2025-05-08 05:33:40
Book
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
Synopsis
Jason Dessen is a quantum physicist living in Chicago, teaching at a university, and happily married with a teenage son. A contentious encounter with an old friend and roommate leaves Jason wondering about how his life would’ve gone differently had he pursued his research instead of settling down with a family. That night, he’s kidnapped by a stranger, injected with a disorienting drug, and left for dead inside an abandoned warehouse. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a familiar but alien version of his own world, where he’d not only continued his research into quantum entanglement, but taken it to an extreme that he never would’ve thought possible.
Notes
Usually, I can appreciate an author’s talent at making a book propulsive and engaging, even if I’m not entirely won over by its depth. Getting the pacing right for a thriller is really difficult, and it should be respected! And I’m also warming up to the idea of authors taking big swings stylistically, choosing to forgo straightforward, naturalistic writing in favor of making the prose itself interesting. But Dark Matter didn’t entirely work for me.
A big part of it is the writing style, and since I haven’t read anything else by Crouch, I still don’t know whether it’s his style, or if it’s a specific affectation he uses in this book. But there’s a drastically overused tendency to write in sentence fragments.
A few words.
A period.
An adjective.
Another adjective.
And so on.
Separated by lengthy, exposition-heavy dialogue in which characters that all have mostly the same voice will give a layman’s explanation of quantum theory or the layout of Chicago. It is undeniably good for pacing, and I often found myself barreling through it, but it also never stops being distracting.
I can’t really fault the book for its content feeling overfamiliar, since it was written during the initial wave of similar projects, and I’m only reading it now after the ideas have been overused in popular culture.
Multiverses.
Alternate realities.
Sliding Doors.
Everything.
Everywhere.
All at Once.
I feel like I can fault it for taking too long to get to the point, however. The first two thirds of the book are going to feel familiar to anyone who’s ever read or seen a story about multiverses, and it seems to treat the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment as if it were still an idea unexplored in popular fiction.
But the last third has a twist/plot development that I genuinely hadn’t seen coming, and it’s by far the most interesting idea in the book. Unsettling in its implications, took the story in a whole new direction, turned the story from suspense thriller into horror, since I had no idea how the protagonist could possibly get out of the situation.
And that ties into my other main criticism of the book, which is that it’s so completely solipsistic, something it mentions in passing but still doesn’t seem to be aware of how off-putting it is. The protagonist is the most important character in the multiverse, and everyone else is an afterthought. I noticed this the most in its handling of its two women characters, who are both described with respect, but are put into roles where they have no real agency apart from supporting or driving the main character. One of them even mentions that she’s being treated as a prize to be won, which doesn’t patch over the problem but merely draws attention to it.
But in its defense, she (Daniela, Jason’s wife) is also the character who explains why their solution for the book’s unsolvable final conflict is a satisfying one, calling out the very specific choices that do make us unique in an infinite multiverse. I was just disappointed that so much of the book is about her, without actually giving her a more significant role to play.
Verdict
I wouldn’t be as critical of a book that I didn’t enjoy reading at all, and Dark Matter is compelling and engaging, with the last third exploring an idea that I hadn’t expected and I hadn’t seen before. If you read it as an entertaining suspense thriller, the kind designed to hit the New York Times bestseller list and written with the movie rights already in mind, it’s solid. But (at the risk of being too corny) if you look at it too closely, it all starts to collapse.
2025-05-07 15:08:11
If you’re not watching Game Changers on Dropout, you should start. I admit I was skeptical when the clips from that series and its spin-off Make Some Noise kept popping up on YouTube and Instagram: I didn’t think the material was all that funny, but I did love how the cast all so enthusiastically supported each other. That seems to be an overriding ethos of the channel and all of its series. Everybody’s just kind to each other, and it’s so refreshing to see. But Game Changers has come into its own the past couple of seasons, with some genuinely brilliant concepts.
Anyway, the most recent episode featured “Kiss from a Rose” by Seal, for reasons I won’t spoil. It was the first time I’d heard the song in a long time, and it got immediately stuck in my head. I’d never thought much about it in the early 90s when it was released, beyond “hella corny” and “Batman” and “that hot dude singing with his shirt open.” Very rarely, I’ll launch into “my power, my pleasure, my pain!” if I hear it playing in a grocery store or something. But I’ve just thought of it as maudlin, forgettable, early 90’s pop.
