wickedbaggins

[wickedbaggins]

All the games I finished this year

All thirty! Twenty-nine! A really good year for indie narrative games, gotta say. Roadwarden in particular has me churning about making a text RPG of my own in Ren’py ...

10 mg: Locked In Very short visual novel about COVID tensions. Man, gotta say, the simulated fight was too harsh and mean for me to really lean into it. Parenting is rough! Especially during a pandemic. AI: The Somnium Files - Nirvana Initiative More of everything in the first game, hooray! More puzzles, more somniums, more AIs, more pipe-wielding teenagers! More musical numbers! Visual novel with puzzles and branching and a lot of gleeful oddness. Plus some horrific what-the-fuckery. It is Uchikoshi. As Dusk Falls Interactive movie about a hostage situation with Rippling Consequences. Not bad, really -- I know a lot of the devs are refugees from David Cage's nonsense, and this is certainly more coherent and affecting than Cage. The writers do seem to have ported Appalachian stereotypes into their rural Arizonan characters, and some chapters feel like one-offs, but it's not bad and makes some decent stabs toward depicting PTSD. I like the accelerated-comic visual style. Beacon Pines Visual novel with adventure elements. You get keywords in some branches that you can apply to other branches. You play a darling pre-teen deer, hanging out with his darling cat friends, in a not-so-darling setting with a Wicked Corporation and an Old Money Family with Secrets. Plays happily in the body horror (and general horror) space without ever being all that scary. It's a pleasant romp with breathless narration. Chinese Parents Raising sim. Growing Up, below, is so similar that it may be too polite to call it a clone, but Chinese Parents is the superior game. The translation is occasionally iffy, sometimes very iffy, but you feel the parental PRESSURE and how much they WANT you to succeed, for selfish and unselfish reasons. Ends up a kind of melancholy and funny family piece, a window into the struggle to get through childhood that feels much more real than Growing Up. And I kinda enjoy the haphazard art. Coffee Talk Visual novel with coffee-and-tea-making minigames that I almost always failed and had to look up. Embarrassing for a pure chill game! Otherwise, charming slice of life with gorgeous pixel art and interesting-enough discussions (although "earthlings are too stupid not to overbreed the earth!" was weirdly offensive). Consider It What even is this? Tiny minigames? Choices made based on tiny movements? A personality test? I laughed at the Grave of the Fireflies jokes. A lot. Excavation of Hob's Barrow Pixel point and click with some incredible cutscenes? Character-shots? And a wonderfully awful mood. It's horror that you see coming, but that doesn't decrease the effectiveness when it finally gets to you. Our heroine is incredibly plucky and incredibly doomed. Forgotten City First person time-loop puzzle-and-talk with a bit of sneaking and combat. And a lot of running. Funny and dark and thoughtful, with some delightful antiquities nerdery. You are in a pocket of the Roman empire, after all! I didn't ultimately love the final reveal, but the journey there is a really fun time and I always appreciate a philosophy battle. Growing Up Raising sim. So similar to Chinese Parents that it's, politely, a clone, but with much nicer art and cleaner writing. The game feels disjointed, though. The various visual-novelish arcs related to your friends and interests are pretty intensive, but your parents never cohere as people and their requests never make much sense. The pressures in Chinese Parents are made very explicit; you are your parents' hopes and dreams. The parents in Growing Up appear to expect nothing of you as a whole, which leaves their requests feeling completely arbitrary and random. Which they are! But it feels less intentional. Henry Stickman Impressively stupid and arbitrary choose your own adventure, and all the very best choose your own adventures are stupid and arbitrary! This 'un knows exactly what it is: a horrible death simulator. Her Story Clever, intricate film database about a murder and the gal who done that murder, maybe. Glad I got this in before Immortality - you can see the roots of the longer film clip game. Also has a great musical number. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist Another life sim! Comparisons with Chinese Parents and Growing Up are inevitable, but this is going a different direction. Like Growing Up, it has intensively developed friend-and-interest arcs. Like Chinese Parents, there is a tension between child and parents that fuels the story. But this has heavier adventure and RPG elements. There are quests (if usually unmarked) and extensive exploration. It's a little didactic, but the weird alienness of the planet plus harrowing turns in the plot plus a heady metanarrative keep the game far from being a screed. Very interesting and replayable. Immortality Less accessible film database than Her Story -- trying to click on points of interest to match-cut to different clips is interesting, but it's harder to go back and review. Much longer than Her Story. There are, after all, three films + commentary in this one. And a very clever trick/twist, although that trick basically requires you play with a controller. Also has great musical numbers. Lost Ember Beautiful game where you play a psychopomp wolf able to possess other