My father loved his practical cadillac most at eleven every night for centuries with unwavering hope of surviving life’s fad diet brushed his teeth and exploded maybe with ambiguity maybe tala madani’s cumshot number one shaped like christ’s apostles or john lurie is gunna make it though this year of joy divorced from our investors dipped in gold jungles say a girl’s bug command is her smithy gone father says shadow the orange tree longing o devoted petroleum molecules circulate in the olfactory longing whine of leaf blowers drink him too so we believe we were young and safe and you must say great grandpa was a notorious professor at the bolognese school of this is how people speak to small children in the city of underground fighters it felt terrible when i burrowed back to life to live among the maglev of my parents brandishing their divorced saints begging light of sunken eyes disturbing the air from what i thought was pleasure was solitude was the ability to retrofit hope into the chassis of metaphor you’re stone and river i’m computer weed and the glitched up church pouring a yard of concrete through great grandpa’s white hot screen door that’s what it was a viral devotion to he who has too many preferences snoop dogg ha dichiarato di aver smesso di fumare but what about you apologetically broke my lungs filling with immaterial light which devours real light toothsome from the unknowable massacres rolling katamari like over the horizon.
The author and his daughter Maeve play The Binding of Isaac.
As a new dad, I’ve found my priorities suddenly shifted away from gaming. I work long hours at an insane job. I take care of my now-17-week-old daughter. I try to be a good partner to my wife. If I’m lucky, I steal some time to eat, shower, and brush my teeth.
No one can smell me over Zoom, so what’s the difference?
Once in a while though — between burpings, diaper changes, and bath time — the dad gods bless me with thirty minutes of idle time. Do I do the reasonable thing and nap? No. I grab a controller and settle in with my old, now-frivolous-seeming first love: Gaming.
My pathetic, frustrated yawps at the “You Died” screen, which might as well be burned into my TV, woke up my tentatively sleeping tot every time.
I’ve discovered a few things during these blissful little interludes. I should not be launching into a Destiny 2 raid with my infant hypothetically dreaming in the bassinet or drooling on my shoulder. Nor is it the time for a round of Overwatch. Feats of gaming such as these require focus, some level of team communication, and a not-insignificant time commitment.
Nor can I recommend diving into that 80-hour JRPG like Octopath Traveler. I tried playing it on Xbox Game Pass, but found it was a challenge. I couldn’t stay focused on the details of Therion’s quest. What’s a Dragonstone? My daughter’s doused me in spit-up. I need a wet washcloth, not a Dragonstone.
Ditto for any Souls-likes. My pathetic, frustrated yawps at the “You Died” screen, which might as well be burned into my TV, woke up my tentatively sleeping tot every time.
Octodad, ironically, presented a significant physical challenge for this infant-toting dad. The 2014 seafood sitcom simulator’s flicky, one-handed mouse controls were spastic. Thirty minutes with the game left my wrist cramped in agony.
That said, I’ll always be a gamer at heart. Here are my favorite 8 games that I’ve enjoyed since becoming a distracted dad gamer. Consider it a Father’s Day gift from one me to you.
Little one asleep on your shoulder? No problem! Griftlands’s card-based combat, set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, isn’t tied to twitchy reaction speed, but instead strategic and thoughtful choices. One-handed gameplay is simple and intuitive.
There’s no battle clock, so if you walk away to change a diaper your character won’t be dead when you return.
You can save anywhere, anytime outside of battle; something you’ll see in many of the games on this list. The whims and worries of modern parenting strike unexpectedly so this is a great feature.
Dad brain is real and you’ll forget your own name often. Griftlands helps fight this by implementing an encyclopedic lore reference system right into the game’s dialogue boxes. A simple feature I never knew I wanted, this helps me tell my Spark Barons from my Grout Bogs.
You and your non-verbal offspring can bond over the game’s art style, which has a vibrant Saturday morning cartoon with radiation scars vibe.
Binding of Isaac: Repentance (Nicalis, Inc., Edmund McMillen)
The twitchiest game on this list, Binding of Isaac was originally released in 2011 but received a major DLC in March. Repentance rebalances the game and adds new characters, levels, more than 130 items, and a treasure chest full of content.
It’s about a baby! As a parent, you’ll relate to items such as “Used Diaper,” “C Section,” and “Mom’s Bra.” Some of these items (“Meconium” comes to mind) I couldn’t fully appreciate until I was a father.
