The thing about being in a place, whether you're renting or buying, is that you need to take care of it. Or ask someone else to take care of it. Or try to take care of it yourself, only to realize you should have asked someone else to take care of it. But how are you supposed to know you should've asked someone else, before you try it on your own? Heck, that YouTube video didn't look that hard. You could do it, right?

On and on it goes, over and over.

Patrick's been through a version of this cycle many times in his place, while Rob's still coming to grips and "enjoying" the discovery process. A process that, sadly, usually just ends up costing you money, only to realize you need to spend that money somewhere else instead.

But hey, at least it's YOUR grass.

At least, that's what you tell yourself

Rob: So it's our first spring in the new place. And while we were watching a ton of the World Baseball Classic for the last couple weeks, I realized that I am suddenly the target demographic for a ton of stuff that has just rolled off my back in past years. Namely, hardware and lawncare stuff.

An Ace Hardware ad cut through the wall of medication pitches and announces that, "It's spring and time to acquire tools" and Patrick it was like some kind of activation phrase had triggered deep within me. It was like a choir of angels rang out with, "Ace is the place with the helpful hardware folks!" I looked out at the melting snow, shafts of sunlight cutting through the trees, and thought, "Yes. Yes it is time for tools."

To be clear, I don't actually like a lot of lawncare tasks. I mowed my share of lawns as a kid, washed a lot of siding, sucked at weeding, and hauled a lot of firewood and kindling around in wheelbarrows and I basically hated all of it. Maybe I'd like it more now that I can have a cold beer halfway through, but frankly I'd rather just have the beer while sitting in a lawnchair on the deck.

But I love matching a problem to a purchase and buddy, a house and a yard are bottomless founts of problems with purchasable solutions.

The past winter we ran up a fortune in plowing fees, to the point where we could have bought a legitimately decent old truck for what we paid. If next winter is just half as bad, the fees would cost significantly more than a very good plow. So we find ourselves lusting after beat-to-shit pickups and thinking about how awesome it'd be to have something we could fit with a plow, but also use to haul bags of gravel or soil from the hardware store, or go and pick up some cheap furniture at a secondhand store.

On the other hand, there are a number of folks that have made the argument that what we actually need is a lawn tractor, which is kind of a like a BattleMech but for yard-work (dammit, I may have just sold myself). Like learning about the Kubota configurator may have been as bad for my psyche as the Porsche and GM configuration tools. Want a riding mower that can plow snow, dig a trench, and haul cargo? How could I not? And crucially, I feel like if I owned one, I'd instantly become the kind of guy who makes perfect use of one.

What's a perfect solution to a nagging chore or problem that you dream of having in your garage? Or did you already achieve that dream and you're looking forward to busting it out in this warmer weather.

Patrick: This is a tough one, because the difference between our homes could not be more vast. Part of the reason we bought the house that we did was specifically built around the idea of how much time and energy we wanted to spend in our driveway and in our lawn, knowing we had kids on the horizon and we were getting older. The backyard is slightly bigger than most by suburban standards—it probably takes me 30ish minutes to mow properly? The front yard is much more modest—it probably takes 15ish all told? 

It’s also a function of time. I don’t have whole afternoons to wonder what I could get up to outside. I get maybe one a month. There is always an activity to attend, a playdate down the block, a party in an hour.

There is someone down the block who has a rideable mower for this exact type of lawn and it’s one of the neighborhood laughing stocks. You can only imagine it was purchased either on a whim, inherited from a family member, or was deemed just too cool to be sold when they decided to move into a smaller house.

It does look really damn fun to ride, though.

Warning: What follows includes what some could feel are spoilers for the endgame of Cairn. It includes extensive discussion about a major decision at the end of the game.

You spend most video games being incrementally challenged, step by step, before arriving at the proverbial mountaintop and being asked to complete a final gauntlet. Put it all together, you bad ass gamer, and prove you’re The Best. There is no proverbial mountaintop in Cairn—it’s a literal mountaintop you’ve spent the better part of 10ish hours slowly trying to reach. In theory, it’s the whole point of playing Cairn, and the central motivation for its main character, Aava.

Yet, it’s at this point, when the endgame feels within your grasp and emotional victory—for you, for Aava—is near the game asks a shocking question: What if you just climbed back down?

“Go back down,” the game beckons. “Continue the ascent,” the game counters. 

“The mountain is in my gut, deep inside,” mutters Aava, contemplating the decision, one that might be better for her life on the ground but could feel like failure while surrounding by rocks and sky.

“No, I think the mountain is all in your head,” replies Marco, a much younger climber you meet along your journey, one who also thinks you should head down. “You can heal if you want to.”

Brother, are you a bad enough gamer to prioritize your mental health?

“There is always a moment where, if you do a hard climb, where you can't you can't push it away anymore that you might die and it's very present and it's in your face and you have to address take a decision,” said Audrey Leprince, co-founder and CEO of Cairn developer The Game Bakers, in an interview. “I think this is part of climbing, this is putting your life on the line, and deciding you're going to do it, even though it might cost you your life.”

As I recently highlighted on Remap, Leprince’s own father was an alpinist who directly inspired and consulted on Cairn. Her father was even part of climbs where many people lost their lives.

There’s a version of Cairn that’s purely a skill test. That version of Cairn would also be excellent, because Cairn does not wholly rely on its moving narrative to be successful. What makes Cairn remarkable is that it’s both a tremendous climbing game paired with an emotional story with real stakes. And while Cairn does not have a “good” or “bad” ending necessarily, it does tug at what you think is good for the main character, versus what’s good and satisfying for you as the player.

“We wanted the player to decide if they're gonna risk the life of their character,” said Leprince. “To do it, we pushed a little bit [on] the fourth wall there and by making the player decide ‘I'm gonna be a gamer and I’m just gonna go to the summit and that's what I know you're expecting me to do it, because we're playing a video game!’ and at the same time, the character is telling me [something different].”

Douglas Goodall knew the world. When he joined Bethesda Game Studios in 2001 as a writer and designer, he was working in IT and had worked as a programmer on unreleased games. He was also a fan of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls role-playing game series who had spent countless hours in its fantasy world of Tamriel, learning the histories and mysteries that lurked in the background of the games' quests. When he was hired to work on the next game, Morrowind, he thought that knowledge would be worth something. After all, he knew the lore better even than the people working at Bethesda.

He was unprepared to hear that his expertise was unnecessary. That having extensive command of the lore of The Elder Scrolls didn’t mean he understood how the world was built.

The designers on his project would produce multiple conflicting pieces of backstory and exposition about Tamriel throughout the game, without any evident care for which account was true. There was no truth: Existing lore could be contradicted if the changes were “cool” enough. What kind of way was that to build a world? Goodall felt like players who cared about the lore were wasting their time, and did not know it. “It did upset me, probably more than it should have,” he said in 2025.

During a dispute with his boss that a colleague remembered as about whether the world of The Elder Scrolls could accommodate Amazon women, Goodall quit the company. “I loved the original Elder Scrolls too much to stop arguing in their favor,” he said later. He had approached The Elder Scrolls full of zeal for the world and conviction in the stories that took place there. He had come into the world factory armed with faith, only to find that it was the heretics who were the worldbuilders.

The language of lore is religious. The history of the world is written in bibles; if recognized, it becomes canon, a shorthand for truth. A story is true, or not, to its lore. When the HBO television adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels outpaced the source material, the studio assured viewers it was working off Martin’s outlines for the books he was yet to write. The show, in other words, was still preaching from the gospels.

Worldbuilding, the development of lore, is a professionalized skill, or obsession, of fantasy writers. J.R.R. Tolkien spent more than a decade detailing the history, customs and language of Middle-Earth before writing The Hobbit. In 1962, an interviewer for the BBC asked him why. Tolkien shrugged, then said, “I don’t think I could reveal why one wishes [to] create a thing like that.”

Martin developed the "mythos" of the video game Elden Ring on commission; not a single written word of his is in the game. The author R.A. Salvatore wrote “10,000 years” of fictional history for a game never completed. The act of worldbuilding can be satisfying in itself: “That is my favourite high—better than all the drugs I have so cheerfully poisoned myself with,” said Greg Stafford, creator of the role-playing setting Glorantha. 

Gary Gygax, co-creator of the role-playing system Dungeons & Dragons, did not much like Lord of the Rings. “It was so dull. I mean, there was no action in it,” he said. “I’d like to throttle Frodo.” Gygax’s violent impulse was a profitable one, leading indirectly to the principles of D&D: what if, instead of having to tolerate an annoying character, the player could throttle them? In so doing, the player would leave a story and enter a game, one all their own. Gygax “had little time for people who played too by-the-book… [who would] ask the publisher of the game what to do.” Said Gygax, “Whatever they were told, they did. And I said, that’s silly—just make it up.”

In 1975, Gygax supplied a formula for worldbuilding: “decide upon… the countryside of the immediate area… the layout and composition of the nearest large town; and eventually the entire world—and possibly other worlds, times, dimensions…” Even if none of those times or dimensions were visible outside the grounds of the player’s adventure, the sense of a world with history deepened and reinforced the fantasy, just as the image of a sky does in a video game. The sky is ornamental, but without it, the world would feel false.

For the video game Disco Elysium, such details were developed for over a decade before production on the game even began; in the source material are answers to all the game’s mysteries. “If I was to say there isn’t an answer, that would be to say that the world is meaningless,” said one Disco writer.

