Behold the Frost Shepards | More TK #4
I was having a pretty good week, all things considered. Probably having less of one now, but that’s the way of things.
The biggest news is that, through a series of machinations that I am absolutely not allowed to tell you about for a few weeks at the very least, I finally got a chance to play The Quiet Year. I had originally bought the game in February 2020, just before the pandemic lockdowns, and then there was a pandemic lockdown and the game never seemed like it would translate well to a Zoom session, and then when the lockdowns were over I either never had the time to throw together a session or I didn’t trust my friends enough to let me bring them something and have them receive it wholeheartedly. Maybe that’s just a me thing. I don’t know.
The game itself is this terribly interesting constructed narrative puzzle—the players set the frame of the map and then make decisions based on card prompts and a lot of thinking out loud. There’s a whole secondary mechanic involving Contempt tokens and the expression of discontent but I didn’t wrap my head around that in this session (plus there was only two of us playing so it would’ve made the already-awkward aspects of the Contempt mechanic even more pronounced). But I had a blast. There’s something very compelling about making a little mining town with an evil cave named The Evil Cave and subjecting its inhabitants to a kind of droll and meaningless series of torments among the feywild.
The Watchlist
Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics
These have been on in the background for basically the whole time they’ve been on, and yet I find the Winter Olympics so irrepressibly dull in a lot of ways. Maybe it’s because the U.S. feels worse at a ton of the events since the Shaun White / Apolo Ohno era of my youth, or maybe our perceived historical villainy on an international stage is finally being matched by the current spiritual villainy of the people running the country.
How about that men’s singles skating final though, huh?
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Insane that I never saw this, but also perfectly understandable—one does not just turn to their partner and say “hey hon, tonight I’m thinking we shut the door on a great cinematic oversight on my part, Stanley Kubrick’s sex-cult thriller that irrevocably altered the careers of both of its lead actors by the mere act of introducing them to each other.” Also, I said this in my Letterboxd review already, but it bears repeating here: it really is kinda bracing that this was the ur-example of elite sex cults for decades—the ceremony, the robes, the masks, the intrigue, all of it—and then the actual, real elite sex cult is a bunch of peevish billionaires and intellectuals emailing “thank you for the underage sex” to each other while taking private jets to and from The Private Island Where Everyone Knows All The Illegal Sex Stuff Is Happening. Movie rules, though!
Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem (2003)
Yes, I am making you read that whole title. I’m very annoyed by this one! Daft Punk is one of my favorite artists, bar none, forever, and “Discovery” is an all-timer of an album, and this annoyed me for how flimsy it is. I don’t want to be the kind of person that demands every piece of art justify its own existence (because that’s a facile exercise from jump, ars gratia artis, etc.) but my god does this ever feel like a Fortnite tie-in from the era before Daft Punk was doing literal Fortnite tie-ins. It doesn’t help that it’s Toei Animation at seemingly its laziest—beyond some clashing visual styles and some very cheap on-threes filler animation, the whole thing is droll, relying on Daft Punk’s music to provide a narrative. The problem with doing that for “Discovery” is that “Discovery” is not an album with a story. It barely has a through-line or central conceit, unlike the later “Human After All” or “Random Access Memories”—there are story tracks, I guess, but it’s not like “Digital Love” or “Something About Us” click into a larger frame at any point.
Eternity (2025)
Incredibly light on its feet, because it’s got nothing going on under the surface. Da’vine Joy Randolph basically solos anyone she’s sharing a scene with, which is fine when she’s paired up with John Early (someone who I assume has taken a UCB course and knows how to play second fiddle in a scene where needed) but kinda falls apart when anyone else is acting at her. Made me want to rewatch the Matrix sequels, if I’m being honest.