i find enormous value in reading things. also watching things too, sometimes, i’m not opposed to the odd video essay, but i think reading things – especially longform things – is really, really valuable. if you have liked anything i’ve ever made, there was reading behind it. (reading + lived experience is really just everything i do)
to that end, i’m going to provide a list of recommendations for things to read, mostly from other websites because the barrier to entry is lower.
this page might get long. i’ll keep coming back to it and populating it further as i think of more stuff
inclusion on this page ≠ endorsement of every opinion someone holds. people i disagree with can still be interesting
the list
websites
alicemaz.com alice is passionately driven and smart and interested in a wide variety of things. everything on this site is cool and worth your time. i have recommended “alien intelligences” to a dozen people for a dozen reasons, in particular, and “playing to win” is a fun read for people who care about games and game-things
cjthex.com CJ is a video essayist whose thoughts and work i respect massively. their video essays are good, their text essays are good (they’re why i made this site) and they have really cool ideas about how to make the internet a good space for community again (their patreon book club is one of my favorite things on the internet and is so incredibly worth $3/month)
objectionable.net the website of philosopher and former food critic C. Thi Nguyen, this guy has a ton of interesting thoughts about games, gamification, the difference, and the role it all plays in our world. his book, Games: Agency As Art, is excellent, and you can get the broad-scope gist of it for free from papers he hosts right there on his homepage. re. papers of his, i particularly like Games and the Art of Agency and The Seductions of Clarity.
books (nonfiction)
a thousand books have shaped my thinking in a thousand ways, but i can think of few i owe more to than the stunning The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. it’s a deconstruction of many of our myths about prehistory, and challenges the pervasive “progress” narrative that many modern thinkers find themselves stuck in. (more than that, it provides historical context to that challenge in a way i find refreshing!) strongly worth a read.
if you’re at all in the video games/streaming space, in any way, Stephen Flavall’s Before We Go Live is a must-read. jorbs (as he’s called online) talks about the abuse and exploitation those spaces are rife with, and why it’s worth it to keep being in them anyway. sobering, sad, but ultimately hopeful. also just high-quality writing about systems and people. if you like my stuff maybe you’ll like his; i certainly learned a lot from the way he thinks over years of following him.
fiction (all media)
general note: while there’s a ton of good fiction in the world and if you know me irl i’m happy to give recs, this page’s shaping ethos is “things that have meaningfully shaped my thinking”, and to that end, it’s that sort of fiction represented here.
Heaven Will Be Mine is a visual novel about girls raised in space who are being asked to come back to earth, and what they do in response to that request. it’s so queer and so brilliant and its fictional metaphor-ideas are more true than most true things i’ve seen. i have analysis of its entire plot tumbling around in my head, but when i publish it it’ll necessarily have full-game spoilers, so go play it before i do so you can read my takes :>
This Is How You Lose The Time War is my favorite book. reading it more than once is essential to the experience, i think; becoming wrapped in its plot and characters so that the temporality bends itself around and you can see the whole book, crystallized whole, cause and effect twisted backwards, is really how that book was meant to be experienced. take a pencil to it. annotation is good for you
honorable mention to Celeste, i’m named after it, i talked about it more in this video essay