The world of The Elder Scrolls is, by this definition, meaningless. This has been no impediment to its success. The Elder Scrolls series comprises five entries—Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim; each more popular than the last—and one long-running online game. In video games, it is probably the most successful RPG franchise to come out of the West. It is easy enough to understand why. The games are vast fantasy sandboxes: approachable, adaptable to different tactics and plans, meme-friendly, and blend violent action with awesome exploration. The series’ stories and plots are simple; its lore is confounding and metaphysical: as if the pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto spoke dialogue written by Alesteir Crowley. If a player invests tens of hours in an Elder Scrolls, they will master its game systems; if they invest the equivalent time unpacking its lore, the less they will understand. 

The Imperial Library is an Elder Scrolls fansite cataloguing every piece of world information from inside the games, and a lot from outside them. A typical addition to the Library is a “comparison between the psychopomp Moon Beast of Lorkhaj, and the darker version summoned [by] a disciple of Namiira.” Lorkhaj is one race’s interpretation of a god known by others as Lorkhan; Namiira is the “mistress of decay” who corrupted Lorkhan, but only in some cultures. An administrator of the Library, who uses the screenname Lady Nerevar, told me: “There is no one answer to discover and be done with, but rather dozens of possible interpretations to discuss. There is a framework for its cultures and history, but it’s up to you to come up with the specifics.

“It’s not important that specific minutia matches up as long as the overall vibes remain consistent,” she said. “I think lore is a series of themes.”

The Elder Scrolls lore subreddit has 174,000 members, only 9,000 fewer than the one for Greek mythology. This idea, commonly accepted, that lore is a series of themes and not facts, can be intimidating. “That’s a terrible thought,” one user protested. “It pretty much means that anybody can say anything, that every theories and ideas are true. If that’s the case, then this whole subreddit is pointless, asking questions is pointless, any investigating work done to try to understand the lore is pointless, because everything can only be true and nobody can be wrong. That’s scary…” Three years later, that same user was advancing a theory that “Yokudan soul-singers” manifest spirit swords by splitting the atom, debating whether a ghost from an Oblivion expansion pack was "a time traveling gay cyborg", and just asking questions about the Orsinium massacre.

Charles Brandt, one of the Imperial librarians, compared being a lore fan to role-playing ancient archaeology. An obvious difference is that the mysteries of the ancient world concern facts irretrievably lost; the mysteries of The Elder Scrolls could be answered at any time with facts, but will not be. What happened at the Battle of Red Mountain, from the series’ foundational lore, when the Dwemer race mysteriously vanished from the earth? If it were Tolkien’s world, he would know. Bethesda? “A lot of the lore isn’t meant to have a definitive answer,” Skyrim co-lead designer Kurt Kuhlmann told me. “We are never going to give you the definitive, official timeline.”

The Elder Scrolls is an oddity in both its medium and its genre: A massively popular fantasy world known to anyone who knows anything about games, but with no canonical history, timeline or comprehensive, causative explanations for the things people stumble across in their journeys. Last year, I spoke to a number of the writers and designers behind the lore of The Elder Scrolls to understand why this most mainstream of fantasy video game franchises is arcane and unanswerable at its margins. 

The lore of The Elder Scrolls has been able to grow, and encompass conflicting cultural interpretations of moon beasts, because there never was a single foundational text establishing the lines in which future contributors could color. Nor has the series had the equivalent of a Tolkien figure to weigh in on the original intention.

Vijay Lakshman, lead designer of the first Elder Scrolls game, 1994’s Arena, came up with the phrase “Elder Scrolls” without knowing what it meant. The Arena project grew out of a love for D&D, pen-and-paper RPGs and medieval fantasy movies that Lakshman shared with programmer Julian Lefay.

Lakshman said that he developed “five novels’ worth” of detail about the world, but as a business plan: the idea was the base game would comprise one corner of Tamriel—the continent on which The Elder Scrolls takes place—and the rest of the world would be sold piecemeal, as game modules. “I had to write out all the [places] to know what’s going on. I did the Khajit, the cat people. I remember doing the lizard folk. The Bretonians, which are like Britons. The Dark Elves.” Ted Peterson, a designer and writer, compared this collaborative worldbuilding process to a birthday card passed around an office: everyone took a turn to name a town.

In Lakshman’s telling, Arena became at 13 months of development the most expensive game Bethesda had ever produced; founder Christopher Weaver gave the team one month to wrap it up. This forced Lakshman and Lefay to abandon their expansive plans and refocus the game as a standalone tour of Tamriel. “If I hadn’t had all that backstory, it would have been impossible,” Lakshmann said. “I’m not saying Arena had a great backstory. It didn’t. It was the best we could do at the time.”

Arena and its sequel, Daggerfall, depicted a familiar medieval fantasy world of magic and monsters, reminiscent of D&D. This was also a business decision. “It was very D&D-ish. Daggerfall is vanilla,” said Lefay in 2017. “There’s a reason why vanilla is so damn popular. People like vanilla. They understand it. They get it. They identify with it…. Originality is nothing. It doesn’t matter. You can be as original as you want, and it’d still be shit.”

With Daggerfall, Lefay and Peterson took the opportunity to flesh out their fictional setting. (Lakshman left Bethesda after Arena.) The world of Daggerfall was packed with books to read: histories of recent wars and criminal underworlds, guides to gods and etiquette, fables of kings and doomed lovers—all attributed to fictional authors. All information about the world was filtered to the player through the voices of the characters in that world. The designer did not tell the player how, objectively, the world was organized. They didn’t even tell themselves. “A lot of things were in my head,” said Peterson, “which is ridiculous for a game with that much lore.”

Bruce Nesmith, who had then spent a decade as a designer at the D&D publisher TSR, joined Bethesda for Daggerfall. He remembered how much ambition Lefay and Peterson had for building out the history of their world. Nesmith, who worked at Bethesda from 1995 to 1998 and 2004 to 2021, said that it would be hard for anyone to care about the lore more than those original writers, Lefay and Peterson.

Kurt Kuhlmann joined Bethesda at the tail end of Daggerfall’s development as a junior designer. When I put this comment of Nesmith’s to him, he pulled a puzzled face.

“I don’t think I’ve ever really enjoyed anything that I’ve really understood,” Ken Rolston told me last year.

Rolston was the lead designer on Morrowind, the arch-heretic whose cavalier approach to narrative and worldbuilding so frustrated Douglas Goodall. Rolston boasted a comparative wealth of experience next to many of his Bethesda colleagues, having designed tabletop role-playing games–including D&D and RuneQuest, set in Greg Stafford’s Glorantha–since 1982. He was no stranger to working with expansive, lavishly imagined game worlds, and delighted in adding to them. 

Rolston's new colleagues, like Kurt Kuhlmann and Michael Kirkbride, had grown up with Rolston's worlds. “They all had the same currencies of excellence, so therefore I could sit as a reigning god among them,” said Rolston. He could, because he had had to learn how, create a role-playing game in six months, worldbuilding included. “I’m always bluffing. I never know what I’m talking about,” he added. “I’m sure that God, if He were to exist, would probably be making it up as He went along.”

Michael Kirkbride came from a place bounded by faith on the one side and hard scientific reason on the other. He attended the University of Huntsville in Alabama on an art scholarship—he wanted to be a painter. To the neglect of his art studies, he fell in love with a creative writing class. Comparative religion caught his attention as well. Growing up in the Deep South, he had the U.S. Space and Rocket Center to one side and the preachers of the Bible Belt on the other—“rocket scientists and Jesus freaks”—and it intrigued him, the dissonance of that. He was not, however, being paid to write. When the scholarship money dried up, in 1993, Kirkbride dropped out. It did not imperil his prospects: three years later, he was hired as an artist at Bethesda.

There, he bonded with Kuhlmann, the junior designer who had just graduated with a masters’ degree in history, and had as a hobby made a board game about the Peloponnesian War.

Kirkbride, Kuhlmann and Rolston formed a productive creative triad. Kirkbride was interested in the fantastical and cosmic, Kuhlmann in the material analysis, and Rolston in what it actually meant to anybody. “It doesn’t matter that we have all these mythic heroes and all this magic and this unlikelihood. How does the pet regard it when it’s getting scraps under the table?” Kirkbride explained in 2019. “Kurt would take my stuff and interrogate the logistics of it, Ken would turn around and make it into a homily that they sing at the temple.”

Ted Peterson had moved to Los Angeles. Julian Lefay was leading an Elder Scrolls spin-off, assuming that he would also lead the Daggerfall sequel. Kirkbride, Kuhlmann and Rolston were on a different Elder Scrolls spin-off; the first extension of the Elder Scrolls world without either Peterson or Lefay’s participation.

Beau DeMayo, a writer who worked on Netflix’s adaptation of  The Witcher, once criticized that show’s writers for insufficient reverence towards the original Polish novels. “It’s a recipe for disaster,” he said. “Fandom as a litmus test checks egos.” Kirkbride and Kuhlmann were not fans of The Elder Scrolls and their egos were not checked. Kuhlmann liked some stuff. He liked that all the lore in the world was presented from subjective perspectives. He liked the stranger bits, like the end of Daggerfall being built around a giant robot. (“What’s that doing in a fantasy game?”) But he thought it was generally derivative.

Kirkbride thought it all was boring. “By boring, I mean generic. There’s nothing inherently wrong… I’m being diplomatic. That shit was boring,” he said. “It was a bunch of fantasy salad with not a lot of background beyond a map and some names. Any kind of worldbuilding, I didn’t see.”

What did excite Kirkbride was inconsistencies in the fiction. He would go to the office late at night and play the games. If something didn’t make sense, that was interesting. “That meant I could explain it six different ways. What do the cat people think about that? It’s bullshit. Okay, now what do the Nords think about it?” He found writing up those explanations to be a good creative exercise, but the real fun was in emailing the work to his colleagues or leaving printed copies on their desks, without explanation, for them to decode in the morning.

