2026-01-07 02:00:00
If you were to see me in person, no doubt the first thing that would come to mind would be “now that guy is a dancer!”
Sadly, you’d be mistaken. But I sure do like looking at dancers, especially in movies. My intense love of movie musicals like The Band Wagon, Singin’ in the Rain, and An American In Paris was yet another one of those things that went blissfully unquestioned in all the years before I came out. But the big movie musicals have mostly gone out of favor, despite the efforts of Steven Spielberg, and when they do pop up, they’re usually emphasizing the animation or the CGI or Lin-Manuel Miranda’s wordplay, instead of live humans dancing.
So even though I’m not a huge fan of Jungle as musicians, I do appreciate when their videos pop up in my YouTube recommendations, because they’re all showcases for a recurring troupe of contemporary dancers. I think my favorite is “Keep Me Satisfied,” because the choreography feels to me like a combination of Michael Jackson’s and Gene Kelly’s. The guys at the beginning are doing poses right out of Kelly’s “gotta dance” ballet.
At least, that’s how I see it. I’m pretty much completely ignorant of contemporary dance. Which is probably a huge part of why I like watching it. Because it’s inherently expressive, and because I don’t even have the language to describe it, I can’t overthink it or over-analyze it. It either fails to connect with me at all, or it knocks me flat on my ass.
Which is precisely what happened with “It’s Not That Serious,” directed and choreographed by Ricky Ubeda and set to the song “Sympathy” by Vampire Weekend.
I saw a clip of it on Instagram, starting at the bit where the man and the woman are looking into each other’s eyes, and all of a sudden, a woman in a sweater vest and neckerchief pops up in the foreground and appears to be doing choreography from an entirely different type of video. Is this some kind of Tik Tok1 thing where people are dancing in front of music videos or something?
Anyway, I was immediately captivated by that short clip, and I had to find the rest of it. What is this for? Is it from a movie? Apparently not; as far as I can tell, it exists only to be awesome. At the time I’m writing this, I first saw it about 3 hours ago, and I’ve already watched it around 6,000 times. My husband — who had to suffer through my obsession with the Kenzo World video starring Margaret Qualley — came upstairs and asked, “uh oh, is there a new earworm?”
I don’t even pay much attention to clothes in videos, but I’m obsessed with what everybody’s wearing in this one, like they’re all from some international prep school for only the hottest children of diplomats. I love every single thing about it, is what I’m saying.
And from what little I know about dance, this video seems to have all of it. Modern dance to hip hop to boxing to Bollywood and probably a dozen styles I could never hope to recognize. The only frame of reference I have is the one time I saw Punchdrunk perform “The Drowned Man” in London, and while it was mostly lost on me as immersive theater, seeing the dancers right there in front of me performing with such precision and energy after 2+ hours took my breath away.
I’m glad I don’t know enough about it to understand it, because every once in a while I just get to see people pouring themselves into the creation of something like this, and it makes me think, “No, this world is a good place, actually.”
2026-01-05 10:59:01
Today on Spectre Collie: shameless objectification of professional actors!
Well, not really shameless; it is embarrassing to realize how much you’ve been programmed by the media, and how you’ve still got these hard-coded ideas of what’s supposed to constitute “hot,” even though they really don’t make any sense at all.
The thing that prompted this realization was watching Game Night. I mentioned that its self-aware asides felt like vestiges from the early 2000s, unnecessary in something that was already working extremely well as a contemporary screwball comedy. But I didn’t mention the part that felt even more dated, which was the sub-plot about the friend Ryan, played by Billy Magnussen.
His storyline is pretty charming. He brings a date to game night who’s supermodel hot but vapid, if not outright dim-witted. We quickly learn that none of his relationships last much longer than a week, and he’s always bringing a new woman to the party, and they’re all supermodel hot and vacuous and basically interchangeable. Eventually, he brings a coworker played by Sharon Horgan as a platonic date, to be his ringer so he can actually win a game for once. Over the course of the night, he learns that the problem with his relationships has always been that he’s trying to be the smart one, when he’s actually the pretty but dim-witted himbo.