But here’s the thing: it’s actually a good song! It’s a perfect showcase for Seal’s vocal range, and whether or not the lyrics actually mean anything, the phrasing is pretty interesting. “The more I get of you, the stranger it feels” doesn’t scan with the rest of the chorus, so it feels like a period at the end of a sentence instead of a melody repeating. It’s given me a renewed appreciation for a song I’d always dismissed.
Another ubiquitous Seal song from the early 1990s that I haven’t thought much about: “Crazy.” I admit I haven’t been as won over by this as much as I was “Kiss from a Rose.” But only hearing it on the radio and public PA systems without ever buying the album, I never knew that it was produced by Trevor Horn.
Listening to it now, it’s kind of obvious — I can’t tell if the sound is so closely associated with the late 80s/early 90s because “Crazy” played all of the time, or because Horn defined so much of what I think of as the sound of that time. I know of his music mainly through Art of Noise and “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes, but he seemed to have a hand in absolutely everything. I should go through and compile a Trevor Horn-produced playlist at some point.
(Incidentally: on the deluxe version of Seal II, which contains “Kiss from a Rose,” Seal does a cover of “Manic Depression” with Jeff Beck, and it’s pretty solid).
2025-05-06 01:00:00
The new M4 Mac mini is extraordinarily impressive as a piece of design, squeezing the current state of the art for Mac computers into an incredibly compact size. I admit that I spent a good amount of time trying desperately to justify getting one, even though I have absolutely no need for it.
I recently saw a video on YouTube (which I won’t link to, because I’m being kind of harsh on it) where a guy outlined his project to turn the Mac mini from a desktop computer into a portable one. He 3D-printed an enclosure that would hold the mini and a bluetooth keyboard, with a hinge attachment to hold a compact widescreen monitor. At the end, he proudly showed off his achievement, prompting me to ask, “What the hell is the point of all that?”
It seemed pointless because for over a year, I’ve been using a 14″ M3 MacBook Pro as my main computer. And it’s been flawless. Not that I’m a super-user or anything, but I’ve never once had it be anything other than fast, efficient, and capable of doing everything I want it to do.1
It’s so capable, in fact, that I almost never think about it. I’m even a little bit disappointed that I treat it like a desktop machine and rarely need to remove it from its dock, because it is so light and powerful and portable and, if you’re a weird gadget nerd like I am, just a pleasure to hold and carry around.
Since we spend most of the time seeing technology making incremental improvements2, it’s easy to lose sight of just how remarkable the current state of consumer technology is. Especially when the bulk of the news is about how tech companies are making everything worse. (And even the most fervent Apple fan (e.g., me) would be foolish to suggest that Apple isn’t a significant part of that).
It seems like a good idea to stop every once in a while, take a look around, and just appreciate that some things are just neat.
The aforementioned video, for instance, has the guy not only using a home 3D printer to make his needless creation. That would’ve been unfeasibly expensive until fairly recently, and not possible at that level of print quality until very recently. Plus, the video is full of YouTube-influencer gimmickry, like floating text and motion graphics and other AfterEffects, and lots of scenes where the host is talking to himself using video compositing. He uses a professional CAD package that would’ve been unattainable for most of the past 20 years, but is now free to use for personal projects. It’s all set to a generic synth soundtrack, probably made with software that came for free with his Mac. There’s even a shot where he has a light bulb come on in the background, made possible with ubiquitous home automation and probably controlled via a smart phone.
I say with no trace of irony that it’s amazing how so much of this stuff has become so ubiquitous, accessible, and affordable that it can become such a gimmick that we no longer notice how remarkable it is.
And I don’t like it, but part of this was prompted by hearing so many accounts of people online talking about how difficult it is to be viable as an independent game developer these days. My immediate response is to think, “For most of my lifetime, it wasn’t even possible, much less viable!” I don’t love it because it sounds so similar to the type of asshole who balks at student loan forgiveness; “if it was hard for me, it should be hard for everyone!” But there’s a nicer idea at its core, which is to marvel at how development is easier and more accessible now than it’s ever been.
It seems easy to forget that for much of my life, it was unreasonably expensive to get a compiler, much less a functional game engine. (There almost certainly was a free version of gcc or something out there, but I was ignorant of it or how to get it). Now, IDEs are freely available, there are multiple options for development languages for the web and otherwise, and Xcode is available for free to anyone with a Mac and a network connection. I’d definitely prefer it if the Mac still came with an easier kit for rapid application development like HyperCard, but as someone who had no access to a C++ compiler until I got a job that paid for my license, it’s remarkable to think of how accessible it is now.
