Matthew Supert

This past week I have been knocked out of commission due to a nasty head cold. I unfortunately have never been able to "nap" so I have be stuck on the couch, cleaning up work emails and trying to find something else to pass the time. Too tired to read or engage my brain in any real creative activity I decided to give the recent Gamepass release Pentiment a go, and boy did it hit the right spot at the right time. 

Pentiment is a text based murder mystery game focused around 16th century Bavaria, the Catholic Church, and the Holy Roman Empire. The adventure takes place in the town of Tassing where you have to first investigate a murder at the local abbey. The murder mystery has you as the main character going around the town, looking for clues and interviewing people in the town. All standard "your choice affects the world and people" stuff we have seen in many games. 

What really sets Pentiment apart though is the atmosphere. First the game's art style is a wonderful hand drawn and there is almost no music in the game, with the exception of two notable instances in my play through. It came to be incredibly relaxing while laying on the couch sick. 

The other thing that really caught me about this game is how it built this sense of family and community. The game is really about the people and the families of Tassing. There are three acts in the game that take place over twenty years and through each act you see families grow, some members pass away, and others get married to each other. It was touching and it really grounded me to the characters to see where they have come and where they were going. Finding out that someone from the first act had passed away really struck me emotionally as I needed to delicately navigate how to inquire about the circumstances of what happened the seven years I was gone. 

This was the late 1500's after all and times were tough. Political and religious struggle was bounded by the plague and class warfare and that is reflected in this game. It all came together though in the third act as the game culminates on Christmas Eve. All of your choices an all of the lives of the characters in the game come together on the Christmas Eve celebration at the local inn. All of the townspeople are there and there is this brilliant moment of cultural community that is brought together that just really touched me from a storytelling perspective. That pure sense of community and despite all of the hardships and tragedy that have occurred to the characters in this game, they all soldiered through it together, as a community.

The game can be a bit hard though to get invested in, especially if you aren't prepared for the amount of text you need to parse through. Additionally, there is a beautiful element many of the character's text in the game is different based upon their profession. For example, the monks at the monastery have text bubbles in a gothic font. The local printer has his family's text in a print font. This is a great touch, but can be a bit hard to read at times. Thankfully, there is a "simple font" option for those who want to turn it on, but the game does lose a bit of charm there. 

Also, the other minor fault in the narrative flow is that the game doesn't always give you a good indication of how much interaction and time you have between the scenes. There were multiple instances where I could have interviewed more people, but didn't realize my current interaction was going to progress forward the clock. That was not telegraphed very well early on. 

Overall though, such a wonderful and touching game and I think I might play it again to see how the story changes with different dialog choices and different interactions. Check it out if you are looking for a nice, slow paced game.

It just occurred to me that, after switching phones this past fall that I never actually posted all of the highlights from our big motorcycle trip this past fall with the MEWS crew. If I am being honest, I did not journal the trip this year, so instead I'll just go ahead and share the GPS data, photos and videos. 

Video

Photos

Megan took me out this past Saturday for my 40th birthday, so let's take a look. 

The afternoon started off by hitting up the Starbucks Reserve located on Michigan Avenue. One of six in the world it is a four story roaster selling specialty coffee and even has a bar on the fourth floor serving coffee cocktails. We arrived mid afternoon so it was incredibly busy, but we were able to grab a spot by the window and have a latte and a snack. 

Next stop was to the Driehaus Museum, which was absolutely fantastic. It is located just two blocks west of Michigan Avenue at Wabash and Erie. It was super gorgeous and in immaculate condition. It took us a little over an hour to walk through the house. It is a a restored "gilded age" home owned by the Nickerson family from the late 1800's. 

The final highlight of the evening though was dinner at El Che Steakhouse, where Megan book us the 10-course chef's counter. We sat right at the chef's prep kitchen in front of the open wood fire, where they cook all of the food. I'll be honest in that I can't remember exactly all of the details of the menu, but needless to say, it was delicious. Both of us though, while not sick did sleep horribly that evening as our bodies had to digest all of that super rich food and drink. 

Ohh, and the outfit I wore that day? Also part of my birthday gift from Megan from Banana Republic's Heritage clothing line. Overall a wonderful birthday experience. 

"...I don't think I've ever said that Radchaai are gender neutral--just that they really don't care about anyone's gender, and don't mark it socially or linguistically... it's not really a thing they care much about. They care about it, maybe, as much as we care about hair color.

[I] think it's worth considering...how much of what we consider to be "obvious" about someone's gender when we look at them is actually a set of social cues. Hairstyle, kinds of clothes, even certain colors of clothing. Ways of standing or moving. These can change from culture to culture, or even from decade to decade (just a couple hundred years ago, high heels and hose were a guy thing. Less than a hundred years ago, pink was a "boy" color.)... And consider that while quite a lot of people will say that one's genitals are the defining element of one's gender, we very rarely see the genitals of the people we quite automatically assign gender to. We're not actually gendering the people around us based on their genitals. We're making assumptions about their genitals based on a complicated mass of social cues."

