This Ol' Nook

Like, you set out to get some beautiful swooping mithril armor, and just as you get there it's fuckin'. BAM. A breastplate like you've never seen that weighs at least 50 lbs on its own, covered in half-inch-thick plates and spikes and shit, to the point that they replaced the normal little leather strips on it with iron chains because they just pop under the strain, and stretched over that is a tattered crop top made out of a scorched and bloodied battle standard that's been painted with the image of a brutal warrior bare-handedly ripping the tongue out of the open mouth of a monster.

That's not a bad thing?

Right?

He sighed.

"Nor indeed will I force it from you. I will not spread open the layers of your soul to claim a prize or pound of flesh."

I was getting suspicious now, confused, and a couple other attitudes wrestled for dominance somewhere below the two as I tried to figure out what kind of game he was playing. After a long moment, I came to a consensus. I needed to know more despite his well-known propensity for lies and trickery.

"That doesn't-"

"Make any sense?", he finished for me, "Yeah, that seems to be the norm these days. You all come to me seeking some reward in exchange for your soul. You come to me looking for boons and other such things, all because of your myriad stories of folk figures selling their immortal selves to me and walking away happy, only to mysteriously become rich, successful, perhaps even inordinately skilled." The devil rolled his eyes and sank his cheek further into his palm as he rocked forward on the old stump of the gnarled, ancient oak that once marked the crossroads here. "Got those for themselves, I'm afraid. Apologies for letting you down."

"Then..." My brow furrowed. "Then what do you do with them?"

"I take their souls away."

"Well yeah, but that doesn't explain how they all change so extremely!"

The devil eyed me, his frown shifting from abstract fatigue to pointed frustration, subtly. "You know that feeling, deep in your bones, to reach for what you cannot possibly attain. That weight in your limbs when you're tired, and choose to continue anyway. That striving for the next tiny scrap of progress." The way the sentence was structured had the anatomy of a question, but it was said with all the force of a statement of fact. Something small deep inside me nodded in agreement before I had a chance to reject the notion.

"That weight is your soul. It pulls you, inexorably, towards an impossibly perfect version of yourself. It ties you to every promise you've ever made and then broken, to yourself and others. It pushes you into a web of commitments and false promises and structures of authority. It is the reason artists work lifelong jobs in corporations and would-be eminent scientists play unfruitful bar gigs on a six string guitar."

He groaned as he stood up. The devil himself, and I could hear his knees creak as the legs they were attached to straightened out. I was standing eight feet away. Granted, he was eight feet tall.

"You have come here to purchase something from me that I do not have, and will never be able to give you. That said, I remain willing to take your soul with me to hell, where it will remain under my purview for all eternity. Choose, please."

I was agape. I was bamboozled. I was, for all accounts, unexpectedly sad.

"And it'll be safe?" I asked.

"The soul is a terrible weight, a choking tie that binds, a blinding light that guides you wherever you have committed yourself to going. It is aspiration against reason and Selfness in its purest form, though bound entirely by consequence. It is the vain hope that salvation can be found within condemnation, and for my subjects, that is a commodity in direly short supply."

Silence, for a moment.

"Okay" you say, "I'll just spend the time to prune that out, and THEN I'll have the nice stuff I like!" And you do! It takes a while and some really creative seed manipulation in the algorithm, but you finally get a station full of awesome music you can jam out to that's filled with all sorts of barely-knowns.

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A quick aside, here: pandora is really good at finding people you've never heard of nor do you think you'd have predicted to exist. You'll come across a track called "A Treatise On The Natural Link Between Pain And Anger", play it, and hear nine minutes of the mildest electronic music you've ever heard, and then the very next song will be the most hauntingly beautiful arrangement you've ever experienced and it'll be one of three chiptune tracks by an artist called "Criecher eet shoe", it's glorious. When it works.

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And then, you run into the second part. Because of the way Pandora works, you've now trapped yourself into an endlessly repeating cycle of like 113 songs.

"Hey, songs!" Pandora will say, "My user really likes you, and I want to show him more songs like you! What can you recommend?"

"I can recommend Sir Chloe!" shouts Good Kid, exuberant, "And MANESKIN and Worse in Person, too!"

"I can recommend Upsahl! And The Pretty Reckless!" Shouts Sir Chloe.

"And what about you, The Pretty Reckless? What do you recommend I show my user?" Asks pandora, blindly.

And The Pretty Reckless will shrug, and say in the most innocent voice, "I'unno. Good Kid?"

Gladlands and Adventuring Party is really helping me break out of that, especially given the fact that they address the dependability paradox of, "Well sure you're there when the situation is dire, but the situation is barely ever dire, and the whole rest of the time you're just kinda miserable".

It also helps me bc now I get to think of my gladlands OC, Dogman the Carrier. He's mute, has six arms, and gets around by hanging from the ribcage of a giant scrap metal marionette that he moves by pulling on a series of cables. He calls the puppet-mech "Dog", despite it looking nothing like a dog because he's never seen a dog. In fact, it looks like a homunculus because he's taken the rumored physical traits of a dog (tail, long face, triangular ears, quadruped, etc) and applied them to the shape of a human.

He carries things.

What genre is it that has those games that are like. All story. I mean they have fun gameplay in them but the whole thing hinges off the story and the quirky little dialogues you can have with the characters? The adventure you go on?

The ones that feel like what flavor a good picture book would be if it was an ice cream?

You know, your uhh:

-OXENFREE 1&2

-Life Is Strange

-The Fall 1&2

-That one game where you play a detective with a psychic link to yourself but he wears glasses and you don't idk I never played it

You know the ones, THE ONES?? Yeah those ones. What are they. Why do they haunt me with their vague categorization. Do telltale games count.

My favorite thought is that humans are all just self-replicating machines. We're an organism, made up of organs, which are in turn made up of tissues, which are made of cells, which are FUCKIN ORGANISMS AGAIN and who have THEIR OWN ORGANS but this time we call them organelles because they're ittybitty and we needed a word for the ittybitty ones.

We are, collectively, a giant dogpile of billions of instances of the grey goo scenario. I mean really, we're nothing else. How do you make a human? Oh idk maybe throw together a bunch of organic cells that share dna and tell them "Hey you guys, you have exactly three things to do. Go eat, replicate, and for god's sake try not to die" and all our biological building blocks were like "yeah ok" and so it was that the *planet earth* was made into one giant calculation on how to make the most efficient and effective scavenger it can out of some spare *carbon* and whatever else it had in the fridge at the time.

Not to mention how the entire food chain is just a massive nutrient extraction and refinement process. Plants eat nutrients in dirt, herbivores eat plants, carnivores eat herbivores, and whatever is the easiest to eat gets sliced up, prepackaged, and shipped to your local superstore. The bible says adam was made of mud or some shit? Yeah ofc he was. We all are, Adam. Get in line. We're a bunch of bipedal machines made of billions of smaller machines, designed with the sole purpose of eating things that eat things and *getting on with it* it's wonderful.

And we fear things like zombies, or werewolves, or the borg, etc that would take us and use what they find to make more of themselves *like we haven't already been doing that ourselves*. The human equivalent is something like a bunch of humans exploring deep space and finding a planet populated entirely by cattle.

"Hello, meat planet. Welcome to our bellies.", they'd say, their eyes glinting with subtle malice and overt hunger.

"Look man, I have no idea what you're planning but please don't kill us for food stock", the cows would reply