The thing that immediately stood out to me was how old-fashioned the stereotype of “hot, dumb girlfriend” was. Superman did it with its version of Eve Teschmacher, but most of its characters deliberately have the corniness turned up to maximum, to capture the Silver Age comic book feel. And Game Night calls back to old-fashioned screwball comedies, so it feels similar there. “This is a deliberate throwback, instead of anything trying to feel contemporary.”
It felt a little jarring in Game Night, though, since it was throwing the image of “this is the kind of super hot woman a shallow guy would be attracted to” into a movie where Rachel McAdams, Kylie Bunbury, and Sharon Horgan are presented as “baseline attractive.” Not “plain,” but more that they’re so normal that it’s not worth commenting on.1
Where Game Night does comment on it is with the men. In addition to Magnussen being the “dumb, hot one,” Jason Bateman’s character is repeatedly contrasted against his brother played by Kyle Chandler, who is cooler, wealthier, and much, much hotter.2 Meanwhile, the whole storyline with Lamorne Morris’s character is that he feels insecure when he finds out his wife (Bunbury) slept with a high-profile celebrity while they were on a break.
Even though the movie trots out stereotypically hot women for effect, I didn’t pick up any sense that it was saying, “these women are so hot that you should feel bad about yourself.” Even Horgan’s character, who’s set up the most to be insulted by Billy’s not being attracted to her, doesn’t seem to care in the slightest.
My gut reaction when seeing Billy’s girlfriends was that it was odd for the movie to present these women as unusually hot when Rachel McAdams was standing right there. But thinking back on the roles McAdams has played (that I’m familiar with), she’s gone from glammed way up to way down all throughout her career. Early on, she was the stereotypical, impossibly hot blonde; she was the head of the Mean Girls. In the upcoming Send Help, she’s the frumpy office worker who gets ignored or dumped on by everyone including her terrible boss. In between, she’s been at just about every level of glamour from unattainable ideal girlfriend to relatable ideal girlfriend to femme fatale to relatable housewife and mom.
McAdams seems to treat it all as drag, which is something I think Scarlett Johansson does really well, too. Being super-glamorous movie star (like in Asteroid City) is something she can do, but she never seems all that interested in making that her whole thing.
It’s funny to me that there was so much attention paid to Avengers marketing concentrated on showing Black Widow as a sex object — and for good reason, because they totally did — but in my mind, the MCU has gone even harder in objectifying its male characters. I’m sure I’m not the only person who saw the teasers for the Thor movies, highlighting every single curve of Chris Hemsworth’s physique, and thought, “is it okay for me to be looking at this in public?!” And the actual movies famously linger on shots of Chris Evans, coming out of the Super Serum chamber or grabbing onto a helicopter, with only slightly more subtle horniness than all the shots of Grace Kelly in Rear Window.
It seems increasingly rare overall for movies to call out how hot a character is, or at least compared to how it was in my formative movie-going years. And interestingly, the examples I can think of are evenly distributed between men and women. Outside of the MCU: Emma Stone gawking over a shirtless Ryan Gosling in Crazy, Stupid, Love. Jon Hamm having an entire storyline in 30 Rock about how he’s so hot, he doesn’t have to be smart or actually good at anything. The recent movie Eternity, which had just about every single character saying repeatedly and at length how impossibly good-looking Callum Turner is.
For the ladies, I can only think of Barbie, where everyone is unusually beautiful, and still Greta Gerwig via Helen Mirren’s narrator comments on how incongruous it is to see Margot Robbie saying that she doesn’t feel pretty. And the Jumanji movies, where Karen Gillan is presented as a hyper-idealized, sexy, bad-ass video game character. Both of them feel like explicit or implicit commentary about objectification of women, and both of them also have male characters who are even more explicitly objectified. Look at how hot and ripped The Rock, Ryan Gosling, and Simu Liu are. Just look at ’em!
