#Essays

[literaria-journal]

articles to read instead of doomscrolling #2

The Protagonist Is Never in Control

Walk in these

The existentialist philosophy of Lana Del Rey

On Terror; The Incomprehensible Sublime

An art history lesson from painter Helen Frankenthaler, 60 years later

Between Two Fires: The Music of French and Italian Poetry

An aesthetic little life

Frida Kahlo's Body

Annie Ernaux fixed my disintegrating attention span

No one told me about proust

Our narrative prison

A story of two Pompeii lovers

[somerabbitholes]

some more:

Social media and the collapse of ritual

Where are Lucy's friends in Materialists?

Sociologism Literature by Harry Schiller

Passion and Palestine by Derek Penslar

New TV Novels by Lisa Borst

From Progress to Catastrophe by Perry Anderson

The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser

The Trouble with Friends by Weike Wang

some essays to fill your time

Just a bunch of things I've read recently.

The Authoritarian Roots of India's Democracy by Tripurdaman Singh

Why is Everything So Ugly?

Casual Viewing by Will Tavlin

“You are Next”: Unmarried Urban Women in India and the “Marriage Talk” by Shilpa Phadke

Crossing Days by Thomas Dai

Inside the Indian Manosphere by Lhendup Bhatia

Optimism and Desperation by Camilla Grudova

Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College by James Walsh

Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility by Som-Mai Nguyen

When My Authentic is Your Exotic by Soniah Kamal

The discontent of Russia by Joy Neumeyer

On anti-political projects by Kat Rosenfield

'Correcting' historical wrongs is a slippery slope by Manu Pillai

[luthienne]

Hanif Abdurraqib, In Defense of Despair

[pluggedintosaverockandroll]

favorite video essays pt 2

"learned helplessness" & the tech literacy crisis | Internet Analysis

The Long Queer History of Punk

How Nostalgia Controls Us

Sympathy for the Machine

The Beautiful Horror of Deep Space

the perpetual infantilisation of millennial women

I Want More Quiet Horror

Boeing: How Capitalism Crashes Planes

How Greed Ruined Gaming

shop 'til you drop: horror's condemnation of overconsumption

prev | next

[mournfulroses]

Mary Oliver, from Long Life: Essays And Other Writings originally published in 2004

[soracities]

absolutely enraptured rn

[papenathys]

Absolutely insane lines to just drop in the middle of an academic text btw. Feeling so normal about this.

[ A Critical History of English Literature, Vol. 1, Prof. David Daiches, first published in 1960 ]

[joytri]

[ailelie]

Essays and Meta on Interactive Fiction Design

2025.5.20: Updated original list with more resources. I've also fixed the links.

Structure

Standard Patterns in Choice-Based Games

Design Patterns in Choose Your Own Adventures

Small-Scale Structures in CYOA

By the Numbers: How to Write a Long Interactive Novel That Doesn't Suck

Adventures in Text: Innovating in Interactive Fiction

Structuring IF Side Plots

Narrative Graph Models

Beyond Branching: Quality-Based, Salience-Based, and Waypoint Narrative Structures

Puzzle Dependency Charts

What does your narrative system need to do?

Narrative Logics

Design Decisions: Stats

Loose, Tight, Flat, and Bumpy Stats in ChoiceScript Games

7 Rules for Designing Great Stats

Think Before You Stat

Set, Check, or Gate? A problem in personality stats

Design Decisions: Choice

Mailbag: Moments of Non-Choice

Should Games Have Meaningful Choices?

Creating Choices in Interactive Writing

A Bestiary of Player Agency

Making Interactive Fiction: Branching Choices

Successful Reflective Choices in Interactive Narrative

Design Decisions: Other

Writing in Collaboration with the System

Story vs. Game: The Battle of Interactive Fiction

Narrative States

How to write a branching narrative and won't lose your mind

Storygame Genre

Narrative Mechanics, Narrative Dynamics

That Darn Conundrum

Writing Advice and Opinions

The Seven Deadly Sins of Writing Interactive Fiction

Three Solutions to Three Problems in Interactive Fiction

Writing Interactive Fiction in Six Steps

Writing IF

Game Analysis

CYOA Structures: Tween Romance

These Maps Reveal the Hidden Structures of 'Choose Your Own Adventure' Books

Playing With Words: The remarkable Firewatch is part of a new generation of games taking cues from the text adventures of the 1980s