animals. Bogged down by controls that never feel quite right and, for my tastes, a far-too-human-centric story. The story's not ineffective, but it runs on forever and its themes feel muddy. It's somewhere between the somewhat strange trope I've seen in other indie games of "revolution is good but violence is bad" and maybe a "all life, not only humans, is sacred" story, but it doesn't quite cohere. The inciting incident is also too arbitrary and the oppressive pre-industrial civilization is thinly drawn other than "they sure like monuments". and "they are wrecking the environment". Both the environmental and the revolutionary message lack enough specificity to really be compelling. It is really nice to play a fish or a hummingbird (some of the animals with freer movement), but the animals are vehicles and tools to the extent that the "we are all one" idea, if intended, doesn't hit maybe as it should. It's largely the typical walking sim frame of "go 'x' steps until you get the next commentary or cutscene", which I don't find too engaging. The landscapes sure are super nice though. Luck Be a Landlord Your landlord keeps increasing your rent and slot machines are yer only hope. That's the game! Monster Prom Finally got around to the Monster Prom visual-novel-dating-sim franchise this year. It's charming and silly! Monster Camp Monster Camp is Monster Prom! But more hyper-focused on one character at a time! Which has pros and cons - it's a bit less silly, but you do get to know the character better! Monster Road Trip Monster Road Trip feels INDEED like the game the previous two games were leading up to. We've established our cast, now let's do Oregon Trail! Less focus on dating (it's really a side activity), more focus on hijinks in random places! Very silly! Although because the characters are now so established, suddenly, I have moral questions in this amoral game! Should a good boy werewolf be murdering people at Knife World?? Did the rest of the cast fool him into thinking they aren't real murders? He's not so bright?? I don't know?? Norco Really amazing visual novel-adventure-lite game. I played this near the beginning of the year, read Ducks at the end of the year. Both of these are about the economic opportunities that OIL provides on paper, and the environmental and personal degradation it enacts in truth. While Ducks is autobiography and Norco is surreal and heightened, they are both incredibly personal and devastatingly sad. It is worth calling out Norco's sideways sardonic sense of humor and how glorious the surrealism is. Peachvale Extremely short little thing about being queer in a small town. Well-written, no conclusion, really, day-in-the-life.  Pentiment Visual-novel-adventure, a historical fiction centered around a tumult of changes. Illuminated manuscripts in abbeys giving way to manuscripts created by secular craftsman (and here's, also, the printing press). Catholicism slowly threatened by Protestantism. Peasants losing what protections they have. People learning to READ. A very dense and interesting setting threaded through by a plotline that carries through several decades, involves a couple of murders, and a lot of THINKING. Art style is fantastic. So is the writing. Persona 5 Royale Some epic JRPG. You might have heard of it. It's immense, generous, incredibly stylish, big-hearted and thematically firm … ish. Persona sure runs into the trouble of wanting its grand, powerful statements about identity and exploitation and freedom, but also still wants to objectify women, be an adolescent boys’ fantasy, etc., etc.. But it does have a lot to say, and a lot of it well. The cast is delightful, and it takes quite a variety of gameplay and dungeon design to stay interesting for 120+ hours. Prose & Codes Fun letter substitution cyphers that highlight a bunch of cool old books on Project Gutenberg.  Return of the Obra Dinn What a wonderfully nasty puzzle box of deaths. Absolutely compelling art and weirdly compelling sound. I'm not sure I wholly get the overarching narrative, but I'm not sure I need to. Sometimes you're just cursed, mate. Don't fuck with the ocean. Roadwarden Text RPG. A tight, tense experience of being some poor person trying to fix a neglected road and reconnect isolated, mistrustful communities. Great world and character building, fantastic mood.  Strange Horticulture Puzzle game game with a shop management interface. Very tactile experience. Sorting your ever-growing collection of plants, messing with lenses, counting off squares on a map. Storytelling ladled out in drips while you go pluck plant 500 (which has, like all the others, its own name and a purpose). Fun and absorbing. ValiDate Gorgeous art, but incredibly didactic, and rooted in a morality system I don't quite understand. The gap of (little) judgement for the deadbeat dad character compared to (massive, interventional) judgement for the hot mom who goes to clubs to hook up baffled me. Is hooking up worse than ditching your kids? Is the idea that hot mom should know better? Is hooking up and/or dating bad if the other ladies' feelings get hurt? Are you supposed to be able to avoid feelings getting hurt if you are hot and mature? I don't know! Very confused. But man, that art. Zachtonics Solitaire Collection Played this collection of card games as far as I was able. I can one day conquer Shenzen Solitaire, I'm sure, but Fortune's Fool is beyond me. Tarot decks have tooooo many cards. You win, Zachtronics.