The one that stood out the most to me was Emily Blunt in Edge of Tomorrow. The movie introduces her character — over and over and over again, since it’s about time loops — in mid-workout. It’s so over the top that I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear old-timey striptease music and a crowd of men cheering and hooting. And it was difficult for me to process, after decades of movies and TV explicitly presenting actors that might as well have arrows pointing at them with signs that read THIS IS HOT, to see a Real Actress
being shown in much the same way as the Barb Wire poster. My lizard brain was saying “you’re showing me a 9 and telling me I’m looking at a 15.”3
While I’m in the middle of a blog post about objectifying actors, I do want to stress that I’m talking about how Hollywood presents people, not my actual opinions, or to suggest that there is any objective truth in hotness ratings. Ultimately, my main point is that it’s almost entirely bullshit. And only “almost entirely,” since a big part of the entire point of those scenes was to show how much body-building prep work Blunt had done for the part.
But the part that makes Edge of Tomorrow interesting to me is that while the scenes are over-the-top, they’re not gratuitous. You learn that Blunt’s character was previously caught in the same type of time loop as our protagonist, and the experience turned her from someone who was presumably a rank-and-file soldier, into a total bad-ass super-hero. I suspect that casting Blunt against type was the whole point.
And I suspect that I’ve spent so long being trained how to “read” relative attractiveness in movies and television that I got hung up on it and missed the point entirely.
The overall impression I get is that Hollywood has very slowly, almost imperceptibly changed since the days of Weird Science. I’m purposefully ignoring a ton of trash, and pretty much every single thing on reality TV, but among the stuff that I think still has relevance to art and popular culture:
Which seems like a kind of progress, I guess? I hope it’s obvious that I’m in no way claiming that Hollywood has Fixed All The Problems, and it’s not every bit as crass, sleazy, misogynistic, and manipulative as it’s always been. But it does feel like the bar has been slightly nudged upwards; it’s harder to get away with the same kind of objectification that was prevalent in popular movies during my teens and twenties.
And it seems rarer to have big stars who can coast on their looks. Glamor feels more like something that actors can put on or take off as they like.
As evidence for that bold claim: Ana de Armas, Florence Pugh, and Sydney Sweeney are three of the most objectively, flawlessly beautiful women I’ve ever seen. And they all have managed — by being extraordinarily talented — to take a variety of roles that depend on more than their being in full-glam mode. Contrasted to actors like Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman, who had to take parts that deliberately obscured or downplayed their appearance before people seemed to take them seriously as actors, instead of just beautiful.
If my theory is true, and Hollywood is gradually getting better at not pointing at actors and screaming at the audience, this person is a 10, there’s a sinister side effect. That baseline level of “Hollywood ugly” is still active and likely will continue to be active forever, so we’re left with an unrealistic level of what constitutes a 7. If you’re casting Rachel McAdams and Jason Bateman as average enough to be unremarkable, you’re perpetuating the idea that those of us who always considered ourselves average have been actually been at best a 3.
One of the most commonly seen and savagely mocked cliches from the movies of my formative years: the mousy, bookish woman who takes off her glasses and lets down her hair and… gasp!… she looks like a movie star!
It’s mocked for good reason, because it’s almost entirely the product of male filmmakers reducing women to nothing more than what men find attractive. The gross “That’s What Makes You Beautiful” syndrome. I still remember catching a scene from some movie that tried to pass off Ginnifer Goodwin as “the plain, insecure one,” and I yelled at the television, “you go straight to hell” and angrily switched it off.
But I do have to wonder how much, if any, of that cliche could get “taken back” and turned into something positive. Because if you can somehow remove the sleaze from it, and the core idea that appearance is the last, crucial, step towards actual self-worth, you’re left with an idea that we don’t see enough of.
That it is all surface bullshit, and some of the most beautiful people in media look like that only because a ton of people work hard to make them look like that, and it’s something they can put on or take off at will. Reject the bit where the male lead sees the woman take her glasses off and realizes she’s perfect for him, and just think about the bit where the glamorous movie star is only a pair of glasses away from looking like what passes for average in Hollywood.
