Let me step onto my soapbox for just a sec: I think we nailed it when we called it “irony poisoning.” Because that’s what it is, a poison, that seeps in between your bones until you’re incapable of admitting to yourself the hard truth of what you love because you’re too afraid of the vulnerability of being honest for one goddamned second. It’s humiliating to love something, to love it honestly and with your whole chest, and there’s a particular kind of anxious tension within people who are preoccupied with being and doing good where we’re drawn to making excuses for ourselves constantly. It’s the same kind of protective impulse teenagers have when they like something “ironically,” a little hedgehog-spike-shell to apologize to our peers for loving a thing despite knowing better. And then we forget why we love that thing in the first place: it’s about flesh, and fluid.

It should be no surprise that I fuckin loved Camp Miasma. Besides getting oneshot by Jane Schoenbrun yet again (also: I think we listen to the same podcasts???), there is an earnestness to their work that is just such a balm to me. There’s a trend I’ve picked up on in queer media of holding back, of thinking about optics, of trying not to be too strange in front of cishet people lest they think we’re all actually freaks, and I find it usually makes the art worse. Not a problem here! A real film for perverts, thank god!

Also there is a joke in here that sent me into ORBIT, I cannot BELIEVE they were allowed to do it. The man’s still alive! Incredible. I saw it twice.

I’m back in the mines.

JK I’ve been working on a poetry project about Bloodborne – it’s basically about having a body and cosmic horror through the lens of being a trans person living in the world today. And it involves collage! Bloodborne is a game I think about a lot, and it was a joy this month to come back to it again and play it through.

At this point (especially as a primarily Eldenring player), Bloodborne’s systems and difficulty feels like sliding into a warm bath, my heart rate exactly the right kind of elevated, the nightmare comforting to experience once more. Game’s a masterpiece, but also so because it makes me think about it when I’m not playing it, which is just like, what art is, you know? This go around I’m struck by the fact that your character is completely unable to fulfill the role of Hero in the sense of the hero as savior – you can’t save anyone, almost every NPC in Yharnam will experience a horrendous fate whether you intervene or not (your intervention making some fates much worse, in fact). What you can do is end it. Yharnam is a place of cycles of violence and exploitation, and while you might be the final janitor in the violence-based cleanup crew, your character can co-opt the system itself and end the Night for good.