The two women in his life, Chloe and Eve, basically revolve around him and do little else which is a shame, because they are both incredible women. Chloe’s character has been built up in the past, a strong intelligent single mother with some compelling backstory. She prided herself on her ability to rationalize, to do the right thing, but her story is so woven into Lucifer’s now that their romantic intentions are clearer now. She spends a lot of time being a badass, solving crime but she also spends a lot of time crying about Lucifer, the literal devil.

Eve is similarly linked to Luci in totally different ways. She is a thrilling character, imbued with the personality and backstory of the first sinner, but also the first human woman, filled with compassion, spirit, and curiosity. Actress Inbar Lavi brings so much zeal and childlike innocence it’s impossible not to love her. She does bring out the worst in Lucifer, loving him as the tempter from the garden, strong and unyielding in his punishment of evil. So despite her bubbly innocence her biggest character developments either revolve around pleasing and keeping Lucifer in her life, or trying to rebel against her husband, Adam. I truly hope, if there is a season five, she comes back; maybe we can get some more backstory or footage from Eden.

All the other supporting players actually had a lot to do, and a lot of growing to do as well. Barring Dan. I don’t remember fully why he is so salty, it’s linked to Charlotte’s death in season three, but he does nothing but mope. Ella, also affected heavily by Charlotte’s passing, questions her faith, but there is no evidence of that journey, no real work is done before she moves back to her faith, apart from a totally random, gratuitous tonsil hockey session with Dan. Seriously where did that come from, and why the creators thought it was necessary.

Linda, Mazikeen and Amenadiel had the most complete, satisfying arcs throughout the season’s length. Linda becomes pregnant with Amenadiel’s baby, which is a fascinating turn of events. What will the baby be like? Would it have wings, or be celestial, or have laser vision. It also begs the question, if Amenadiel could impregnate a woman on his first try, how is there not a little baby Lucifer anti-Christ running around? Their struggle in coming to grips with what it will mean to be parents. Amenadiel's newfound love and respect for humanity has him excited to raise a baby away from heaven. Leading to one of the most impressive pieces of plot, when he tries out being a father figure to a young black man who’s had a rough relationship with the law. He learns both how hard it is being there for a son, but also about real-world politics, in this case police brutality against black people in America. It was a surprisingly insightful moment for a typically camp show. Would it be better to raise their son, Charlie, on earth, or in the silver city?

Side note, Lucifer and Amenadiel's sister coming down to steal the baby when the plan was to raise him on Earth, only to give up after moderate resistance, was another wasted opportunity, though it did plant the seed in Amenadiel's head to take the baby.

Mazikeen slowly becomes more human this season (ironic considering her initial stance on Lucifer hanging out with Chloe), through her friendship with Linda (the best relationship/dynamic on the show next to Maze/Trixie) and her job as a bounty hunter. With Lucifer Linda and Trixie, she built a sort of pseudo-family, but she still lacked a romantic connection, which has her unfulfilled apparently. I didn’t like this either. Her last minute fling with Eve wasn’t thought out, and it was just a ploy by Eve to win back a man who didn’t care so it sort of felt like a big screw you to Maze, who like a lot of the others had little else to do this year.

Although Lucifer’s character arc was tight, was a step towards real growth, and a realistic way to delay gratification for his and Chloe’s relationship it came at the expense of any larger story arc or side plots for some of the other characters who deserved a little more after coming back from cancelation.  The end shots, Lucifer sitting on a madly impractical throne does lead to the exciting possibility of exploring more of hell, and baby Charlie brings with him the opportunity to explore the silver city. However, after being canceled once already having as big a cliffhanger as last season seems risky, and if the show doesn’t get a season five fans might go mad thinking about it, even if the fourth season was a little messy.

[duckbeater]

Some Notes on A. S. Hamrah

A lifetime ago, I thought it’d be rewarding to teach A. S. Hamrah’s “A Better Moustrap” to first-year students struggling through their second semester of basic comp. I wanted to wow them with Hamrah’s heedless deployment of unsettling theses, argued crisply and irreverently, in an essay that supplies a plausible solution to its concerns (a rarity among most rhetorical appeals, whose authors left my students stimulated but empty-handed). Very in the vein of “A Modest Proposal,” “Mousetrap” confronts a social ill—fetish videos where women crush small animals to death under their Stilettos—yet proposes a non-ironic salve: “crushies,” where “the must-have plush-toys of the Christmas rush will be smashed underfoot.” Most of my course was based on weird internet shit, which I thought (I still think) mostly anyone can appreciate, especially the young. “Mousetrap” is full of that weird-internet-shit jouissance.

“Reading this is like eating your favorite food,” I told the class. “You’re just gonna shovel in ideas. They’re all delicious. Eh, they’re pretty weird, too. But it’ll be fun.” It wasn’t fun. Nobody read the essay. Moving through its arguments, in front of twenty-five nineteen-year-olds and a few grandmothers, was embarrassing. I had to dissect Hamrah’s great takes on crush video culture, his movements through film history, his appraisals of Mickey Rooney, then his wider and, to me, scintillating prognostications on American adulthood—an adulthood most everyone in the classroom (accepting the grannies) was soon to inherit—totally alone. “Do you watch these videos?” one student asked. “Then what’s your fetish?” asked another. “Bryson fucks books!” became the consensus. (“I fuck your dads!” I thankfully did not say but very much wanted to. I was a coward; this partially explains why no one bothered to complete my assignments.)

Flying solo—or falling sans parachute, as the case may be—through Hamrah’s film criticism and cultural reportage of the last decade has probably been a shared experience among his far-flung admirers. Finding his byline in Bookforum or the obscure domain of the International Federation of Film Critics or mirrored pages from the defunct Hermenaut was usually the result of a periodic Google search. If he appears more regularly now, and more regularly in prestige venues, that’s the fault of n+1, where he’s contributed reviews tri-quarterly since roughly 2008.

Indeed, it was Hamrah’s initial, online-only contribution that inspired so much ardor and devotion. “Oscars Previews” provided bright, bursting capsules—the gleeful bitchery of a best friend's phone call. Apparently this quality was transliterated from its material creation, when he reported the piece to his editor, Keith Gessen, over a phone, after complaining he didn’t have time to write the thing. Each entry in this salvo (none are more than a hundred or so words) lands with a zinger. They have the polish of a joke, featuring a setup, some reinforcement and then a payoff. He even plays some of his capsules against each other as callbacks. The entirety of Hamrah’s entry on Michael Clayton reads: “There was a lot of driving in Michael Clayton. I like driving in movies but after a while Michael Clayton started to seem like a car ad—though it showed how a car ad can be liberal. That’s a message for our times.” The wit is authoritative, hypnotic, dismissive. The taste behind these pronouncements felt sui generis, and the criticisms brief enough to be dispatched verbatim without attribution. I was a senior in college when I first read Hamrah. I had a busy season of parties at professor’s houses and dined-out on his opinions for weeks. 

This is not to say Hamrah only works when you’re young and grasping for style. But I do think it’s evident now that his short forms are the seedbed for his long form successes, paper sketches for the larger canvas. When you read enough of Hamrah’s capsule reviews, you get the sense he’s reporting exactly (or only) what fits into his little joke, sometimes you can even hear him reaching for his beats. When you read a whole book of them, you get the sense Hamrah’s less interested in the works under review than in his performance of reviews, his performance of freedom and audacity.