I’m never going to look like the Kens in Barbie, but then I really enjoy never spending any time in a gym, so it feels like it comes out even. And any time I remember I’m about the same age as Jon Hamm, it’s slightly reassuring to remember that even he doesn’t look like Jon Hamm all the time. Which is less healthy than appreciating that none of it matters in the slightest if you’re not making a living based on your appearance, but I’m a fundamentally insecure person who occasionally needs a little bit of shallow pettiness to get by.
But in terms of thinking about how media works, it’s interesting to see an industry largely built on glamour having to reassess and redefine how important glamour is.
2026-01-02 10:04:02
We spent the week of Christmas at a hotel in midtown Atlanta, situated right between the house where Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind, and an intersection with pride flags painted in the crosswalks.
I knew that Atlanta has a large population of LGBT people, and it has for decades, but it was still jarring to see such an open, even mundane, display of pride every morning, in the middle of a place that I’ve always associated with repression. Shouldn’t that kind of thing remain safely contained within Little Five Points, at least?
Inside the hotel itself, there was little indication of place; it all looked like you could be at any mid-to-high-end hotel in any American city at Christmas time. Except for inside the bathroom, where there were two pieces of digital collage artwork (which I assume were in every room), combining photos of things that uniquely signify Atlanta: the Fox theater, Atlanta Falcons tickets, a pop top from a bottle of Coke, etc. One of them had the images on top of repeated text reading “Georgia on my mind,” which is fine, and “The city in the woods,” which is bizarre. I spent the first 25 years of my life living within an hour of Atlanta, and I never, ever heard it called that by anyone, ever.
But it was still familiar, in a way, since for as long as I’ve been alive, Georgia has been weirdly over-eager to make up stuff to be proud of. Why not pick “the city has an awful lot of trees?” Really it’s not that much weirder than building your cultural identity around soda, or pretending that people in the southeast are invested in professional sports anywhere near the level they’re invested in college football. And I mean, there’s not a lot to latch onto that isn’t problematic.
Especially for those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, it often felt like we’d been handed a heritage along with a shrug and a billion asterisks attached to it. You basically had three options:
It’s always seemed like a lot of work, trying to maintain some small level of performative Georgianess, just to have the feeling of being from somewhere. The alternative is being unmoored, a kind of blandly generic American. Is that what people from Delaware feel like all the time?
Even though I did live within an hour of Atlanta for the first 25 years of my life, we rarely went inside the city limits. We always lived in the suburbs, as the circles of white flight radiated outwards, and going into the city was either dangerous, or a nightmare to drive. The former was hugely overblown, even in the 70s and 80s, the product of white suburbanites being generally afraid of cities. The latter has always been the case, and the Atlanta area is still a nightmare to drive, even worse than anywhere I’ve been in LA.1
I’ve seen a lot more of the city as a visitor, and the overwhelming impression I keep getting every time we go back is “inauthentic.” Likely at least partly due to the fact that we tend to stick to touristy areas, but also inescapable. Playing to some made-up idea of what The South is supposed to be like. Like a hack stand-up comedian doing a “white people are like this, but black people are like this” bit, where the stereotypes are either impossibly dated, or just bizarre and completely unrelatable.2
But over this last trip, I realized that everything that I tend to think of as “inherently Georgian” is made-up bullshit, too. Not just in the sense that all culture is made up, but in the sense that my home state has a very long history of clinging to stuff that’s just fake. All of the “Lost Cause” bullshit from the Daughters of the Confederacy. The controversy over removing the Confederate flag from the Georgia state flag, even though it had been only added in the first place as a protest against the Civil Rights movement.
There’s long been a cynical inauthenticity to all of it, like people desperate to preserve a heritage built entirely on revisionist history. Even at its most charitable, it’s clinging to an overly romanticized version of a past that most of us don’t actually even remember.
