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December 2025

Created: 2025-12-31 (15:43:00)
Status: completed

Happy new year! There’s a little something for everyone in this newsletter, assuming everyone likes ballads, comics, interactive fiction and/or critical writing about pornography.

Updates

My plan at the moment is to go back and fix the more neglected pages on this site. Most times it’s not that there is nothing else to add to these pages, it’s that for whatever reason (distraction, laziness) after initially setting them up, I never went back and added the stuff written out for them.

I have added some reflections on computer hardware and early web-media to the page on web spaces, which for the past six months was not much more than a single paragraph complaining about crypto-freaks using the phrase spatial web. Still a lot more to come.

I also went back and made some quality-of-life improvements to my jam game, Eidolon, adding saves, the option to change the text size, and fixing a couple typos.

Continuing my long-running practice of moving between social media platforms around every three months, I once again have an Are.na profile. Common consensus seems to be that Are.na is like a pretentious Pinterest. For me it recalls the fun old days of del.icio.us and FFFFound. So follow me to see, um, cool bookmarks?

Mountain valleys inaccessible until Autumn

Digital gardening

There is a lot more waiting in the wings, to go on this site. In most of the newsletters from the last six months, I have promised to write more about specific books and games. Again, usually there are already reams of writing ready to go, but my problem is finding the time to actually type them up, edit them and post them online!

Putting any writing up used to be a minor ordeal for me. I have a lot less weird energy about it these days, but can still get overly serious about things and forget that the writing on my site is mostly about, like, videogames and Pokémon cards. It isn’t as though my essays about the dialogue system in Morrowind or the secret code system in Animal Crossing need to represent a culmination of years of hard scholarship.

Thinking about this site as a digital garden, or as a ruin, is a nice ameliorative to this kind of paranoid thinking. The point of a garden, after all, is that it needs to be cultivated over time. Parts of it will inevitably be neglected and weedy (this is at least my experience of gardening anytime I lived anywhere that had one). Pretty blooms and overgrowth in one season have to be deadheaded and pruned the next–if not pulled up entirely.

This seems like a more forgiving approach to putting stuff online, to accept that the writing may never be fully resolved. It at least makes things easier for me! Whether it makes the writing any fun to read is an open question.

All this to say, my aim is to publish more, and worse, writing up in the new year.

Fog and dead branches

Marginalia

Canberra at this time of year turns into pretty much a ghost town as everyone flees to the larger cities, or to the coast, or overseas to cooler climates. It is less pronounced than, say, a decade ago, when the whole city closed up and there was nothing to do but drive aimlessly around with friends, eat at McDonald’s and get drunk… but things still quieten down a lot.

I adore the city when it is like this. I’m too old and uncool now to roam and drink, so instead have spent the month catching up on reading. To start, I was recommended Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin and very happily disappeared into it for a week.

Dean transposes characters from the traditional Scottish border ballad to an American college campus in the early seventies, which turns out to be a rich basis for exploring early adulthood and anxieties around reproductive choice. Situating Tam Lin, a ballad that revolves around someone getting pregnant out of wedlock, in the years immediately before and following the Roe v. Wade decision, is an act of genius.

Aside from that, the novel is full of allusions to, and reflections on, Shakespeare and Milton and obscure renaissance tragedies. I’m a little jealous. I might have stayed with my literature major as an undergraduate if the other students had been quoting The Worm Ouroboros and the biography of Samuel Johnson, too. And aside from all that, it turns out to be a faithful retelling of Tam Lin itself. It’s brilliant.

In loose connection, I have been rereading The Wind in the Willows. Not much to say about this one that has not been said more thoughtfully elsewhere. I am struck, every time, at how wonderfully it moves between moments of beauty and poignancy, and pure farce. Rare is the writer who can directly follow a chapter like “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” with “Toad’s Adventures.”

Recommendation: accompany reading this book with In The Willows by Louie Zong.

Finally, a complete tone shift. I finally read Putty Pygmalion by Lonnie Garcia. A quote on the back of describes this as a comic about “being held hostage in someone else’s sadness,” and… well, yes. The dynamic between Derryl, a lonely radish, and Peter, the rabbit-man he has crafted out a banned children’s play-doh toy is deeply imbalanced from the start, and only deteriorates from there.

The majority of the story takes place in Derryl’s home, which is represented though dimly lit photos of a doll house. The effect is claustrophobic, and gets progressively creepier as Peter learns more about Derryl and the circumstances surrounding his own creation. Agh, this comic is so, so good! Read it!

Memories of satanic transmission infrastructure

Around the grounds

Returning to the web spaces essay has sent me down some rabbit holes the last month. Most of them are books, journals and media from the early era of hypertext, so, not exactly current. But… did you know there was a videogame version of Serial Experiments Lain? It was developed concurrent to the anime but never got released outside of Japan. I dimly knew it existed but figured, since it was never translated, I would probably never actually play it.

Turns out someone has both translated the game and ported it to the web! Turns out they did this like four years ago! I had no idea! I have been poking around with it and so far found it wonderfully incomprehensible, even in translation. It’s like experiencing the show for the first time all over again. Life is full of unexpected gifts.

An upshot of my brief time on Bluesky was that, because it coincided with the Itch and Steam adult content takedowns, I started following a bunch of articulate people pushing back against pay-pros and puritans. Turns out a lot of them also write intelligently about adult games themselves, too!

Bigg (NSFW) has opened the floor for pitches to the fourth Adult Analysis Anthology, which collects long-form writing about pornographic games. The pitch sets out a (non-exhaustive) list of possible subjects including primers for adult game development, reviews, anecdotes and “tender accounts of players’ personal relationships with porn games.”

I’ve been reading, off and on, through the three published Anthologies and enjoying the diversity of the writing. The writers are clearsighted about the fact that the majority of porn games are bigoted, misogynistic, generic and/or not especially fun to play, and willing to point out the flaws in even the ones they enjoy. But what comes through is a lot of care for the genre, and a sense that porn games could be and should be better, and that the writing about these games should be markedly better, too.

It is really refreshing, honestly, to read essays about porn by people who are unabashedly into porn, many of whom themselves make porn and adult games. All three issues of the Adult Analysis Anthology are on sale as a bundle for $9, for the next half-decade apparently, which is great value for a hell of a lot of good writing.

Wow fuck oops this was a long newsletter! This is the end though! Honestly! Happy 2026!

Concrete foundations litter the valley floor

References

Endmatter

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