—

The Earth Dies Streaming, apart from film writing, is a log of Hamrah’s fascination with his persona, his brand of humor and arch sensibilities. He’s not exactly a curmudgeon—he wants readers to know he’s tried too many drugs to be a curmudgeon (comparisons to acid trips crop up, as does “bad speed”)—and he’s not exactly an academic (despite his Ivy League bona fides as a corporate semiotician)—and he’s not even a movie reviewer in the jejune, crass, sell-out way so many movie reviewer must be in today’s enfeebled, saturated, and deeply compromised market (he tries “to never include anything in [his] writing that could be extracted and used for publicity”). This is where I trot out a gif of Amy Poehler playing a Cool Mom in Mean Girls. Hamrah’s bobblehead offers virgin daiquiris to teenage cineastes. “I’m not like a regular film critic,” he says, “I’m a cool film critic.” The tits, the wink, the velour sweatsuit.

Other irritations. Hamrah’s insistence on the inferiority of animated films and his churlish dismissal of Miyazaki’s contributions to the medium’s history. He’s always on accident catching some part of a children’s movie—on an airplane, in a public clinic—and using these unsatisfactory experiences to comment on the aesthetics and advancements of animation at large. It’s a hobby horse he flays as often as Adorno assaulted jazz, and (to both their credits), slightly adorable for how insistent and under-thought. If only, as he does in “Jessica Biel’s Hand,” he would immerse himself in the backlog of lauded animation from this century and the last, he might, for once, be able to say something interesting about it.

Hamrah’s stance against feature-length animation is nearly as looming and placeless as his stance against other films critics, whom he evidently reads closely but can never be bothered to cite. His essays are peppered with a dreaded sea of bought-off weekly reviewers whose pedestrian tastes frustrate him. This, despite the regularly insightful, playful, and overall helpful criticism of David Edelstein and Emily Yoshida at New York; Dana Stevens at Slate; Manhola Darghis at the Times; Justin Chang in Los Angeles; and the fairly dour takes of Peter Debruge in the industry’s digest, Variety. Hamrah alludes to David Denby’s work in Streaming’s introduction, then names him outright in a later capsule review of Little Children. Otherwise, your guess is as good as mine as to with what critical consensus Hamrah finds his views out of alignment. These are critics and journalists who, obliged by deadlines, report weekly on their film-going habits. That they have new things to say even once a month is a miracle, but that they do so four to ten times a month is frankly incredible. (It must be evident that I’m a fan of movie reviews and film criticism. I work an office job where between menials I find intense delight and distraction in the work of daily reviewers, and I carry around with me an ungainly amount of knowledge regarding box office performances and future releases that in all other ways I have no interaction: I go to the movies maybe three times a month, often by myself, and often I see low-brow flicks. Last weekend I saw the third How to Train Your Dragon movie; the weekend before that, Isn’t It Romantic; a weekend before that, Roma. I saw these movies on the advice of daily reviewers, and Roma only after reading Caleb Crain’s celebration of it.)

I volunteer Richard Brody and Christian Lorentzen as Hamrah’s contemporary intellectual kin, with caveats. Brody’s work is too mystical, too mythical to properly critique his subjects, and his symptomatic readings, which border on the Lacanian in terms of the extraneous and deranged, become hulking apertures that always overtake whatever work is under discussion, squashing them. Also he is never, ever funny in his reviews. Brody is a curmudgeon, and what he criticizes rarely appears in the films themselves but float around the films’ receptions, financing or forebears, and when he ventures into specifics—a film’s lensing, its sound, the actors and their acting styles—his descriptions become ridiculous. Lorentzen, as with his book reviews, writes to a word count. (There is no other reason for the amount of tedious plot summary in a Lorentzen take-down.) If Hamrah sounds like these critics, it may be because all three are careful in their dissents to let the filmmakers know they think they’re complete assholes. When these three do find praise for a work, it’s the entirely appropriate object of adoration, art-house and independent, or, gotcha!, a studio event they appreciate for more correct, more interesting, and more nuanced reasons than everyone else.

What sets these critics apart from the daily reviewers I listed above, may be the daily reviewers’ capacity to surprise and be surprised. Perhaps they saw a movie with a daughter and her friend; they appreciated a family flick in context; they were caught unawares by stray scenes in a larger, unsuccessful work, and appreciated glimpsed wisdom. They have hope yet for a return to better forms. These reviewers are flexible and receptive; they are as likely to be charmed as they are to be chagrined. Even when Brody, Lorentzen and Hamrah are surprised by the quality of a work, they take it as an affront to their sensibilities and bridle, like horses suspicious of an open gate. Why were they not warned? Why should they trust this development? Their reflexive, ingrained annoyance, occasionally flowering into high dudgeon, fills their actual reviews with foregone conclusions. One does not visit their writing for news, or for new takes, for synthesized connections, or revelations of form. One visits for the comforting familiarity of a flagging standard—“a continuity of aesthetics that [has] become an aesthetics of continuity,” if I’m remembering the St Aubyn phrase correctly.

Criticism this entrenched in its own personality ends up toothless. It’s why Renata Adler, for instance, will be remembered for her reporting and not her film criticism. Despite its bite—and it’s quite biting—it rarely leaves a mark. Hamrah never cites Adler—nor do I think he will. His prose and her prose are rather too alike. He must sense the comparison coming, and dislike it, because Adler is not particularly well informed on film and filmmaking. Her amateurish moonlighting grated in 1968, and it grates now, but only for its prosumer-level expertise. Her prose (like Hamrah’s) remains indelible, deadpan, and addictive. When I recall the subhead to Kyle Paoletta’s appreciation of Hamrah, “Always On: A. S. Hamrah’s film criticism is a welcome corrective in an outmoded field,” I consider Adler’s own attempts at the form, as a corrective. And I find them contiguous with other platforms discussing same, places like Slate, Twitter, and The Ringer’s Exit Survey, which preempts the leap from hot take to tweet. (Q: “What is your tweet-length review of Venom?” A: “What if All of Me (1984) but action and also tater tot–loving aliens?”) What I’m saying is this: Hamrah’s form is not novel. His tone is not novel. His writing is, however, very convenient (brief, digestible) and entertaining, and he’s been adding more personal atmosphere of late.

So the named lodestars in Hamrah’s critical firmament: Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag, Jonathan Rosenbaum, J. Hoberman and Manny Farber (to whom Hamrah pens an exceptionally sweet and informative essay). Hoberman, the only critic still alive among these titans, shares Hamrah’s acid tongue and penchant for political excavations, while doing his readers a courtesy by assuming not all of them attend film festivals or live in limited-release area codes. The same semester I taught “A Better Mousetrap,” I taught Sontag on sci-fi movies and Hoberman’s seminal “21st Century Cinema: Death and Resurrection in the Desert of the (New) Real” (later to become his book-length essay, Film After Film). Hoberman can be as tart and irreverent as Hamrah, but he’s not above recounting plot summaries. He’s both a guide and a rebel. I suppose, following my own argument, if in fact I’m making one, this makes Hoberman the better critic—a classification that would not hurt Hamrah’s feelings. (This would hurt very few film critics’ feelings.)   