After all, if cultural identity were actually based on cultural impact, then our hotel should’ve been filled with pictures of Outkast and the movie industry. Both hip hop and film production have been Georgia’s greatest cultural contributions this century, but the city and state both seem to be stuck selling themselves with peaches and sweet tea and biscuits and remnants of a 160-year-old war that our side lost.
It was odd coming from Los Angeles to Atlanta, knowing that the city where I live is constantly giving me reminders of the glitz and glamour of the movies, while the city where I’m from is where the movies are actually being made. But it’s also not surprising, since the reason Georgia has been attracting so much production3 comes down to tax breaks and lack of identity, two things that don’t often come up in tourist brochures.
More and more often, I’ll see a movie and only realize after the fact that it was filmed in Georgia, since it’s been Vancouverized. It’s been used for decades to represent “Any City, USA,” or at least any city in the eastern half of the US, and the productions almost never take advantage of any of the things that make Georgia towns and cities unique. My own home town has a “historic” old town area, which was used for filming a TV series… but only after they re-did it to look like New Orleans.
Which is all a long, meandering train of thought leading me back to pride flag crosswalks in midtown Atlanta. Sure, they’re every bit as performative as painting “y’all” in huge cheugy letters on the wall of your Southern Fusion Cuisine restaurant, or for that matter, painting the stars and bars on your truck. The difference, of course, is that the performance actually means something, and even more importantly, that it’s not aspirational. It represents the way things really are, not the way we want them to be.
Most obviously, it was a reminder to reject the perception that it’s unsafe to be gay in Atlanta, even though I spent most of my life convinced that it was. And more significantly, to reject the idea that this is some modern invention, the result of a ton of LGBT people moving into the city. They’ve always been there; the only recent development is that they’re more free to acknowledge it. The pride flag inherently symbolizes rejecting assumptions about the way things are, and accepting that you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.
And then more significantly than that, seeing the crosswalks kept making me think “oh, this hotel is in the gay neighborhood.” Which is itself an outdated notion. I was reminded of the Castro in San Francisco, which feels like a gay theme park, full of all the flags and signifiers of “where all the gays are,” but too expensive for most of the city’s gay people to actually live there.
The boundary is mostly imaginary. Useful as a sign of visibility, an acknowledgement that “you’re not alone,” but not a real border of any significance. I remembered years ago, while we were in Piedmont Park in Atlanta, my then-fiancé asked a passing family to take a photo of us kissing under a photo op with mistletoe, and I was mortified, but of course the family did it with no hesitation, and asked us to go back and kiss again so they could get a better shot. Meanwhile, the only place I’ve ever had strangers yell the f-slur at me was in the gay haven of San Francisco, California.
And as long as we’re breaking down fake, outdated notions, why not dispense with all of them? A lot of the things I know to be true about Georgia and Atlanta specifically are based entirely on things I heard from my parents, who lived and/or worked in the city for decades before I was born; and other white suburbanites through the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Even if my assumptions were true at one point — and that’s a pretty big if — then they’re almost certainly out of date and irrelevant to now.
Over the past few years, such a big deal has been made over “turning Georgia purple.” I’ve always had an image of the state as being islands of progressive Democrats in Atlanta and a little bit in Athens, surrounded by a sea of repressive Republicans. But as with every other place in the United States, there’s a spectrum of opinions and viewpoints everywhere.
I never in a million years would’ve expected my actual hometown, outside of Atlanta, to be predominantly Democratic, and yet that’s exactly how they voted the previous election. Realistically, that’s because the demographics have shifted, and more non-whites have settled there; it’s not as if a bunch of conservative, small-town white people were suddenly convinced to change their minds. But even that is still clinging to the notion of borders and demographics and voting blocks, instead of people.
It all made me realize just how much my thinking has been poisoned by politics over the past couple of decades. The media dividing everyone up into districts and states and even wide geographical areas that we can all understand: this is what southerners are like, this is what The Heartland believes, these are the types of people who live in urban areas.4 Even in the brief periods when we get a respite between campaigns and fund-raising requests, it’s so thoroughly infected the ways we think about each other that we assume it extends to culture and everyday life as well.