There are more video games than ever. There are more ways to play video games than ever. Why not be a good little consumer and buying a little more, as a treat? You deserve it, don't you? Don't we all?

At what point do you stop, stock of what you're accumulating, and try to figure out a better path forward? This problem is only greater if you're also into movies and music, which each have their own considerations for maximizing your time with them. (Of course, "maximizing your time with them" does not mean "better"!)

With Steam Machines delayed but Microsoft having announced their new console, dubbed Project Helix, it got Patrick looking at his entertainment center, turning to Rob, and wondering if there's a better path forward than more little black boxes. The answer?

Well...

Patrick: The moment RAM prices started skyrocketing because of AI bullshit, I have to selfishly admit one of the first reactions I had was “I hope it doesn't impact Valve’s plans for Steam Machines.” Naturally, weeks later, Valve announced it was pushing all of its new hardware outside of early 2026. Now, we’re in the “sometime in 2026” window, which feels like it wouldn’t take more than a nudge to press us back into “early 2027” and lord knows when from there.

I’ve always owned every console for obvious reasons: I want (the chance) to play every video game that comes out. Yeah, sure, it’s also part of my job and at times shaves pennies off my taxes, but games are my primary hobby and passion that does not involve the Chicago Bears, so buckets of my work and disposable income are going to be funneled into expanding it, too.

Enter “Project Helix,” the destination that’s been obvious for the Xbox platform for a minute now, a world where the line between “PC” and “console” is not blurred, it’s removed entirely. Microsoft has already said their next console will be expensive as fuck, which, on one hand, sounds like the company further conceding defeat when it comes to being a major console player and conceding to my own gaming PC. 

On the other, if we’re headed towards a world of little black boxes that are miniature PCs slightly subsidized by the companies producing them, does the existence of a Project Helix actually mean I’m suddenly not that interested in a Steam Machine? 

What I mean to say is that my primary interest with video game min maxing is making it more convenient to play video games. I don’t want to switch rooms. I don’t want to switch displays. I don’t even want to switch seating positions. Just let me play the video games I’m playing or want to play, you know? Now, you might say, “Patrick, just buy a tiny PC and shove that in your entertainment center,” but I’ve looked at those prices and already said no thanks. What the Steam Machine and Project Helix seem to promise are cheaper versions of “effective budget gaming PC” and “effective budget high-end gaming PC,” and the latter sounds really promising.

Right now, my entertainment center is home to:

• Sound bar (that's on top, I guess)
• Switch 2 dock (mine)
• Switch 1 dock (my nine-year-old’s)
• Steam Deck dock (mine)
• Apple TV (family)
• 4K/Blu-ray player (mine, but broadly unused except as a conversation piece and justification for me continuing to buy discs that are slowly stacking in the corner)
• PlayStation 5 (mine)

If I could wave a magic wand, all those games are coming out of the same little black box. But my pursuit of “anything at any time” has resulted in more and more little black boxes in there.

The 4K player will, at some point, make its way downstairs as part of a refresh for that area. The PS5 can never leave because the dream of day one PlayStation exclusives on PC is never happening. If my nine-year-old’s Fortnite habit holds, she might get a monitor in her room.

Am I really gonna put a Steam Machine and a Project Helix thing down there? Pretty unlikely!

Honestly, the problem is that I can see all the boxes. I need an entertainment center where they’re hidden. Then, I can keep getting more little black boxes and no one has to know it.

What’s in your entertainment center, Rob, and what little black boxes do you want to get rid of?

Rob: So it’s interesting timing you bringing this up because we are getting a new electronics console this weekend. We’d had our eye on BDI storage units for a while, because a lot of AV and home theater outlets we follow rate them really highly for managing the chaos and ventilation needs of a fully equipped entertainment center. There was a ton of stuff that we weren’t comfortable putting in our current console because effectively it’s made of a series of wood cubbies, and once you’ve lost one piece of gear to overheating, you’ll go to serious effort to stop it happening again. Their stuff is expensive but, look, sometimes a well-regarded furniture chain nearby goes out of business and you can start snagging things absurdly cheap at auction.

And God do we need to be able to put this stuff out of sight because here are the boxes currently arrayed on my console below my TV.

• Anthem MRX 740 receiver
• NAD 2200 Stereo Amplifier
• Falcon Northwest RAK PC
• PlayStation 5
• Xbox Series X
• Panasonic DP-UB820 4K Player
• Synology NAS
• Philips Hue Syncbox 8k
• AppleTV 4K
• Aerial Acoustics CC3 center speaker (it BIG)
• Schiit Audio SYS RCA switcher
• Dynasty Audio WSA-5RP transmitter (for rear channels)
• Bluesound Node Icon Music Streamer

If you could promise that all the games could run perfectly on one machine, then I’d probably get rid of the consoles and just have the PC. But I’m less sanguine about the frictionless experience you describe being a possibility for me, because no matter what happens with gaming hardware, my gaming habits also involve a keyboard and mouse, game controllers, a racing wheel and pedals, and occasionally a HOTAS flight controller setup. And let me tell you, wireless transmitters to PCs are so dodgy that even with little USB extenders for the USB-A receivers, I frequently find I just need to run a huge cable across the room to make sure I don’t get little drops from the mouse or keyboard signal.

Tom Paris will not die. 

For the last dozen or so hours in Voyager: Across the Unknown, I have been trying to kill him. When there's an away mission, I send him first. I make bad choices with him, things that the real Kathryn Janeway would never authorize, never approve, never even consider. I look at the numerical values presented, see where his faults lie, chart the impossibilities of his success and say "Make it so." These are decisions that Starfleet would have drilled out of the real Janeway if she wasn't the most Bloomington, Indiana tomboy to ever follow in her Vice Admiral Daddy's cop footsteps. No. These are the decisions of me, Dia Lacina. Not even a What If...? Mirrorverse Janeway would be this casually reckless. And yet, Tom Paris persists.

I've seen people roll bad in games before. Hell, I've listened to the first season of Friends at the Table. I've personally taken a fistful of d6 and whiffed every single one. I've lied to friends on the verge of falling apart and quitting about what that 2d10 came up as behind my screen. I've never seen someone roll like Thomas Eugene Paris in my entire life. This is what happens when you luck your way out of a New Zealand penal colony, onto an early model Intrepid-class, and somehow survive not only the seven year journey through the Delta Quadrant, but seven seasons on a new untested cable network. Tom Paris is the embodiment of mediocre Starfleet men who roll nothing but 20s—because 20 is the only number on their dice. 

The thing is I didn't realize how much I actually like Voyager, until I decided I needed to kill Tom Paris.

Voyager was a tough sell for me when it premiered. While the prospect of another non-Enterprise show and a woman at the helm was exciting, the "lost in space" angle didn't thrill me and I hated Kate Mulgrew's Pioneer Woman Updo. Also, at the time, the world didn't know if the Voyager and her crew would make it home from the Delta Quadrant. It was a new untested network. The innumerable articles freaking out in all directions about a [Ferengi voice] female captain. All around were the threats of cancellation that could see it ending abruptly with this crew as a perpetual Space Family Robinson. After Earth 2, Space: Above and Beyond, and the absolute betrayal that is SeaQuest 2032—I wasn't willing to trust again just yet.

Also, Neelix is a tough sell.

Besides, this was a franchise demanding I split my attention between the best years of The X-Files in its first half, and Farscape for its last 3 seasons. And by the time Voyager finished its seven-year run, I had stopped remembering to watch it entirely. I was in college and Bush was about to embroil us in a patchwork of foreign policy disasters that started well before I was born and will still be rippling after I'm gone. On May 23, 2001 when the show ran its truncated conclusion, I was definitely on the verge of blackout drunk in a college dive bar that didn't card with an older, busty classmate with a double Erl. It was a Wednesday night after my three-hour psych elective. We both preferred Charmed. 

I'm on my 9th run of Voyager: Across the Unknown now. And it’s finally settling in just how ambitious this game made by German studio Gamexcite is. By any metric. But especially from a studio who, according to their website, previously remastered one Asterix game for mobile, and made two other Asterix games themselves. It's safe to say this narrative survival adaptation of a major television property is quite the scope-up in terms of project size and complexity. Voyager: Across the Unknown is ambitious. It's not quite the ambition equivalent of launching a new network with a woman at the helm of a non-Enterprise Star Trek series in the mid-late 90s, but it comes close.

Halfway between yet another godforsaken Class D planet and godforsaken Class J, B’Elanna Torres decides she wants more reserve batteries. I don’t entirely disagree with her. We only have one, and we’re on our 7th dip into “Gray Mode” (reserve power, minimal systems, minimal life support) in this journey. I look up how many times Voyager actually went into Gray Mode in the television series — five episodes. I agree to make the batteries.

This is yet another way Across the Unknown chooses to ruin your life as the manager of Starfleet’s sleek, new starship. Introducing mechanical novelty and quick characterization by Starfleet rank or job into missions designed to drain resources, split your focus, and have both principal and walk-on characters offer terse praise or vituperative abuse. B’Elanna is in engineering, so she wants batteries. Neelix wants you to secure food and housing. Tuvok wants you to unfuck morale so he can stop breaking up fights. No one cares about what Janeway wants. That’s not how command works.

One of my earliest memories is bounding into my parents' room, squealing at my dad to come and watch a replay of my first goal for England in International Superstar Soccer 64. 

The goalkeeper sprinted to intercept my defence-splitting pass, bent one knee, curled his arms as if to cradle a baby, and scooped up a ball that wasn't there—my striker had already nipped in front and scored in the open net. "Woooow," my dad said, in the same voice I hear him use now when he speaks to young children. "Well done Samuel!" 