—

Very little of the above matters. I had hoped to answer why, then I got bored (then I had to go to work; after that, I had to design a booth for a marketing expo in London; then I lost the thread). When I was in Brooklyn last December, I dropped into the Spoonbill on Montrose. The first book I bought on my second time in New York City was Hamrah’s The Earth Dies Streaming, and I carried it about like an obsessive as I made my way by foot to Prospect Park. I devoured it in a few days. I devoured it again on the plane ride back to Chicago. And I’ve read all the capsules before, and most of the essays—they’re usually posted in front of paywalls. If I quibble with Hamrah, it may be because he’s made me a better writer, and surely a better thinker, yet I found that I disliked my own dismissiveness and superiority, my own rigidity. If I can name my influences, I thought, I can break from them. But this is unso. 

[themoldguy-blog]

The Asbestos of the 2000’s, Black Mold

What the CDC isn’t telling us, and what you can do about it.

In 1997, a surge of news reports were flooding the headlines regarding several rare deaths caused by mold illness. The CDC and the EPA both responded by shutting down the supposed conspiracy theories surrounding the suspicious causes of deaths. Years later, a flurry of reports came in regarding a similar string of deaths again citing mold toxicity. Yet these headlines are not getting the attention they should be.

It began in Cleveland, Ohio at Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital. Dr. Dorr Dearborn noticed a pattern between infant patients and started piecing together what was causing their symptoms. At first glance, it seemed each patient’s lungs were bleeding for no apparent reason. Bleeding lungs afflict one in four million children, however, Cleveland was seeing one in every thousand babies affected.

That made the incidence rate in Cleveland the highest in the world. Seeing so many cases in one city, all clustered within a six-mile radius of Rainbow Hospital, convinced Dearborn that he had an epidemic on his hands.

"I knew the disease should only affect one in four million," Dearborn says. "So I called the CDC."

Ruth Etzel, the CDC's former chief of air pollution and respiratory health, was on a flight to Cleveland the next day. Dearborn saw two more cases in December, which brought the total number of impacted babies to ten. Records showed that some of the infants had improved in the hospital and been sent home, only to return after suffering subsequent bleeding episodes. This led the researchers to suspect an environmental problem in the home.

When the CDC revealed the supposed link of pulmonary hemosiderosis to black mold in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report in January 1997, a virtual media panic descended on the city. The conducted study had found an association between the ‘black mold ‘Stachybotrys chartarum, also known as Stachybotrys atra, and the infant bleeding-lung disease. Dearborn would need to prove the mold caused the illness in laboratory research or show evidence of mold spores or toxins in the sick babies.

Etzel was researching mycotoxins, and turned up evidence that Stachybotrys had caused hemorrhaging in farm animals in Europe. She returned to Cleveland with a mycologist who found Stachybotrys in five case homes. The excessive rainfall in the summer of 1994 and recurrent plumbing problems contributed to the water damage sustained by some of the case homes, creating a favorable environment for Stachybotrys growth.

Investigators discovered that all the  infants lived in homes older than sixty years, all of which had recent water damage. They found the case infants were more likely to live in homes with larger quantities of Stachybotrys chartarum and other molds than were the control infants.

Driven by concern for the public health and leaks to the press, Dearborn and Etzel went public with their findings in early 1995.

A number of other mold scares had been reported around the country. The Tottenville Branch Library on Staten Island, which had a particularly damp basement, was shut after a staff member had trouble breathing, and Stachybotrys was reportedly found. Panic began to spread and insurance companies joined in the pandemonium.

Fear of lawsuits caused schools, libraries, and other buildings across the country to be closed and cleaned, at great expense, when even small traces of Stachybotrys were found. The mold was responsible for closing a branch of the New York City Library in 1997 and chasing the American Red Cross out of its headquarters in Minneapolis earlier this month. A case in Texas made national headlines when a woman was awarded $32 million after she sued her insurance company because it didn't cover mold damage claims.Thousands of people were filing suits over toxic mold.

In 1997, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found an apparent link between mold contamination in the homes and cases of infant pulmonary hemorrhage.

Stachybotrys chartarum appears slimy and black, possibly with white edges. It looks like any black mold that grows in wet places.Stachybotrys requires water-soaked cellulose material and can produce toxins, called trichothecenes, which are highly dangerous to humans and have been used to produce chemical and biological weapons.

Once inhaled, the toxins are thought to attack the immune system. Studies have shown that adults who have had chronic exposure to Stachybotrys have reported a variety of ailments, including flu symptoms, dermatitis, and fatigue. The effect on infants, as suggested by the Cleveland study, seems much more severe, because their lungs are still developing. The Stachybotrys toxins may disrupt the development of the capillary walls, enabling any kind of stress factor, such as a simple cough, to cause the capillaries to rupture and the lungs to bleed.

One question, in particular, which researchers could not answer with any degree of certainty, has also become a chief criticism: Stachybotrys is common in water-damaged buildings throughout the country, so why has this cluster of rare, unexplained lung bleeding occurred only in Cleveland? The answer is, it wasn’t and it’s still ongoing.

One of the most troubling aspects of the controversy is the reluctance of the CDC to reveal any information about its review of the Cleveland study or its position on whether it still believes that unexplained pulmonary hemosiderosis is linked to the black mold. The CDC did not set up interviews with any of its staff experts, despite repeated calls to the agency's press office over a two-week period and discussions with three different spokespeople. Calls to CDC epidemiologist, who was reportedly on the review committee, were not returned.

In 2002, the U.S. International Trade Commission reported that according to one estimate, US insurers paid over $3 billion in mold-related lawsuits, more than double the previous year's total.  According to the Insurance Information Institute, in 2003 there were over 10,000 mold-related lawsuits pending in US state courts. Most were filed in states with high humidity, but suits were on the rise in other states as well. By 2004, many mold litigation settlements were for amounts well past $100,000. In 2005, the U.S. International Trade Commission reported that toxic mold showed signs of being the "new asbestos" in terms of claims paid. However, in 2007 laws began to change.

Farmers Insurance, for instance, has said that it will stop selling new homeowner's policies that include water-damage coverage. In addition, it has asked the Department of Insurance to allow the company to exclude mold damage from its policies entirely, even mold that results from a covered event.

23 years later, deaths and cover-ups are still ongoing. Mysteries seem to stir around the investigations started, the findings and conclusions of the mold epidemic.

Respiratory disorders are the most common of all mold illnesses. That’s because tiny mold spores easily become airborne and then can be inhaled by anyone in the vicinity. Some of the lung problems caused by mold, other than pulmonary hemorrhage, include:

Shortness of breath

Wheezing

Coughing

Respiratory infections, including pneumonia and bronchitis

Hypersensitivity pneumonitis (a lung disease similar to bacterial pneumonia)

Worsening of symptoms in people with asthma

Development of asthma-like symptoms in people not previously diagnosed with the condition

Other Mold Illnesses

Other health problems sometimes caused by exposure to household mold include:

Headaches, migraines

Chronic sinus infections

Allergic reactions

Sore throat

Runny nose or stuffed up nose

Red, itchy, watery eyes

Skin rashes

Chronic fatigue

Depression

A flood of reports trickle through media and then fall in between cracks just like the initial 1997 reports from Dr. Dearborn. Cases of severe lung infections, damages, personal injury, pulmonary hemorrhages, and even death have been ongoing.