Over the past ten years — okay, 20 — okay, maybe more like 55 — it’s felt harder and harder to envision a way forward. It’s easy to have high-minded, vague ideas about unity and progress, but the specifics are where I get hung up; how do you show grace to the people making inexcusable decisions, enabling the people doing irreparable harm?
Remembering that “we’re all just people,” and “there are more good guys than bad guys” and the like are fine as mantras to get you through the day, but how do you act on any of it? How do you push for unity without regressing to a place where you’re just forgiving, excusing, or even enabling the perpetuation of evil?
I don’t claim to have all the answers, but one thing I’ve realized is that my respect for politicians and politics in general has been chipped away to the point of non-existence5, but I’ve just shrugged and left it at that. Maybe a good first step is to ask myself: if I hate the cynicism, insincerity, and selfishness of politics so much, why do I still think of things in those terms? Why am I still clinging to ideas about what people and places are like, which were developed decades ago specifically to win an election, based on facts that are no longer relevant, assuming they were ever true in the first place? How about we all stop thinking like politicians and go back to thinking and behaving like human beings?
2025-12-31 02:00:00
This week, thousands of people will gather and direct their attention towards the One Times Square building to celebrate as its ball drops. Which has always seemed pretty intrusive, if you ask me.
I remember feeling extremely awkward and self-conscious all through my teens. It’d be hard for me to imagine a bigger nightmare than what Peter Brady had to go through: forced to join all of his siblings in a recording studio, with some middle-aged recording engineers along with his mom and housekeeper all watching on happily, as they all sang a song about how his display of secondary sexual characteristics. But the monsters in charge of The Brady Bunch turned it into the catchy “Time to Change” and forced him to go through it again and again.
Sitcoms were always pulling stuff like that. I vividly remember an episode of The Cosby Show where the audience laughed at Theo not knowing how to shave. Not cool, audience. A less embarrassing rite of passage would’ve been to have Cliff giving Theo tips on dating women and no wait scratch that forget I said anything. I get that it’s supposed to reassure kids that it’s all perfectly natural — as Greg Brady1 said, every boy has a man inside.
But it’s hard to make the transition from Boyz II Men, and it’d be easier without everybody staring and pointing. Speaking of difficult transitions: it’s also hard to say goodbye to yesterday, but that’s what everybody’s going to have to do on January 1st. Somehow I feel like it won’t be that difficult to say good riddance to 2025, though.
2025-12-24 03:00:00
“Don’t put all your hopes into a headset, Chuck,” I hear the voice saying. “It’ll break your heart every time.” And I get that, imaginary voice, but this time is different.
The thing that stood out to me more than anything else with Valve’s announcement of new Steam hardware in early 2026 wasn’t that any of it was some mind-blowing vision of the future. It was that it was all so practical. It seems like every choice they made was the right one, both for customers and for Valve’s bottom line.1
The Steam Frame headset was the part that most interested me, as somebody who was absolutely dead-set convinced that VR games would be the future, who’s been disappointed as the years pass and that keeps turning out not to be the case at all. It gives me the vibe of people who’ve been burned before on the typical release cycle of a VR headset: initial excitement, waning interest as the friction gets to the point of making it not worth the effort, and eventually wondering where exactly you last left the thing and whether the batteries in the controller have corroded.
A while ago, I was having an online conversation with a friend, and he made the perfectly valid point that if VR was ever going to take off, the Quest 2 would’ve done it. Facebook/Meta was in a unique place when they released it, both having Croesus-level stockpiles of money and a boss who was intent on launching Second Life As Global Marketplace.
Even if you were only mildly curious about VR, the Quest 2 was priced at a point that was not that much more than an impulse purchase. It’s got an unprecedented install base (according to Qualcomm via Wikipedia, at least 10 million units were sold as of November 2021). But even that level hasn’t seemed to convince enough people that VR as a medium is worth caring about.
