MetaRegress Blog

Blog

A collection of miscellaneous thoughts, but really this blog is mostly just to experiment with so that I know what I’m doing when it comes to Wordpress.

  • Five Movies About Trying

    The poster for Quick Change; Bill Murray is dressed as a clown holding balloons
    The poster for The Great Escape; Steve McQueen is jumping a motorcycle over barbed wire with a prison guard tower in the background
    The poster for On Golden Pond; Henry Fonda and Catherine Hepburn embrace, with Jane Fonda standing behind them; on the bottom half of the poster is a silhouette of a boat with two people fishing in it
    The poster for Fitzcarraldo; Klaus Kinsky turns wildly to the viewer, pointing behind him to a boat being dragged up a hill by numerous indigenous people
    The poster from Once Upon a Time in the West; three men in the foreground writhe and fall as a man in the background fans the hammer of his pistol with a train in the backdrop

    A few days ago I happened to watch The Great Escape and Quick Change in the same day, and realized I’d seen half of the main characters from my favorite movie Once Upon a Time in the West back-to-back; Charles Bronson in Great Escape and Jason Robards in Quick Change. I mentioned it off-handedly to a friend and he suggested On Golden Pond, a Henry Fonda movie about fishing. I decided to round it out with Claudia Cardinale in Fitzcarraldo.

    Charles Bronson in The Great Escape; he's lying in a tunnel as he digs it, looking worried
    Jason Robards in Quick Change, looking confused

    There were some fun inversions at work in all of these movies compared to Once Upon a Time. Instead of the unflappable, repressed Harmonica, Bronson played a tunnel-digger whose fear nearly gets the best of him until a friend helps talk him through it. Robards goes from playing a bandit to a police captain. Henry Fonda befriends a kid instead of shooting him. Claudia Cardinale’s love interest with a wild dream is alive and gets to make a go of it without being killed by a rival interest, and she owns a brothel rather than working in one.

    Henry Fonda and Doug McKean in On Golden Pond, dressed for fishing
    Claudia Cardinale and Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo, looking triumphantly out at the ship being rebuilt

    But the thing that struck me about all five of the movies was how much they centered on a struggle being undertaken for its own sake, with limited extrinsic motivation.

    Henry Fonda as Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West walking through the desert

    In Once Upon a Time, Harmonica pursues his revenge against Frank beyond all reasonable bounds, hounding him relentlessly until he can even the score. Revenge is perhaps one of the foremost acts that people do not for their actual benefit but just because they want to do it. Harmonica’s brother doesn’t come back; Frank doesn’t realize the error of his ways. But Harmonica got to shoot the guy who killed his brother, and then has to live with the unchanged world that comes after.

    Angus Lennie as Archie Ives in The Great Escape

    The characters in Great Escape are invited early on by the camp’s commandant to relax and ride out the end of the war in peace. Haven’t they done enough already, risking their lives and being captured? But they’re escape artists by nature; schemers and exploiters, boundary-pushers, hackers. Being put into a prison camp merely gives them a new target and a cohort of accomplices. And whatever their captors might say, they know there’s more they can contribute to the war – even the very act of escaping is their own contribution, siphoning resources from the front lines.

    Bill Murray and Geena Davis in Quick Change, both looking exasperated

    Bill Murray’s character Grimm in Quick Change plots an elaborate bank robbery and getaway just to get money together to move out of New York, a city he hates and which spends the whole movie hating him right back.

    Henry Fonda and Doug McKean in On Golden Pond, dressed for fishing

    Norman’s pursuit of Walter in On Golden Pond is just some made-up feud between an old guy and a fish. But it helps Norman stay motivated and focused as age saps him physically and mentally. It gets him out on the lake each day, befriending the kid he finds himself stuck with.

    Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo, mad determination in his eyes as he looks up towards Cholo who is barely in frame on the left

    Fitzgerald’s obsession with opera and bringing it to Iquitos in Fitzcarraldo drives him to incredible lengths, leading an expedition with all the makings of a disaster as he tries to haul a boat over a mountain. He wants to be someone, and he has an aesthetic vision that he wants to see realized, and to make it a reality he’s willing to try just about anything.

    It was very fun to see this ad-hoc project of watching various movies featuring the main cast of Once Upon a Time in the West accidentally produce a set of movies with a coherent throughline. Just like in all these movies, something interesting can emerge from undertaking a self-appointed mission. Sometimes the journey is the destination.

  • What I’ve Been Playing

    Anodyne

    A screenshot of Anodyne; the main character, Young, stands in the mountains facing away from the camera

    I’ve been aware of Anodyne for a while and bought a copy a few years back but never got around to playing it until this last week or so. It was really good! I love exploring in games, and it’s a big focus of this one.

    The map can help you generally but intentionally leaves off a lot of details, so you have to rely on notes or memory to fill in the rest. The areas, both in the overworld and in dungeons, encouraged you to get familiar with them and understand how they fit together.

