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So, the New York Times bought the word game phenomenon Wordle¹ for ‘low seven figures,’ or expressed in more human terms, ‘upward of a million dollars.’ I’m happy that Josh Wardle got his bag, though I despise the NYT for things like rampant copaganda, warmongering, transphobic editorial practices, and puzzlingly enough, boot-licking anti-labor covid jokes. It seems logical that Wordle will eventually get wrapped in with the other games that they NYT bundles alongside its crossword section, itself mired in controversy. Needless to say, I’ll be opting out of the game as soon as opting in means the NYT gets any ad revenue or mined data. A cursory glance at the replies on the NYT’s awkwardly third-person-voiced tweet shows that I’m not the only one who is unhappy with the news.

Wordle’s viral success was pretty clearly due to a combination of only a handful of factors. It’s a quick game and it’s difficult to lose. There’s only one puzzle every day, and everyone in the world has the same one. Upon completion, a share card generates the ubiquitous and iconic emoji-based teaser. These things combine to make a game where everyone is on the same page, generally feels a sense of accomplishment, and can readily share a captivating glance of their progress with everyone else who is in the know. It’s an ideal model of a viral design, even if the creator just made it on a lark for his partner to enjoy. I don’t think this was crucial to its success, but it didn’t hurt that it was self-contained, a single HTML file calling a single JS² file with the only unnecessary fluff being Google Tag Manager. Even if people didn’t realize this, it certainly had an impact as far as being reliably quick to load. Grossly, the NYT writing about it prior to buying it almost certainly helped as well.

In my mind, the acquisition news immediately and irreparably fragmented what felt like the most important aspect of the game – the fact that folks across the globe were all working on the same challenge over the course of the same 24 hours³. Debates over which clone(s) – of which there are many – we should all migrate to flooded the replies to NYT’s tweet, Discord servers I’m in, and text messages from my friends. Almost as quickly, conversations about the game seemed to dry up significantly. When there’s one clear canonical version of a thing that everyone enjoys, it’s easy to stay in sync. When enough people suddenly hate that version of the thing, we’re now plagued by the paradox of choice. Assuming we all collectively get over that hump, the best-case scenario is that those of us who fled Official Wordle all collectively agree on the One Canonical Clone. This won’t happen, of course; attempts at unifying on this cause are already comically fraught. But let’s pretend it does.

The New York Times is going to succeed with its acquisition; there are plenty of NYT subscribers, plenty of folks who subscribe solely to the crossword, and plenty of players who simply won’t care unless and until it disappears behind a paywall. In this best-case scenario, we’re still going to have two distinct groups. How this plays out depends on the hypothetical One Canonical Clone.

Wordle clones are a dime a dozen. As mentioned, the game has no inaccessible dependencies. It’s entirely contained in an HTML file and a JS file. You can go download these now and play a local copy forever⁴. As such, plenty of the clones out there are exact clones, or nearly-so, just changing a name or colorscheme. I know of several of these hiding in the shadows on personal servers, for obvious reasons. If we all agreed one of these was the One Canonical Clone, we’d maintain perfect parity with the Official Wordle, but taking it down would be trivial for the NYT and we’d all have to make the clone decision again. The (technically, not legally) open nature of the source also means that we have access to the two word lists that the game uses. It is thus entirely possible to write the game code from scratch, only scraping the word lists. It’s worth noting that the order of the solutions list matters as well – it’s prerandomized, and the script doesn’t rely on PRNG at all. This too would ensure parity between Official Wordle and the One Canonical Clone, but I imagine NYT could get this taken down via the word list copyright violation. They could also at any time obscure their own code and change either of the word lists and/or implement PRNG. Of course, plenty of the clones that folks are flocking to⁵ don’t even attempt parity from the jump.

This of course ignores matters of feature parity and deviations from the original. Does the clean-room One Canonical Clone have a colorblind mode? Can NYT sneakily claim grids of yellow, green, and grey are protected trade dress? Will the One Canonical Clone’s developer add “helpful” features that add just enough friction to make daily play more of a nuisance than a joy? The clones are all too similar to declare an obvious replacement, but a _lot _of questions would remain even if we all managed to unite on this.

