So the new year is here. I had a really great new years, just chilled with a couple of friends and enjoyed the moment. It was honestly one of the best new years I have ever had. I don't know, there's this weird desperation that lingers in air in new years celebrations, like people feel like they need to do something big and flashy and get sentimental about the past year. I've always hated that. This was one of the first times it felt like the anxiety that surrounds new year celebrations was completely gone and I could just enjoy myself. When I was walking home at like 1AM I saw the bus crowded with people coming from the city. As it drove by and left me in the silent dark, I felt very fortunate that my year started the way it did.

Despite having a terminally chill new years I was like completely asleep the whole of yesterday and didn't really do anything. I tried to play some Hypnospace Outlaw. It's a game I bought a few weeks ago and been playing little by little. I've heard it described as a "psychedelic Papers, Please" and the look of the game intrigued me. But as I started playing it the gameplay really annoyed me. It's probably just me but I always felt like I was just bouncing my way through pages trying to find out what I was suppossed to look for with no rhyme or reason. The game is going for a 90's internet vibe and I think that it suceeds at it, there almost this sense of nostalgia that hits me when I see some of the pages. But like "Superliminal", the game feels more like interactive art than a game, so my immersion into it has been pretty limited. I hate that, since this is a game that I want to like. I got so fustrated that I started reading walkthroughs just so I could see how the game progresses.

This year I've been wanting to integrate more artistic experiences in my life. Like I mentioned in my previous post I got myself a museum card so I can visit museums more often and I'm going to try to read more books on media critique. A piece of media critique that I recently stumbled upon is a film analysis on the film "Annilation". It was a pretty good video about how themes and metaphors are the key component of the movie, how identity changes and identity changes in the face of destruction and when you're in a group. The movie was marvelous, creepy and beautiful at the same time. I still think about that bear once in a while.

Annihilation and Decoding Metaphor

The video does have some doozies though, like how ambiguous endings are meant: "...to fustrate the audience, to deny a clean sense of diegetic closure and thusly force engagement with the metaphorical". The video does want to fight the opinions many people had about the movie where they developed only a surface-level, literal interpretaion of the film but jees....

Moderat - The Mark (Interlude) | EXTENDED | Annihilation Soundtrack

The soundtrack for the movie was awesome too, I can't get Moderat's "The Mark" out of my head now.