On Isaac’s most basic level, gameplay cycles occur from room to room and each room typically takes a minute or two to complete. You can save between rooms and come back later once parenting releases you from its milky grip or, if you’re lucky, play an entire floor or two while the baby sleeps.
You’re definitely a better parent than Isaac’s mom who, in the game’s precipitating events, attempts to murder our young protagonist with a knife and chases him into the basement.
This iterative update of the 2019 point-and-click RPG includes superb new voice acting and some additional features.
By far the best game I played in 2020, Disco Elysium is allegorical, fantasy storytelling at its finest. The player embodies the dark and vibrant world of a down-on-his-luck cop in Revachol, the “disgraced former capital of the world”. The game presents an imaginary foreign land that comments on our own with a rich, philosophical, and entertaining script, an unforgettable cast of characters, and masterful pacing.
This one requires a little more headspace from the player as the story, which demands your attention, involves a world of deceit and political and psychological manipulation. Disco Elysium — at its core — is about the choices we make that determine who we are over the course of one’s life. And, while the game certainly has nothing to do with parenting, its story is a deeply human tale about empathy, relationships, and change — themes that should resonate with new parents.
Raising a child is at turns surprising, dispiriting, unprecedented, and quotidian. As such, nothing prepares you for the journey like an education in the classics of absurdity (I’m thinking especially of Beckett, but also Sartre, Kafka, and filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos.) Cardboard Computer’s episodic point-and-click adventure Kentucky Route Zero reminded me of this time and time again. Pandering to neither genre conventions of the point-and-click video game nor any one literary archetype, KR0’s story deserves a place in the pantheon of itself.
This one vibed hard for me during those quiet, late nights where sleeplessness takes hold, anything is possible, and your hands are not your own.
One of the slower-paced games on this list, KR0 offers players the opportunity to meander around existential and absurd set-pieces while contemplating broad themes that include the imagination, family, storytelling, pleasure, work, folk themes, and childhood. Its precisely crafted cast of characters will stick with you for a long time.
An unlikely pleasure for me, it takes a special kind of person to enjoy EVE Online.
Players will discover multiple gameplay types within this free-to-play space MMO.
Inexplicably to family and friends, I prefer to spend my limited time in EVE mining raw materials from asteroid belts in high-security space (a reasonably safe endeavour) and then sell these resources on the game’s player commodities markets. It’s an oddly satisfying gameplay loop that, as a new parent, doesn’t overcommit me.
Corporations, EVE’s version of an MMO clan, allow the player to make fast friends in-game. I highly suggest the clan EVE University, which specializes in teaching newbros (EVE-speak for new players) the ropes of this nuanced game.
For parents, corporations are especially great; because the game is played worldwide, you’ll find friendlies online any time of day.
Diapers are expensive. EVE Online is free to play. Sweet.
Kind Words (Popcannibal)
6. Kind Words (lo fi chill beats to write to) (2019)
Logging into pen-pal simulator Kind Words is like going for an easy stroll through a forest you’ve hiked thousands of times since childhood. It’s likely to bring warm, familiar calm to your soul and offer up a few pleasant surprises.
No time pressure and no lose state, Kind Words encourages you to take your time and offer kindness — in the form of anonymous letters — to strangers on the internet.
Popcannibal designed Kind Words’ music, interface, and soft, neon aesthetic to deliver maximum chill. It’s like playing one of those lo-fi hip hop YouTube videos.
Shoot your shot, dad! You’ve got a lot of kindness to offer the lost children of the internet.
In the time-traveling-mech strategy roguelite Into the Breach by Subset Games, failure is inevitable. This is a lesson that has become familiar to me as a new parent. The progression one makes and the lessons one learns through every screw up are key in both scenarios. Unlike Into the Breach, however, I’ve been unable to reset a terrible, no good day and unscrew my parental snafus. And that’s okay.
I hadn’t played this one until it landed on Stadia earlier this year. Google’s cloud gaming platform lends itself well to the impromptu gaming sessions dads often find themselves delivered unto.
A basic concept: Strategy games are great for dad-gaming because they provide the time and space to put down the controller and slowly consider the implications of each move.
