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Date: February 5th, 2020.

Time of Writing: 10:57 PM.

Weather: Cold.

Mood: Content.

Day Overview: Woke up an hour before my alarm and rolled around in bed clutching my face and cursing the sun for a few hours before I finally got out of my old skin like a rattlesnake and slithered out of my dorm building to class. We watched a movie about an ancient Vedic ritual. I retreated to my dorm room and read the film studies textbook chapter for tomorrow's class, and also took a phone call from my brother. Later in the day I had a discussion section about that movie and the paper I have due next week that entails my visitation to a religious ritual of some kind to observe and interpret. It has to be a ritual outside of my own faith, so anything Jewish is off the table and honestly if I could get something that wasn't Christian that would be good too.

Afterwards I went back to my room and read for a little while before meeting my friends for dinner. Tonight's lineup was Jess, Dev, and Spencer. Via was supposed to join us but could not because she had dinner with a cousin she hadn't seen in a few years. We sat and ate and sat some more, looking at stuff on our phones, before we finally scurried off to Jess' dorm and played pool in the lounge. Quickly the mood turned from semi-serious competition to absolute madness and insanity, mostly prompted by my own actions and attempts at humor that were so incredibly terrible that they bounced back around to being funny. Some unfortunate soul came in with a birthday cake and celebrated his birthday with a few friends. I don't know why - maybe he felt threatened on some primal level by the pure crackhead energy of my friend group - but he offered us all cake. I never say no to cake. After some time, we weren't playing pool anymore. We were engaging into a ritual completely unique to our friend group, a game totally unknown to most sane men. We were playing

HOT TUB:

• Play starts with a player attempting to break. They can only hold the cue with one hand while they do so. There are no scratches until first contact is made with the pool balls, each player in sequence using a one hand hold on the cue to guide it from where it lies slowly to the main set. Once contact is made, then the players are allowed to use both hands to hold the cue.
• In addition to standard nine ball pool rules, two additional balls are added to the game. If the player sinks either of these balls, they have to take their next shot blind. If the player sinks the cue ball, they have to take their next shot blind as well.
• When only the 9 ball is left, players must resume using only one hand to hold the cue. There are, again, no scratches unless the cue ball somehow falls into a pocket. As in nine-ball, whoever hits the 9 ball into the pocket first wins.

On My Mind: Don't really got that much for you right now, sorry. There's a lot on my mind, but I can't really share. It's mostly about how my brother is doing, it's partially about wanting to explore campus, and it's also about wanting to sleep. Not very interesting to read, and not very worthy to write.

• Altar of Fire directed by Robert Gardner: This is that film about the vedic ritual that I mentioned earlier. It was a bold choice to leave the vedic chants and mantras untranslated, but I wanted more background on the people involved in the ritual. I understand back then documentaries had less of a narrative focus so this is sort of besides the point of the film, but that doesn't change my own personal enjoyment being adversely affected by lack of a real story, here. The bits where they interviewed others who had come to visit the ritual was interesting and could have been developed further. That said, the dedication to (seemingly) objective filmmaking is admirable. I dunno. Nothing to really fault the film for, but it wasn't the most pleasant of watches. 5/10?
• Hypnospace Outlaw developed by Tendershoot: It took me a looong time to finish this game, and I'm glad I did. What starts as a bizarre and wonderful exploration of a digital alternate version of the early internet accessible while people sleep turns into, very quickly, a character drama with lives at stake. It made me laugh a lot, and made me think differently about moderation and content policing on the internet. It also scratched the itch I've always had to explore some of the wild west days of the internet. There was astonishingly high amounts of effort put into generating art assets for this game, be it the vaguely familiar and absolutely 90's music and visuals or the ludicrous amounts of backstory for this bizarro world, lore that most players would have no reason to investigate. It starts simple, but by the end the player has to manage Papers, Please levels of information. I have a few complaints regarding the general pacing of the story - the beginning was amazing, the middle felt rushed, and while the ending is a great concept I feel like it fell a little flat because that portion of the game was just so short. There are also some performance issues here and there, but that might have been the in-game O.S. acting up. Who knows? I want more of this game and I hope with mod support I don't run out of content any time soon. Setting aside the technical flaws, this is... an 8.5/10.

Produced: Apart from a couple new sentences in the essay, I got nothing here, whoops.

Other Thoughts: Thank you for reading my blog! Maybe try playing Hot Tube sometime! My radio show, The Theme Machine, is Friday morning, 12:00 AM-2:00 AM EST. This week's theme is characters! Alternative names probably include people, names, and titles. Weird? Yeah! But it'll make more sense when you listen, on WMUA!