​I've been posting far less, basically everywhere, because Social Media Is A Peesoshit. Or maybe it's just the internet nowadays?

This is a little different from my other articles, it's mainly a personal post typed up at 11 PM.

The last time I wrote something here was around a year ago. I don't write too often here, and the articles I write are too ambitious, either being opinion pieces on some piece of media with some sort of personal story about my feelings on it, or writing large summary pieces with two to five paragraphs about every piece of media I experienced in a span of time. My last article was seven thousand words - I definitely need to rein this in somehow, especially if it helps me write more.

But yeah, this is a state of the blog - what's up with it? What's up with me? Well, this year's been pretty nice for me, I shifted to a new city and made new connections, lost quite a few but it's alright. I've been fairly busy this year, but I'm trying to get back into being more active in terms of writing and personal projects.

I made a Mastodon neighbourhood of my own, for example! My profile link's here, and I'll be updating here a whole bunch hopefully (I will singlehandledly make Mastodon a social media site worth being on just to spite Musk). I've also started trying my hand at art, though that's still a work-in-progress - hopefully someday I'm able to make art for these articles, that's my dream.

I'm going to be posting a bunch of articles in the upcoming weeks, going to pace myself for the same. It won't be all video games (though there will be a bunch, fair warning), and I will try my best to stick to a deadline of one article per weekend.

So hey, if you followed this blog earlier, thanks for sticking around! If you're new here, check out my old articles! And regardless of how you found this site, welcome. I hope you're having a great year.

For a blog that started off as a general media blog, where most of my articles used to be about movies and TV shows, a lot of people noticed that all my recent articles seemed to be about video games, and asked me why that was.

Was I disillusioned with the state of franchise cinema? (Yes, but there's plenty of other movies.)

Did I think video games were somehow better at accomplishing their artistic goals than movies? (God no, they're basically the same but I'm not the kind to go on screeds about Gaming As Art.)

Was I mentally burnt out because of the pandemic and my personal life and general loneliness and anhedonia, undergoing a general film and show and book slump as a result? (Uh... Yeah, that's basically it, but could you not be this specific in this article?)

Anyway, I was part of a chat group with people who choose and watch movies from Mubi™️ (the streaming service, not sponsoring this article) and discussing them at the end of the week. It had been a while since I joined, and it took some time before I actually started watching movies along with them. Once I did, though, I actually ended up enjoying the experience - Mubi™️ has a lot of movies from around the world, and many movies from other states in India as well, most of whose film canon I had no idea about.

So basically, I went from watching two movies in the span of eleven months (August 2020 - May 2021) to twenty-six movies (not all of them from Mubi™️) in the span of the next seven months (June-December 2021). And now that 2021 is coming to a close, I've got a lot of movies I watched that I want to write about, even if I don't think I can write a full fledged article on any of them.

So, here's a list of all the movies I watched on Mubi™️ this year.
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​​(Author's Note: I've written about three of these games a few months ago in my last article, but I never got around to giving my thoughts on the rest. This will have some repeated paragraphs from the last article, but if you haven't read those, you can safely go ahead and read the rest of this one)

Back in 2004, my family used to go to this club in Kolkata called Dalhousie Institute, and there was a little place inside named Diagon, a small space with a library and a cyber cafe. Being a young voracious reader and gamer (back when the word "g*mer" didn't immediately put an image of shrieking unwashed manchildren in your head immediately), I used to frequent that place a lot, and on one of the PCs, I discovered and played this little-known blockbuster game called Halo: Combat Evolved.

The Halo series has been around for over twenty years now, with a massive franchise spanning multiple games and books, having a direct influence in the explosion of mainstream popularity in the once-major internet phenomenon of machinima, and generally being a massive influence on the FPS genre through its mechanics. Did I know all that would happen in 2003? Not at all. But I could feel that I was playing something new, exciting and important, and the future of video games felt infinite.

Now I'm a jaded cynic living in 2021, which means it's the perfect time to actually play the rest of the games on the PC - now that they're out, anyway. 