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Year End Wrap-ups

Why not. Here’s the first list. Games I played a lot of, but absolutely will not finish in the next week. Because they’re huge games.

cyberpunkdreams A Fallen London clone, i.e. a text RPG where the primary gameplay is clicking on storylets (i.e. "I am scouring the streets for resources") and slowly building up qualities and trading them for other qualities, i.e. a story-rich grind game. This certainly has a better balance of story-to-grind than the endless middle of Fallen London than I'm stuck on. It also does some interesting things with gender presentation and I'm not even 100% sure I hate how deliberate every major and many minor actions have to be (are you dressed appropriately to go to that place? Do you have enough bullets to do this thing?). It is, however, still a lot of grind and a lot of grind in a really aggressively unpleasant setting and a lot of grind in a game with permadeath. There's more than a seed of something really good here, but it's also kind of a drain to play in every way. Done with it again. Elden Ring Ah yes, the game that finally pushed me into the "oh, I can play difficult action RPGs" bucket and also, really, "I enjoy difficult action RPGs". I'm not great at playing on our PS5 and have just picked this up again on PC, the better to start it again with a somewhat-less magic-heavy build, and it's a fun and compelling game. Part of what makes it great is the horsie. Fantastic horsie. Fast as thought and jumps like a hare. Zipping across the map rather than careful, iterative progression is a joy and what makes this From Software game by far the most accessible. Kynseed A life sim more than a farming sim, and sort of a hodgepodge of systems at that. The narrative appears to be largely "uh, keep engaging with our systems and numbers will tick up", but it is enjoyable for all that. The combat is chunky and on the difficult side, and the pixel art is incredible and if you don't really feel like farming, it's a pretty small percentage of what you do. The mini-games -- well, they're trying to rebalance them. One day I may successfully make jam. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Second attempt's the charm, I guess. It's a marvelous game to wander around, but the horsie is not as good as in Elden Ring, which is a bit of a problem. On the other hand, glider. Wonderful glider. Get up high and go soaring over the landscape. There is also a plot which is engaging, it is, but I do honestly find any interruption to exploring the map a comparative chore. Monster Hunter Rise The ultimate kill-beautiful-monsters-to-make-pants simulator and it's a lot of fun with great designs. Some real pathos in killing these magnificent creatures, though. Humans-as-endurance predators. Sometimes hard to hear the frustrated, furious wail as I corner some great fur-or-feathered scaly thing in its den yet again. Nioh 2 Hard-as-shit, but more generous than a from software game in giving you tons of gear and anima-soul-bits. Colorful, too, palette of greens and reds, over-the-top storytelling that's still elliptical and hard to follow. You turn into a yokai but it helps less than you might think. :( A good time. Meditative in a strange way. Lots of weapon variety. also dress-up elements. Red Dead Redemption 2 The great cowboy life-sim and dress-up game where you do in fact have to shoot people sometimes and ruin your groove of dominos-playing, theater-watching, and sunset ambling. Should actually approach the plot again. Horsies are of course essential. Don’t leave home without one. Stardew Valley Finally dug into this 'un, but didn't quite complete a year of game time on the Switch. Gonna restart on PC with some mods to get the full-plus-extra experience now. I'm starting to sort of get the groove of farming sims, if I still don't understand why this particular one sits so high for so many people. Really like fishing mini-games, maybe?? Witcher 3 Wild Hunt I've played it before! Here I am playing it again. Turns out I forgot huge chunks of this huge-ass RPG with dozens and dozens of short stories appended to its main quest and it's a pleasure to revisit, even if I don't have any appreciation for the Bloody Baron storyline in This Year of Hells. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 I may still want it to be Xenoblade X, but I actually like this cast of 3, even if I do get less interested in the main plot as it continues (a common problem). The main antagonists are appealingly bonkers and making each settlement its own node with its own successive sidequests is a good touch. The landscape is beautiful and endless. I write about it and do want to go back to it. Perhaps after Harvestella??