I don’t know what the point of this post really is. I think sometimes we grow attached to a Thing and we lose it for reasons beyond our control. This sucks, and in a desperate attempt to cling to the Thing, we frantically scramble to replace the Thing while realize that what made the Thing special could only really exist within the Thing’s original context. Sometimes it’s best to learn from what you loved about the Thing and channel that into Something New. Enjoy Things while you have them, lament their loss, but know that you’ll experience that feeling again. In my opinion, the news of Wordle’s acquisition was enough to ruin the Thing. And I think that just has to be ok.

At the end of every year, I try to do a bit of a media retrospective of my favorite stuff that came out that year. I neglected to do one last year, what with all the things going on. But, some good art has happened over the last two years. Particularly music, in my opinion, which was originally all I was going to stuff into this post. But, I opted to add video games and movies to the mix. I may also do a post about comics in the future, probably less specific to 2020-21 and more just… things I’ve read in the past couple of years. I rarely read books that aren’t comics these days, but I have to put in a good word for Rosemary Mosco’s A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching, a beautifully illustrated guide to an underappreciated bird. Aaron Reed’s Subcutanean was also interesting, a procedurally generated horror novel. I’m hoping to write a bit about this and gimmick in general in the future. I’m sure I’ve missed plenty in this post. Particularly with film, I’m sure I watched more than one movie that was made in 2020 that I didn’t hate, but looking through release lists, I can’t even find stuff that I did hate. And of course… the last few years have done a lot to the ol’ memory. Anyway, here’s some stuff I appreciated from the past couple of years. I’ve been struggling to finish this for a month or so… to that end, note that none of this is in any particular order. Next post should be more interesting.

Music

Bacchae – Pleasure Vision (2020)

I keep putting off publishing this post because I can’t really think of what this album reminds me of. It rings a distinct vibe with me, but I can’t quite place it. In a sort of post-hardcore vein, I suppose. Absolutely stunning album, though, that I’ve been listening to… near-daily? I don’t know, a lot.

We are the Union – Ordinary Life (2021)

Trans ska! Coming out album for frontwoman Reade. Lot of feels here, but even if there weren’t, it’s just a great album. Great time for ska, not really something I’d predicted for the early 2020s. ‘Morbid Obsessions’ was a track that really hit hard for me on this one, and it has a banger of a video.

Kero Kero Bonito – Civilisation (2021)

I love KKB’s earlier work, but I’d largely call it fairly simple pop music. Clever lyrics, and a lot of fun. Civilisation, which joins together two EPs, is less fun and far more complicated. Some wild rhythmic structures in an album that lyrically is a sort of vaguely optimistic look at the rather frightening state of everything. I’ve listened to this album a lot. Lovely animated video for ‘The Princess and the Clock’.

Sevdaliza – Shabrang (2020)

Sevdaliza has sort of a trip-hoppy vibe? And this sophomore album feels a bit more consistently produced to me than her earlier material. Not that her early stuff was bad, but this feels more like an album, and it’s a beautiful listen start to finish.

Catbite – Nice One (2021)

This excellent woman-fronted ska band released a short album a few years back, and then re-recorded it twice in two completely different styles. Now they’re back with this somewhat longer album, and it’s gold all the way down. ‘Call Your Bluff’ is a favorite off this one.

June Jones – Leafcutter (2021)

This album is real gay! I dunno, it’s just sort of indie pop stuff, lyrically beautiful with a hint of melancholy to the delivery. June has a beautiful, haunting voice.

Rural Internet – BREAKING UP (2021)

Queer hyperpop hip-hop type stuff, incredibly chaotic from start to finish. Rural Internet released a second album in 2021 and it’s excellent as well. But BREAKING UP just has a really special structure to it, and an incredible way of communicating energy.

Hayley Kiyoko – I’m Too Sensitive for This Shit (2020)

At some point in 2021, I went to see what Hayley Kiyoko was up to and stumbled across a streamed performance she did for SF Pride 2020. This was the first time I heard the track ‘She’ from I’m Too Sensitive for This Shit, and I bawled my eyes out. The rest of the EP is great; the opener, ‘Demons’, has some great Circus-era Britney vibes. But, y’know, gayer.

Hachiku – I’ll Probably be Asleep (2020)

Oof, just beautiful, heart-wrenching bedroom pop. ‘Shark Attack’ is likely the only time I’ve heard an artist clarify that a song is about their late dog and not oral sex. So, you know, lyrically there’s a bit of tender ambiguity to chew on.