A little bit of history, first - the Halo series is an Xbox franchise, with the first Halo being credited as the reason the first Xbox started selling so much, and the second heralding the Xbox consoles as the best way to play multiplayer games. Because of this, for a very long time, only the first two games were available for the PC, with the rest being Xbox console exclusives - the first one had a PC port released two years after its original release, the second one got a PC port three years after its own release, and PC owners never got a chance to play the rest. It was only at the end of 2019 that people were able to play the other games, when The Master Chief Collection started to be ported over, one game at a time (with remastered versions of the first two Halos), until the end of 2020. It doesn't have all the games, though - Halo 5: Guardians, the latest entry in the franchise so far, doesn't seem to have any plans for porting, and it's most likely that PC players will never get to play it at all.

Either way, at least I had the rest to play through, and the experience was pretty interesting, sometimes surprising, something frustrating, but I'm ultimately glad to have played through the whole thing.

In 1995, Neon Genesis Evangelion, a Japanese animated show based on an original script and running for 26 episodes, represented a seismic shift in the form and format of storytelling not just in anime, but in multiple forms of media all over the world, to the extent that even modern US animated shows have multiple references to its imagery.

In 2021, the final Evangelion movie, Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon A Time, was released theatrically as the final piece of Evangelion storytelling. While it's possible that the studio might make spinoffs of varying quality and scope in the future, this is the final end of Evangelion (funnily enough) as a story told by a singular vision.

In 2010, I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion for the first time and felt five emotions all at once upon finishing it - disappointment, wonder, catharsis, anger and confusion - and all those intensified upon watching its followup theatrical movie, The End Of Evangelion. Since then, Eva has had a tight grip on my psyche and tastes, being the one piece of media I've always called my eternal obsession.
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Over twenty-two years later, I've watched the final Eva movie and I have a lot of thoughts, and I'm struggling to put all of them into words. But let's try anyway.

(Heavy spoilers for all of Evangelion follow here)

Well, it's been a full month since the CoVID lockdown started, and a year of me working from home. Not sure how I feel about that, honestly, so let's distract ourselves from the fact that this month was LOADED, with a whole bunch of great games I played and replayed.

Just in case you're new to this series, I generally write an article every month recording the new (and old) stuff I’m watching, playing or listening to, and I’m doing it in a series of monthly articles. I’ll write some quick notes about the old stuff I went back to in the first section (Repeat Value), before getting into the new stuff (...The New Stuff).

It's all games this month, because I'm still going through that goshdarned mental block. Hopefully I can turn that around sometime in April.
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Welcome to State of Media Consumption: January + February edition! I missed out on writing the January edition last month because there were a lot of things going on and I had other articles I had wanted to write, and February was mostly spent playing a single game. 

Just in case you're new to this series, I generally write an article every month recording the new (and old) stuff I’m watching, playing or listening to, and I’m doing it in a series of monthly articles. I’ll write some quick notes about the old stuff I went back to in the first section (Repeat Value), before getting into the new stuff (...The New Stuff).

Because a lot of it ends up being games, I think I'll split the article by medium from now on, to avoid direct comparisons through ranking.
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​This is an article I've wanted to write for a very long while.

Outer Wilds is a 2019 video game that I finished in 2020, and towards the beginning of 2021, I was listening to a podcast episode specifically dedicated to the experience of finishing this game. Austin Walker, one of the hosts of Waypoint Radio, talked about how, once he finished it, he immediately has the thought of being sure that this was his favourite game of 2020. This thought continued, though, and he had to ask himself - was it more than just that?

I related to this sentiment a lot, and I had some thoughts of my own knocking about in my head since completing it. I had one specific experience I've never had with any other piece of media, and had never thought I'd feel after watching any movie, reading any book, or playing any game. I've tried to put this experience into words for a long while, and I've decided to finally write it out and release it as an article.

So, this is the story of how Outer Wilds, the space exploration adventure game, gave me an existential crisis. This isn't an article I could spin into anything positive, so apologies in advance.

Some major spoilers are present in the article, and while I won't mention anything in the endgame, I do spoil some mysteries that you might want to figure out by yourself if you were looking forward to playing this game sometime in the future. This is a game about discovery, so if you haven't played the game, I'd recommend you read this article only if you don't plan on playing it.
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