There is no fire-fighting in this game. Only fire-watching. Respect the restraint.

As an adult male that begrudgingly accepts the label “gamer” — I play them regularly, I follow the latest releases — my favorite movement in games right now is toward shorter, more focused narrative games. Games that steer away from grand adventure and intense action and tell intimate interactive stories. Games that feel like they’re made by adults, and for an adult sensibility; games that don’t require lightning reflexes or hours of dedication to enjoy or excel in. Gone Home, Her Story, SOMA, and The Beginner’s Guide are some of my favorite recent examples, and now currently, Firewatch.

The setup: main character Henry flees a difficult relationship situation to work in a fire lookout tower for the park service in Wyoming. It’s beautiful, isolated, and lonely, but for his boss and eventual friend Delilah on the other end of the handheld radio.

Playing the game consists of exploring your patch of forest, dealing with minor problems (some which later become major ones), and getting to know the woman on the other end of the radio as you do your jobs. There’s some excitement, definitely some mystery and tension, but no fighting, racing, collecting, or puzzle-solving like other games you might play. You can’t die or lose. You can’t even jump.

But it’s moving, it’s human, it’s beautiful both visually (the scenery, lighting and color palettes are spectacular) and emotionally. It feels grown-up, which so few video games manage to do. And at least for me, it made me think about my life and my relationships, which almost no games do. So, based on the big-boy ideas dealt with in Firewatch, two topics for discussion*:

(*saving the others that might spoil surprises in the game)

Henry takes the job as a fire lookout to get away from a tough relationship, needing time to think and sort out his life.

Why do we associate going out into nature with figuring out our lives?
Aside from quiet and lack of distraction, what are we looking for when we “get away from it all”?
Aside from nice landscapes that make good photos, what is the emotional benefit of “natural beauty”?

Henry “meets” Delilah over the radio, and for the rest of the game she’s really your only other point of human contact.

Have you ever become friends with someone you’d never met in person?
How did they become your friend?
How was your friendship with them different than with people you have met?

Corona-ad-style trips look like paradise during the week, but getting trapped in one forever would be a little bit like hell, wouldn’t it?

Last weekend I was on vacation, and I have very few good vacation stories or photos, because it was intentionally more of a “do nothing”-style vacation. No adventures, no excursions, no tourist destinations, not even very many activities. Sometimes, that’s nice.

But on the last day I had a vacation-induced thought: sitting around doing nothing is ‘relaxing’ after a busy or stressful work period, but doing nothing for too long would surely drive a person crazy in the end. Without much purpose or any concrete goals or productivity, doesn’t life quickly become empty?

Let’s say “doing nothing” has a few boundaries: you can do vacation-type things like play games, read books or magazines, eat and drink or even go to bars or clubs or restaurants. But once you do anything that could be considered work, or productive, you’re not “doing nothing” any more. So no writing, creating, building. Even gardening or decorating or demanding chores are off limits. In this scenario you’re not fantastically wealthy but you’re wealthy enough not to worry and to have a well-above-average lifestyle and budget. You can be wherever you want, but you have to stay there: traveling to a new place every day is too much of an adventure, and wouldn’t count as “doing nothing”. So.

How long do you think you could go doing essentially nothing?

What would you fill your time with in order to “do nothing” for as long as possible?

What people could you do nothing with the longest?

What about doing nothing, specifically, would eventually drive you nuts?

Full/Sad Disclosure: Lelaina from Reality Bites is the fictional character I would have most absolutely married. Possibly still.

As a fan (and a 30-something human guilty of some of the perceptions the article diagnoses), I thoroughly enjoyed this in-depth look at the career and symbolism of Winona Ryder, “Winona Forever”. It’s full of interesting stuff on how an actress represents a generation, how an individual gets trapped in time because of that symbolic role, and so much more.

“If you spend your most crucial adolescent years being watched by millions of people being told what’s good and what’s bad, you have no sense of who you are,” Ryder explained. She saw a therapist who diagnosed her with “anticipatory anxiety” —feelings of dread over anticipated events—and, quaintly, “anticipatory nostalgia.” (In the Times,psychologist Dr. Constantine Sedikides recently described this lesser known “condition,” which could be considered our current era’s raison d’être, as the drive to “build nostalgic-to-be memories.”)

…

“To us, Winona Ryder is a bona fide icon,” designer Marcus Wainwright said. “She also has this beautiful timeless quality.” But it’s actually her timeliness that gives her value—she is a human incarnation of ‘90s nostalgia.

We cannot see Ryder without seeing the grunge era. In the New York Times Magazine in 2011, Carl Wilson riffed on the “20-year cycle of resuscitation” that had finally turned to Gen-X nostalgia.

…

As Tavi Gevinson told Entertainment Weekly in 2014, “how I feel when I see pictures of teen Winona Ryder and Johnny Depp holding hands in leather jackets, like, nobody can match that.” The only person that can come close is Winona Ryder now, because embedded in Winona Ryder now is Winona Ryder then. She carries her past with her. The teen actress who sought to make her own life nostalgic before it had even passed her by peeks out from within the woman Marc Jacobs now imbues with nostalgia—she is a Russian nesting doll of reminiscence.

Sorry for the overbearing quotation, but there’s just so much to unpack here! Let’s go most straightforward to most abstract:

Which celebrities do you feel represent your youth, or your most core values and beliefs and personality that will never really change?

As they get older, and you get older, how does that connection change?

Do you ever feel “anticipatory nostalgia”, the need to create memories to remember later? Is that a useful or healthy tendency, or anti-social, neurotic, and potentially detaching you from authentically enjoying your experiences?

Not hating, but I’ll still take a King Size Snickers any day.

Recently the artisan foodie community went nuts when intrepid food bloggers revealed that some Brooklyn (of course) chocolate makers’ process may not live up to their professed “bean to bar” ideals. Heavens!

This New Yorker piece examines where the furor comes from and what responsibility both haters and lovers of “hipster food” may have to bear for buying into the myth.

For consumers, it is embarrassing to have been seduced again—by the Masts, if you agree they did anything wrong; by artisanal food that can’t possibly remain true to its ideals when it becomes a category of mass appeal; and by the glib, high-class opt-out from contemporary life that the hipster aesthetic depends upon. The backlash against the Masts has far more to do with pent-up irritation at the self-satisfaction of urban cultural élites than it does with cocoa beans. We can only hope that the embarrassment is pervasive enough to kill the tired-out hipster category altogether.

But whether you care about this at all may be the most revealing thing about the whole debate.

How do you feel about hipster foodie culture in general? Good? Bad? Annoying? Overrated? Exciting?

Have you benefitted from this trend? Has it hurt you in any way, or do you believe it has hurt or helped society in general?

Why do you think you have any response at all? Where are your opinions coming from? What are they based in?

Most “best ever” Super Bowl ads are just sexy girls, according to dummies who take surveys on best ever Super Bowl ads.

The Super Bowl is getting close, which always brings back the weird habit of people who don’t care much about either team saying, “Who cares, I’ll just watch for the commercials,” which doesn’t happen during any other day of the year.

But on all those other days, people hate ads; meanwhile lower TV viewership is making it harder to sell the ads that pay for the shows. So if both are true, we can’t be far from a breaking point, in terms of actually sustaining television as a business.

How would you rather TV creators and networks get compensated?

Either: New technology makes skipping ads or changing channels impossible, so you have to watch the ads to see the show?

Or: Cable services, Hulu, and anything else you use to watch television cost double or triple what it does now, with no more ads, ever?