    Perhaps what’s most impressive is how much exploring there is with only a few ways of interacting with the world; unlike in Zelda, you don’t end up with a backpack full of goodies to let you open up new paths. But the careful attention to layout and the way screens can work with each other still makes the world feel big and interesting.

    The sense of exploration also extends to the characters; you often can’t get a lot of information about the few characters you encounter, and have to piece a lot together from observation and implication.

    I really enjoyed it, and I’m giving myself some time to sit with it before moving on to the sequel.

    The Local

    A first-person movement game with lots of fun techniques to explore and a big playground world to try those techniques out on. Neon White really got me interested in these kinds of first-person speed games, and while Hot Lava scratched some of the same itch the games in that style are not super common so seeing The Local fitting into that mold was great.

    Being more free-form rather than using individual bespoke levels is a nice touch; like in Tony Hawk or Burnout Paradise, knowledge of your environment becomes a skill you can hone alongside jumping and grinding and air-strafing. It lends itself to a playful approach to the environment as well, causing you to look for interesting paths across a given part of the world as you explore, which really feels like it captures the mental vibe of parkour.

    Balatro

    I got this on release about a year ago and had fun clearing a few decks before getting distracted by other stuff, but I’ve recently been diving back in.

    It’s nice because it lets you scratch some of the fun roguelike combo itch without necessarily being as intense as something like Slay the Spire, where having to manage things like card flow and resources feels a lot more punishing even on its base difficulty.

    Guilty Gear

    I’ve been playing Xrd off and on for around 6 years, but a year and a half ago I found a local scene so I’ve been playing a lot more consistently.

    Having a core group of people to play with is a lot of fun in fighting games; you can more consistently measure your progress against them and there’s also a lot more room to make niche adaptations to each other’s playstyles. I’ve never been a big ranked grinder in fighting games, so playing consistently with people in person has been very useful for helping me get more hours into the game which ultimately is needed for improving.

    FF14

    Another pretty long-term game; I’ve been playing since just after Shadowbringers came out and having a great time. I’ve messed with most of the different things in the game, from Savage raids to Eureka to Blue Mage.

    I recently started learning Futures Rewritten Ultimate with my current Savage group, which has been a lot of fun – Ultimates are one of the few things I haven’t dabbled in, so getting a taste of what they’re like has been cool.

    I’m looking forward to the new field operation in the upcoming patch at the end of the month. I’m curious what they’ll do with it after Eureka and Bozja; I hope it’s a bit more collaborative like Eureka, but we’ll see.

    FF12

    I’ve been playing through the whole series of mainline Final Fantasy games, and I’m at the tail end of 12 currently. It was a game I had fond but vague memories of, and I’m really enjoying revisiting it. It feels like a throwback to the more dungeon-crawl-focused earlier games like 1-5, where resource management and attrition are big considerations. After 6-10 going for shorter dungeons with more emphasis on plot and characters I’m enjoying the change of pace.

    I like the idea of the gambit system, but it feels like it’s still missing some things. It could just be my own lack of vision though; it seems like it’s pretty flexible in some ways.

    Somewhat similarly, the battles taking place in the world instead of a separate screen is cool but doesn’t feel like it leads to a ton of extra gameplay. Being able to sneak past monsters is good, but that’s been a thing even in the ‘see monsters on the map and touch them to initiate combat’ style of games. You do occasionally get monsters wandering into your ongoing fights which is cool, and having to have a retreat path through a dungeon is also interesting since if you run the wrong way you’re probably just going to find more monsters.

    Anyway that’s it! I’ve been busy with lots of games, and it was fun to reflect a bit on them.

    Also I have to admit, part of making this post was because on my last post I found out I couldn’t upload images to wordpress due to some PHP configuration issues on my server, so I wanted to test it out after I made some tweaks.

  • Setting Up WordPress

    I’ve been trying to decide on some side projects to tackle while looking for work and figured learning to set up a WordPress blog would be a pretty good place to start. While it’s pretty old tech that isn’t as trendy as substack and so on, I liked the idea of something that was battle-tested, still sees a decent amount of use, and that I could host entirely on my own.

    I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get everything set up; I already had a DigitalOcean droplet for my personal website and I’d figured out stuff like DNS and basic nginx configuration for doing a simple HTML site, so making adjustments to be able to host a WordPress blog was a good way to reinforce the knowledge I already had while building on some new skills.

    I followed this really good tutorial that laid the steps out in a nice accessible format while also doing a good job of providing context for why various steps were being taken.

    Being able to leave a lot of the installation details to the WordPress CLI tool was great, though I am a bit curious what it’s like to do all that manually and how much of WordPress is just ready to go out of the box. But it’s a hard sell to go back and do it the hard way once I’ve had a taste of just firing off a few CLI items and getting a site running.

    Of course there’s still plenty of stuff I want to mess with; customizing the behavior and look of this would be nice to avoid it feeling quite so generic, but it’s cool that something simple can be brought up so quickly and easily. If I run into interesting problems along the way I’ll try to document them here.