Video games

Calico (2020)

Game set in a magical little town where you run a cat café. You can make a bunch of animals follow you around including cats, cool birds, and capybaras. You can make the animals big or small. Honestly, that’s all you need to know.

Doom 64 (1997, 2020 rerelease)

Ordinarily I wouldn’t count a rerelease, but this is the first time Doom 64 has been ported to something more modern than an N64. I expected it to just be More Doom, but I was surprised by how puzzly it was. I really enjoyed the level design in this game.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020)

The face that this only came out in 2020 is really telling me how much the pandemic has distorted my sense of time. I’d only really played Pocket Camp before, and it was a fun time but I fell out of it. I can’t really assess New Horizons as a game, I can’t really detach it from the work-from-home pandemic experience. I will say that there are lots of good outfits, and games that offer me a dollhouse experience are incredibly important to me. I’ll also say that the museum is a beautiful video game space, particularly the butterfly room and the aquarium portion.

Monster Train (2020)

Deck-builder, somewhat in the vein of Slay the Spire, but with a tower defense type twist. There’s a lot of depth here, and the builds can get incredibly silly. A lot of different strategies to play with as you’re always controlling essentially both a primary and secondary class.

Good Job! (2020)

Really fun physics puzzler. It’s one of those games where a lot of the fun comes from how absolutely chaotically you can just wreck shop.

Röki (2020)

Emotional adventure game with a great sense of space and a compelling story. Lots of sweet monsters. Some less sweet monsters. Simple but enjoyable puzzles.

Manifold Garden (2020)

I played this one pretty recently, as I had been waiting on a physical edition. This was one of those games that kind of ruined other games for me for a while. I’ve mostly fallen out of first-person games, but a good first-person puzzler in the vein of _Superliminal_… I’m all in. The gimmick here is that you can shift gravity to an adjacent wall that you’re near. Great stuff, and a visual treat.

Carto (2020)

Top-down adventure game where the gimmick is that you rearrange the map, Carcassone-style. Really cool game, I loved playing with this mechanic.

Disc Room (2020)

This is one of those games that works because losing is so unpunishing. Aside from being integral to progression in the game, the bullet-hell-esque rooms are quick whether you succeed or fail, and your next attempt is completely frictionless. Good soundtrack, I grabbed it on saw-shaped vinyl.

Tetris Effect: Connected (2020)

I already posted about this, but I’m more and more convinced that whether you want to play Journey mode or a classic Marathon, this is the best Tetris to date. Obviously, Tetris Effect is older, so I’ll say something specific to Connected that I didn’t mention in that post: the 4-player coöp boss fight mode where you end up merging everyone’s playfield together into one massive 40x20 board? It whips.

Slipways (2021)

Very puzzly resource-management/construction type game. The core premise is simple, building trade connections between nearby planets. The puzzle is in managing what planets to connect such that you’re producing enough to keep expanding in the same way. Bit hard to describe, that didn’t really do it justice. Incredibly brain-burny though.

Super Mario Bros. 35 (2020)

I wrote about this, and I’m still bitter about Nintendo’s ephemeral approach to this brilliant concept. Don’t have much more to say about it, and it’s pointless anyway since nobody can play it now.

Chicory: A Colorful Tale (2021)

Made me cry, so that’s a good start. Very emotional game from the folks who did Wandersong, a game I discussed in my 2019 retrospective. Top-down adventure game where you’re restoring color to a world devoid of it. You can basically paint anything and just sort of… have a lot of fun with the world while you’re playing the game. Very good difficulty/accessibility options. Lena Raine did the soundtrack, and it’s evocative in that way that I find unique to Lena’s work.

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (2021)

Short top-down adventure game where you help Turnip Boy commit tax evasion. Cute, lot of fun little interactions.

Boyfriend Dungeon (2021)

This game had some issues; I’m not going to argue with the handful of valid criticisms that circled the well of social media for a week or so after it was released. Personally, I felt a bit put-off by the fact that there were only two dungeons. I don’t like to complain about game length, but two just felt incomplete. At any rate, I liked what this game did. Dungeon crawling dating sim is 100% my jam.

Beast Breaker (2021)

Launch your cute little mouse friend around a battlefield, ball-physics style, to blast through big ol’ critters. Lots of charming characters, neat weapon builds, and the story goes on for quite some time. Great pick-up-and-play-a-level sort of game.