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Old city builders

doing the thing where I’m playing some old games for a little bit to see how usable their UIs are. Got into some of the classic city builders. I will be playing more Emperor even if it likes to put its tutorials in multi-page pop-ups. I probably won’t be playing more Pharaoh because every time I move the mouse, the map jumps to one corner or the other. Emperor feels very much like a game that’s superseded it (same company and all).

I did enjoy that your residential buildings cannot level up if they are too close to fire stations, bazaars, granaries, essentially any functional building, OR a house of lower quality. The fastest way to get stalling residentials leveled up is to run about bulldozing crude huts and moving anything unsightly, like, apparently, fire stations. Something about people objecting this much to seeing a crude hut from their sturdy hut is kinda sadly amusing to me.

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Monster Hunter!!

Been messing around with Rise and started messing around again with World. I am no Monster Hunter expert. I played, like, 30 hours of Generations Ultimate and now like 40 hours of Rise. Novice numbers!! But enough hours to know World feels very different. Honestly, I don’t like a lot of those differences. The village feels too large; it’s a chore to explore. Turning in research and subquests is on one floor, your weaponry and armor on a different, and your canteen on yet another. I can’t even remember where the palicos hang, but that’s my fault on resuming an old game. I much prefer the classic layout of quests - “village” or solo here, and “hub” or multiplayer (but in my case, still solo) here. I don’t like having to “post” quests and set the participants down to one when I’m just hanging. But when I actually get out in the field, although I miss all the quality of life bits from Rise, the differences aren’t just irritating. The world is gorgeous. I don’t even mind that I have no idea where the creatures I’m hunting are. I love using vines to climb and swing. When a Great Jagras comes out of the undergrowth, it feels spectacular and sudden. There’s some wonder involved created by the environment, not just the monster design, and that is missing in Rise. The emergence! The long slow hunt. Rise still feels like the Monster Hunter game I’ll grab for a quick run at a monster, but the distinctness of World means it doesn’t just feel like an older, clumsier iteration

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WHELP, I guess I’m back then

Wanted to get back into slightly less half-assed reviewing anyway.

At the moment, I have a steam curator page at https://store.steampowered.com/curator/31516831/, but the character limit is quite strict, my dudes.

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[wickedbaggins]

Okay.

Putting aside whether or not James Gunn is deserving or not, or even putting aside the fascinating person who provoked the resurgence of this old tweet controversy, I think we need to start asking ourselves some hard questions.

1. What speech should you be fired for?

2. What speech should prevent you from being hired, and for what jobs?

3. Counting that the Internet preserves everything, is there a statute of limitations on how long a bit of speech will affect you? (No.)

4. What atonement is sufficient to cancel out ill-advised speech? It is not illegal to make a controversial tweet, but it can have profound ramifications (corporations often dislike controversy). What should be expected of a person before society can forgive a mistake? I know often the answer is “Never.” And often it is “immediately”. The difference between the two can be arbitrary.

5. Lastly, a warning. James Gunn will absolutely be fine. But a fireable tweet doesn’t have to be something in unusually bad taste. It can be a harsh reaction. See the ArenaNet firings. You can be fired for, say, being a loud activist. Or for being photographed wearing a work shirt at a party with alcohol. Or, say, for initially expressing bias against white people in agricultural work and have only that part of the video go viral (somehow, the part where you talk about overcoming that bias gets cut). We have no protections. We are exposed and this is scary. This has been scary. Remember that the tools that can take down figures you dislike can and are being used against people you do like. 

So where do we go from here? 

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criticism

What are movies for? What is art for?