A crummy goal, really. But to me it was as good as Beckham's halfway-line lob against Wimbledon in '96, as Eric Cantona's nonchalant chip against Sunderland in 1997 (I was one of those many '90s "glory hunters" who supported Manchester United despite living nearly 200 miles away in Essex).

If football was religion for me and my friends, then football sims were our cathedrals. Our allegiances to EA's FIFA series or Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer were tribal but transient, flipping each year depending on which had the crisper passing, the hardest shots, the most realistic faces, or the silkiest skill moves. We rotated through each other's houses, spending schoolday evenings and weekends passing two controllers reverently between us. The sacred rule: winner stays on. 

My obsession lasted well past my teenage years and I built entire friendships on FIFA at university. When I lived with my best friend in my mid-20s we wrote all the results and all the scorers on pieces of A4 kept in the top drawer of the TV stand. By the time he moved abroad we'd stacked a book's worth of paper.

The total decay of football sims over the past 15 years has therefore been painful to watch. 

Pro Evo has capitulated, reborn as an impotent free-to-play game that's incomparable to the series I loved growing up. Shorter-lived series—the likes of World League Soccer, This Is Football and Virtua Striker—are incompatible with modern development costs. 

Everything but the FIFA series, now called EA FC, has withered and died, leaving a bland monolith whose only competition is the previous year's entry, and which has consistently neglected its sizable singleplayer community to feed the hungry gacha beast of Ultimate Team. Its parade of lucky-dip player packs generates a massive chunk of EA's yearly revenue and looks, from many angles, an awful lot like gambling (you cannot buy EA's premium currency in Belgium because of gambling laws). 

And pending regulatory approvals the only football sim in town will soon be majority-owned by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, the country that last year executed 347 people, the most in its history, including the journalist Turki al-Jasser and two young men, Jalal al-Labbad and Abdullah al-Derazi, who were arrested for alleged protest-related crimes committed when they were 16 and 17.

This deterioration is mechanical, moral, and perhaps inevitable. It mirrors some of the patterns of the wider games industry, where corporate greed and the resultant layoffs have squashed experimentation and where the values of owners or executives turn choices about what we play into ethical dilemmas (see Xbox, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Epic Games, etc). 

But it also mirrors what I see happening in the sport I still love. Saudi Arabia, which already owns Newcastle United, was recently selected by FIFA to host the 2034 World Cup, a decade on from Qatar 2024, a tournament built and made possible by migrant workers facing human rights abuses. FIFA's selection came exactly a week after its fawning president Gianni Infantino handed a made-up Peace Prize to President Donald Trump.

And I couldn't help but notice that the way the Saudi-led consortium bought EA—a "leveraged buyout" with borrowed money—was the same way the billionaire Glazer family purchased Manchester United in 2005 in the face of fan opposition, saddling the club with enormous and expensive debt. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, our minority owner and odious head of football operations who recently claimed the UK had been "colonized by immigrants", has now closed the staff canteen at our Old Trafford stadium to cut costs, but the players still eat for free while earning up to £350,000 ($412,000) per week.

Yet still I watch. Still, I play.

To understand where we are, I think it's important to know how we got here. 

My childhood was the golden age of football sims. When FIFA arrived in late 1993 we already had the Kick Off series, Sensible Soccer, and SEGA's Striker. Soon they were joined by Actua Soccer and Komani's International Superstar Soccer, which eventually spun off into Pro Evo. This is Football, a heavily licensed Sony-published series that ran for seven years, launched in 1999. I spent the second half of 2002 playing RedCard, a surreal game with unlockable animal teams and a brutal tackle mapped to each face button. You could literally drop kick a dolphin.

"The genre was really vibrant back then," says Richard Moss, author of A Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games. "There's games that are hyper-violent, there's stuff where you're playing with cartoon characters, all this weird stuff going on. And they weren't really concerned with each other at that point."

The rising costs of development in the PS2 and Xbox era and the consolidation of players' attention eventually left just FIFA and Pro Evo standing. FIFA was arcadey football for the masses backed by a huge marketing budget and comprehensive licensing agreements. Pro Evo, Moss says, was the cool game for purists. Slower, more tactical, emphasising passing and movement. 

The rivalry inspired both sides to improve.

It is, of course, a tiny miracle that you can hop into a giant glob of metal and electronics and find yourself in another part of the world a few hours later. Flying! What a concept. But that doesn't make airport travel, especially when it goes awry, any less stressful.

More often than not, you board a flight and it goes where it needs to go! But when it doesn't, or it only goes where it needs to go much later than it was supposed to, you can feel helpless, stranded, and unsure what to do next. The "helpless" part is the one that hits the most; in most cases, it's out of your hands and help feels at arm's length.

Which brings us to this week's letter series, where Patrick recounts a high-wire act in trying to return from relaxation, while Rob looks into the past, and remembers a harrowing journey from Stockholm to Boston.

Snow! Connections! Other languages! Drama!

Hey, at least we're both home right now!

Patrick: I think last weekend was the most stressed I’ve been traveling in a good minute, Rob. 

The basic setup: we traveled to Cabo San Lucas in Mexico to celebrate a friend’s 40th this past weekend. The house we rented—and Cabo San Lucas in general—was nowhere near the unrest during the past few weeks in the region. Deep in what I can only describe as rich suburbia, we planted our asses down in a house I could never afford and drank beer by a pool.

On the way back, my wife was headed on a work trip, while I ventured home to relieve a tired grandmother from watching our kids. One of which, of course, got sick while we were away. 

As she waved goodbye, my flight went from on time to slightly delayed. Then, slightly delayed a little further. And then pushed back two hours. At which point, what I can only describe as nervous whispers began between everyone waiting for the flight, unsure what to do next. The first wave of people walking up to the service counter made sense: folks who had a connecting flight that was clearly no longer going to happen. Most everyone else, though, was staying put.

I needed to be home for my kids but a delay was not catastrophic. I had plenty of work to do and games to play. But it was when I saw one couple frantically whisper to another couple, prompting them to rush towards the counter that I worked up the bravery to ask what they knew.

Their response, said with the same tone of George W. Bush learning about the second tower while reading to a room with children, was simple: “I overheard them say the plane is broken.”

It’s at that point that I walked my ass to the increasingly long line for the service counter, too, even if all I had to work with was random hearsay from a person I hadn’t met until this moment. A few others joined us, too, and created a weird psychological effect in the room. Uh, should you be nervous, too? Why are more people getting in line when nothing has been announced? 

The line moved slowly, each ticket change taking anywhere from five to 20 minutes. Along the way, someone from American Airlines announced “the plane is still being worked on,” a statement that seemed to have the opposite intended effect, as more people hopped into line.

Each minute that ticked by took me one step closer to the front. But each minute also brought me closer to my flight’s delayed departure time. Could I have my cake and eat it, too? If I changed my flight but the original flight was actually going to leave, could I switch back? I pitched this to someone who was walking away with a new ticket and told it wasn’t possible.

Even worse, there was a consensus flight that everyone was trying to get on, one that would route you to Dallas for a distressingly quick connecting flight, but one that would have you in Chicago a little after midnight. Ideal? No. But you’d be able to sleep in your own bed that night. 

The only problem, Rob, was there were only a few seats. I started counting the people in front of me, spread across two lines and two separate service counters. Would I make the cutoff?

I eventually reached the front and was handed updated tickets five minutes before the original flight was supposed to start boarding. I was making the smart move. The practical move. But I will not lie, I nearly burst into tears when I saw a bus approaching the terminal, seemingly preparing to start taking people to the plane. A cruel joke, playing out right in front of me. You saw eyes go wide in the waiting area, as people clutched their bags and prepared to stand up.

Instead, the bus was merely using that gate to turn around. You could hear a pin drop.

The flight to Dallas was uneventful, until we approached the gate and were told the plane had to find another one. 90 minutes to catch a connecting flight, one that would require moving through customs and boarding an in-airport train to another terminal, turned into 60 minutes. 45. 30.

Fuck.

I sprinted out of the plane, rushed up stairs instead of using escalators, and cursed the TSA agent who demanded I take out every electronic device—Switch 2, Steam Deck, iPad, laptop—and place them in separate bins. The same agent who also briefly misplaced my passport, only for said passport to magically appear moments later on the scanning belt. 

Eventually, I spotted a young couple who’d been in the same line with me back in Cabo San Lucas, as we all decided to take a chance on the flight to Dallas. We exchanged a nod, and I used them as a goddamn video game waypoint marker to the gate, following in their wake. It was a way of reducing my own anxiety and having nowhere to project it other than my brain.

The flight was mid-boarding when we arrived. It left without fuss. I arrived in Chicago a little before one, and was home about an hour later. My nine-year-old had made a bed in her room, expecting I’d be sleeping with her. I laid down, passed out, and was happy for this to be over.

The next day, I saw my original flight was cancelled. I’d made the right decision.

Rob, what’s your worst travel story?

Rob: Oh this is easy. And timely, given that I just spent a week buried under a blizzard and my entire body still feels slightly shattered from all the shoveling and roof-raking I did. See, this is the worst winter the Boston area has had since the Snowpocalypse of 2015.

You may remember this a bit. In the early weeks of 2015, Boston was hit by a series of blizzards that arrived almost like clockwork every week or so. Any one of them would have been a memorable snow. All of them in sequence exceeded the city's capacity to deal with it. In June or July, the snow mountain that had been dumped out by the BCEC where they hold PAX East was still melting. When the second storm hit I took one look at my 1999 Toyota Camry buried under 16 inches of snow and trapped behind a five foot embankment created by the plows and decided I didn't need to drive until spring. The car melted free in May and turned on without a hitch. I felt very smug, given that the rest of Central Square had descended into near-violence over the parking spaces people kept digging out of the ever-shrinking roadways.

