On tangled writing
And why it's better to be authentic and messy than to not be anything at all
Lately I keep writing a couple thousand words for this newsletter, which I still want to call a blog, only to get frustrated and delete them. I believe that I’m a decent writer with no particular sparkle or specialties, but one who gets the job done nonetheless. Unfortunately, I’m also a perfectionist who refuses to share anything unless I’m either fully confident in it or entirely sick of it and trying to unburden myself. I know I am not alone in the pursuit of perfection, although I think it manifests differently for all of us. I have recently been upset at the proliferation of AI/LLMs in creative spaces and I think a lot of people are using them because of their own fear of inadequacy or imperfection. When I was in high school, one of my teachers gave us extra credit at the end of a semester for either turning in five perfect pages of writing (to be graded strictly) or for sharing fifty pages of writing which would automatically receive the credit. His goal was to teach us that writing a greater volume would inherently lead to greater quality. This was 23 years ago and I still have not fully absorbed this lesson even though I opted to share fifty pages of awkward poetry and journaling with him in order to turn a B to a B+ in his class. I am working on sharing my work as it is. Not as I hope it will be one day when I am finally “a better writer.” I’m the writer I am today. I’ll be whatever I am tomorrow when I get there.
I recently read an article on The Ansible, (a substack I highly recommend), about video game soundtracks and the games they accompany, especially pertaining to the Hollow Knight games. The author and I are acquainted, so I sent him a message praising his writing and sharing my enthusiasm for the topic. We chatted a bit and I mentioned that I’d tried to write about Silksong, the new game in the Hollow Knight franchise, but my thoughts and words were just too much and kept coming out all tangled. His reply? “There’s just SO much you can write about [the game], right? Write it tangled!” So today I am writing it all tangled. I wrote a two-thousand word diatribe about the importance of human creativity instead of AI for this that I have decided is best left unwritten. This preamble takes its place and hopefully makes the same point.
Regardless of environmental concerns and IP theft, I don’t want a machine to make art out of a prompt. I don’t want a machine to talk to people I love (or work with) for me. I don’t want to automate the most vital parts of the human experience to soften the rough edges of life that actually make us feel. Sometimes I say incredibly raw or weird things to people I love in a vulnerable moment. When I receive an affirmation or caring, thoughtful responses to my weirdest most unsanitized words, it shows that people see who I actually am and remain present and involved. A computer program isn’t going to “write it tangled” and accidentally touch on something emotionally raw in the process, it’s going to force things to fit into an established format where none of us experience friction and nobody has to think or feel. Sure, some parts of life are tedious and it’d be lovely to hit a button to skip through them, but I’m not ready to yield control of my communication to something outside myself. I don’t imagine I ever will be. My thoughts and feelings are the only things I have that will ever be fully my own.
I’ve been using Trauma Angel to write about the arts, and their role in my life, for the past year. In 2012 I started my old blog Black Metal & Brews to write about weird inaccessible music (and booze) that made my life more interesting. Perhaps it’s because of the types of art I prefer, but I have never really been drawn to things that feel slick or fully put together. Today while I type this up, I’m relisting to an old favorite outsider black metal album, Hirngemeer by Todesstoss. It’s incredibly well crafted, but the whole thing is filled with jagged little moments and deranged vocals. Not a single thing about it would exist if the people making it were concerned with fitting into a polished or pre-made format. And it is so filled with soul and adventure in a way that replenishes something in me. I listen to this album maybe five or six times a year at most, as it can be a lot to get through, but it’s like hitting reset. Not everything is meant to be universal and all-encompassing. My words here are not changing lives, except maybe my own (a little bit). I don’t think a single person I know reads every dispatch I send out. I do think that a handful of people read this newsletter on occasion and I think they enjoy it or learn about a new piece of art or experience from it and I think that is entirely enough. I am learning that not everything has to be everything. Sometimes you just do something specific, knowing that it is exactly what it needs to be.
Today I recommit myself to creating, imperfectly if I must. Instead of hoping to always get it right, I’m going to aim to just get it out consistently. My own sense of the quality of my work as a creative person has never been accurate in the past and it likely won’t improve as I grow and progress. But I trust that if people are still reading these, I’m probably getting it right enough of the time to justify the continued existence of this newsletter. This opening essay is shorter than the one I cut out, but I hope the words to follow on all the art and experiences that make life richer (for me) will also illuminate something for you. And I hope that we can reconvene again for this in two weeks as it’s supposed to be instead of this taking a couple months. I say this every time, I think, but thank you for being here.