There have been several successful games targeting the Quest, but not the huge, must-have title that will generate a big enough wave of interest to finally lift VR out of its niche.
Apple’s Vision Pro was never going to sell at huge numbers, because it wasn’t intended to. It was pretty clearly intended to be the first step into expanding VR and AR into a much wider audience beyond people interested in games. The tech in it is amazing, but the idea was to establish a platform that could eventually sell at iPad-level numbers (even if not iPhone-level), once the tech inevitably caught up with the ambitions of the first model, and it became lighter and affordable.
But that focus on making it a “lifestyle product” ended up doing even more harm than the price, in my opinion. It’s way too cautious about doing anything “too immersive” or allowing direct interaction with digital objects; its AR tracking tech that’s already ground-breaking on the iPhone is hobbled on the headset, probably because of overheating; it’s too expensive to attract developers interested in making a wide range of stuff; and it’s not exceptionally good at much besides watching movies. If you’re not that interested in watching a Metallica concert or walking across a canyon on a tightrope and feeling like you’re really there, then there’s not much for you.
And the PSVR 2 kept the focus on games, and it was pitched as an accessory for a device where players likely already had an extensive library. But it wasn’t backwards compatible with PSVR games, and it wasn’t great for playing flat-screen games on a virtual screen (I didn’t even know whether that was an option until I just did a search, since I’d never heard any comment about it), and it didn’t attract much interest from developers wanting to make a standout VR experience for it. It was positioned more as a new platform instead of an accessory for the PS5. Plus, it required a cord; sometimes the most boring things cause the biggest problems.
So just in terms of positioning, I’m optimistic about the Steam Frame:
That last point is pretty important, because it eliminates the “wait… what’s the catch?” hesitation. A friend of mine dismissively described the Steam Machine as “a vanity project,” but I think that’s both apt and complimentary for the Steam Frame as well.
Years and years ago, some people at Valve decided that VR was really cool and that more should be done to make it consumer-friendly, and it’s been a going concern in the company ever since. They do it because they like it, and they can afford to keep doing it. So they don’t need to establish it as a whole new platform, or a flagship product for a future vision of online services, but just as another way to play games in your Steam library.
It’s not even that they sell both the razors and the blades. They’ve made a metric asston of money selling the blades, and they can sell the razors for a little bit of profit as well.2
Which might seem like it’s only beneficial to Valve, but their “hey, it might not ever have a huge audience, but why not be the best at it, anyway?” approach to VR resulted in Half-Life: Alyx, so I think it’s working.
For as long as I can remember, VR devotees have been saying “sure, tech demos and small experiences are really neat and show the potential, but as soon as a AAA-caliber VR game is released, that’s when the medium is really going to take off!” Half-Life: Alyx is that.
And the medium didn’t really take off as a result, but I never got the impression that that was ever the intention. It was clearly a showcase for the Index controllers, but it didn’t require them. And it does require Steam VR, but that’s freely available to anybody with a Windows machine. It was never pitched as a killer app for the Index, or even for Steam, really. It felt more like the killer app for the general concept of VR games.
It’s worth pointing out that it’s structured as individual chapters in a connected story, giving the player natural stopping points that don’t feel like interruptions. The idea of “a huge, sprawling, AAA-caliber VR game” sounds good until you remember that for anybody but the most hard-line VR devotees, it gets pretty tiresome wearing a headset for more than a half hour or so at a time. I don’t want a VR experience that will absorb me for hours; I want something that I can play for less than an hour at a time and think, “that was pretty bad-ass.”
So my prediction and hopes for the Steam Frame are:
The last part is the most appealing for me, not just as somebody who’d like to put out a weird VR experiment without having to deal with the Quest, but as somebody who has more fun with the shorter, weirder games in VR than the ones that try to be massive blockbusters.