In 2003, a physician whose name remains anonymous released her case that connected mold and pulmonary hemorrhage.

In 2001, a jury awarded a couple and their eight-year-old son $2.7 million, plus attorney’s fees and costs, in a toxic mold-related personal injury lawsuit against the owners and managers of their apartment in Sacramento, California.

In 2003, The Tonight Show co-host Ed McMahon received $7.2 million from insurers and others to settle his lawsuit alleging that toxic mold in his Beverly Hills home made him and his wife ill and killed their dog. That same year environmental activist Erin Brockovich received settlements of $430,000 from two parties and an undisclosed amount from a third party to settle her lawsuit alleging toxic mold in her Agoura Hills, California, home.

In 2004, the Institute of Medicine released a report finding evidence of a link between certain species of mold exposure and severe respiratory illnesses. A later review of research conducted by the World Health Organization reached the same conclusion, and called attention to findings that mold exposure appears to lead to an increase in the chances of children developing and dying from asthma. 

In 2006, a Manhattan Beach, California family received a $22.6 million settlement in a toxic mold case. The family had asserted that that moldy lumber had caused severe medical problems in their child. That same year, Hilton Hotels received $25 million in settlement of its lawsuit over mold growth in the Hilton Hawaiian Village's Kalia Tower.

In 2010, a jury awarded $1.2 million in damages in a lawsuit against a landlord for neglecting to repair a mold-infested house in Laguna Beach, California. The lawsuit asserted that a child in the home suffered from severe respiratory problems for several years as a result of the mold.

In 2011, in North Pocono, Pennsylvania, a jury awarded two homeowners $4.3 million in a toxic mold verdict.

Between October 2014 and January 2017, five mold-infection-related deaths occurred at two UPMC hospitals. Several related lawsuits have been filed against the hospital system, which settled with two of the patients for $1.35 million each.

In 2019, Months after a mold infection killed a pediatric patient at Seattle Children's Hospital, its CEO has revealed that fourteen patients have become ill from the same infection since 2001. The hospital shuttered eleven operating rooms twice, first in May and again this month, after it detected the common mold Aspergillus in the air. As of February 2020, seven of the fourteen patients have passed away.

Mold exposure represents a major public health issue worldwide. Yet, the CDC still states that mold is not serious and should not be tested.

According to the World Health Organization, 7 million deaths per year are linked to indoor and outdoor air pollution. For years, people complaining about the effects of living or working in damp, mold-filled environments has not been taken seriously. Nothing is scarier than knowing something is making you and your family sick, and not being able to figure out what it is. The anxiety caused by an unseen danger like toxic mold can feel overwhelming. 

There is currently no standard for indoor air quality, meaning, there’s no safe and unsafe levels of mold. Both the EPA and the CDC advise against testing seemingly because they are unwilling to set a baseline of limitations for indoor mold that can affect insurance companies bottom lines. It’s time for both of these organizations to change this. 

The CDC needs to reopen it’s investigation and reconsider this as a serious public health concern. To put an end to these preventable deaths the following link is a petition to for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to finally set a federal standard for indoor molds in medical facilities.

Please sign this petition if you want to have indoor air quality standards.

[See a history of publications: History Of Mold 1837 - 2001]

Source:

Sprouse A. Integrative Sexual Health, Chapter 10, Toxins: A Pervasive 21st-Century Problem for Health and Sexuality. Oxford University Press. March 14, 2018. (Sprouse treatment: mold avoidance, infusions of intravenous nutrients, sauna detoxification, heavy metal chelation).

U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command, with the College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Illinois. Toxicologic and Analytical Studies with T-2 and Related Trichothecene Mycotoxins (3-year study on the inhalation effects of mycotoxins). August 20, 1985, Contract No. DAMD17-82-C-2179.

World Health Organization (WHO). WHO Guidelines for Indoor Air Quality – Dampness and Mould. http://www.who.int/indoorair/publications/7989289041683/en/. Published 2009.

 Ammann HM. Indoor Mold Contamination--a Threat to Health? J Environ Health. 2002;64(6):43.

 Ammann HM. Indoor Mold Contamination--a Threat to Health? Part Two. J Environ Health. 2003 Sep 1;66(2):47.

Daschner A. An Evolutionary-Based Framework for Analyzing Mold and Dampness-Associated Symptoms in DMHS. Front Immunol. January 2017;7(672). https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2016.00672.

McMahon SW, Hope JH, Thrasher JD, Rea WJ, Vinitsky AR, Gray MR. Global Indoor Health Network (GIHN). Common Toxins in Our Homes, Schools and Businesses. December 17, 2012. (This 2012 position statement by GIHN has been replaced with new papers on individual topics.)

 International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness (ISEAI). https://iseai.org.

Weblinks:

https://realtimelab.com/mold-statistics/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC145304/

https://www.aafp.org/afp/2005/1001/p1253.html

https://www.cdc.gov/mold/pdfs/hemorrhage_report.pdf

http://www.asthmacommunitynetwork.org/system/files/webinar/pdf/HHDeck_3_18_13.pd

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC145304/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1566217/pdf/envhper00520-0107.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1566692/pdf/envhper00516-0113.pdf

https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/84/2/408/1692272

https://www.everydayhealth.com/columns/health-answers/mold-and-a-misdiagnosis-that-could-leave-you-breathless/

[the-record-columns]

June 27, 2018: Columns

I do love old newspapers...

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

    Having recently put my hot little hands on a small trove of old local newspapers, I have very much enjoyed going through them, enjoying the history they chronicled, most often weekly, and the advertising, clever and not.  The papers in question are The Wilkes Patriot, The Yellow Jacket (which we have often referred to), a paper I have never heard of called The Laws' Lash, and The Wilkes Republican.  These papers were all published in Wilkes County, but I also ran across one published in 1923 by a Dr. O. A. Johnson of Kansas City Missouri, "The Truth About Cancer," full of testimonials from folks he had "cured" of cancer.. 

    Today I will briefly tell you about The Laws' Lash, published monthly in Moravian Falls by Leonard B. Laws, Editor and Publisher.  On the front of the paper it stated," VOL. 4, NO. 8, Moravian  Falls, NC, October 1913, 15 Cents Per Year, Worth $1."   One note on the front page paraphrased The Bible a bit stating, "It is as impossible for a big rich rascal to go to prison, as it is for a camel to trot thru a needle's eye."  On the masthead it allows that The Laws' Lash is "The Cruel Rascal Scalper."  It goes on, "Northing published like it from the Dismal Swamp to the Golden Gate.  It dehorns human pug-uglies from the pulpit to the penitentiary.  It spanks the dictionary for contempt, and makes its own words.  It cuts, shoots and stamps rascality all at one biff."  With a brief nod to a wonderful man, W. O. Absher, who never read any further than a word he didn't know, I looked up "biff" in the dictionary and it is a slang term meaning "to punch."    Just below that is a brief poem about The Lash, "It meets the world without a sigh, It knows no human fear; It camps upon the trail of wrong, Though many a foe is near."

