The Rivers Flowed Clear and Blue

In Noclip’s roundtable best-of-year show, Danny O’Dwyer, the channel’s founder, accuses Anthology of the Killer of having a victim mentality. He says “The reason I like video games is that I see the world as one.” He has the gun. Gaming respects that. Anthology of the Killer does not.

2024 was not the year of the gun. I did not feel, walking humbly into 2025, that I had control over my destiny. Global Warming is not under my control. I am not choosing to make transphobia happen. Anthology of the Killer is about many things, but chief among them is our political reality - that powerful, stupid people are changing our world, that their fears and myopic interests bleed out into our lived experience in ways we can’t realistically change.

It’s a scary situation. It’s a funny situation! Anthology of the Killer has a lot of fun with it. Vengeful ghosts build memorial waterparks. The night college downstairs teaches you how to be a slasher villain. The rich failson of a drinky-bird dynasty starts kidnapping random alt kids he thinks might be serial killers. That zinester you liked now is a consultant/CIA informant.

And yet, at the end of the series, you look back at the totality and just feel terrible. This vision of a future, where the in-group says fuck you and beats down as hard as it can, is succeeding. It is a part of our lives now, online and offline, wherever you are.

I admit these games do lack a vision for a brighter future, but I personally found that refreshing. I did not exit 2024 with hope, but with tenacity. BB does the same. Perhaps both of us have a ‘victim mentality’, but in a year like this one I can’t imagine feeling any other way.

Then maybe...

Maybe...

We are living in an area that makes up no more than 30% of the entire Gaza Strip, and this area has been reduced to rubble and tents. We are besieged by land, sea, and air. There is no real way out and nowhere we can escape to. There are cranes and massive sand embankments surrounding Gaza, and people are living under constant surveillance and fear. You cannot leave, and you cannot choose where you want to go. All you can do is wait.

Water stations have almost completely stopped operating because fuel and oil have run out. The tents have been torn apart and worn down by the extreme heat, and people are living inside them in conditions that are impossible to describe. Hospitals have been extensively destroyed, with medicines and medical supplies unavailable, and even basic diagnostic and treatment equipment has become extremely scarce. Almost everything is prohibited from entering Gaza, and even what is allowed in is subject to approval and restrictions.

The entire education system has collapsed. Schools have been destroyed, children have been deprived of their education .

The reality here is far worse than anything I can write. Words cannot convey the scale of what we are experiencing, and no single photograph can show what it is like to watch an entire city collapse before our eyes.