REVIEWS
ALBUMS
Deftones- Private Music
If you asked me how I feel about Deftones, I’d tell you (honestly) that I love them. If you asked me to speak with any authority on an album they’ve released in the last twenty years, I’d likely fail. I recall bits and pieces of Saturday Night Wrist and I know maybe two songs from Diamond Eyes. Everything they’ve released since is in a territory that is never unenjoyable but also doesn’t hit the strange and adventurous peaks of their run from Around the Fur through their self-titled album. On private music, there are some truly great moments, but the album is taking longer for me to sit with. I don’t expect new Deftones albums to have tracks like “Rx Queen” anymore, but I also don’t expect them to impress me as much as White Pony for that exact reason. I think that, after the passing of bassist Chi Cheng, there’s less holding guitarist Stephen Carpenter back from just putting more strings on his guitar and playing big fun riffs. I love a big fun riff, but I miss when a Deftones record took a lot of twists and turns along the way. Still, this record is giving me something to chew on and I’m enjoying the process of slowly discovering it with repeated listens. I felt similarly about Ohms, but that album is also not one I know terribly well. For now, I’ll just say that “milk of the madonna” was an instant hit for me and I can’t recall the last time I thought that about a new song by Deftones, so my hopes remain high.
Yellow Eyes- Confusion Gate
A couple years ago, Yellow Eyes decided to wander into their strangest territory yet with Master’s Murmur, an album that was thick with atmosphere and intentionally light on anything that could be considered “metal.” I loved it and understood the journey they were taking, but I think a lot of their audience was confused or disinterested. Their loss. With the surprise Halloween release of Confusion Gate, Yellow Eyes are firmly back as a black metal band, but with the heavy presence of that strange energy remaining as the foundation upon which the songs are built. It’s genuinely wonderful to see the band growing more focused over time without fully streamlining their songs or becoming a “by numbers” version of themselves. Instead, it feels like their own search for identity is paying off and the band grows both stranger and more vicious with every record. So many of these songs have delightful little moments that jump out to pull me deeper, from the strange slow lead in “Suspension Moon” to gorgeous, mournful saxophone contributions from Patrick Shiroishi on songs like “The Thought of Death” and the elegant title track, which closes the album out in a dramatic and gorgeous fashion. Yellow Eyes was never gone, but this feels like a massive triumphant return all the same. Whenever they decide to announce an album release show, you know I’ll be front and center for it.
RECENT JOYS
LISTENING
At the Gates
I’ve listened to At the Gates pretty regularly for the last couple decades because they’re a great band. Recently I did a run of their whole catalog because their singer Tomas Lindberg passed away far too young. His voice had such a human rasp to it even when he sounded like he was possessed by something from another dimension. In the era of early aughts metalcore, I was frequently exposed to singers who sounded like they had the kind of bizarre talents that few could emulate. Lindberg sounded gifted, but he still sounded like a person whose greatest strength was just throwing his entire being into a performance. It inspired me to join bands and try my hand at singing. I can’t pretend I held a candle to any of my inspirations, but almost everyone who saw me play live or listened to my recordings could tell just how much I admired Tompa’s style. I had the honor of meeting and chatting with him a couple times at Roadburn in 2017 and 2018 and he was always so kind to me, even though I was not a person of particular importance to him in any way. He remembered me and went out of his way to be silly and sweet. I truly believe that kindness and compassion for others who have nothing to offer you is one of the most important traits a human can carry, and from my limited experience it seemed that he was full of goodness. Those classic recordings still get my heart racing, but now there’s a tinge of sadness too. I’m just glad I got to live and experience his music while he was still around.
READING
The Dry by Jane Harper
The “small town contains many well-kept secrets” trope may be a classic, but the book itself paces the sense of discovery out slowly and carefully. It’s all presented in a way that makes trivial moments feel stressful and leaves the reader uncertain until the very last page. The sense of aloneness while being observed permeates much of the story and I found myself genuinely worried about some of the characters in the book as their own personal tragedies unearthed themselves after decades of silence and burial. It seems this book was successful enough to spawn film adaptation and written sequels, so I’m excited to check them out. I’ve currently got the sequel, Force of Nature, in my “to read” pile and I’m eager to see where it goes next.
Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer (The Southern Reach Trilogy)
I saw the film adaptation of Annihilation maybe four years ago when I was at my sickest. I don’t think I knew it was based on a book until I began watching it, so I intentionally waited a few years so that I could forget a healthy chunk of it in order to allow this experience to stand separately. I’m really glad I did, because the horror of it unfolds immediately yet slowly. Taking it in without the greater context has been maddening and thrilling. I don’t think I could read multiple pages about moss or fungus on the walls of a tunnel in a state of rapt panic in most other books, but in Annihilation I often found myself worriedly holding my breath as if I were the unnamed biologist who tells the story. Over the course of the next two books, rather than directly following the same story in the same format, the narration expands to other people and other elements relating to Area X and the facilities at the Southern Reach which are dedicated to its study. Everything from seemingly mundane details of organizational structures and chain of command to the home life of facility officials outside of work eventually skews towards the surreal and formless, leading to this sense of all points connecting back to this subtle yet horrifying mutation of reality. The writing is direct enough that complex scientific concepts are never forced upon the reader, yet the whole thing still flows beautifully and is so wonderfully structured and layered. A small detail in one book expands to multiple pages in another. I’ve just begun reading the fourth book in the series, written some years after the initial trilogy, and I can’t wait to see what strange shape it will take.
PLAYING
Hollow Knight: Silksong (on Steam)
This is the “tangled” thing I wanted to write. It’s more tangled than ever because I stopped playing the game about a month ago and I’m not really ready to pick it up again just for the sake of writing about it. My understanding won’t change and I beat the game to its true ending with something like 84% completion. I think this is the strangest thing for me about Silksong, which is undeniably an improvement on its predecessor in almost every way. I played through Hollow Knight multiple times. I hit 112% completion (thanks to DLC) on multiple save files. I did a run in under three hours for a Steam achievement. I completed Steel Soul mode, which requires beating the game’s final boss without dying a single time. I have done nearly everything in Hollow Knight save for completing its overwhelming boss rush Pantheon mode, which was simply beyond my skill level. In theory, I should be drawn to Silksong in such a way, but I’m not. I loved it, don’t get me wrong. With time I might even love it more than I loved the original game, (although there still isn’t a song that hits the way the City of Tears music hits, especially with the rainfall effects), but whereas Hollow Knight left me wanting, I feel fully satisfied and at peace with my experience in Silksong. It is long enough, thorough enough, and intense enough. I am not throwing myself back at it in some desperate attempt to burrow deeper. I have played through the game and found enough of the secrets to satisfy my curiosity. There are even more that I didn’t encounter. I didn’t want to be that person who looks up a guide on their first interaction with a highly anticipated game. I wanted to take it in as directly as I could, with every experience a fresh new surprise. For the most part, I achieved that. There was one location I had to look up to progress near the game’s end because I simply couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong, but otherwise I played the game without aid. When I was a kid, some thirty years ago, I would play games multiple times over without uncovering all their secrets. Sure, I could call the Nintendo Power hotline for like $3 a minute and infuriate my mother, but the most likely outcome was that I would wander around the broken world of Final Fantasy III (VI) until I accidentally found that thing I hadn’t noticed before. I remember playing Chrono Trigger a good fifteen times before finding a secret room in the Kingdom of Zeal that was EASILY laid out for me by subtle hints in-game. I think I was around thirty when I found it, even though I first played the game at age ten. Silksong feels like a game that I’d rather place into these categories. Something timeless and fresh. When I replay Hollow Knight now, I know almost everything I’m going to encounter. Silksong will obviously be less surprising when I decide to play it next, but I hope that I can stumble into something next time around that I didn’t see on my first playthrough. I barely experimented with the Crest system at all (I’m bad at any equipment/play style shifts in most games). I pretty much found one or two tools to use and just forced my way forward with them. In future plays, maybe I’ll tinker around a bit more and try different new things. Silksong was one of the most challenging games I’ve ever played. It frustrated me in many ways, but it also felt like a relief when I finally defeated a boss that took me two or three hours to best. With an easier experience next time (due to familiarity), perhaps I’ll enjoy toying with my own equipment more and I can find the appeal in the many strange builds available to me. What matters most, I guess, is that I’m focusing on my own experience here rather than the game itself. Yes, I loved the magic of the game. I loved humming along with Sherma and his little triangle song. I loved the initial fear of Shakra fading into familiarity as I realized this powerful warrior was my friend and mapmaker, not a threat (to me). I loved how much agency Hornet has as a character, in contrast to the blank slate of the knight in Hollow Knight. But what I loved most of all was that this felt like I was playing a game in the same way I played games as a kid in the nineties, albeit with far less free time than I had in the fourth grade. The game’s magic allowed me to sink into those parts of myself that disregarded perfectionism and I just had a great time exploring the beautiful horror of Pharloom. If you’re at all curious about platforming games, metroidvanias, action/adventure, or really just video games in general, I’d recommend Silksong as highly as possible…just be prepared to replay the same areas dozens of times as you grow acquainted. It could be frustrating, but you should view it as a chance to get lost in the environments. Be patient and enjoy the experience, you’ll get where you’re going after enough time.
