5/5/26
reading
i finished Wuthering Heights over the weekend. shortly after the last time i wrote about it, there was a chapter where Heathcliff was behaving truly monstrously towards his son. obviously he'd been a monster throughout the second half of the book, but it always seemed so cartoonishly hyperbolic to me that it didn't actually hit, emotionally, but this time it felt so similar to abusive relationships i've experienced or seen more skillfully depicted that it was rather harrowing to read, which honestly may have been the first time i really found myself immersed in the book.
once i got to the end of Nelly's story, essentially getting back to the present tense of the book, i went back and reread the first three chapters, since i started the book several months ago and didn't remember them super well. having learned the tangled and frankly supremely fucked up history of all these characters, it all made a lot more sense the second time around. it made perfect sense that Lockwood's reaction to being treated like this, and then learning why everyone's acting that way, was to simply say "fuck this house I'm going back to London, I'll be back to settle my lease when it's up". of course, when he comes back (spoilers for a 179 year-old book!), Heathcliff's died, and Cathy and Hareton are about to be happily married. on the one hand, it feels like such a tritely sentimental happy ending, but on the other, learning that Heathcliff's last weeks were spent, at long last, haunted by visions of his one true love, refusing to eat as she refused to eat in her last days, and that this was not a cause for dread or terror as it would be for most people, but was in fact an ecstatic experience for him, is itself haunting. when Lockwood encountered Catherine's ghost in chapter 3, he was terrified, as one would expect when a young woman appears at your upper-storey window. but for Heathcliff, already tortured by her absence, finding out that someone else experienced her presence was torturous, and getting that for himself after several months of acute longing must have been like letting out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding since her death. for all that Catherine and Heathcliff were, individually and as a unit, impetuous, selfish, manipulative, and abusive, to see them finally joined in the oblivion of the grave was still a comfort, and that the people left behind in their wake were able to find a measure of happiness themselves even moreso.
playing
i picked up the Final Fantasy Tactics remaster in the last big Steam sale (conveniently, it's on sale yet again!). i got a copy of the original back in the oughts when it was somewhat hard to find, but i never got very far in the game, because life remains full of distractions. so far, i've gotten further than i ever had before... but i've also found myself fairly distracted from it this last week. still, i'm enjoying it a lot, even if the dialogue is rather over-wrought. the game came out in 1997, a year after George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, and clearly they came out of a zeitgeist, but the new translation (and the dialogue in Final Fantasy XVI, which shares more than a little of the same DNA) almost feels like a parody of that in HBO's Game of Thrones adaptation, what with Ramza's "lord brothers" and all the peasants supping on "broth of bean" when they aren't being slaughtered in the pointless wars of the nobility.
i'm also pleased to discover that the seemingly complex zodiacal compatibility system is incredibly easy to understand with just a bit of basic astrological knowledge. the way the game presents it is so intimidating, twelve codex entries in a row that say something like "Sagittarius has good compatibility with Aries and Leo, poor compatibility with Pisces and Virgo, and best compatibility with Gemini (unless one of them is a monster, and then they have worst compatibility)." what this actually translates to is good compatibility with signs of the same triplicity (Sagittarius, Aries, and Leo are all Fire signs, which also means they share a trine (120°) aspect), bad compatibility with signs that it has a square (90°, which also means they share their modality, in this case mutability) aspect to, and for some reason, best compatibility with the sign in opposition (180°) to it, which also shares the same modality, and is traditionally the least favorable aspect, being of the nature of Saturn, the greater malefic. i suppose that explains why those units do the most damage to each other, but it makes less sense why the also heal each other most effectively. one of these days i might throw a guide explaining all this up on Steam with an actual zodiac wheel to explain, because it makes much better sense when you can look at it and see the relationships between the signs.
but, like i said, i've been distracted from FFT, and that's because of two games: Forbidden Solitaire and Titanium Court.
Forbidden Solitaire is presented as being a game from the 90s, that you remember as having been controversial for some reason, that you find in a thrift store and start playing. as you play, your sister messages you her increasingly unnerving research about the game: it's funny when there's a crowd of people upset that a solitaire game is so violent, but more concerning to learn that one of the developers killed herself in what appears to be some sort of ritual, and several other suicides were associated with the game. by the time you figure out what's really going on with this game, as your sister begs you to stop playing, it's probably going to be too late for you.
it's co-developed by Grey Alien Games, who make the excellent Regency Solitaire series, and Night Signal Entertainment, whose Home Safety Hotline i've got a vague impression is quite good but i don't really know anything about it. given how good this game is, i should probably check it out!
the music in the penultimate boss fight has a recurring synth line (you can first here it at :34) that reminded me of something in a Skinny Puppy song, but i couldn't quite put my finger on it. so i did what any normal, well-adjusted neurotypical person would do and went and listened to all of their albums until i found it. there's a kind of similar synth, pretty far down in the mix, at 1:15 of Chainsaw, but i didn't think that was actually what it was, so i kept listening, and something like six hours later found what i was actually remembering, which comes in at 1:05 in Inquisition. so now you know, and thank heavens, so do i.
now, Titanium Court. what the fuck do i say about Titanium Court? i first became aware of it a month or two ago when it was recommended in Failbetter Games' newsletter, but reading what they wrote, and its description on Steam, didn't really grab me. but then Remap Radio's article about it showed up in my inbox, and i read it, and felt myself going insane, and bought it basically instantly.
Is Titanium Court a well-oiled match-3 video game? Yes. Is it a tower defense game? Also yes. Do you spend a significant amount of time exploring a castle like it’s an adventure game? Well, yes. Does the entire game, at times, feel like an elaborate trick being played on you? Absolutely.
this is an insane game, for insane people. it made me laugh maybe a dozen times in the first five minutes. every new thing that happens is baffling and delightful in equal measure. maybe i'll figure out something more coherent to say about it when i've figured out more of what it's doing (though i think i have a fairly good idea of its basic structure, at this point), but for now, just go read Patrick Klepek's article and if it sounds like your jam, pick it up.
speaking of Failbetter Games, Fallen London has been going for fifteen whole years at this point, and it's still one of my absolute favorite pieces of media. they just announced that the eighth, and definitely not final, piece of the current major storyline, Firmament, in which we finally get to explore the strange terrains of the Roof after more than a decade of teasing (and a stretch goal that didn't quite make it for their first expanded FL universe game, Sunless Sea, which in retrospect i'm glad of because it would have foreclosed on this version of the Roof, which i deeply adore) is releasing this Thursday! Firmament has been really divisive; many players are put off by it's overly-baroque prose (even for this game, in which the only real reward is more and better text) and by its lack of clarity in whether or not choices you make with little information will have ramifications later on, or whether those ramifications will be good or bad. at least as many, myself included, are super into it for those same reasons. the story has occasionally been gated on progress in the Great Hellbound Railway story, and while my main character and first alt completed it long before Firmament was announced, on my newest alt i've been seeing what the experience is like with the bare minimum of Railway progress. this has meant there have been a few places where Firmament assumes she knows something that she hasn't actually encountered yet (because it's very silly to build the first station and then ignore your railway for several months, especially now that the costs of making tracks have been drastically reduced), and now it means that i'm rushing to get her through one of the big, pivotal story beats near the end of the railway because i didn't expect that i'd only have two days notice of the next chapter coming out!