Game engines — except for Godot, of course — have all kinds of very real licensing issues associated with them, but have unprecedented accessibility if you previously had zero options unless you had the skills to write your own engine. Not to mention developers making Blender freely available, when we’ve spent most of our lives not being able to afford tools like Maya and 3DS Max. And Nomad Sculpt makes it possible for an amateur like me to make 3D models I’m actually kind of happy with; the accessibility isn’t just in terms of price, but in actual ease of use.
I don’t want to be too much of a Pollyanna, since it does undoubtedly feel like things are slipping backwards for the first time, after decades of tech and development getting more and more democratic and accessible. Web sites suck now, useful information is getting drowned out by LLMs, and there’s increasingly a premium around what should be freely accessible information. There will always be a gold rush mentality around technology, so we have to hope that people will be able to pick up after all the damage caused by the AI bubble when it inevitably bursts.
But I genuinely do think that it’s important not to be so caught up in the negatives that it becomes impossible to pause every now and then to appreciate how much potential we have now. It’s never been more possible to make cool things. An environment where it’s difficult to get exposure for your work also means that we’re living in a glut of wonderful stuff. Maybe instead of being dispirited, we can use it as inspiration.
2025-05-05 04:07:56
Customarily, you’re supposed to wait until you’ve finished, or at least made significant progress with a game before you share your opinions about it. But even at my best, I’m still really bad at video games, and after a long stretch of not playing much of anything other than sims and turn-based strategy games, my already-unimpressive skills have atrophied.
Which all goes to say that I’m only barely into Blendo Games’s brilliant new Skin Deep. In fact, after struggling through a mission over several attempts and finally barely just making it through, the game showed me its opening credits sequence, making it clear that I’d been proud of myself for surviving through what was still the tutorial.
That’s bad, because I’m impatient and want to keep on discovering more of what the game has to show, since it seems to keep showing me new, weird things. And it’s also good, because I’d rather my experience with the game last as long as possible. I keep seeing people online giving their impressions after finishing the game (which has only been out a couple of days), and I kind of feel bad for them, because they’re done while I get to keep feeling like every story development is a monumental achievement on my part.
I haven’t even been to wonky space yet!
Anyway, Skin Deep is a game where you play as Nina Pasadena, an agent for an insurance company who’s tasked with infiltrating spaceships that have been captured by pirates, freeing the crew of cats who’ve been taken hostage, and then delivering everyone to safety. It’s a bit like Die Hard reimagined as a sci-fi slapstick comedy.
When you free one of the cat hostages, it leaps out of its cage as the word MEOW appears on screen in huge letters, with a drawn-out male voice saying “Meeeooow.” Because the overriding design ethos of the game is to be incessantly weird, funny, and delightful.
Skin Deep‘s narrative designer and writer, Laura Michet, wrote a great blog post about the team’s approach to comedy in the game, which I haven’t yet read in full because it contains spoilers. But it’s immensely gratifying to read an account of an entire team being so fully in sync when it comes to sense of humor and comedic sensibility, especially when you’ve seen how well it pays off.
Most of the games I’ve worked on have been comedic, but of the “battering the player senseless with jokes” variety, in the hopes that a good enough percentage of them will land. The highest achievement in that style of game, in my opinion, is when you manage to make the player an active participant in making the joke: when you can put all the pieces into place so that they get the setup, and then hand it over to them to deliver the punchline. Where you’re not just looking at the camera and saying, “Get it?!” but setting up a situation where the player has to get it before reaching the next step.
When it works, it’s sublime. And it feels like it’s the basis for the entirety of Skin Deep. It is relentlessly clever, but the core of your interaction with the game is taking a bunch of the components of physical comedy and then making them work together. Your only tools for fighting pirates are banana peels and bars of soap, empty cans of tuna or soda, copious boxes of pepper to make them sneeze, or a lighter paired with highly flammable deodorant or hand sanitizer. Your reward is popping the head off of a (still-living) pirate and tossing it in the trash, flushing it down a toilet, or throwing it out of an open airlock.