Film

In the Earth (2021)

Brilliant sort of supernatural, psychedelic horror. Lovely synth soundtrack. Does the Close Encounters of the Third Kind communicating via cool synths thing. Colorful and visually intriguing including sequences by Cyriak. Lots of flashing, watch out for that.

Clifford the Big Red Dog (2021)

It was just fun. The dog is very big, and he looks pretty rough. There’s a part (spoiler alert?) where everyone’s trying to get rid of him because he’s too big, and he tries to make himself small! It’s wild. I wouldn’t call it good, but I had a blast with it.

Lamb (2021)

Slightly spooky drama about some folks in Iceland who have a run-in with a sheep demon of some sort and end up raising a half-sheep/half-human son. I don’t think any of my friends liked it as much as I did, but it was touching and slow in the way that I enjoy.

The Matrix: Resurrections (2021)

I’ve never been huge on the Matrix series. This film was about what I expected, perfectly enjoyable but I wasn’t as hyped up for it as anyone else I knew. I did think its intense lean into self-referential material worked extremely well, and its heavy-handed rejection of the coöpting of the original film’s motifs was well-deserved and well-executed.

Psycho Goreman (2020)

Not really a horror film so much as a… monster buddy film? It plays with some horror type tropes, and it’s not afraid to get a little gross and gory, but it’s wonderfully self-aware and not afraid to joke around. Brilliant film.

Werewolves Within (2021)

Fun comedy horror thing. Somehow based on a Ubisoft game? I know nothing about the game, but I’m still shocked that the film was at all self-aware and genuinely a pretty good time. Silly characters kind of drive the whole experience.

I have been deeply into audio equipment for as long as I can remember. When I was in high school, I was always scouring Goodwills and Hamfests for the next old thing that would bump up my hi-fi game and look good while doing it. The latter part wasn’t difficult; not everything was Bang & Olufsen, but audio equipment from the ‘70s and ‘80s pretty much universally looks interesting if not outright lovely. The first piece of new audio equipment I owned was a Roku SoundBridge M2000¹, a roughly rack-width aluminum tube that connected to a home network to stream from iTunes, a variety of other home music servers, and internet radio stations. It accepted no media of its own², it was purely for streaming. Roku opted to keep the unit free of buttons; all interaction was done via remote control or computer. This meant that the front of the unit was made up of only one thing – a massive blue dot-matrix VFD. It looked like nothing else in my hi-fi stack. It looked like nothing else on the market; the display and the overall aesthetic were a direct result of the lack of physical media and the bold decision to omit face buttons.

By 2005, VFDs were the predominant displays on hi-fi and multimedia devices. A lot of things were largely the same shade of blue as the massive Roku. Pioneer largely used orange displays; these stood out. Before VFDs were ubiquitous, early adopters stood out. Companies that used LEDs stood out from one another by using different colors. Fast forward to VFDs being phased out and LED-backlit inverse LCDs (that is, LCDs that operate such that the backlight shines through to form the display elements)³ becoming popular, LED colors could once again be part of a brand’s products’ visual identities. Monochromatic OLEDs were a thing for a spell; I recently acquired a twelve-year-old Sansa Clip+⁴ which has a unique monochromatic OLED screen split into yellow for the status bar and that very OLED shade of blue for everything else.

The individual elements that make up a display were just as much a visual identity as the one or two colors that a company opted for. The shapes of the segments in a seven segment display, the use of more segments than seven, were the custom indicators words or beautifully-detailed icons? Something was lost as displays shifted toward dot-matrices. My beloved HP-41C calculator used a beautiful, 14-segment display for alphanumeric support; its later reimplementation, the HP-42S uses a more functional but incredibly bland dot matrix. Some of the HP-41C’s characters were a bit of a stretch, I do think the HP-42S is more legible for letters. But in general, I find seven-segment displays far more immediately recognizable than the fonts these companies opt for when given a dot matrix. When I was looking to upgrade up from my old Fluke multimeter, a large part of the reason that I opted for a Keysight U1272A instead of the comparable Fluke 287⁵ was that the Keysight used seven-segment numerics. There’s something to be said for a ‘font’ that’s as standardized and recognizable that we pick it up like the E-13B font in the MICR line of a cheque. Any given figure on a seven-segment display basically always looks the same, even if there is some room for variation.