7 works of interactive fiction that every developer should study

The Illusion of Free Will: On "Bandersnatch" and Interactive Fiction

Scarlet Sails (and a discussion about game size

Musings on IF

Interactive Fiction as Literature

Riddle Machines: The History and Nature of Interactive Fiction

Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction

Interactive Fiction for the Modern Game Designer

The Joy of Text: the fall and rise of interactive Fiction

Going Interactive or: How I Learned to Relax and Let the Reader Take Control

In the Beginning Was The Word

An Alternative Taxonomy for Interactive Stories

Misc

Ethically Designing Unethical Worlds

Break the Loop

Game Taxonomies: A High Level Framework for Game Analysis and Design

An in-depth look at what otome players wants

Mailbag: Self-Training in Narrative Design

[lucidloving]

@heavensghost // Erin Moran, "940 Main Street" // Jason Schneiderman, "Little Red Riding Wolf" // @mah_hirano on tw // Adrienne Rich, "Planetarium" // Richard Siken, Editor's Pages: Black Telephone // Molly McCully Brown, Places I've Taken my Body: Essays // @loputyn // Mason O'Hern, "You Are Not Just Anything" // Friedrich Nietzsche, Good and Evil

[shitpostingkats]

Zack Fair has a really fascinating relationship with killing where a lot of the rest of the cast doesn't. He fights people as well as monsters and gradually stops being able to differentiate the two. He helps clear out beasties and ghoulies but he also intros the game with a massive attack on a foreign nation just to shore up corporate interests and for a good chunk of the game places those two activities in the same spot in his mind. One of his side projects at work is quashing the last remnants of rebellion in said occupied country and rooting out the spies in their resistance, at which point he hands them over to his bosses to be interrogated and presumably tortured. But if he comes face to face with the same people in a combat scenario, he won't kill them, because he views their desire to see themselves free as an honorable trait. Then he turns around and attacks hordes of people who defected Shinra. He uses the blunt side of his sword, not to spare lives, but because he doesn't want to damage the sharp edge.

Wutai forces and Genesis clones have a different categorization to him, something he can mentally label as "other". But after Nibelhiem, your primary enemy type becomes other Shinra soldiers. Just after Zack has had his realizations that the monsters he was wiping out share a haunting amount of basic building blocks with his coworkers. And with himself.

Actually, let's pause. Zack is the only character we see have any sort of acceptance of being Jenova-ed. Every other character is unwilling and usually not even a conscious being yet, but Zack A) knows what is being done to him, and B) openly states he wants those monstrous traits for himself. "Those wings / I want them too." Up to this point, every other character has equated being Jenova-ed to being baser, to being subhuman, but Zack at the very beginning tried to convince Angeal that it meant freedom. Power to do what you want.

Zack Fair willingly and with open arms embraced being made less than human because he thought it would give him the strength to break out of captivity.

So he busts out, and the first thing he's greeted with it a horde of enemies that he knows are human, has worked and talked with, and are in fact the same shape and type of person as Cloud. Just a couple cutscenes ago, these were his coworkers.

The easiest way to get through them is to set them on fire and blow up the munitions they're carrying on their person.

(It's such a beautiful demystifying of the elemental system. I love it.)

Oh also, you're on a time limit, so you gotta kill all these guys fast, because they're trying to go for the weak spot, Cloud, who can't fight and is getting dragged away.

After that, the next thing Zack does is find a gun and start taking long ranged killshots.

There's a tangible feeling of a lesson being learned.

Zack is (I think?) the only SOLDIER we ever see use a gun. It's worth noting that even the most fallen of SOLDIERs stick to their flashy blades and their weird swordfights. Other characters even comment how bizarre it is, but ffvii also runs on that fantasy world logic where if you just Get Good enough, swords are just as good as guns if not better. Guns are the lower, more primitive weapon, fit for grunts and hitmen but not elite fighters.

(I could also go into detail on how some of the SOLDIERS weapon are sold as bespoke merch in world, and basically another tool in the toolbox of how to sell these flesh and blood men as mythologized products. But we don't have time to unpack all of that.)

For Zack, we know that his sword is even a symbol of honorable combat and a legacy of trying to do the right thing. Zack picking up a gun is basically debasing himself to being just another man in the field. And it's a sniper rifle. The weapon guaranteed to get him as little contact with his opponent as possible and does not even give them a chance to fight back. But it's whatever gets the job done.