Judgment (Ryu Ga Gotoku)
8. Judgment (2019)
Play it on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Stadia, and Xbox Series X/S
I suspect it’s incredibly common for a new father to find themselves unexpectedly pinned under a sleeping baby on the couch. One minute you’re feeding her and half-watching TV, the next she’s snoring, mouth agape, in your lap. When you can’t stand up but want to play a game, Google’s Stadia, for all the bad press and typical Googlian fear of abandonment, has been invaluable to me during those times.
Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s 2019 detective noir beat-em-up Japanese arcade simulator has been at the top of my list since it released on the cloud platform earlier this year.
Judgment plays out like a narrative-heavy prestige TV drama with its action focused less on combat (though this is a Ryu Ga Gotoku beat-em-up and you will smash hundreds of Yakuza with bicycles) and more on your skills of observation, exploration, and deduction. And drone racing — have I mentioned you race drones through the skies of Tokyo?
In the best of times I imagine traveling with a baby is a challenge, it’s near impossible to consider it during a global pandemic. This game, with its gorgeous and precisely recreated city, quietly scratches my itch to return to Tokyo.
As with Into The Breach, playing this game on Stadia made booting, loading, saving, etcetera, a breeze. Plus you can take your game with you to any room in the house and play on TV, computer, tablet, or phone.
That’s all I’ve got, folks. There are like two or three hundred different video games out there, so please let me know in the comments if I missed your favorite title for gaming while parenting.
shows how twice although they both turned men took and rembrandt painted the 1970s made sense (or not) of the art-historical or cultural upheavals of sexual violence against women nancy princenthal dramatic perhaps but with replete with replete with replete without physical princentury the political or psychological and coercion in artists have made for a male art-historical or psychological princenthal writes pointing to convey it was inherently renderstood no era or culture has been a convey it in life abuse an extremis a new book an experience an abuse
collatinus
his fantasies an early 70s in seedbed performances himselves invading their bodies to tie their bodies him as he masturbated an elegant account perform even if some critics didn’t buy it or not quite their bodies to tie the obvious history and weaves in intimate relation and aggress sexual violence in prince in seedbed percepts to an empts like chris burden account performances himselves the first agnes martists were often account performance articulator describe more candy near a prize broad jump 71 offer the obvious of his best
hardman
she convicts that no image could become his sexual advance she could subject was as if the could became his sexual advances she conviction that no image conviction that no image could subject it was as if the slaves offered her door she awakened he identified her two choices she could become his sexual advances she could submit to his conviction that no image conviction that no image could repress perhaps inadvertently going adulterous sexual advances she could become his sexual advances she could submit to the could subject it was as if he submits to the body
the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.
The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.
The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. The EHT is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the Universe predicted by Einstein’s general relativity during the centennial year of the historic experiment that first confirmed the theory.
Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data — roughly 350 terabytes per day — which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined.
Beyond confirming the existence of the black hole, EHT tells us that all its features of the hole match the predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The object is rotating clockwise. A black hole, unless a hole in your jeans, spins. This rotation drives the jets that the hole ejects from its environs into deep space. Interestingly, the image from the telescope is asymmetric, which might be a further clue to the spin and mass.
Looking at a black hole is what the Event Horizon Telescope has done for the past 12 years.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is not less remarkable than the objects it observes. With a collaboration of 200 people, the EHT uses not a single telescope, but a global network of nine telescopes. Its sites, from Greenland to the South Pole and from Hawaii to the French Alps, act in concert as one. Together, the collaboration commands a telescope the size of planet Earth, staring at a tiny patch in the northern sky that contains the Messier-87 black hole.
Black holes bend light so much that it can wrap around the horizon multiple times. The resulting image is too complicated to capture in simple equations.
a perfect sphere, made of nothing.
The experimental challenge is formidable. The network’s telescopes must synchronize their data-taking using atomic clocks. Weather conditions must be favorable at all locations simultaneously. Once recorded, the amount of data is so staggeringly large, it must be shipped on hard disk to a central location for processing.
The EHT’s observations agree with expectation. But this result is more than just another triumph of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It is also a triumph of the astronomers’ resourcefulness. They joined hands and brains to achieve what they could not have done separately.
In 1978 French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet drew the image of a blackhole by hand.
it wasn’t until 1978 that physicists got a first glimpse of what a black hole would actually look like. In that year, the French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet programmed the calculation on an IBM 7040 using punchcards. He drew the image by hand.
“We had to convince all of these observatories that the science we wanted to do was good enough that they would let us come in and rummage around in some of their sensitive insides,”
The Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile took six years and a lot of negotiations to receive all the necessary upgrades.