The move to dot matrix displays genericized them; the move to full color even more so. Of course companies are going to make full use of this, but something is lost when everything is in full color instead of one color that a brand has made their own. I’m sure that color-coded waveforms on modern oscilloscopes are useful, but I have no desire to give up the monochromatic green of my early digital scope’s green CRT. It’s just easy on the eyes. Beyond that, full-color displays are all basically backlit TFTs or OLEDs now; they all look good from a technical standpoint, but they’re incredibly samey and boring. I have a TFT replacement screen for my WonderSwan Color, and I keep resisting installing it. The backlight will make it much more convenient to play, but it just looks… uninspiring compared to the almost pearlescent shine of its reflective unlit stock display.

I’ve name-dropped five or six products in this post that I love, that I regard as classics. I’ve posted several times before about products where the display is worth discussing. This is all largely because they don’t use modern, boring displays, and because someone had to deliberately establish an aesthetic for them around a restricted, custom display. They’re devices where the display is a part of the experience, not just an interactive means to an end. The Roku was stunning at the time, the HP-41C’s alphanumeric display was uniquely its own⁶, the orange glow of a piece of Pioneer equipment stood out among so many blue panels. These things all have character, and when I talk about these devices with others, the display is a notable thing, it’s worth describing. Now that so many things basically look like real life… well, they just blend into the background, uninteresting and mundane. I know we’re never going back to monochromatic phones⁷, but I’d love to see simpler displays coming back when applicable. I think the upcoming playdate handheld console may be a shining example of this – a monochrome display that promises high resolution and reflectivity. A point of pride for the engineering team. I hope to see more engineering teams taking pride in the aesthetic of their displays instead of just slapping in the most readily available TFT.

In 1984, Alexei Pajitnov wrote Tetris for the Elektronika 60 computer. This was not a home computer by any stretch of the imagination; it was a Soviet interpretation of a DEC LSI-11, itself a shrunk-down version of the PDP-11. It had no display capabilities of its own, and this initial release of Tetris had to be played on a text-mode terminal that communicated with the computer. Pajitnov, working at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, was tasked with demonstrating the limits and capabilities of the equipment being developed. So, despite not being a gaming rig (lol), Pajitnov came up with a great proof-of-concept to show off this state-of-the-art machine. It quickly got ported to PC, and from here its story becomes fraught with capitalism and intellectual property battles. But the important takeaway is that these issues arose because of how incredibly popular the game was. It paved the way for decades of falling-block games, some better than others. It was so engrossing that its lingering effects on the thought patterns of hardcore players was noted and named the Tetris effect by popular media; this has since been generalized and studied as game transfer phenomena. And in 1989 it became the killer app for the Game Boy, ushering in an era of casual, handheld gaming.

In 1999, Bandai released one of my favorite handheld consoles, the Wonderswan. It was designed by Gunpei Yokoi, who also famously designed the original Game Boy. Sadly, Yokoi didn’t live to see the release of the Wonderswan. The system launched alongside a falling-block game named in tribute to Yokoi, Gunpey. While I felt no need to describe the game of Tetris, I’m less confident that the majority of people reading this have played Gunpey. I call it a falling-block game, though the blocks technically push upward from the bottom. Blocks are either made of diagonal lines that go from one corner to the opposite, or vee shapes that start and end on corners from the same edge, bending at the midpoint of the opposite edge. Blocks are cleared by rearranging their positions on the playfield such that lines continuously extend from one side of the playfield to the other. If I’m not describing this well, I unfortunately don’t think it matters much. Gunpey, to me, exists as a nice tribute to Yokoi, and a demonstration of the potential that the Wonderswan’s portrait-mode capabilities have. As a game, it’s just slow and dull. It can be quite frustrating too; when new blocks come in, they’re sparse, and the playfield can become incredibly full with one column empty simply because the RNG hasn’t been kind. I show it off to friends as an introduction to the Wonderswan, and as a device to talk about Yokoi, but I’m never inclined to show it off as a game.