Anyway, sometime after blizzard number three I went to Stockholm for a Paradox event. Now your options for getting to Stockholm are kind of limited from the US. It's a smaller European city and not a major air travel hub at all, so most routes will have you taking a connection or two. Or there's Icelandair, a decent airline that functions as a pretty incredible tollway on trans-Atlantic air traffic to Scandinavia. Because back then, every Icelandair route had a stopover in Iceland to catch a connection and maybe you spend some money on the island while you are there.

Toward the end of my visit in Stockholm, I saw that Boston was about to get hit with another blizzard. The day it was time to leave, I almost asked to change my itinerary because I knew they were going to shut down Logan Airport. The storm's timing was starting to line up perfectly with my arrival.

But until this trip, I'd never really had any problems with airlines. Never had a cancelled flight, never got diverted. So I was complacent. How bad could this go? I asked at the Icelandair desk in Stockholm whether they were still able to land in Boston and they confidently told me that Logan was still open and they didn't anticipate any problems.

Cut to me landing in Iceland a few hours later. Logan Airport was closed due to weather, my flight was cancelled. But, okay, not a big deal. They had three or four flights going to Logan each day. I'd just catch one of the next ones. Au contraire. All those flights were sold out, and the few seats that had been available had already been snapped up by other passengers on my flight. The next flight they could promise me a seat on was in six days. There was also a huge classical music festival in Reykjavik that week, and there were absolutely no hotels available in the city.

They were very apologetic but said there were rooms available near the airport in Keflavik that they'd put me up in for free. This… didn't sound so bad. A few days or even a week in Iceland? I mean I was flat broke and couldn't really live it up while I was there, but my last time there had convinced me it's one of those places that is basically heaven on earth.

To paraphrase Jason Molina, even heaven needs a place to throw all the shit. For Iceland, Keflavik appears to be that place, with its proximity to both the airport and the US airbase and the attendant industrial and warehouse capacity those facilities imply. Me and a bunch of increasingly shell-shocked American travelers were loaded onto a bus and driven through an ice storm to one of the grimmest motels I have ever seen. Made largely of pre-fab modules, my room was basically a cell with a bed and the bathroom was… basically a waterproofed cube with a showerhead cut into the top of it and a slow drain on the floor a few feet away from the toilet and sink. Outside, through whipping snow, I could glimpse the dim lights of a distant KFC and a gas station. Want to go to Reykjavik? Prepare for an expensive cab ride or take the shuttle that leaves once per day.

I lasted a day. The weather was foul, and I was far too broke to find much to do in the city, where everything is expensive due to the usual costs of supplying an island, and the seven hours of hazy daylight pushed me indoors and eventually back to my dire little room. Once I got there, I called the airline and begged them to get me out of there. No dice. Nothing to Boston, or eventually connecting to Boston. The way it was explained to me later, Icelandair doesn't have a lot of extra capacity. Even a single canceled flight can cause lengthy rebooking delays. Multiple flights canceled? Those people are just out of luck. The airline is going to maintain its schedule for all its other customers and address the stranded travelers when it can.

"Well what about New York? Can you get me to New York?" I begged, staring at (the apparently daily?) ice storm whipping across the roadway.

A pause. "Yes, sir, we could" replied a woman whose incredibly beautiful voice was almost certainly the reason she had a job basically telling people they were utterly out of luck and there is nothing the airline can do to help them. "But you do realize, you would be responsible for getting yourself to Boston? If you decide you would like to have us rebook you on a flight to New York, that would be the end of our obligation to you."

"Yes, that's fine. I can handle that part. Just… what is the fastest way you can get me to New York?"

0515 Greenwich Mean Time (12:15 AM Eastern), Keflavik. I am part of a long column of exhausted travelers picking their way across fifty yards of tarmac towards an aircraft that is too big for any of the gates at the airport. There's no snow, but something I'd describe as a North Atlantic gale is still blowing itself out. I am wearing a wood coat, gloves, sweater, long underwear, and sweats. I may as well be naked. My eyes water as I cast my gaze to the door of the plane and see a writhing mass of souls attempting to gain entrance up the stairway, while the rest of us huddle miserably beneath the arclights of the airfield. We are bound for Manchester, then Heathrow. I am just three or four hours from Boston. I will not be home for 24.

1400 GMT (9 AM Eastern), Heathrow. Somehow, we are late. We were sitting too long in Manchester, we had trouble getting a gate, and now I am sprinting through Heathrow toward a British Airways 747. Somehow this involves several trips up and down escalators. My lungs are burning. I am suffocating under layers of wool and knitwear. I regret every late night in Stockholm, every cigarette, every drink. I get to my gate and see absolutely nobody there. My heart sinks. An attendant looks sadly at me. "They may not have closed the door yet. Give me a moment." I stare out at a beautiful spring day. A radio crackles. The attendant smiles. "Just made it. On you go!"

2300 GMT (6PM Eastern), Penn Station. Six hours of turbulence across the Atlantic. A glacial progress through Customs, and then a series of sprints through train stations to make it aboard an Acela bound for Boston. The ticket cost as much as the stories I was commissioned to write for this trip. I take off my coat and sweater and realize that I smell awful. My cotton T-shirt has the texture of a waterlogged chamois. I've been doing interval training all day under 20 pounds of wool. My seatmate looks at me. We briefly make eye contact. He blanches. I sit down and spend the next several hours trying not to raise my arms, as if that's going to accomplish anything. I am covered in travel miasma. The Acela lurches down the track. Usually it's three and a half hours to Boston. In the wake of the blizzard, it takes almost six. My companion is with me all the way to Route 128, the last stop before Boston. "Please let me out," he says, then adds, "I mean, this is my stop." He didn't mean that, but I appreciate the gesture more than he knows.

0400 GMT, (11 PM Eastern), Central Square, Cambridge. I text MK that I'm almost home. Then I drag my bags and suitcase up the salty brown steps of the Red Line T stop and find myself in a trench of snow. I am six and a half feet and I cannot see over the lip of it to the street. The sidewalk is barely wide enough for two people and there are entrances cut into the trench at each crosswalk. The city is preternaturally quiet even now. The T is shutting down soon, there are still crews out trying to clear snow. I walk home with my coat open to my T-shirt. 

The air feels incredible. I am giddy. I am paying 2300 a month for 500 square feet with upstairs neighbors who keep pissing off the fire escape. The kitchen floor is pitched up by about 8 degrees. The back door is so far from flush with the sloping kitchen floor that we basically have a hole in our wall that no amount of weather-stripping can fix. Something is living in the walls, much larger than the mouse that we have stupidly adopted in lieu of having a dog because we can't afford any of the rentals that allow dogs. We are broke, we're losing our lease come the spring when the landlord decides to renovate. But I have never been so happy to be home and here in the icy white tunnels that have been carved out of the blizzard that stranded me in Iceland, I am struck by their near-magical beauty. I've never seen anything like it here, and I don't think I will again and a decade later this is going to be the thing I remember most clearly from this entire winter, that the most miserable three days of travel of my life…

…ended with a moment of perfect happiness and relief. In my memory, it started to snow on my walk back home, but maybe it just felt like it did, and I only imagine that I looked up and watched fat white flakes come drifting gently down against the darkness of the night sky.

In 2018, two close friends since middle school, Adam Stjärnljus and Klas Eriksson, decide to make a video game based on an evocative drawing by Adam showing a plain-looking boy in a beautiful field, standing next to a strange little creature and, nearby, a similarly odd robot. 

This is that drawing:

They drained their savings to hire a part-time programmer, hoping to execute a simple plan: bring that drawing to life and show the world they could make The Next Great Video Game.

“Then, five months came and went and we had this very bad prototype and publishers slaughtered us,” laughed Stjärnljus in an interview with Remap.

Five years later, that busted prototype would become 2023’s gorgeous Planet of Lana, one of many so-called “cinematic platformers” that have come in the wake of games like Limbo and Inside, experiences where the aesthetics of the world are nearly as important as the gameplay.

“It was like three years of just pitching the game and working on it and failing miserably at so many stuff,” said Stjärnljus. “We'd never made games professionally before. Almost everyone in the team never had worked on games before. It was a lot of trial and error.”

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Today, the sequel arrives, and like the original, it’s co-directed by both Stjärnljus and Eriksson. 

I’ve played several hours of Planet of Lana II, and if you like games like it, you’re likely to enjoy your time revisiting this world. It’s also the most mechanically dense cinematic platformer in a minute, especially compared to Reanimal, the new game from the former Little Nightmare developers. The “game” part of cinematic platforms is often loose, but not in Planet of Lana II, where you arguably spend more time unpacking puzzles than you do admiring the landscape.

Cinematic platformer is not in Planet of Lana II’s official description on Steam. It’s “adventure” and “puzzle platformer.” On PlayStation and Switch, it’s “action.” On Xbox, it’s “action & adventure.” And when you ask the developers, they even use a slightly different description.

“I think the best description I would give to Planet of Lana is a cinematic puzzle adventure,” said Stjärnljus. “Yes, it is a platformer, but it's not that important part of it. It's a side-scrolling platformer, yes, but it's really an adventure—a cinematic puzzle adventure.”

Okay, so we’ve got a new term: cinematic puzzle adventure! But the history that Planet of Lana is pulling from is actually very specific and old, and comes from the duo’s history with games like 1991’s Another World (also known as Out of this World), an early trailblazer in an era where no one was using the term cinematic platformer, and 1997’s quirky Oddworld: Abe’s Odyssey.

“The important point is to use the flaw of media to express something with it, to use it as a medium,” said Another World designer Éric Chahi in a retrospective interview with Eurogamer from 2007, celebrating the game’s 15th anniversary. “As example, polygons are angular; I incorporate it in the style of Another World. Always better suggest the reality than copying it.”