Oasis is (was), hands down, my favorite rock band. Its ironic that I like them as much as I do considering I really do not like the Beatles at all. Oasis is as close as you are going to get to a Beatles sounding band without being an actual cover band. For those of you out there who are Oasis fans, you are well acquainted with the long standing feud between the Gallagher brothers. They are in short assholes and they are assholes to each other. Liam, the lead singer, developed an almost historic reputation for his antics and the journey that was Oasis came to an end around 2008.

All of the band member's have experimented with projects for the past decade, but we not have before us Liam's first solo album. I have always been able to enjoy his and Oasis' music without having to like the member's personally. I don't need to be friends with them, so what they do with their personal antics are of no concern to me. 

This album is pretty much exactly what you expect it to be. It sounds like Oasis, and for me that is just find. Some good, solid brit rock is always welcome. The opening track "Wall of Glass" is a great sounding song that captures that glimmer of Oasis and Liam. That quintessential Oasis guitar riff is featured right there while the track opens. 

The rest of the album is good, but doesn't really present any truly memorable songs. If you are an Oasis fan, like me, then you will probably love this album. It is good to have fresh album in my library with this sound. For everyone else out there, I would say check it out. It is sort of like how the new U2 albums are. When you listen to them they are all solid albums and well produced, but not necessarily "memorable". 

You won't often see me get onto a soapbox on my blog here, but with the whole political atmosphere as of late I have seen too many posts on social media and elsewhere from people who have taken a few words from a political philosophy, put it onto a meme and then expanded that to encapsulate and summarize what an entire political theory is. That sort of stuff annoys me to no end. If one wants to disagree with a political ideology they should take the time to try and understand what that theory is, where it came from and why it's ideals came to be where they are. 

My undergraduate degree was political theory, and while that seems like a sort of useless degree to have in a practical world, I feel like being exposed and reading the works of political theorists has made me an extremely well rounded person and one who can empathize with various points of view. These political theories, philosophies, and movements were born out of a need. They didn't just spring up out of nowhere so there is always at least some degree of legitimacy to what they are trying to convey. Some, in fact many have not stood the test of time, while others ebb and flow in their prominence around the world depending upon various political and socio-economic conditions in the world. While none of them are the Truth, all of them hold some bit of truth and reasoning for why individuals and societies believe what they may believe. 

So with that in mind, I am going to outline a couple of the works that I have found to be the most influential upon me. Hopefully, you will read some of these yourselves. And please, in the future, don't just Google something and take the first sentence or two of Wikipedia and use that as your education on a topic. All of the books here also have volumes of work worth of discussion and critique upon them so I won't go and try to summarize in detail what they are about. Instead I'll try to mention the main topic from each book that is typically drawn out and discussed in conversations.  

Most of the books I will recommend are probably in the public domain, so I will try to link to their ebook and if it is available the audiobook. 

Finally, before I get into my list I want to point everyone to another resource which i feel is way more useful than Wikipedia for a lot of these topics. The Internet Encyclopedia or Philosophy, is a great place to go if you need to get your summarized version for some of these books. Most of these are going to be hard to read so some sort of companion is truly helpful. 

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I am teaching myself to play the mandolin. I have been toying with the idea of learning a new musical instrument for a while now, but I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to latch onto. I was confident that it would be a stringed instrument since that would be completely foreign to me. 

Megan has stated that she has wanted to learn how to play the violin, ahem, fiddle, for quite some time. One idea I had was to try and find a potential companion instrument, with the hopes that we could one day play together. 

Various instruments ranging from violin, cello, viola and banjo have all been under consideration. All would allow me to play some folk music and some Irish music as well for Megan. 

The mandolin emerged as the top contender a couple of months ago. Not only is an entry level mandolin dirt cheap, but I was surprised to find the wide range of music that the mandolin can cover. Being in the lute family the musical repertoire ranges from medieval court music, to just about every folk genre you can find. It seems to have a particularly strong presence in Italian, Irish and American (Bluegrass) folk music. 

So, mandolin it was. My first couple of days with it were productive, but also a real challenge. My form needs a significant amount of work and many of the notes get a metallic "twang" to them, I think due to my bad finger positioning. Through the book I have purchased and also a fantastic website called MandoLessons.com, I have been able to get down the basic notes, understand the basic fingerings and learn my first three chords. 

I hope there is a lot more to come. 

I have a couple of recent vinyl pickups which I will be posting here over the next couple of weeks. The first one up is the album Tour de France from Kraftwerk. This is a 2009 reissue of the album and I received this as a birthday present. If you do not know who Kraftwek are, they are an electronic music group from Germany who has been around since the 1970's. They are early pioneers of techno and the Berlin techno scene. Their music is sometimes quintessentially identified as "robot" music since the beats and rhythms are very mechanical. The group is also known for their live performances and visuals. 

This album follows in their standard music profile so if you know that you like or dislike Kraftwerk then you will know what you are getting here. The opening tracks on side A, Tour De France Étape, are probably the best tracks on the album. They are a relaxing, almost downtempo collection of synthetic textures. 

The album also features a really nice 20 page artbook, which is a collection of typographic images. It is a nice touch for those out there who are collectors of that sort of stuff. 

Great album and certainly a good evening listening type of album to put on while reading or relaxing.