    The Laws' Lash is practically devoid of advertising, and most of what look like ads end up being premiums awarded for people who send in names of people who might subscribe to the paper--remember, it was  "15 Cents a year, Worth $1."  Those premiums included, flashlights, straight razors, clocks, watches, rings, and even 14K gold Diamond Point Fountain Pens, valued at $2.50.  And this was in October of 1913.

    One of the largest differences between The Lash and advertising in all the other papers I listed is the lack of patent medicines.  One of of the larger ads in this paper was from the Philadelphia Printer's Supply Company, basically advertising all the things The Lash might need to buy for itself.  

     The other ad which caught my eye was for a book, not a tonic or pill.  The book, entitled, Tobacco Habit Easily Conquered,' promises to tell how to banish the tobacco or snuff habit in three days.  According to the ad, once the "nicotine poison" is out of your system, you will be calm, sleep better, have a better appetite, good digestion, strong memory and have "manly vigor." No longer will  you need a pipe, cigar, cigarette, or chewing tobacco to pacify "the morbid desire."  And, best of all, the author, Edward J. Woods of New York will send his book free to anyone who writes to him. No kidding, that's what the advertisement said, free "to anyone who writes to him."

    Bear in mind that this news about "nicotine poison"  is all a full 50 years before the Surgeon General of the United Sates made his report on the dangers of smoking.

    The Laws' Lash had a definite anti-Catholic tilt and seemed unhappy with both Democrats and Republicans, but in the issue I have he seemed to reserve the most venom for a publisher in Bixby, NC named Henry Davis who published a "...little Donkey tune newspaper called The Hornet."  Apparently Mr. Laws felt as though Mr. Davis was stealing his work, stating "The copper-riveted cuss (Davis) has swiped everything The Lash ever had except its date line and the ink paddle, and we have to sleep with one eye open to keep him from nabbing them."

    C'mon, Mr. Laws, how do you really feel?

  Instant Replay

By LAURA WELBORN

What if we all had the ability to have an instant replay before we make a decision or act?   

 I can’t help but think I would make better decisions if I could view a video of exactly what happened that did not have my “prejudices and past experiences coloring my thoughts”-  Just the facts of watching what exactly happened.   Past experiences have saved us from making fatal mistakes and were critical to survival but sometimes we need to open our mind to a more thoughtful assessment of the situation (instant replay) to move past our experiences and make open rational choices or “calls” that help us move forward.

   "The older we grow, and the more real-world tragedies and challenges we witness, the more we realize how incredibly blessed we are, and how frequently the fantasies (our own perspective) in our heads hold us back from these blessings.

   "We stress ourselves out, because of fantasies.  We procrastinate to the point of failure, because of fantasies.  We get angry with others, with ourselves, and with the world at large, because of fantasies.  We miss out on many of life’s most beautiful and peaceful moments, because of fantasies.

   "I challenge you to move through this day and practice seeing and accepting life as it truly is.  Do what you have to do without fantasizing and fearing the worst, lamenting about what might happen, or obsessing over how difficult your work is.  Be present, take it one step at a time, and do the best you can.  

 "One of the hardest lessons in life involves the ability to change your perspective and let go—whether it’s guilt, anger, love or loss.  The change is always tough—you fight to hold on and you fight to let go.  But letting go from the inside out is oftentimes the healthiest path forward.  It clears out toxic attachments from the past and paves the way to make the most positive use of the present.”  (inserts from Marc and Angel Hack life blog)

    You’ve got to emotionally free yourself from some of the things that once meant a lot to you, so you can move beyond the past and the pain it brings you.  Ask yourself:  Where could my perspective use a healthy shift?  Where do I need an instant replay to get a different perspective without my own prejudices and past influencing my perspective?

    Try practice shifting your perspective first thing every morning this week, just to set the tone for each day.  Because when you start the day feeling whole and centered, you tend to carry this mindset into everything you do and every conversation you have.  This is especially helpful when you are forced to work through a difficult life situation, or deal with difficult relationship matters and maybe you will get your own “instant replay” to look at things more critically and with less personal bias.  

    Sometimes it helps to find someone (not biased to you) who can look at the situation and be your “instant replay” on the situation.  The more we can open our hearts to looking at a situation with a different perspective the more emotionally healthy we will be. 

     Asking yourself is my behavior in this situation reflective of who we are?  Represent the values we hold dear?  Are we acting in loving kindness?  

   IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

hen in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

For the past five years I've been maintaining Defender's Quest, I've kept telling myself: there's got to be some magical untapped audience I've yet to reach. I've tried every possible trick to find them, and while many have helped, none have been a silver bullet.

Support Mac and Linux

5.2% and 1.8% of lifetime revenue, respectively

Participate in Humble bundles

(back when they were really good)

Sell direct, on GOG, Itch.io, etc

significant chunk, still dwarfed overall by Steam

Localize all the things

Professional: German, French, Spanish, Japanese

Volunteer: Russian, Korean, Italian, Czech

Probably worth it? But not crystal clear.

Well, I finally found these magical undiscovered players: they're in China.

In "Steam Discovery 2.0, Stegosaurus Tail 2.0", we noted the trend of Chinese players appearing on the global PC gaming radar.

For one, Valve mentioned the trend at Dev Days 2016:

and I had noticed it myself, both anecdotally:

as well as in our revenue reports:

At the time, China was still a very small slice of our overall revenue (as you can see in the graph's embedded pie chart -- it's the tiny turquoise slice at the very top). Still, it was enough evidence to start localizing Defender's Quest into Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

Now, whether or not localization is worth it depends on how much text the game has. And Defender's Quest has a lot of text.

Category # words Cutscenes 22,196 Journal 24,943 Everything else 8,709 Total 55,848

The Cutscenes and Journal together comprise a small novel -- 47,139 words, about the same length as Slaughterhouse Five. We decided to translate only the "everything else" category: the game would be completely playable in Chinese, but the story content would remain in English. This way we could test the waters, and if initial results were good, we'd follow up with a complete translation.

Spoiler alert: results were good.

I have never had a localization pay for itself this quickly, not to mention this unambiguously. When you localize a game, you are betting that sales from the target region will increase more than they would have had you not done it. Usually, however, you're never quite sure how many regional sales you would have made anyways. For example, my first language is Norwegian, and most Norwegians my age speak fluent English and consume lots of English media. Chances are they'll buy a game whether it's localized into Norwegian or not. This effect is so bad that prominent Norwegian games like OwlBoy aren't even localized into the developer's native language. (Same goes for um... Defender's Quest. Tilgi meg, Bestemor!) But what about Germans? There's a lot more of them, and research says they have a stronger preference for native-language media than Norwegians. So we did a German localization (among others). And it was probably worth it, but the effect was somewhat obscured since Germany was already a strong selling region.

The Chinese stats tell a completely different story.

For context, when we updated the game with Traditional and Simplified Chinese translations, we ran a Steam weekly deal at 50% off and popped one of our visibility tokens (see this article).

Result: China was our #1 sales region, not only in terms of units sold, but also in terms of gross revenue.