Fast forward a bit, and it’s now 34 years since the release of Another World.

“It’s really nice sometimes with the constraints of a side-scroller,” said Stjärnljus. “Because coming from a film and animation background like we do, it's very nice to be able to limit what the viewer, what the player can see, and frame scenes and set the tone. You’re traveling sideways and you can't see what's coming ahead, but you can see the foreground and where you are.”

That “film and animation background” is from the production company the two started together before making Planet of Lana, building off their shared love of movies, music, and games over several decades. It’s a bond that goes all the way back in Sweden’s equivalent of middle school.

Playing Cairn, the latest game from Furi and Haven developer The Game Bakers, is hours of trials, tribulations, revelations, successes, failures. It's telling the story of a world-class alpinist, Aava, trying to find herself on One Last Climb, but it's also letting you embody her and experience the climb itself. 

Through meticulous re-creation of the process of mountain climbing, it gives you the tools to try and answer the question of why someone like Aava is attempting something so dangerous and potentially futile. It's a deeply fierce gaming challenge to ascend, carefully placing one limb at a time on hand and footholds, to the very top of an inaccessible mountaintop. Cairn is an experience that leaves one breathless, moved, and, in all honesty, changed.

It’s one of the most remarkable video games of the past 10 years, let alone 2026.

“We want to leave players with everlasting memories,” said The Game Bakers co-founder and CEO Audrey Leprince. “We want our games to mark them and to bring them an experience.”

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Cairn tells its story in two distinct modes. 

There’s Aava’s emotional journey, which largely plays out in cutscenes, as Aava reaches different milestones alongside her quest to scale Mount Kami, a kaiju-sized beast of a mountain that is, for most, a doomed endeavor. There is a reason the natural inhabitants of Kami have finally abandoned it, why the cable cars no longer run. But Aava is drawn to Kami and what might exist at the top. Plus, the world wants to watch her try. They want the happy photo at the top of a mountain. But will reaching the summit provide an explanation for why she climbs, despite how much anxiety it causes the rest of the people in her life? An understanding of why she chooses isolation over community? It’s a question the game asks, even if Aava tries to avoid an answer.

“It was really the fascination of all of those people who put their lives in danger for a sport or a hobby,” said Leprince. “And alpinism was really embodying that idea of 'Why do you do that?' Why do you make yourself so miserable in some ways? It's so dangerous and it's so hard and it's so painful and you might die out there and yet you want to go again.”

It’s a story that’s personal to Leprince, too; her father was an alpinist. He’s even listed in the credits, because he was an active advisor during development. He was also part of climbs that caused Leprince stress as a child. In one instance, half the people in her father’s group didn’t make it back. On some level, Cairn is a chance for Leprince to explore a family question: 

Why?

“I am lucky that I share the question with everyone and I think people will make their own answer to it,” she said. “There’s no answer in Cairn. We don't want to give answers. We more want to ask the question and then let you decide what you think is the answer. But [I’m] definitely closer.”

Then, there’s the player’s own arc. In Cairn, you have full control over Aava’s arms and legs. The majority of your time in Cairn is spent slowly placing one of those arms and one of those legs in increasingly precarious parts of Kami, as you slowly (hopefully) climb up. It feels like solving a puzzle every time you move a single part of her, and any mistake could be her last. Aava is a world-class athlete, but Kami is a world-class opponent, and the additional tools Aava has access to—pitons and a rope, mostly—are distressingly limited.

Leprince described the development of Cairn as three-year journey with a three-fold challenge:

1. How players control the character
2. The physics and climbing system
3. The level design of the mountain itself

All three challenges had unique issues of their own to overcome, but the mountain itself was the one that required the most work on The Game Bakers’ part. There was no path to follow. 

“No one's ever done it before,” said Leprince. “People just put holes and pre-calculated animations that are going to trigger and everything. We arrived and there was nothing. We had to invent all our workflow, all our pipeline, all our tools, all our process to reach that level of level design. And it took us some time, I can tell you. We spent at least a year just in pre-production, just trying to figure out is this going to work.”

Football is over. Baseball is almost here. Basketball, entering its far more interesting post-All Star stretch, is finally going to get interesting.

But there are sports beyond America's big three, so why not dream bigger? Why not consider the possibility of becoming interested in something...new? Could another form of disappointment exist?

At least, that's where Patrick's head is at as the Super Bowl heads into the rear view mirror and the biggest discourse amongst Chicago Bears fans is whether to pay a bunch of billionaires to build a stadium.

Which they should not do, by the way. Even though they probably will.

Patrick: I was fortunate enough to be extremely busy this past Sunday, which meant I had no time to process that it was the first time in many months without any football on TV. I like basketball, I often love baseball, but god damnit, football is the one that gets me out of bed. I’ve got the Olympics on in the background like white noise, but it’s mostly that: pleasant background chatter. Perhaps it’s time to try something new. To be daring. Rob, I think it’s time to get into F1.

My friend, who is very F1-pilled, pointed out that I’d muttered about this idea a few times, and he pointed out that the new season of Netflix’s Drive to Survive season is kicking off at the end of the month. I am not going to watch seven seasons of Drive to Survive, so you can stop right there. But look, I did watch the incredibly mediocre F1 movie from Apple, aka the poor man’s Top Gun: Maverick, and at least came away interested in learning more about the drama of it all. 

When I got into football, I downloaded a bunch of podcasts, signed up for fantasy football—I tried to find various avenues into the sport beyond a generational fandom to the Chicago Bears.

Drive to Survive, at least, seems like the easiest and no nonsense way to lock in before the new F1 season starts in early March. But I’m also considering a podcast to join me on my regular outdoors runs as the weather starts to warm up. I ask: Who is the most Chicago-coded F1 team? If I’m to start rooting for a single driver/team, who can I pick without being an asshole?

Help me, Rob.

Rob: If we had forums, this prompt is a "discussion locked after 1052 pages" kind of thing. I do this shit for a living with Shift+F1 but Patrick asking me to find him the Bears of F1? Suddenly there's real pressure! This is my chance to convert you!

I woke up thinking about this and spent my entire shower arguing with myself about my answer, because there were three teams that immediately sprang to mind, but I realized two have better NFL analogues. We'll get to those in a minute.

The Chicago Bears of F1: Williams

Williams was a family operation that was a predominant power in an earlier era of F1. One of the absolute best sports documentaries I've ever seen is simply Williams, and what starts as a straightforward team history ends up being a painfully intimate portrait of a family that apparently never talked about their issues until a film crew came asking questions! It's very clear that the whole operation started as Frank Williams' obsession and turned into a burdensome legacy for his wife, and then his children. The team spent the 2000s and 2010s sliding into embarrassing irrelevance as the Williams family's finances fell behind the investment required to compete in the sport. The team has one of the highest trophy counts in F1, but for about five years its cars were reliably near last place. The second or third season of Drive to Survive shows the lead designer and owner flying commercial, with car parts strapped into the seats next to them because they weren't able to finish their car in time for the start of testing.

So you basically have all this stale prestige from the equivalent of the George Halas era, and a grim decline. But the team sold to an investment group a few years ago and they hired a Ben Johnson-like figure, James Vowles. He was regarded as one of the strategic geniuses behind an incredible championship run at the Mercedes team. He's got a goofy charisma: he's an awkward nerd but genuine and unguarded in a way most team principals (basically coach and GM) are not. He's savvy about it, too. The Williams Youtube presence is the best in F1, a mix of good self-analysis, oddly cinematic behind-the-scenes films, and a video podcast starring their drivers called Team Torque.

Team Torque is in a golden age right now because Williams also has the two most personable drivers on the grid. Alex Albon is a lot like Vowles: awkward and a bit strange, obsessed with his pets, but kind of hilarious. Carlos Sainz is newer to the team, a well-regarded driver who was treated like a secondary driver rather than a team leader at. He's become a bit of a hearththrob and leans into it in a self-deprecating way, flirting shamelessly with Albon in every episode of Team Torque. But in between the grabassing and tangents they will also give you some of the most honest, reflective talk about the state of racing that you hear from any drivers.

Williams is still an organization that has years of organizational rot to dig out. The people working there might be great but 20 years of operating on a shoestring left them pretty dysfunctional, and there are some signs that after a great season last year, they've stumbled badly with the huge overhaul to car design required for this season. But what could be more Bears? They might be about to plunge into mediocrity after a false dawn, or they might be carrying on with a rebuilding that's finally under the right leadership. With Williams you only get heartbreak and disappointment or heartwarming underdog success.

Now I told you there were two other teams I considered for my answer but I realized there are better parallels.

The Dallas Cowboys of F1: Ferrari.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what Love Eternal is about. You’re a high school girl, and for no discernible reason, your family is visited by a force beyond comprehension. Demon? God? Both? You’re cast into a castle-looking realm of spikes and labyrinths, and while there is no guarantee of escape, staying still is its own death. You have one special ability to help navigate this hellish maze: you can snap gravity on and off, theoretically letting your thread your way through meticulously engineered killzones. 

In practice, you're going to die a lot, and at first glance this places Love Eternal in the same punishing, pleasantly tortuous genre as VVVVV and the rich, modern history of "precision platformers." Except Love Eternal isn't trying to be abstract, it's trying to be mysterious and as you drag yourself through its traps and tricks, it's pulling you deeper into an ambitious horror narrative. You just have to be good enough, or determined enough, to let the game tell it to you.

It's a conceit that occurred to designer Toby Alden from watching players navigate their earlier (also challenging) games.