In 2004, Q Entertainment released Lumines: Puzzle Fusion for the PlayStation Portable. Its designer, Q’s founder Tetsuya Mizuguchi, was captivated early on by the effect music had on people, the ability of a DJ to push an entire crowd into collective movement. He saw the PSP as something new, simply because of one detail – its headphone jack¹. In an interview in Issue 2 of A Profound Waste of Time, Mizuguchi states that he “wanted to make Rez meets Tetris” but couldn’t as Electronic Arts held the exclusive license at the time. “So I went away and made Lumines. [Laughs].” Lumines is often described as a rhythm game because of how tightly it integrates music. I avoided it for the longest time because of this, but it isn’t a rhythm game at all. It’s a falling-block game that fundamentally understands how players fall into what Mizuguchi refers to as a state of ‘flow’², and it uses this knowledge to engage with the player on a very deep level. At its heart, Lumines is a game where you drop squares made of four blocks. Blocks are one of two colors, and when clusters of the same color form squares on the playfield, they clear. But from the very first entry in the series, Lumines: Puzzle Fusion, the experience was also colored by the driving, responsive techno soundtrack. It was colored by the game’s lack of linear level progression – they don’t just get faster and faster, but they play with your state of ‘flow’ by constantly changing the rate of play in both directions³. When I eventually grabbed Lumines Remastered on the Switch, it quickly became my favorite falling-block game.

In 2006, Mizuguchi oversaw a reimagining of the WonderSwan title Gunpey. Yet again working for the PSP⁴, Gunpey [2006] took what was kind of a dull slog of a falling-block game and it added a handful of quality-of-life updates that made it much more… playable. But on top of small gameplay tweaks, this release from Q Entertainment brought along much of the feeling of Lumines. Mizuguchi might not have had the Tetris license yet, but his company was able to invigorate another falling-block license, giving an incredibly fresh breath to a game that never really felt that great to begin with. It’s still a few leaps away from the S rank of my falling-block tier list, but it’s a very playable game and does a lot to solidify Gunpey as a tribute to such an important figure in video game history. Moreover, it shows the shape of things to come when Mizuguchi gets to overhaul an existing license.

In 2018, Mizuguchi’s most recent company, Enhance Games, released Tetris Effect. Finally, he was able to realize his dream from 2003 of Rez meets Tetris. By now, of course, Mizuguchi knew how to use music and pacing and trippy visuals to play with the player’s flow. It’s likely far more fair at this point to call it Lumines meets Tetris. The Tetris Company holds rather tight control over their licensing, and games made since 2001 largely have to adhere to something called the Guideline. The Guideline has changed over the years, but what hasn’t changed is a fundamental goal of standardizing the Tetris experience. Mizuguchi’s vision didn’t really include the Guideline. By default, pieces are all the same color, there’s only a single next piece shown, and if you play through the entire Journey mode, you’ll never hear Hydelic do a rendition of the Russian folk song “Korobeiniki”. Originally released as a VR title, it’s an incredibly immersive experience, enhanced by the fact that it breaks so many of the generally inalienable rules of the game. It’s an astonishing accomplishment, a decades-old vision of what Tetris could be.

Earlier this year, Tetris Effect was updated with a multiplayer mode, released as Tetris Effect: Connected. Earlier this month, Connected came to the Switch. My first experience with Tetris Effect was on a friend’s VR rig. I didn’t get to spend too much time with it, and I was left feeling quite confused. The experience was incredible, and the level of immersion was almost overwhelming at times. I played quite poorly, in part because of being overwhelmed but also largely due to the aforementioned Guideline omissions. In particular, I am used to pieces adhering to the Guideline colors. I rely on detecting the colors of Next and Held pieces in my periphery as a core gameplay mechanic. I felt quite lost without this visual cue; the fact that there was only one Next piece barely even factored in when that Next piece was, in practical terms, invisible to me.

Despite not entirely knowing how I felt about that experience, I bought it as soon as I woke up on the day it came to Switch. I’ve always been an Endless Tetris player rather than one who aims for the 150 line clear Marathon mode. Preferring this endurance experience, I was a bit taken aback that the standard mode – Journey – was a finite run. I played through it at normal difficulty and one-credit cleared it on my first run. I still wasn’t entirely sure how to feel. I started a run on Expert mode and botched it fairly early on. I poked around and found the Marathon mode, found out that there was an Endless mode. I also found options to play with Guideline colors, and expand the Next pieces to four. I went back to Journey mode on Expert. I was confused by the fact that drop speed would bounce around wildly instead of progressing in a linear fashion.