Last week's sale figures:

As mentioned previously, the before/after results of localization were completely unambiguous.

Of all the revenue Defender's Quest has earned from China on Steam in its entire lifetime, 45% of it was earned last week. That's right, we basically doubled our lifetime sales from China almost immediately! Obviously there's some degree of "pent-up demand" in play here, but based on other developers' experience, I suspect we'll see improved sales from China in our long tail, as well.

Here's a per-country breakdown for our lifetime sales, excluding this past week (ie, the entire time before the Chinese localizations were availalbe):

Back then, China was #22.

"But, Lars!" you say, "Defender's Quest has been on sale for five long years! Maybe it's already soaked up most of its potential western buyers already?"

Judging from 2016's figures, apparently not:

The same 10 countries that dominated lifetime sales show up here, just with a few positions swapped. The biggest change is that Japan and Korea represent a larger overall share in 2016 vs. overall lifetime (We shipped Korean and Japanese localizations in 2014). And the Anglosphere + Europe still dominate.

Here's a side-by-side chart of last week vs. 2016 for easy comparison:

So China zooming to #1, even for just a week, is amazing. Germany has traditionally been our strongest non-English region to date and it's never pulled off a feat like that. But you'll also notice Korea and Japan had a higher market share in this last sale, and Taiwan showed up out of nowhere to beat Russia, Canada, and the UK!

How do we explain all this?

Concerning China, it's basically the perfect candidate for localization:

Large market (18% of world's population!)

Strong preference/need for their native language

Population spends money on games (middle class has exploded recently)

But there's another story here. During the sale, 50% of copies were sold in East Asia. The growth from Chinese speaking regions makes perfect sense, but I was surprised to see growth in Korea and Japan. We've had Korean and Japanese localizations available since 2014, after all. What's going on? I have five potential explanations:

First, it could just be statistical noise and I'm reading too much into things.

Second, it could be part of an ongoing regional rise in PC gaming in East Asia in general. Japanese publishers are releasing more games on Steam, whether it's Square-Enix's back catalogue of Final Fantasy games or From Software's latest Dark Souls title, and Japanese players are following them:

@larsiusprime Yes, Japan certainly grows faster than an average on Steam http://pic.twitter.com/FVx90voTJ3

— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) December 27, 2015

Meanwhile, Koreans have always been big fans of PC gaming, and Steam has lots of games they like, most notably DOTA 2. Also, Steam has made strides in supporting local Asian currencies, so this growth makes sense.

Third, it could be a result of Steam's discovery algorithm explicitly recommending games to players based on their native language. Just a few years ago, everyone in the world saw the exact same Steam home page, whereas now it serves up unique recommendations, and the user's language is a key variable:

Fourth, just as there are large numbers of Spanish speakers in the USA because of its proximity to Mexico and Central America, I bet there's a decent amount of Chinese speakers in Japan and Korea. So some of those extra sales from Japan and Korea might actually be from Chinese players.

Fifth, there might be a "cultural lift" phenomenon, where visibility in a major country (such as China) trickles down to nearby countries within its cultural sphere of influence. I'm not as sure about this last one as the observed lift in Korea and Japan happened a bit faster than this explanation might predict.

But if any of these effects are in play, I can still make a solid prediction: Asian countries will continue to dominate Defender's Quest's market share in 2017. Last year Asia was 11% of our revenue and 14% of our units sold. I expect that market share to at least double for 2017.

Traffic Analysis

So, we got a lot more sales from Asia, and especially China. But how are these Asian customers finding us? Here's a breakdown of our traffic report during the post-localization sale:

Category % Visits Home Page 37.36 Weeklong Deals 15.80 Specials 14.01 Discovery Queue 11.10 Tags 7.79 Search 4.61 Valve Website 2.46 External Website 1.46 Games < $10 0.97 Other 4.44

These are some really surprising results. If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll know that the Discovery Queue almost always dominates our traffic charts. Here's our traffic from our last promotional event, by comparison:

Category % Visits Discovery Queue 23.47 Tags 14.3 Specials 11.73 Home Page 10.62 Search Results 9.15 External Website 7.89 Weeklong Deals 6.98 Valve Website 5.29 Games < $5 3.05 Games < $10 1.64 Other 5.88

Here's a combined table for easy comparison:

Latest sale Category % Visits     Previous sale Category % Visits Home Page 37.36   Discovery Queue 23.47 Weeklong Deals 15.80   Tags 14.30 Specials 14.01   Specials 11.73 Discovery Queue 11.10   Home Page 10.62 Tags 7.79   Search 9.15 Search 4.61   External Website 7.89 Valve Website 2.46   Weeklong Deals 6.98 External Website 1.46   Valve Website 5.29 Games < $10 0.97   Games < $5/$10 4.69 Other 4.44   Other 5.88

Expanding the "Home Page" category for the latest sale reveals that 30.40% of the traffic came from the Special Offers Grid, and 4.56% came from "Updated Games."

What's really interesting to see here is that despite the fact that this latest sale had a smaller discount (50% off vs. 67% off for the previous one), much more traffic came from the "in-your-face" promotional channels (Home Page, Weeklong Deals, Specials) rather than the softer-touch organic discovery channels (Discovery Queue, Tags, Search) we've almost exclusively relied upon until now.

Next, let's look at our visibility round results.

As mentioned in the previous article, post-Discovery update 2.0 visibility rounds are optimized for signal-boosting frequently updated games. They specifically target your existing audience as well as people who have wishlisted your game. On the face of it this seems pointless because it's not giving you any "new" visibility, but for games like ours, it seems to work -- probably because the "Recommended by Friends" module has the highest click-through rate of all the discovery channel on Steam's front page.

Here's where we're at so far:

Our click-through rate is lower, which makes sense as we ran the last round in December and have likely thinned out the pond a bit. However, we're still getting a good number of clicks. We've already beaten the previous view count in just one week -- it will be interesting to see if we're also able to surpass the total absolute number of clicks by the time the visibility round expires. I'm pretty sure these last for either 1 month or 1,000,000 views, whichever comes first, because my last round lasted for 1 month down to the minute, and my friend Ryan Clark recently ran a round that halted at around 1,000,002 views, a suspiciously round number to suddenly terminate on.

It's hard to tell how much the visibility round had to do with the Asian regions. Steam indicates 30.7% of our purchases in this period were fulfilled wishlists, but we don't get any kind of regional breakdown for that. The fact that we reached more eyeballs faster makes me think we've got wider Asian visibility than before, but I don't have solid proof.

So, should you localize your game into Chinese? Probably.

Some quick caveats. If your game isn't selling a whole lot already, I can't guarantee that localizing into Chinese is going to double your sales or anything, and the cost of a localization might even exceed what you could expect to earn from it. Furthermore, genre effects likely apply -- some games probably resonate with the Chinese audience more than others, and our story-heavy Tower-Defense RPG is apparently one of them.

Do your homework

If you've got a simple game, you can probably get away with simple bitmapped fonts, but if you absolutely need full true-type font support with arbitrary dynamic text (as we did), you'd better get your head totally wrapped around Unicode, text encodings, fonts, possibly even IMEs (Input Method Editors). In my case, the prior experience of eight previous localizations, including fellow "CJK" languages Japanese and Korean, was invaluable.