People who’ve played previous Blendo Games will recognize locations and characters from the entire catalog, most notably Gravity Bone, Thirty Flights of Loving, and Flotilla. More than that, they’ll recognize what Christopher Donlan points out in his review for Eurogamer: a clear and confident voice. Skin Deep doesn’t just have all the signifiers that it belongs in the “Blendoverse,” but feels like the culmination of years of experiments in style and design and presentation, testing the limits of how games can remain fully interactive while telling stories that feel cinematic.
The tutorial has several of the jump cuts that defined Thirty Flights of Loving, which I honestly think work better in theory than in practice, and also dozens of clever ways to deliver exposition and advance the narrative. A speaking character will have a spotlight cast on him while the rest of the room goes dark. Images describing what he’s talking about will be projected on the walls and swirl around the room. A slideshow projector will fly into your room to deliver a holographic message. Tutorials are administered via Google Cardboard-style VR glasses. You’ll witness a significant plot point by navigating a zero-gravity shipwreck, and then be able to fly through a Bond movie-style credits sequence.
It’s all kind of breathtaking, how far it goes to deliver an experience without ever wrenching control away from the player. All while maintaining a tone that’s confidently goofy and silly without being corny, predictable, and meme-like. Instead of telling you a funny and imaginative story, it wants you to be an active participant in telling it.
Even if you’re really bad at telling it, like I am. And even there, the slapstick keeps it on the fun side of frustrating. As I’m trying to stealthily take down a pirate, only to end up jumping on his shoulders, bashing his head into a washing machine, slipping on the suds and falling to the ground, getting shot as I’m trying to stand back up, only to have the shock from my auto-defibrillator be what ultimately knocks out my target, I’m spending the whole time thinking not I am an all-powerful master assassin, but Okay but I have to admit that this is a pretty good gag.
2025-05-03 13:51:49
One thing I liked in Thunderbolts* was during the end credits, as a series of newspaper and magazine covers and clippings move across the screen to show how the media is reacting to the events of the movie. One item shown blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quickly is the quote “I like them!” attributed to David Brooks.
Brooks is the commentator for The New York Times who’s become infamous — at least in the parts of the internet that I spend the most time in — for having some of the shittiest, most tone-deaf takes. I’m not completely sure that the quote was included with that connotation, but it fits perfectly with the tone of a self-aware, highly meta-textual movie about a team that describes itself with “we suck.”
Based solely on the premise, you might think that this was just the MCU equivalent of Suicide Squad — or I read one comment online that it just looked like “Guardians of the Galaxy but grayer and less fun” — but I think it’s perfectly placed in the timeline of the MCU, both within the fiction and outside of it. The movies haven’t been subtle about gradually setting up a team of anti-heroes (and a team of younger heroes at the same time), and the public hasn’t been subtle about getting tired of superhero movies. There’s a strong sense throughout Thunderbolts* of “yes, we get it.”
Since the story focuses on Yelena as its protagonist, it makes a lot of callbacks to Black Widow, which incidentally I still think is one of the most under-appreciated of the Marvel movies. But in retrospect, I feel like Black Widow was more or less the culmination of the “phase 1 formula” of the MCU: big action sequences, a great cast, a tone that was self-aware enough to be funny and charming but didn’t treat its over-the-top comic book moments as a joke. In other words, making Hollywood action movies out of comic book characters. Thunderbolts* feels to me more like making a 1990s comic book out of all the elements of a Hollywood action movie.
In the late 80s and through the 90s, which is when I got back into the hobby, comics seemed to be in full-on metatext mode. Characters were getting rebooted and reimagined, with creators seemingly more interested in asking questions about what it means to be a superhero, and how these stories can be relevant to adults, than in making straightforward superhero stories. I never read any of the comics that the characters in Thunderbolts* were based on, but the comics I was reading in that era had characters fighting metaphors more often than supervillains.
And Thunderbolts* is full of metaphors, most notably depression and grief, but also the explicit question “what are we even doing here?” That means it feels a bit more grounded than previous entries in the franchise. Characters swear more than usual, and there’s straightforward talk about drug use. (But still all within the confines of a PG-13 rating). I liked that John Walker was allowed to just be an unlikeable asshole, even if not an irredeemable one. And it doesn’t spoil anything to say that the villains in this movie are way too powerful for the team to defeat in a typical super-powered fight — they say as much in the trailer — but they still turn out to be uniquely equipped to defeat them.