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“When I would watch people play the platforming sections of my games, I could tell that they really entered this trance-like state of focus, where they're really dialed in,” said Alden in a recent interview. “A lot of what makes horror effective is pacing and lulling people into a false sense of security. It’s not dissimilar to how comedy operates, where you set up a premise and subvert it. You’re doing this platform challenge, you're really locked in, everything else slipping away, maybe you forget that there was a story—and then suddenly it rears its head again.”

Love Eternal is, in the words of its designer, a “psychological horror platformer.” If that sounds a bit like Mad Libs, a collection of descriptive words that seem hard to imagine as an actual video game, you’re not alone, but it does make plenty of sense when you actually play Love Eternal, a game that wears its inspirations from Silent Hill and David Lynch on its sleeve from the jump.

“That's the buzzword salad I've been tossing around to describe it,” said Alden. “What I'm trying to get at is [that] horror is a broad genre and encompasses a lot of flavors. The thing I was trying to distinguish Love Eternal from is there isn't a lot of gore. There aren't a lot of jump scares. You're not collecting pages.”

What you are doing in Love Eternal is playing one of the most difficult platformers in recent memory, with a striking and compelling horror narrative to go along with it. It’s a game that is perfectly fine to punish your fingers, knowing full well it means you won’t see the end of the story. There are no options to make things easier. There is only failure, or trying again, while trying to make sense of the twisted forces lurking in the dark, dooming the game’s characters. 

Love Eternal is not easy to recommend. It’s easier to know who it’s not for. Alden gets this.

“There is this trade-off with difficult games where the more difficult your game is, the more people you'll alienate, the more people won't be able to finish it,” said Alden. “The flip side of that is the people who do finish it will be much more strongly invested. An uncharitable way of describing it would be like Stockholm Syndrome [laughs].”

Make no mistake, Love Eternal is hard hard. A game that prompts guttural screams from the player in equal parts joy and suffering. It’s extremely satisfying when you make it to the end of a room, but there are no shortcuts. Attempting a shortcut is merely you rushing a jump due to impatience, because you’re tired of trying it for the 20th time—and the result is another death.

It’s part of the reason it’s surprising Love Eternal pitches itself as a game with a story. Stories yearn to be told in video games. And sure, Love Eternal has a “story” that’s part of the player’s experience, but also has a story story, one that’s told in beautifully drawn and creepy cutscenes. 

It’s also a game that, later, features one of the most shockingly subversive sequences I’ve played in a game like this—or any game—in years. Spoiling the wow moment would do its surprise a disservice, but know that bypassing Love Eternal means missing a highlight moment.

(I'll have a piece about this you’ll-know-it-when-you-see-it bit later.)

Love Eternal is, in some ways, a spiritual and literal sequel to one of Alden’s previous games, Love, a platformer so demanding and exacting that no one beat it for seven years. A game without a plot. A game where players are tossed into the endgame deep end from the start.

“There was no difficulty curve,” said Alden. “It was just a linear line up, and it just didn't stop.”

If you put Love and Love Eternal side-by-side, you’ll notice similarities. In some cases, there are levels that look practically identical, only with new art. That’s because Alden opened Love and started to “sand down the rough edges and make it approachable.” Love Eternal ends up being a game made with years of hindsight about making Love, a game people largely couldn’t finish.

"The interesting thing about trying to learn something challenging is it’s this act of faith in yourself that if you put the time in, you will be able to do it. The type of challenges in platformers are really conducive to that experience, because you can really see yourself getting closer. You can see yourself making progress. There's this amazing sense of gratification when you actually get it.”

“Approachable” is probably not the right word for Love Eternal, however. But one person’s hard is another person’s cozy. You spend enough time in difficult games and start to lose perspective.

“The interesting thing about trying to learn something challenging is it’s this act of faith in yourself that if you put the time in, you will be able to do it,” said Alden. “The type of challenges in platformers are really conducive to that experience, because you can really see yourself getting closer. You can see yourself making progress. There's this amazing sense of gratification when you actually get it.”

I feel this. Confidence is not a trait I’d often use to describe myself, gaming or otherwise, but platformers are a genre where I have faith in my fingers, knowing that if I put in the time and effort, I will find a path. You feel this with Alden, too, as if the games they’re designing begin from the premise of crafting a puzzle that’s at the ends of their own skills. Then, they work backwards to where another player might finish it. Another player, though. Not all players.

“I’ve always liked hard games,” said Alden. “It’s something you can only do in games. When we talk about a movie or a book being difficult, it can be maybe challenging to parse, but it's not like you're actively being prevented from completing turning the pages.”

Perhaps books should invest in the idea of heavier pages to convey depth and nuance?

It’s not entirely clear what happens in Love Eternal. It’s more of a vibe, perhaps a reflection of the game’s own creative process, in which Alden and their primary creative partner, their brother, made up the story as they went along. The ending happened when, well, it happened. It’s the kind of game where you’re inclined to message a friend after, or go searching on reddit.

“There's nothing in the game that's this one-to-one analogy to an experience I had, or this is actually all a metaphor for X, if you decode the secret messages I’ve left in this game, this is what it's really about,” said Alden. “One of my pet peeves is when you Google any work that has any kind of subtext now, the third Google autogenerated answer is ‘What was the point of [INSERT NAME]?” [laughs] Oh my god, can we engage with the thing as it is?”

Okay, fine, I feel called out. 

What’s fascinating about Love Eternal, though, is the story landing (or not) is icing on an excellent platforming cake. Love Eternal does not need a story to justify being worth one’s time, nor does it really crack structural issues preventing the genre from being useful for stories, but it’s a damn good, damn hard experience that ranks among one of the best platformers in years, and you’ll also be rewarded with delightfully weird and unnerving storytelling along the way.

“My intention for Love Eternal was like, it's not an easy game, but anyone who approaches it with a really sincere desire to finish it and is willing to put in the time will be able to,” said Alden. “Even if you don't play platformers normally, if you stick with it, you will be able to beat it.”’

That’s probably not true, but Alden believes it. And frankly, that belief, however naive, is part of what makes Love Eternal special.

Super Meat Boy. The Binding of Isaac. Designer and artist Edmund McMillen is one of the minds behind some of the most successful indie video games of the past 20 years. You’d think that would provide him some confidence going into his latest game, a deliciously gross but wonderfully fun roguelike tactics game called Mewgenics, which launches on Steam this week. 

“I don't know how better to say it,” sighed McMillen during a conversation with Remap a few weeks ahead of the game’s release. “This is the most important thing that I think I've ever done.”

Launching games is a grind and there are no more guarantees. Super Meat Boy was a tremendous game, an era-defining platformer, but it was released in a world where being part of Microsoft’s promoted lineup for its Xbox Live Arcade service was a financial golden ticket.

Will Mewgenics be a success? Probably. But nothing is assured, and failure, both critical and commercially, would be an emotional catastrophe for McMillen.

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“The process of launching a game—being judged, being criticized—and taking it personally, because this is an extension of who I am is, um, awful,” laughed McMillen. “I’ve been hit so many times over the past 20 years and I know how to take a punch, so I'm prepared. It’s still an uncomfortable thing. It’s still a little weird.”

In Mewgenics, players help four scrappy cats survive a series of turn-based fights until they either return home or die trying. If you are familiar with XCOM or Fire Emblem, you get the deal. You move along a grid, spend points to perform actions, etc., etc. The uniqueness of Mewgenics is the wild variance between runs, in which your cats’ abilities will shape, shift, and demand wholly different approaches. Success or failure, you go back home, watch as cats fight or have sex with one another to produce new cats with blended traits, and then head back out again.

It’s a very weird game and there’s a lot of toilet humor.

Conceptually, Mewgenics has been kicking around for nearly 15 years. Announced in 2012 (!!) as a follow-up to Super Meat Boy with his former collaborator, Tommy Refenes, Mewgenics was even demonstrated publicly in playable form before Refenes and McMillen eventually shelved it. The two later split paths, with Refenes focused on the future of Super Meat Boy (Super Meat Boy 3D is due later this year) and McMillen focusing on other projects, like The Binding of Isaac.

What’s arrived 14 years later is a breathtakingly deep tactics game with the trademark love-it-or-hate-it art style and sense of humor that’s defined McMillen’s work for two decades.

What has also defined those past two decades, however, is a publicly vulnerable artist. The moment Mewgenics goes live on Steam is a sense of relief, but also the end of something else.

“I'm the type of person who likes a lot of noise and distraction because being alone in my head is uncomfortable,” said McMillen. “The silence is deafening when a project ends, it's fucking scary. [laughs] I've had some dark moments. After Super Beat Boy, I hit a couple months where I was not feeling good. Gish was a really big one. That was my first one. And I'm trying my best to avoid the drop, and doing a song and dance routine on YouTube has helped.”

Much of the United States experienced one of the worst snowstorms in a minute over the past few weeks. For some regions, it meant piles and piles of snow. For others, it meant one-in-a-lifetime temperatures that had you dripping faucets and praying for the best.

And for some, it was both!

Rob and Patrick experienced different versions of this recent winter sweep, though one thing the both of them had in common was, albeit very different reasons, making the poor decision to decide to try and drive through a blizzard and experiencing consequences.

Both wives were upset.

Patrick: A few weeks back, you mentioned a good letter series for us might be about preparing for a snowstorm. I virtually nodded, believing that, of course, there’d be much for me to discuss.

Such as…honestly, I don’t have a good answer. The weather was awful in spurts the past few weeks—piles of snow to manage, one day where the temperature with wind chill was something like negative 40—but outside of some groceries delivered a day in advance, it was pretty normal? We didn’t go to the store and stock up, a la COVID, on supplies like we’d never see daylight again? We get snow in Illinois but it’s rarely of the catastrophic variety. The local and state infrastructure to deal with worse-than-normal inclement weather is such that, so long as you’re not actively trying to drive through a potential death trap while it’s unfolding, you’ll be fine. 