I been following Film Crit Hulk for a long old time and I enjoy his columns, but I’m feeling an increasing gulf w/him as far as what art is for.

Dude thinks, and a lot of folk think, that art needs to be essentially instructive. That you must walk away from a movie in some way enriched. That the story logic/character logic must be the kind of well-crafted where you can point out an arc and point out motivations and map a point of change. Classic stuff, for sure, and we’ve been having this argument forever.

I got no beef with fine classic storytelling, but I do have a beef with a few paragraphs in this article: http://observer.com/2018/05/the-two-crucial-filmmaking-elements-causing-all-your-movie-feuds/

And I’m gonna point out a couple of lines in this article, regarding the appeal of J.J. Abrams and directors who maybe paint an absorbing, entertaining experience, but maybe aren’t the best at structuring stories:

“For this viewer, he could throw all logic and story sensibility to the wind precisely because it allows him to zone out and feel something and emote along with it…It is as fascinating an argument as I’ve ever seen for liking his work, but when I think about this verbiage I realize how much it sounds like the language of addiction. “

And this bugs me. I’m just gonna put it out there: This is hugely judgmental. What’s wrong with watching a movie experientially? What’s wrong with enjoying the texture, and bobbing along with the beats? What’s wrong with experiencing a movie like you might enjoy music or an art gallery that builds to nothing in particular? Some scenes thrill you and some bore you, and you take the good away and shrug at the bad. Even Film Crit Hulk speaks of the importance of imperfections to the character of a movie, but if a movie’s fault is it’s more texture than text, he can’t abide it and he’s suspicious of those who enjoy it. And that bugs me. That’s a huge set of movies and a huge set of people and I’m struggling to pinpoint concrete harm. We can, and FCH does, call it indulgence, but I ended up the fine progressive (fine progressive!) I am today because I am suspicious of undefinable harms.

Maybe I’m an an anarchist, but I don’t think that art that isn’t instructive is the equivalent of heroin. Art’s expression and not all expression ends up structured as it should be in the mind of God. I know we’re all looking for the sources of sickness in our society, I know we’re all standing at the movies with a pen of diagnosis and a doctor’s eye, but does every argument about art have to come down to: I think this element is good for us, and I think this element destroys us. 

Can we be so sure? Isn’t there also a risk in prescriptive criticism? I think criticism is an art form in itself, I think you can criticize any piece of art in any way you like, and art is as close to any religion I have. But I’m uncomfortable with dogma. I’m uncomfortable with such broad and exclusive purpose stated with the same certainty as if with the mouth of God. I’m uncomfortable with the forever struggle to establish authority. Enjoying a movie that doesn’t excel at character shouldn’t be, well, a sin, a sign of a deep flaw in the viewer’s character. I might even agree that movies that are firing on all story motivation cylinders are better movies. Just. It’s okay to be delighted without a lot of weight behind that delight. 

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reading ursula le guin always gives me hope.

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Movies of 2017

Alien: Covenant - For this fine, vicious sci-fi slasher film to work, you have to enjoy the journey of David the android and his goals of bloody perfection, ‘cause the humans aren’t written for empathy. I found it mostly a slog.

Baby Driver - A toe-tapping musical heist written to a beat. Terrific fun.

Beauty and the Beast - I found the CGI ugly and the songs thin, but Le Fou’s storyline was a sweet addition.

Blade Runner 2049 - Mesmerizingly beautiful.

Coco - There you are, Pixar. A soft-hearted weeper with good songs and lovely design.

The Dark Tower - How did you get Idris Elba as the gunslinger, and then foreground some kid as protagonist? Like King’s epic got chopped up and embedded in a bad knockoff of Neverending Story.

Dunkirk - A tense snapshot of a terrifying retreat. Does the job of trapping the audience, then letting them go.

Get Out - Social horror. For a couple of hours, you’re ‘that black guy’, a suburban alien among alien suburbanites. That is, unless you’re already that black guy.

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 2 - Shaggier and sadder than the first, uneven, but with some stunning sequences and some very good jokes.

Happy Death Day - The most adorable slasher movie. If you can repeat the day over and over again, you only really need one victim!