My main complaint, in fact, is with Julia-Louis Dreyfuss’s character of Valentina de Fontaine. It seems like she was cast largely because of her performance in Veep, which would’ve been an excellent addition to the MCU. But here, it seems like there are too many guard rails still up. She’s never allowed to just cut loose, and always seems to stop just short of being reprehensibly nasty.
A bunch of ragtag misfits learning to work together as a team to beat a seemingly unstoppable foe could easily turn into the corniest, most predictable story. But I think Thunderbolts* works by having exactly the right combination of actors, writers, and a franchise that’s self-aware enough to recognize when it’s in danger of overstaying its welcome.
It’s aware that its characters aren’t Marvel’s A-listers (or even C-listers), but it has a fantastic, charismatic cast. It’s aware that it can’t keep repeating the MCU formula over and over again and expect another Avengers or Infinity War level of response, so it tries to do something different and more relevant. It manages to honor all of its franchise commitments, not just with a feeling of obligation, but by making them feel fun again. And it dispenses with the wide-eyed “you’ll believe a man can fly!” wonder and optimism, but instead of descending into cynicism, it insists on reminding us why we watch these movies in the first place: for stories about heroes, redemption, and people working together to make the world a better place.
PS I normally hate when studio marketing departments try cute things with titles like Se7en and refuse to use them (I’ll make an exception for M3GAN because it seems to be part of the joke), but I like the asterisk in Thunderbolts* and don’t mind using it because I thought it was so cleverly handled at the end of the movie.
2025-04-30 13:49:34
Bodies Bodies Bodies is a horror comedy satire from 2022 about a bunch of rich, terminally online, awful Gen-Zers trapped in a house during a hurricane. I didn’t like it very much, but I was genuinely pleased to see a movie so completely unconcerned with whether I like it.
I can’t even recall the last time I saw a movie that wasn’t making at least a token attempt to play to the Gen X crowd. Here, representing the out-of-touch old man community is Lee Pace, who’d I’d always assumed was a Millennial, but turns out was born right at the end of the 1970s. His character, and Pace’s performance, were my favorite things about the movie.
He’s the character I identified with the most, for reasons that should be obvious. Pace, like me, is also supernaturally handsome and with a physique that has other men seething with jealousy. But even more than that, he’s trying to have a good, fun hang with a bunch of people in their 20s and finding himself completely out of his element.
The part might not seem to give Pace a lot to work with. He’s basically just there to be older, super hot, and a little bit dumb. If it were under-played or over-played too much, he could’ve just ended up being either the butt of the joke, or just another arrogant beautiful person who’s completely unsympathetic. Instead, he makes the best use of his relatively limited screen time: a realistic expression of annoyance, a good-natured attempt to have fun with a bunch of the shittiest people, or a scene trying to make sense of the game that everyone but him seems to be playing.
The movie’s structure would suggest that Bee is the audience’s entry point into this awful and close-knit group, but it’s actually Greg who’s the most human one in a group of monsters.
Considering that it’s a horror comedy, I didn’t think Bodies Bodies Bodies was scary enough or funny enough. And I appreciate the ideas behind the satire, but the execution just didn’t work for me. I did like the description that I read from the filmmakers, describing it as being less like a slasher movie and more like Lord of the Flies, with the character completely breaking down in just a few hours without their cell phones.
There’s a ton of dialogue throughout, but the only lines that I thought actually landed were Bee’s final line “I’ve got reception,” and an earlier one from Sophie. The other characters are asking if there are any guns in the house, Sophie says no with something like, “David’s dad is a jerk, but his politics check out.” They have no reference for anything genuine outside of social media.
But to me, the rest of it felt like the movie wanted to have it both ways: most of the characters are both the targets of the satire and the ones doing the criticism, often at the same time. The scene at the end with Jordan, Alice, Sophie, and Bee all bringing their baggage to the surface seems like it’d be clever and funny on paper. And I can’t fault any of the performances, especially Rachel Sennott’s, since they’re all played as believable, instead of winking at the camera, or over-playing the punchlines. But the end result just seems like a bunch of shitty people with their Obnoxious dials turned up to maximum at all times. I didn’t get any sense of rhythm.
Which is, I don’t think coincidentally, how I usually feel after using TikTok for more than a few minutes. I don’t actually know whether that was deliberate, but either way, I really do like the idea of something well-made that knows exactly the audience it’s trying to reach. Even if that audience doesn’t include me.