By the time I 1CC’ed Expert mode, I got it. The bouncing around of the timing was classic Mizuguchi, with lulls placed as a brief respite before hammering the player with 20G. Even more than Lumines, the game interacts with the player by manipulating their sense of flow. “Even more than Lumines” became a bit of a running theme. Even more than Lumines, the tetriminoes (in their default, uncolored state) and the background are inseparable pieces of one another. Even more than Lumines, gameplay is a narrative journey. Even more than Lumines the music goes beyond a flow state and makes emotional response an integral aspect of gameplay. It’s sappy as hell, but when the playfield is filling up toward the end of the run and Look Up starts playing, it’s incredibly empowering. Finishing the final three Zone modes of a 1CC and hearing Kate Brady⁵ sing “What could you be afraid of?” one last time makes me feel accomplished.

1CC’ing Tetris Effect in Expert Journey mode has quickly become my favorite Tetris experience. In some ways, I wish there was an Endless Journey mode – one of my most satisfying video game experiences is to spend hours in an Endless game of Lumines. But I understand the significance of calling this mode ‘Journey’. It has a structure, and that structure has an end. I switch between color modes regularly now; one mode helps me get better at Tetris while the other is a more immersive experience.

I marvel at Mizuguchi’s ability to develop things with the amount of foresight that he has. He seems to have grand, improbable ideas that he’s able to make play out decades later, when said ideas become probable. I wonder what Q Entertainment would’ve done in 2004 if they had access to the Tetris license. There’s an almost paradoxical timeline at play where Tetris Effect seems fully inspired by a game that wouldn’t exist had the game that Tetris Effect wanted to be fifteen years prior been allowed to exist. I hope Mizuguchi goes on to do more great things, but this game feels like such a triumph. A decades-long journey wrapped in a narrative disguised as a casual block game. It’s Tetris that makes you feel like you’ve just overcome something significant.

I have written about Tetris before, and I likely will again. I initially intended for this post to be even longer and more even more of a ramble. There are so many bits beyond the core game that are worth reviewing on their own. I may make this post yet, but it doesn’t really seem relevant to the feeling I wanted to convey here. I guess the TL;DR is that it’s very good. There are a lot of modes, and they are all very very good. But the real meat of the experience is in its Journey mode, and I doubt this interpretation of Tetris will ever be topped for me.

I have a Thing I’ve been meaning to start trying to write and draw. And while I keep failing to start trying in a meaningful sense, I have done the most important first step – going through a bunch of my woodcased pencils, buying a couple more to try out, and figuring out what still feels best to me. You get more of a selection, and a better selection if you go for pencils without that nubby little eraser on the end. This is doubly true for myself, someone who prefers a lead density much softer than 2/HB. But, there’s something aesthetically and functionally lovely about an eraser-ferruled pencil, and that’s what I’ll be centering this post on.

That said, I don’t personally think there’s a huge amount of difference between pencils; this won’t be the meticulous examination that any pencil blog has to offer. But, I know that a Musgrave 320 has edges that are too sharp for me to comfortably grip, and I know that the lead on a Blackwing Matte has a tendency to crumble in an unpleasant way. Also, and of far more importance to this post, I know I prefer the sort of rough feel of raw wood vs. paint/lacquer, I know I prefer somewhat rounded/triangular grips vs. purely hexagonal, and I know I prefer softer/darker densities of lead. My favorites, listed here, will reflect this.

Faber-Castell Grip 2001

These pencils are things of beauty. They’re a pleasing, soft grey with black accents in the grip, text, and ferrule. The ferrule and eraser are perfectly triangular to match the triangular body of the pencil. Most high quality woodcased pencils are made of cedar; these are made of Jelutong, a wood which is lighter and sharpens quite cleanly. I love everything about this pencil – except for that grip. Each side of the top ²⁄₃ or so of the pencil is covered in these raised, rubbery dots. They’re not very soft, to the point that they hurt to write with after just a short period of time. Faber-Castell claims that they afford “a secure, non-slip grip,” which… is not a problem I’ve ever needed to have solved. I’ve never experienced a pencil so slippery that holding it securely is an issue. Maybe this problem manifests in a particularly slippery environment, but I think the overall texture of a pencil is pretty much solved. It’s doubly a shame because the matte varnish they use feels so good to the touch, about on par with the nicer raw pencils I have. This pencil could easily be at the top of my list, if not for those little nubbins. Hardness wise, Faber-Castell labels these a 2 ¹⁄₂ (which is charming) or HB. It is likely the second-hardest lead I’ll discuss in this post, but it does write smoothly. I just wish they’d do away with the grip.