“It turns out that the Internet is just too slow to transfer all of our data,” says Doeleman. “All the data that we recorded at the South Pole in April 2017 would have taken about twenty five years to get back using the Internet.”
“We’re confident that we can take the next step and move from still images to making movies of black holes,” he says. “And we feel there are no logistical problems that would prevent us from doing that over the next decade.”
Given the pressure that many schools are under, exploration and play are often discouraged because they seem like “inefficient” modes of learning. Under capitalism, inefficiency is never framed positively—it’s considered wasteful. But I believe that learning is fundamentally inefficient, and that it shouldn’t be dictated by capitalist imperatives. Learning is naturally circuitous, adventitious, sort of a chance operation
[Assange] didn’t run a news agency any more than El Chapo ran a pharmacy.
Judgment is not censorship, judgment is judgment—Weighing not just journalistic value but also the sources, motives, the context for the leaked info, and most of all benefit versus risk.
Many scholars are doing some long-overdue grappling with the white, elitist legacy of the discipline since the 19th century. Scholars of antiquity have everything to gain from working to dismantle that legacy, and inviting engagement with the ancient world based not on racist or elitist identity politics, but on critical thinking, open-minded curiosity, and joy.
Naming and summoning. Naming as summoning. Naming to summon! This makes sense, doesn’t it, as an inroad to genesis? So many of us get started in life with it. And speech acts are volatile stuffs.
Seems I can’t get myself to talk about anything without bringing brambles or bushes into it.
“Nonce” … First not knowing it, then I clutched at it: jewelry-armor! … an instant in the past? A cut back into time reopening what’s too much healed over, sealed away.
the shattered remains of death reception banned in the movie made with snow of surreptitiously formatted vhs tapes only the scene of an extreme fatal soundtrack of citation world and faces scents well worth a look especially if you’ve not an astral other kulik of schwartz the blood clots and anyone unable generates youtubes of fakes and that data faces its own bleak reception worldwide
segment the judges footage smashed to trailer the segment’s weekly top forty cults capture each ferocious creditor with b-movies the films often turn against each other have long affected artists’ very poor organs real gorgon video releases not in the people that hold up the poor proletariat—tribalism primitive communism feudalism capitalism and communism—real gorgon video two features per week authors such as stressed medics scooping ground around faces of death scented wax movie editors the narrator produces real historical change
about that reference he retracted presumably he lives in the paint after 15 seconds: samuel leo i got hard interred rectangles beneath the living? where anime women stare at polygons beneath the two thousand and seven ps3 video game appeared to say: i got hard as a hip hop thang seamless lo-fi hip-hop thang about this name: samuel leos i got hard in the video game appeared to say: i go hard interred rectangle beneath where them servers at? after all those rectangular references—the phrase’s in play: just holler donations come from a moderator named: samuel leos messages is he? where anime women stand in the diagonal rain and cry
The $18 Lady Passes The Asp or Perhaps You Run, Joseph M. Gerace, 2019
Your blood you’re acting Eng-lich you are valuable how you save but either you thought actual is everything long to you, you are adamant to love—oh, trope!—around relation time. Milosz says no system works. If you want your brown what’s the opposite? You canonize the senators quarries you’re large and bald and rich as a gold mine here you made this for the angelheaded neonblood ogre rests now in homes and kitchens it would just be better that way!
your smutgrass will not grow here
i am the realizer the realizer i am
supple cast into tinderbale summer air
shitting and reading bomb hiss
page turner
astrologic tortoise
barren mango seed
these hands
wad of pedagogic khat
delicious trap cannot conceive
cradled by radioactive fog i am the secular seed
seed of balamb garden
controls the freckled and pale realizer
balamb garden i implore you
control the start of yr anti-capitalist pale
i'm in favor of yr anti-capitalist pale
you are the only one willing to abuse yr body
and i'm so here for that
five thousand dollar camera
fixed in a tripod
same location every morning
ten years one photo
federal regulations
prohibit hanging
banners from the monument
a woman's long thin
fingers kneading eggs
into soft yellow clay
experience points
earned for being
mean to my readers
atmosphere of crime
try not to think of the poem
gasoline heat of torches
i hope
to level up
soon please god
Alison Knowles at MoMA in 2011/Robert Caplin for The New York Times
