The Column
This should have been two posts.
Delta
Sometimes you look around and realize how different things are now. Obviously, we’ve gone through huge changes with our recent house move (and schools/job situations changing), but things feel totally different in totally unrelated ways.
My sons are not toddlers any more. Melissa and I just realized one day - “oh these boys are so big now. Things are so different than they were before”. I can actually be in a different room than them, and they aren’t going to immediately need me for something. Rather than doing their bedtime routine for them, I can chaperone it. They are starting to understand nuance. My older can read to his younger brother. They both get reading lights in their beds now. My older son wants to build a treehouse.
My house feels so close to everything, rather than so far away from it all. Its details are all already good, rather than “needing attending”. It feels like energy put into this house will actually improve it, rather than simply fix it. The move was incredibly arduous (all in), but I’ve thought “man I love this, so glad we moved” most days.
My wife is great, as always, and now it feels like the world is great with her. Her time spent in her previous job was spent constantly fighting lack of resources. Her new job isn’t a constant downer, which is huge.
My body feels like it’s finally responding, ever so slightly, to actually doing cardio fairly frequently. I have run 4 miles a couple of times recently, and it didn’t feel like I was dead afterwards. A simple 5k used to be practically insurmountable, and now I genuinely enjoy getting to go for a jog… even more than lifting weights.
A general running theme in there: things are really good right now.
Silksong
This section is about a video game, but also about the making of a video game.
Review
Silksong is the sequel to Hollow Knight, which I adored,1 nearly 7 years in the making.
Silksong is a masterpiece.
Much like Hollow Knight, I love the art, the mood, the story, and the characters. I could gush about Silksong for days. It’s so so big and there’s so many little details that are there if you stop to appreciate them.
It’s not without any flaws, though. People complain about how hard it is, which is valid at times, but it’s also that difficulty that brings the sense of “oh I’m getting better at this” and from of beating a tough bit.
I’ve seen credits roll on the first ending, and am working my way through the incredibly challenging 3rd act of the game to see its “true” ending. It’s incredible and will go down in my Top 5 videogames of all time.
Making Of
Most of the development of Silksong is a mystery, but what’s definitely true is that it was built by 3 Australian dudes who call themselves “Team Cherry”.
In a world of huge companies pushing hundreds of developers and artists to hit deadlines under massive crunch, only to fire them weeks later - Team Cherry has found wild success working on a small team - on their own schedule. When asked in an interview why the game took nearly 7 years to make, they essentially said “we were having fun making it”. And now the thing they’ve built has surely made them all millionaires many times over. They’ve figured out how to play the hands they were dealt perfectly. What legends.
Team Cherry are perhaps the quintessential example of what Cal Newport writes about in his books. They absolutely nailed slow productivity.
Top 5: Videogames of All Time
I don’t play games often enough for this list to bear any weight.
5. Super Mario World
This is a stand-in for all Mario games. I’ve played a lot of them, and Super Mario World will always hold a place in my heart.
4. Battlefield 3
This is a stand-in for all 1st person shooters to me. It’s the one I spent the most time playing, and it felt completely unreal at the time.
3. Super Smash Bros
If I had to pick one, I’d go with Ultimate, I guess, but really all of them are so good and fun. Lots of memories and good times have been had in this game.
2. Breath of the Wild & Tears of the Kingdom
The first of two cop out answers. If I didn’t collapse these bottom two results the list would have been 4/5ths represented by 2 franchises. I like all the Zelda games. These two are truly incredible. I’d recommend them to anyone.
1. Hollow Knight & Silksong
Perhaps some minor recency bias here, to put this over Zelda, but these games really speak to me. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend them to everyone, I love the games Team Cherry make.
Quote:
so steve is nervous nobody will know that’s a url, so just be clear, you know how some websites end in .com or .org, well they added a bunch of new ones like .condos or .focaccia or .ennui or whatever, and so our website actually ends in .date! that’s the real, actual url, play dot date. so believe it or not just type play.date and your browser will take you to our internet home page on the world wide web. now, one important note, the name of the handheld is just “Playdate”, one word uppercase P, please don’t think the device is called play dot date, that’s just the url, and yeah we tried to add a few words up there like “visit” or “go to our homepage” or “https://” but all of them looked kind of horrible, in conclusion we were really excited to get a clean url like play.date but as we’re laying out this sticker back art file we’re maybe feeling just a little bit of regret, not a lot. please visit our website.
- The back of a sticker I received from the makers of the Playdate, in tiny print
Footnotes
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Column 353 is definitely one of my better ones. ↩