Localize your store page!

Nobody's going to bother buying your game if they can't even read the description, after all. If your game has minimal text, this might be all you have to do to reach the Chinese market.

Now, some things not to do.

Don't use Google Translate.

Just don't. You'll wind up with a garbage translation that's incoherent at best and insulting at worst. Players will definitely notice and kill your review score. A partial translation is better than a "complete" garbage one.

Don't mindlessly 'Orientalize' your game

Localization is much more than simple translation, and you'll come across plenty of guides that insist you pick up on the cultural context and make sure to make proper adjustments for those, too. And this is important! For instance, literally translating jokes and cultural references from English isn't going to work -- your translator will need to adapt, change, or even drop them entirely. However, if you do this wrong, you're in dangerous territory of going too far and confusing or even insulting your audience:

The bottom line is -- trust your translation/localization partner to suggest proper adjustments, but don't go off on your own as a clueless westerner trying to "Chinese-ify" things for the locals.

The rise of China, and Asia in general, has taken me somewhat by surprise. Conventional wisdom has always been that Japanese players only play console games, Koreans only play StarCraft and MOBAs, and Chinese players are only interested in mobile F2P games. Although I'm sure those larger trends are true, the sheer size and diversity of these regions shouldn't be ignored, opening a new niche for some indies. This is definitely a great opportunity for some of us, but this works both ways -- we should expect to see a rise in Chinese-developed games, both Indie and AAA.

We've already seen this famously with ICEY.

So I guess the question is -- how long until we see a Chinese-developed Indie game win awards for Game of the Year, Independent Games Festival, Game Developer's Choice, and sell over a million copies?

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

It's a trick question :)

That's all already happened.

That game is FTL:

According to GiantBomb, Subset games is based in Shanghai*, and the two main developers were former employees of 2K China.

*Technically the founders of Subset moved to Shanghai from the USA, but since my own game Defender's Quest was made by an "American developer" -- ie Level Up Labs -- despite the fact that I am a Norwegian citizen who lives in the USA, I think it's fair to call Subset games a "Chinese developer" by the same standard.

I can recommend a great translator by the way, her name is Amy Ho. She does both Simplified and Traditional Chinese and comes with my personal stamp of approval.

Good luck out there!

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

For the past five years I've been maintaining Defender's Quest, I've kept telling myself: there's got to be some magical untapped audience I've yet to reach. I've tried every possible trick to find them, and while many have helped, none have been a silver bullet.

Support Mac and Linux

5.2% and 1.8% of lifetime revenue, respectively

Participate in Humble bundles

(back when they were really good)

Sell direct, on GOG, Itch.io, etc

significant chunk, still dwarfed overall by Steam

Localize all the things

Professional: German, French, Spanish, Japanese

Volunteer: Russian, Korean, Italian, Czech

Probably worth it? But not crystal clear.

Well, I finally found these magical undiscovered players: they're in China.

In "Steam Discovery 2.0, Stegosaurus Tail 2.0", we noted the trend of Chinese players appearing on the global PC gaming radar.

For one, Valve mentioned the trend at Dev Days 2016:

and I had noticed it myself, both anecdotally:

as well as in our revenue reports:

At the time, China was still a very small slice of our overall revenue (as you can see in the graph's embedded pie chart -- it's the tiny turquoise slice at the very top). Still, it was enough evidence to start localizing Defender's Quest into Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

Now, whether or not localization is worth it depends on how much text the game has. And Defender's Quest has a lot of text.

Category # words Cutscenes 22,196 Journal 24,943 Everything else 8,709 Total 55,848

The Cutscenes and Journal together comprise a small novel -- 47,139 words, about the same length as Slaughterhouse Five. We decided to translate only the "everything else" category: the game would be completely playable in Chinese, but the story content would remain in English. This way we could test the waters, and if initial results were good, we'd follow up with a complete translation.

Spoiler alert: results were good.

I have never had a localization pay for itself this quickly, not to mention this unambiguously. When you localize a game, you are betting that sales from the target region will increase more than they would have had you not done it. Usually, however, you're never quite sure how many regional sales you would have made anyways. For example, my first language is Norwegian, and most Norwegians my age speak fluent English and consume lots of English media. Chances are they'll buy a game whether it's localized into Norwegian or not. This effect is so bad that prominent Norwegian games like OwlBoy aren't even localized into the developer's native language. (Same goes for um... Defender's Quest. Tilgi meg, Bestemor!) But what about Germans? There's a lot more of them, and research says they have a stronger preference for native-language media than Norwegians. So we did a German localization (among others). And it was probably worth it, but the effect was somewhat obscured since Germany was already a strong selling region.

The Chinese stats tell a completely different story.

For context, when we updated the game with Traditional and Simplified Chinese translations, we ran a Steam weekly deal at 50% off and popped one of our visibility tokens (see this article).

Result: China was our #1 sales region, not only in terms of units sold, but also in terms of gross revenue.

Last week's sale figures:

As mentioned previously, the before/after results of localization were completely unambiguous.

Of all the revenue Defender's Quest has earned from China on Steam in its entire lifetime, 45% of it was earned last week. That's right, we basically doubled our lifetime sales from China almost immediately! Obviously there's some degree of "pent-up demand" in play here, but based on other developers' experience, I suspect we'll see improved sales from China in our long tail, as well.

Here's a per-country breakdown for our lifetime sales, excluding this past week (ie, the entire time before the Chinese localizations were availalbe):

Back then, China was #22.

"But, Lars!" you say, "Defender's Quest has been on sale for five long years! Maybe it's already soaked up most of its potential western buyers already?"

Judging from 2016's figures, apparently not:

The same 10 countries that dominated lifetime sales show up here, just with a few positions swapped. The biggest change is that Japan and Korea represent a larger overall share in 2016 vs. overall lifetime (We shipped Korean and Japanese localizations in 2014). And the Anglosphere + Europe still dominate.

Here's a side-by-side chart of last week vs. 2016 for easy comparison:

So China zooming to #1, even for just a week, is amazing. Germany has traditionally been our strongest non-English region to date and it's never pulled off a feat like that. But you'll also notice Korea and Japan had a higher market share in this last sale, and Taiwan showed up out of nowhere to beat Russia, Canada, and the UK!

How do we explain all this?

Concerning China, it's basically the perfect candidate for localization:

Large market (18% of world's population!)

Strong preference/need for their native language

Population spends money on games (middle class has exploded recently)

But there's another story here. During the sale, 50% of copies were sold in East Asia. The growth from Chinese speaking regions makes perfect sense, but I was surprised to see growth in Korea and Japan. We've had Korean and Japanese localizations available since 2014, after all. What's going on? I have five potential explanations:

First, it could just be statistical noise and I'm reading too much into things.

Second, it could be part of an ongoing regional rise in PC gaming in East Asia in general. Japanese publishers are releasing more games on Steam, whether it's Square-Enix's back catalogue of Final Fantasy games or From Software's latest Dark Souls title, and Japanese players are following them:

@larsiusprime Yes, Japan certainly grows faster than an average on Steam http://pic.twitter.com/FVx90voTJ3

— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) December 27, 2015

Meanwhile, Koreans have always been big fans of PC gaming, and Steam has lots of games they like, most notably DOTA 2. Also, Steam has made strides in supporting local Asian currencies, so this growth makes sense.