Moon Futura

This is specifically the modern version of the classic Futura pencil. It is, essentially, the pink version of the Try-Rex. It should be obvious from the design of this blog that I appreciate the existence of, and prefer, this pink version (pink down to the ferrule!). At any rate, the thing that sets the Try-Rex apart is the shape of its body. It’s a hexagon, but with three of the faces rounded (in an alternating pattern – flat, rounded, flat, rounded, flat, rounded). This makes all of the curves smooth, and the narrowness that the rounding adds gives the body a very triangular feel. In fact, it seems to give the illusion that it’s a hexagon smushed into a bit of a triangle, but if you measure the edges, it’s at least quite close to being a regular hexagon. It just… bulges, like all great shapes. The lacquer is smooth but lightly tacky, and this combined with the Try-Rex shape makes for a pretty comfortable hold. I do, of course, prefer a raw or at least matte finish, but for a glossy lacquer, it’s nice. And pink. Moon’s lead is some of my favorite lead; its ‘Soft 2’ is certainly on the darker side of a 2, and it’s clean and smooth.

General’s Cedar Pointe

This has long been my favorite woodcased pancil. I can get it in a lead hardness of 1, it’s raw cedar, and it has an aesthetically-pleasing black eraser, ferrule, and text. The raw finish is very smooth while still having a grippy texture. It’s hard to explain this, but I tried a Mitsubishi ‘Master Writing’ 9852EW¹, made of spare wood bits², and the feel was just rough. We’re not talking about splinter-level here, these are all made to be held in bare hands of course. But that’s what makes it hard to describe, these differences are subtle but noticeable on an object that one forms an intimate connection to. At any rate, the Cedar Point feels better to the touch, which is why it’s on this list and not the harder-to-acquire Mitsubishi. Moon makes a bare pencil³, as does Musgrave; both of these feel about the same as the Cedar Pointe, I’d be happy using either if I couldn’t get the General’s. But everything about the Cedar Pointe just feels right to me, and it remains my ‘daily driver.’

CWPE Bridge Pencil (made by Musgrave)

This is my purse pencil. Bridge pencils are skinnier than normal pencils and while I’ve historically had a few vintage ones kicking around, I’m glad that CWPE got Musgrave to produce a modern version⁴. There’s not much else to say about this one – the lacquer is fine, the lead is fine, overall it’s just fine. But for slipping in a slim pocket of a bag, a skinny pencil like this is great to have. I keep it sharpened to a very short point using a Kutsuwa T’GAAL sharpener; shorter points are considerably more durable⁵.

Staedtler WOPEX

Staedtler WOPEX pencils are made of a wood-fiber composite⁶. I’ve used a few other non-wood woodcased pencils over the years (like some of the early attempts at recycled cases by Skilcraft) and they were all… bad. Primarily, they were miserable to sharpen and very bendy. The bendiness meant that the lead often broke, or that weird leads had to be bonded to try to mitigate the problem. I expected WOPEX to not be much better, but… it’s honestly pretty good. They’re slightly harder to sharpen than cedar, but not much. They’re much more rigid than older attempts at this sort of thing⁷. The lead used – essentially the same sort of lead used in mechanical pencils – is harder and lighter than I like, but it’s smooth and strong. I might use these as a ‘daily driver’ if they put a softer lead in the eraser-clad version, but for the time being I love these as a pencil to throw in a toolbox or a bag of miscellanea⁸. Again, with a short point for durability.

Musgrave Tennessee Red

Most decent pencils are made from incense cedar. Incense cedar, despite its name, does not have the strong fragrance that I tend to associate with cedar. The Musgrave Tennessee Red is made of aromatic red cedar, and it smells delightful. Unfortunately it’s lacquered and not unfinished; were it bare, it would easily take over the Cedar Pointe as a daily driver. But the lacquer is comfortable enough to use, and the rest of the pencil does what it’s supposed to, so it’s enough for me to keep one around, uncapped, in the pencil case as a backup that makes things smell great.