Zack starts the game as someone who kills people, but it's hand-waved aside the same way it is for most everyone else, only for him to bite that awareness apple like five minutes before it becomes absolutely vital he survive at all costs. Zack becomes aware that he's on a slippery slope and due to circumstances has to start sprinting. Over the course of the game, we watch as Zack Fair goes from being someone who kills people to a killer.

[writer-logbook]

How to improve your writing style : a 5-steps guide.

Intro : I love the 5-steps format, don’t mind me. Again, this essay is based on my personal experience.

Read in different genres. Ok, I know you’ve probably heard this advice more than you can count but did you ask yourself why it is so important ? You probably wonder ‘‘How reading some historical fiction will help me writing my sci-fi novel ?’’ For that simple reason my friend : they meet different purposes. You don’t know how to describe a castle ? It’s okay, historical fiction got your back. Because it aims at something more realistic and accurate, it would tend to be more specific and detailed when it comes to describing clothes, furniture, places and so on. Why ? Because, most of the time, THEY ACTUALLY EXISTED. Take a closer look at how it is done and draw your inspiration from it (but please avoid plagiarism it’s bad - and illegal)

Take notes and CLASSIFY them. To make reading somehow useful, you have to actually make it concious, which means you have to write things down to remember them. When I come across a description I like, I tend to takes notes of the figures of speech that are used and class them, so when I have to write a similar scene, I have an idea of what have been already used, and weither or not it achieved its goal. I am NOT talking about COPY another author’s style !!!! It’s about finding inspiration and new approaches. I also tend to take notes of the new words I wish to incoporate into my writing. The thesaurus is my new bestie.

Rewrite the same scene from different POVs. First of all, it’s fun. And it’s a really good way to spot quirky formulations. For instance, if you describe a ship, the captain’s POV should be different from that of a simple observer. The first one would be naming each part princisely whereas the other would only be admiring the surface without knowing anything. If the caption is the same for both POVs, maybe you should consider write your passage again (or have a good reason, like a strong amateurism for the mere observer). It’s go hand in hand with coherence - but it would be an essay for another time (maybe).

Read your text aloud. I put major emphasis on that one because it’s as underated as reading books for various genres. You have no idea how much we DON’T speak the way we write. Even dialogues are crafted in our stories - so make sure to give them proper attention. (i even read my email aloud but-). I KNOW how cringey it might be as I am doing it MYSELF but the benefits are worth the 35-minutes shame I endure from my own mess. Before you can shine, you have to polish (shout out to the one who said that first if it’s not me).

Take a step back. I strongly advice you to let some time pass before reading your text again and profreading it. It will cast a new light upon your work and with fresh eyes you’d be more likely able to spot what needs to be erased or rephrased.

That’s all for me today. Since I would be entering my proofreading phase for my writing contest, the next essay would probably about proofreading (with examples from my own novel ?). Unless someone wants me to write on a specific subject first.

Gentle reminder that I’m still French and not a native so please forgive my dubious grammar and outrageous mispellings.

[kitchen-light]

Regretfully, I had to leave all my books behind. I couldn’t bear to make the choice between my beloveds, so I left them all.   Give them back. Give us back our beds. Give us back our offices. And give us back our books.

Nabil S., from "It Was All Songs: A Letter From Gaza" translated from the Arabic by Sarah Aziza, published in Mizna on February 12th, 2024. You can read the entire essay here.

[luthienne]

We open each meeting by asking a simple question: What is keeping you alive today? This allows us to revel in the sometimes small motions that get us to the Next Thing. Yes, I did not want to get out of bed this morning, but there was one single long shard of sunlight that stumbled in through a tear in my curtains, and the warmth of it hitting my arm got me to that first hour of living. There was my dog, who, on the mornings I do not want to get out of bed, will rest silently at my feet and wait for me to slowly emerge from under the covers, and seeing her reminds me that I do, in fact, have only one lifetime in which I can love this animal. As far as I know, we will love each other only here, for a while, and that is worth seeing what I can make out of a few hours, even when I’m wrecked with despair.

Hanif Abdurraqib, In Defense of Despair

[lottiestudying]

01.04.2025—happy April!! still in a major depressive slump, not thriving. enjoy some old photos while i get out of whatever this is