Third, it could be a result of Steam's discovery algorithm explicitly recommending games to players based on their native language. Just a few years ago, everyone in the world saw the exact same Steam home page, whereas now it serves up unique recommendations, and the user's language is a key variable:

Fourth, just as there are large numbers of Spanish speakers in the USA because of its proximity to Mexico and Central America, I bet there's a decent amount of Chinese speakers in Japan and Korea. So some of those extra sales from Japan and Korea might actually be from Chinese players.

Fifth, there might be a "cultural lift" phenomenon, where visibility in a major country (such as China) trickles down to nearby countries within its cultural sphere of influence. I'm not as sure about this last one as the observed lift in Korea and Japan happened a bit faster than this explanation might predict.

But if any of these effects are in play, I can still make a solid prediction: Asian countries will continue to dominate Defender's Quest's market share in 2017. Last year Asia was 11% of our revenue and 14% of our units sold. I expect that market share to at least double for 2017.

Traffic Analysis

So, we got a lot more sales from Asia, and especially China. But how are these Asian customers finding us? Here's a breakdown of our traffic report during the post-localization sale:

Category % Visits Home Page 37.36 Weeklong Deals 15.80 Specials 14.01 Discovery Queue 11.10 Tags 7.79 Search 4.61 Valve Website 2.46 External Website 1.46 Games < $10 0.97 Other 4.44

These are some really surprising results. If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll know that the Discovery Queue almost always dominates our traffic charts. Here's our traffic from our last promotional event, by comparison:

Category % Visits Discovery Queue 23.47 Tags 14.3 Specials 11.73 Home Page 10.62 Search Results 9.15 External Website 7.89 Weeklong Deals 6.98 Valve Website 5.29 Games < $5 3.05 Games < $10 1.64 Other 5.88

Here's a combined table for easy comparison:

Latest sale Category % Visits     Previous sale Category % Visits Home Page 37.36   Discovery Queue 23.47 Weeklong Deals 15.80   Tags 14.30 Specials 14.01   Specials 11.73 Discovery Queue 11.10   Home Page 10.62 Tags 7.79   Search 9.15 Search 4.61   External Website 7.89 Valve Website 2.46   Weeklong Deals 6.98 External Website 1.46   Valve Website 5.29 Games < $10 0.97   Games < $5/$10 4.69 Other 4.44   Other 5.88

Expanding the "Home Page" category for the latest sale reveals that 30.40% of the traffic came from the Special Offers Grid, and 4.56% came from "Updated Games."

What's really interesting to see here is that despite the fact that this latest sale had a smaller discount (50% off vs. 67% off for the previous one), much more traffic came from the "in-your-face" promotional channels (Home Page, Weeklong Deals, Specials) rather than the softer-touch organic discovery channels (Discovery Queue, Tags, Search) we've almost exclusively relied upon until now.

Next, let's look at our visibility round results.

As mentioned in the previous article, post-Discovery update 2.0 visibility rounds are optimized for signal-boosting frequently updated games. They specifically target your existing audience as well as people who have wishlisted your game. On the face of it this seems pointless because it's not giving you any "new" visibility, but for games like ours, it seems to work -- probably because the "Recommended by Friends" module has the highest click-through rate of all the discovery channel on Steam's front page.

Here's where we're at so far:

Our click-through rate is lower, which makes sense as we ran the last round in December and have likely thinned out the pond a bit. However, we're still getting a good number of clicks. We've already beaten the previous view count in just one week -- it will be interesting to see if we're also able to surpass the total absolute number of clicks by the time the visibility round expires. I'm pretty sure these last for either 1 month or 1,000,000 views, whichever comes first, because my last round lasted for 1 month down to the minute, and my friend Ryan Clark recently ran a round that halted at around 1,000,002 views, a suspiciously round number to suddenly terminate on.

It's hard to tell how much the visibility round had to do with the Asian regions. Steam indicates 30.7% of our purchases in this period were fulfilled wishlists, but we don't get any kind of regional breakdown for that. The fact that we reached more eyeballs faster makes me think we've got wider Asian visibility than before, but I don't have solid proof.

So, should you localize your game into Chinese? Probably.

Some quick caveats. If your game isn't selling a whole lot already, I can't guarantee that localizing into Chinese is going to double your sales or anything, and the cost of a localization might even exceed what you could expect to earn from it. Furthermore, genre effects likely apply -- some games probably resonate with the Chinese audience more than others, and our story-heavy Tower-Defense RPG is apparently one of them.

Do your homework

If you've got a simple game, you can probably get away with simple bitmapped fonts, but if you absolutely need full true-type font support with arbitrary dynamic text (as we did), you'd better get your head totally wrapped around Unicode, text encodings, fonts, possibly even IMEs (Input Method Editors). In my case, the prior experience of eight previous localizations, including fellow "CJK" languages Japanese and Korean, was invaluable.

Localize your store page!

Nobody's going to bother buying your game if they can't even read the description, after all. If your game has minimal text, this might be all you have to do to reach the Chinese market.

Now, some things not to do.

Don't use Google Translate.

Just don't. You'll wind up with a garbage translation that's incoherent at best and insulting at worst. Players will definitely notice and kill your review score. A partial translation is better than a "complete" garbage one.

Don't mindlessly 'Orientalize' your game

Localization is much more than simple translation, and you'll come across plenty of guides that insist you pick up on the cultural context and make sure to make proper adjustments for those, too. And this is important! For instance, literally translating jokes and cultural references from English isn't going to work -- your translator will need to adapt, change, or even drop them entirely. However, if you do this wrong, you're in dangerous territory of going too far and confusing or even insulting your audience:

The bottom line is -- trust your translation/localization partner to suggest proper adjustments, but don't go off on your own as a clueless westerner trying to "Chinese-ify" things for the locals.

The rise of China, and Asia in general, has taken me somewhat by surprise. Conventional wisdom has always been that Japanese players only play console games, Koreans only play StarCraft and MOBAs, and Chinese players are only interested in mobile F2P games. Although I'm sure those larger trends are true, the sheer size and diversity of these regions shouldn't be ignored, opening a new niche for some indies. This is definitely a great opportunity for some of us, but this works both ways -- we should expect to see a rise in Chinese-developed games, both Indie and AAA.

We've already seen this famously with ICEY.

So I guess the question is -- how long until we see a Chinese-developed Indie game win awards for Game of the Year, Independent Games Festival, Game Developer's Choice, and sell over a million copies?

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

It's a trick question :)

That's all already happened.

That game is FTL:

According to GiantBomb, Subset games is based in Shanghai*, and the two main developers were former employees of 2K China.

*Technically the founders of Subset moved to Shanghai from the USA, but since my own game Defender's Quest was made by an "American developer" -- ie Level Up Labs -- despite the fact that I am a Norwegian citizen who lives in the USA, I think it's fair to call Subset games a "Chinese developer" by the same standard.

I can recommend a great translator by the way, her name is Amy Ho. She does both Simplified and Traditional Chinese and comes with my personal stamp of approval.

Good luck out there!