Octopath Traveler (on Steam)
The combat system and unique character skills in Octopath Traveler are both so cool. It’s really awesome to be able to walk up to a stranger and persuade them into giving me relevant information to solve a side quest. It’s awesome to hit an enemy with an ice attack and have it stun them into submission for a couple turns. I love the art style of this game and I think it’s really fun to play. I also have mostly given up on ever replaying this once I finish my first playthrough because this game’s writing is painfully bad. None of the characters have particularly interesting stories, nor do they seem to have passions beyond their careers in most instances. Cyrus the scholar is interested in his studies. Tressa the merchant wants to be noble and good because that makes her a better merchant. It’s all very dry and direct, save for Primrose the dancer who is escaping slavery for a chance at revenge, which is unfortunate because her combat skills are some of the least developed and useful (in the early game at least). One of the characters, H’aanit, has such bad dialogue (perhaps meant to read as an earlier or more formal form of English) that they keep adding the letter “n” to the end of words to make it sound different and “be” becomes “ben” a handful of times. It’s excruciating watching these characters’ individual stories occur without actually overlapping and watching them act in their own little lanes without actually uncovering anything that interesting. I’m on the game’s second set of chapters for each character and this might change with time, but my initially delight as I grew familiar with the mechanics is now giving way to a sense of tedium and irritation as I wait for a larger unifying story to occur. I want this game to give me a sense of purpose. I want there to be charm, humor, or personality. For now, there isn’t, but I’m going to keep playing just to see if I’ll be proven wrong later. I hope that I am, but a quick post or two on social media and a quick google search tell me that I might just be doing this for the sake of doing it. Oh well, I’ve spent far more time on things that were even less rewarding.
Hades II (on Steam)
I feel like such a hater today, but I keep playing games that are fun to explore but so much less fun to experience as a whole. Maybe we’d be better off remembering that thirty-ish years ago most games let the gameplay carry the narrative? I don’t know. Hades was such a vibrant game, with gameplay and story and interactions all working to build a roguelike that was playful and engaging from the first attempted run all the way through the late game runs to find every last detail. Hades II lacks a lot of the charm of the first game even though the premise should make it even more interesting. The weapons in this game are mostly fun, although one of them I just never wanted to use no matter how many different forms I unlocked, and the option to go deeper into the underworld or up towards Olympus was exciting at first, but ultimately this didn’t add enough variety to make up for characters with far less depth and a story that resolves itself with a lot less actual sense of resolution. I made it about 80% of the way through the endgame before deciding I wasn’t engaged enough to see each subplot through when I experienced a sense of subtle disappointment with each storyline I wrapped up. This would be a completely acceptable game if I weren’t aware of just how much better it could’ve been with a little stronger writing and perhaps a few more things to toy around with in the encampment between runs.
IN CLOSING
I’ve clearly got a lot to say when I can bring myself to say it, so I’m going to try my best to make it a practice to just write and not worry about how messy it is or if people are going to like what I have to say. I’ll tell myself that I need to write about a specific album or specific idea and then when I can’t really see it through, I shut down entirely instead of simply moving on to the thousands of other topics available to me. Some of you pay me to do this. I wish to be more consistent for my own sake, sure, but I also wish to honor the faith you acknowledge in me when you decide that this is worth your money. In about four days I’ll be on a flight back to California to see my family again. I hope the time out of my usual routine will give me even more to think about and write for you very soon. Thanks for your time. I hope you will also make it more of a habit in your life to just do that thing you care about and spend less time worrying about the shape it will take. See you soon!