To their credit, Meta has put significant effort into supporting developers wanting to bring stuff to their platform, both financially and in terms of support. There’s a detailed guide for releasing stuff both natively and to run streaming from a PC. But just for me personally, I appreciate any time I get to spend not thinking about Android at all. And while I haven’t yet released anything on Steam before, the overwhelming impression I get is that it’s straightforward enough that it’s practically a no-brainer.
Based more on vibes than any practical experience, targeting the Quest still feels like “we’ve got to make this worth the effort.” Steam feels more like, “eh, why not release it and see what happens?”
Smaller games feel better for the future of the medium overall4, since the games that go big — we have to sell over a million copies to make targeting VR even worth it — inevitably have to play it safe. Part of why I lost interest in even following VR games on YouTube is that the video host would always be super-excited to announce a groundbreaking new game, and then the footage always looked exactly the same, firing rifles or bows-and-arrows at robots.
And maybe it’ll even kick off a trend where the bigger games go back to including an additional “VR mode” even if it’s not their primary target. Maybe the additional development investment will be written off by the marketing potential of more interesting videos of streamers freaking out over your game in VR.
None of this requires the Steam Frame to sell ten million units, or for there to be a Fortnite Except It’s VR-level mega-hit, both of which seem a little counter-intuitive. Everything we’ve ever seen in games suggests that you need huge market penetration and a Mario-level flagship game to have any kind of lasting impact.
But that’s exactly what makes me optimistic here. Basically, Valve doesn’t need the Steam Frame to be a massive seller, since Steam is their business, and any sales benefit Steam. Developers don’t need a massive hit to justify the cost of VR development, since Steam’s low barrier of entry makes it an attractive target, and the lack of exclusivity makes it possible to target other VR platforms as well. And consumers don’t have to rebuild their game library from scratch — assuming they haven’t spent the last few years going apeshit in the Quest store — but will still have a ton of potential stuff to play with on day 1.
I already knew from experience that the most important aspect of a headset is reducing friction as much as possible — no setting up external sensors, no establishing your play space boundaries, no cords getting in the way, and as light and comfortable as possible. I’d thought that the Vision Pro had cleverly addressed many of those issues, just by making the headset “AR first” so that you always see your real environment, and not requiring controllers.
What I hadn’t fully appreciated was how much of the friction comes after you’ve owned the thing for a while, and you’re having to figure out what to do with it and/or what to make for it. If Valve manages to get the pricing right, they may have announced exactly the product VR needs to become interesting again.
Not necessarily with mind-blowing new technology for the stuff we think of as VR, like displays or haptics; or with a flagship game, because they already made that; but just by making good decisions, like the additions to Proton to get games running on more architecture, and the emphasis on wireless and streaming tech to make it as platform-agnostic as possible. All things to reduce friction, barriers to entry, and, I’m hoping, an ethos of opening things up and making them fun again.
2025-12-24 02:00:00
You might think that “can I come up with an entire month’s worth of songs that aren’t at all Christmas-related and somehow make them Christmas-related?” is the kind of thing I do only to entertain myself. And you’d be right. But it has the side effect that occasionally I discover new music I wouldn’t have heard otherwise. And really, isn’t discovering new music the greatest gift of all?
I had never heard of Don Ewell, who was a stride pianist, and I’d never heard of stride piano, either. “Atlanta Blues” by the Don Ewell Quartet feels like the prototypical example of an entire genre of music that I could immediately recognize, even if I wouldn’t ever have been able to name it, or even place it in the right decade.
It puts me immediately in mind of a specific time and place: either standing in a long queue for the Tower of Terror, or watching a movie from the late 1990s or early 2000s that quickly needs to establish it’s set in the 20s or 30s.
I was also unfamiliar with Jósean Log, a Mexican musician who both first gained prominence via YouTube and uses a ukulele as his primary instrument, and yet somehow the combination of those things doesn’t make him insufferable. 1
All of his stuff that I’ve heard is pretty catchy, but I’m particularly a fan of “A Pesar de Todo,” from his EP Más Normal De Lo Normal.2