Now, the weather that whipped through here was different than yours. By all accounts the snow you were dealing with was more of a pile on. Be honest, Rob. Do you take the threat of a snowstorm not as a warning—but a blessing to be given permission to load up and hibernate?

There have been moments in the past. A snowstorm knocked out power for longer than 24 hours just after our oldest was born. We stuck it out for a night before getting worried about the thermostat continuing to drop as we entered the second day, deciding to spend the next 24 at my mom’s. Sometime in the midst of that day, my signal that the power came back on was not a notice from the power company, but my phone informing me that I could control my lights again.

More recently, I was in Wisconsin over Thanksgiving when a mild amount of snow became a concerning amount of snow. Not a major worry for anyone in a well-stocked house, but the parts of Wisconsin I frequent are not near major cities. You’re talking smaller areas with more limited snow responses. Your road will get plowed and salted—but not before the major veins, such as they are, are accounted for first. That might take hours, could take half a day. And if the snow keeps coming down after that plow comes through? Well, again, it’s back to waiting again.

On this occasion, I had to deliver a check. With a friend or family, you could wait. But in this case, we’d bought something notable from a local and by the tone of their text message, they were hopeful to get that check despite the snow. And so I went out in the snowstorm, hugging the right side of the road and going well below the speed limit. My car has very new all-weather tires, but they are not specifically snow tires. The drive there, where you’re maneuvering up a series of tiny hills that curve around a lake dotted with bajillion dollar houses, was slow but fine.

What one acutely realizes on the way back is those tiny hills curving around the lake added up and become quite the elevation change on the way down, a descent into a road that has not been well plowed or salted. A road that, as you begin to tap on the break with your all-weather tires, you feel it…slip. It can’t establish a grip with the road. It’s at this moment you look in front of you and realize that, were you to keep slipping, it would be a slow motion wreck off the side of a tiny cliff. Would you survive this tiny cliff? Well, probably so. But would you want to chance the tiny cliff? Probably not. Thankfully, my tires kicked in, I slowed to 5MPH, and made it back.

Rob: You know, my driving instincts were humbled the day the storm started. MK and I were out at the audio shop listening to a few different DACs, and we were delighted when we saw postcard-perfect snowfall outside the windows. We enjoyed the pure cozy vibes while we listened to the same five music tracks on three different setups, then it was time to go.

My car has all-wheel drive and good (though damage-prone) all-season tires. It is ridiculously surefooted in most conditions. So I wasn't too troubled by all the fresh, slushy powder that had been dumped on the ground. I even laughed when we saw some Chevy SUV limping down a street after it had clearly just skidded out on the gentlest hill imaginable. We had no such trouble, and while I could feel the traction control working overtime and the car fishtailing ever so slightly, it wasn't alarming. Until we came to a stop sign. I flicked a quick left and hit the gas… and the car completely broke traction. Just slid to the right at like 3 MPH, heading toward a telephone pole. Fortunately the rear quarter panel tapped a snowdrift from the last snow storm and that checked our momentum enough for the car to get back under control.

I was much more cautious when we reached the turn to get back onto our street. Didn't matter: again the car shimmied and lurched wildly until it came to a halt. It had basically made its entire 90-degree turn by spinning in place.

MK, who used to drive a lot around rural Michigan, was unsurprised. She was like, "You're used to winter driving, but you're used to doing it on 41 through Wisconsin or driving around Boston where they salt like crazy. You're not used to a place where your roads are low-priority for the plows. You have no idea how bad the roads can really get." 

Which was a generous way of saying, "I forgive you for nearly putting me into a telephone pole you fucking idiot."

A home is not a given. 

Living in a place, like game designer Luke Li has in the United States for the past 14 years, does not give you a right to call it home forever. And increasingly, at least as far as the U.S. is concerned, fairness is not necessarily part of the equation.

“Our deadline is in about six months,” said the 27-year-old, who currently resides in New York, in a recent interview with Remap. “We have to get out in six months if we don't have anything.”

Li is part of a team called BROKENCIGS, made up of roughly eight developers, a mixture of part-timers and contractors. A few developers are U.S. residents, but others, like Li, are from China. BROKENCIGS came together during their time at the renowned NYU Game Center. Some team members, worried about rejected applications and financial stress, have gone back home to China. Others, like Li and a fellow BROKENCIGS designer, Cindy Fan, want to stay.

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“Living in New York for two years together with our teammates is a really essential memory for us,” said Fan, who's been in the U.S. for nine years. “To still stay together and keep doing what we're doing [is important].”

Why New York? Because it’s New York. Li and others were drawn to it because of its cultural appeal. People who want to make it big come to New York. They did. And then it became home.

"New York really blew my mind with the amount of stimulation there was when I first visited," said Li, who is from the northern part of China. "The events, museums, bars (there are just too many good bars out here), people, and game-focused opportunities are all reasons that we do not wish to let go of yet."

BROKENCIGS’ guiding light for the past few years has been Inkression, an ambitious narrative game inspired by their home away from home and its art scene. Inkression is, interestingly, a story about a home being ripped away from you, a place you love disappearing because of a policy change. Forces beyond your control. It’s a lot like the situation BROKENCIGS is facing.

“I’m talking to my friends who've played our demo already and they were like ‘Huh, did you guys write this story because of this situation?’” laughed Fan. “Sometimes it feels like it's like a big foreshadowing in a movie.”

What prompted our conversation was a plea for help in an email pitch. It’s easy to scroll past the dozens of games vying for your inbox attention, but the humanity behind this one stood out. 

“I am writing to you to kindly ask about the potential possibility for a press coverage as our team's current status in the country is about to expire,” reads an email I received in early January, “and we are looking at petitioning for the O-1 visa so that we could continue working on our dream games in the city that inspired all of them.”

I've read a lot of pitches in my years. But nothing like this.

“The question for us immigrants is just really about,” said Li. “Do we want to go back to where we came from? Or do we want to continue doing what we do here in where we are right now?”

"Operation Midway Blitz." "Operation Catch of the Day." "Operation Metro Surge."

These sound like moments from history that Rob would spend 10 minutes explaining to the rest of us on a podcast, when, in fact, it's the history that we're living through, the most thoroughly public display of state power and violence from the Trump administration—yet.

Where is hope in moments like this? How do you move through the day when the news endlessly loops clips of an American citizen being killed?

In a letter series written both in, around, and after the murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, Rob and Patrick try to figure that out. Sort of, anyway.

Rob, Jan. 15: The other day I was driving down to Boston for a doctor's appointment when the semi next to me let out a series of loud blasts from its horn. I briefly panicked, wondering if they were about to merge into my lane or if they'd spotted something up ahead that I couldn't see. Then I caught a bit of movement from the overpass we were approaching. There were people waving from behind a large sign made of pasteboard letters: GET ICE OUT FOREVER.

A few hours later I was at a grocery store in Lexington and overheard a customer talking to one of the stockers. He was describing being confronted by federal agents sometime recently. Finding himself suddenly surrounded by a bunch of guys getting out of government SUVs yelling at him and the people he was with. "I've heard that's what they do," the well-meaning older white lady said. "They travel in these packs and just swarm people." She then continued on, helpfully explaining the tactics of immigration agents to someone who had literally just gone through the experience. In its way it was a testament to the indomitable spirit of the northeast, where empathy is often expressed in the form of a book report on recent news stories that have upset your liberal interlocutor.

It's hard not to drive down Massachusetts Route 2, running from Boston through Lexington and Concord and not think about how 250 years ago the road was littered with British dead and swarming with Minutemen in response to provocations that are relatively tame compared to what we see daily on the news. The redcoats on Lexington Common were at least confronting an armed militia force when they opened fire. Jonathon Ross couldn't speak to a mom in a car full of children's toys for ten seconds before he decided to fire half a pistol clip into her at point-blank range. Somehow I don't think John Adams would have taken his case the way he did for the British sentries who carried out the Boston Massacre. Would loyalists have started a GoFundMe for them? "After seeing the woodcuts of the incident I think they were 1000 percent justified in using deadly force."

There are increasing stories that DHS is going to have another campaign in Boston in the coming weeks, not that its agents ever really left. They were here last year but their tactics have only gotten more aggressive. I feel like you can chart a path of escalation from what they were doing in Boston to what they did in Chicago to what they're doing in Minnesota. To live in an American city or a "blue" state right now is to know that the government sees your home as a stage for state violence and statements of moral and legal impunity. Life goes on, but I can't overstate the degree to which every conversation you have around here is in some way circling around the ongoing crisis. Hell, my doctor couldn't even give me my blood pressure check without caveating, "You know, when you consider the… everything… I think we can feel especially good about this result."

Patrick, Jan. 16: I was at a PTA meeting for my kids’ school last week where the principal explained a recent decision by the Trump administration to gut a series of educational grants. Practically, it means the school’s Boys and Girls Club program, which primarily serves the 60% of low-income families whose kids attend our school, was going to run out of money soon. The grant subsidizes the program and means it’s “free” for families who need to take advantage of it. It’s not only a form of after care—they get a free meal.

The principal told us there were plans for a rainy day fund, plans for exploring other grants, longshot hopes a lawsuit against the administration would mean everything would turn out okay…but they were also staring at a situation where the program would have to start charging families to continue operating. 

Is this a cut targeted at a blue state like Illinois, or part of a broader attack on education? I have no idea, man, and I’m not really interested in reading news articles to find out. I raised my hand to find out if there’s a way to personally contribute money to the so-called rainy day fund, and I was put in touch with someone who would tell me what steps to take next. My hope is to livestream a fundraiser in the next few weeks.

That, at least, feels like a tiny ray of hope. A way I can contribute. But…