Iām about to make a bunch of posts with my thoughts on The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. There will be spoilers. I will tag them. You have been warned.
There is my first one, written in the style of the game. Most of it is under the read more cos it's 539 words long.
This is the tragical comedy or comical tragedy story about a being called the Narrator. The Narrator had a story to tell; it was set in an office and was about a man named Stanley.
The Narrator told his story again and again and again in a game called The Stanley Parable. His story often got of track which frustrated him immense. This frustration was normally aimed at Stanley because he thought Stanley was derailing things on purpose.
The Narrator believed he had created both the Office and Stanley but he hadnāt. The Office had existed long before the Narrator wrote his story and Stanley was one of the many employees trapped there.
The Office had always been a strange place. Many unusual and even unnatural experiments were run there. One day, when a section of the Office was looping outside of time, the Narrator began his story about an office and that part of the Office became the place where the story was set.
The Narrator did not know this. As the Narrator, he had some power over the story and so some power over the Office itself. He did not have total control though as the Office was still a thing partly beyond him.
The Narrator also didnāt understand that his story was a game that both he and Stanley were trapped in. In the story/game, Stanley was mostly an empty vessel to be puppeteer around by the Player. However, since he didnāt know his story was a game, the Narrator was unaware of this too. For such a powerful being, he really understood very little.
After a very long time of telling his story, the Narrator did discover that he was in a game. He decided to change things up and aim his story more at the Player. Thus, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe or ā as he called it ā The Stanley Parable 2, was born.
The Narrator wanted his story to be enjoyed more than anything and he was sure the Player would love it.
In the new game, even though he now knew Stanley wasnāt a real person, the Narrator was kinder to him. In the endings that carried over from the old game, he would still verbally berate Stanley, because the Player had liked those endings, right?
In the new endings, he was normally much nicer. There was no point getting angry at Stanley anymore. After all, Stanley was just a puppet. In fact, he was a puppet that the Narrator was very fond of. Stanley was like a favourite toy from childhood, kept and cherished or perhaps Stanley was more like an imaginary friend who just happened to be solid.
However, just as the Narrator had changed so had Stanley. During the endless repeats Stanley had woken up. He was real, he existed, he had had thoughts, emotions, hopes and dreams but this was just another thing the Narrator didnāt know.
When heād been nothing but a puppet, the Narrator had seen Stanley as a person. Now that he was a person, the Narrator saw him as nothing but a puppet.
And the story began again because the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is neverā¦
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Listen, Iām a very organized person, but also my outlines contain things like āstuff happens(tm)ā and my Pinterest has an entire folder called āidk stuff I guessā and my to-do lists regularly include the bullet points ā???ā and āprofitā when I donāt know what Iām doing yet, so I guess my point is that words matter more than we sometimes realize, but not always as much as we fear. Anyway, itās midnight and Iām vibrating into the fifth dimension instead of sleeping so do with this thought what you will.
I'm doing one more extra just because I had to post to the WordPress site to make sure it's still linked to my main blog.
I've read a fair few articles and stuff about how we are too invested in/dependent on modern materials, where the tone is almost shaming
There's some of that in my main hobbies. And let me tell you, make every book available in print and plentiful, in bookstores and libraries and I'll stop borrowing or buying ebooks. Make yarn made of natural fibers in big skeins for $7-$12 in a bunch of colors, and I will quit using acrylic yarn. The latter isn't really possible cause of the labor involved in making those yarns. But I'm not going to quit reading or crocheting, and I'm not a rich person so I have to go with the available/cheaper option.
This book is the opposite of the shaming tone. The author is a material scientist and is flat out joyful about materials. This enthusiasm is infections because I read chapters about the history, making, use, and chemical make up of: steel, paper, concrete, chocolate, foam, plastic, graphite, glass, porcelain, and medical implants - and it was *fun*.
The author couched all of these things in the context of personal and cultural significance, and made a story. In the case of plastics, he wrote a screenplay for a hypothetical movie, that honestly probably would be a pretty good attention getter for a junior high/high school science class, if it were produced.
In fact, the whole book would be great for a high school, or 100 level college class for science. It makes things like chemistry a bit more accessible.
Going to do one more extra just to make sure that the link between this site and my Tumblr still works š
Iāve read a fair few articles and stuff about how we are too invested in/dependent on modern materials, where the tone is almost shamingThereās some of that in my main hobbies. And let me tell you, make every book available in print and plentiful, in bookstores and libraries and Iāll stopā¦
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To some extent, then, what allows us to behave as humans are our clothes, our homes, our cities, our stuff, which we animate through our customs and language. (This becomes clear if you ever visit a disaster zone.) The material world is not just a display of our technology and culture, it is part of us. We invented it, we made it, and in turn it makes us who we are.
Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World,Ā Mark Miodownik
I'm listening to Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik, a book on materials science (it's fun! Not a lot of science books start with a stabbing on a train!), and the section on the invention of plastic is very funny on a meta level. The author talks about an argument he had with a man in a movie theater, years ago, and then formats the entire chapter as a screenplay with notes, to serve as a rebuttal to movie theater man. This is the most extreme version of "I wish I had a snappy comeback" that I've ever seen, it's so petty, I love it.