It - The clown is great. The expansion of Bev’s part is great. The depletion of Mike’s part is disappointing. It’s tense and a little scary, but is as much an 80s ‘kids together’ film as horror.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer - A bizarre, unnerving drama that takes the flat diction and posed emotion of The Lobster and ratchets it to a squirming high.

Kong: Skull Island - John C. Reilly is a treasure. Uh, there was a movie otherwise.

The Lego Batman Movie - Is it the best Batman? It may be the best Batman. It’s unfair to scatter jokes this deep.

Logan - The bodies eventually fall too thick and mean, but I am 100% for old Logan, old Professor X, and ferocious girl, all brittle together.

mother! - I am fascinated by the concept of God’s wife (whoever you want to see her as) as almost mute, endlessly shunted aside, and desperately, futilely trying to keep her house and life together while Man destroys everything. As domestic horror, it’s hair-raising, as religious horror, it’s merciless, but it goes on Very Long, and its tastes run sadistic. 

The Shape of Water - A lovely fable that is also del Toro getting to make an erotic Creature from the Black Lagoon movie that may win Best Picture. I salute his accomplishment.

Spider-Man: Homecoming - Everyone is very cute and the Vulture is a plausible villain with layers.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - What a delight. I am always down for more surrealism and character studies in my Star Wars. I owe this one an essay.

Thor Ragnarok - The Last Jedi might be the best of this year’s space operas, but this is a fine second. A beautiful, hilarious film, and Valkyrie is the GREATEST.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets - My big disappointment. It still has a few terrific sequences worthy of anyone’s wall. Perhaps unmitigated wonder was too much to ask!

Wonder Woman - A charming, heroic film that I found thematically muddled (can you punch war in the face or not? Are we even now ready to forgive us for WWII?)? But its high points are very nice, and Diana’s a good character.

Your Name - A sweet, engaging bodyswapping romance that happens to be showoffily animated. Please, give me all the showoffy animation in everything. 

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The Mind’s Eclipse

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Remember what you can control.

You cannot ensure victory, but you can choose not to surrender. You can choose not to cede the field.

I was thinking of Anita Sarkeesian today. I’ve had my criticisms of her work - this and that strikes me as a little gender essentialist, this and that may be reducing the complexity of what’s under critique. But I have to admire her immensely because she keeps going and keeps producing under immense scrutiny and torrents of abuse. And while one can quibble about the details, her thesis was proven hugely correct by the very reaction to it.

And, see, I’ve also been thinking about Dragon’s Lair. You come to it as an adult (and, uh, as a Don Bluth fan) and the princess is a harmless bit of cheesecake, but this was a game played by kids, kids who fervently wanted that princess, who were playing for that princess. Did Bluth mean any harm? Nah. Should we regulate cheesecake (or beefcake)? Nah. The trouble is when everything, just about everything, is screaming the same stuff at you. When you look on every game box (or even most game boxes) and it’s all selling the same kind of fantasies in triplicate, and you eat it and you drink it and in sufficient quantities, it turns into poison.

The insidious thing is you may not even know you’ve been poisoned. 

Different stories are worth fighting for, tooth and nail and scream, if only to dilute what’s in the water, what’s in the air. There’s nothing wrong with a fine, exposed id - I love Devilman, but it’s also too strained and strange to fit one old, iterated fantasy, one old certainty that you are owed and you will own. We need to see each other clearly. And that takes a world of stories. A wild world of stories.

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Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime, Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat That we must change for Heav'n, this mournful gloom For that celestial light? Be it so, since he  Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid What shall be right: fardest from him is best Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail  Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.  What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less then he Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:  Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.

https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_1/text.shtml

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can someone please explain to me jojo’s bizarre adventure.

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Gasoline Lollipops "Soul Mine"

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“Keep writing. Keep grinding. Send to presses that are publishing work you give a shit about. Don’t water down your voice because you think that’s what it takes to get a book. My homie Chiwan Choi asks us, “Why sell out in a zero-dollar industry?” It might sound corny, but be your whole self on the page. There isn’t much out there more terrifying to the powers that be than a bunch of people being their whole damn selves on the page.”

—Joseph Rios, in “The Whole Self: Our Thirteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the Jan/Feb issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (2018), read the complete profile at pw.org!

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Devilman Crybaby (2018) - ALL RAP FREESTYLE CLIPS (english sub)