Thoughts Thought While Walks Walked is migrating to Substack
Hello!
Although I’ve written on, and for, various sites over the years, my personal hub has, since 2014, been a blog on Tumblr named Brick By Brick, originally organized around the videogame series Castlevania, and later switching emphases to titles including Demon’s Souls, the Dark Souls trilogy, and Bloodborne. As I wrote in the blog’s first post, “This site was . . . born out of the perception that there is a lack of critical engagement of the series that balances strong mechanical/structural comprehension and a micro-focus on audio/visual design.”
Below are some examples of my writing on videogames:
The Soul of Place: My Favorite Dark Souls Sites || No Escape
Souls Games are Great, Except for the Messages from Some Players || Kotaku
Secret Geometries || Heterotopias, Issue 2
Understanding the Sublime Architecture of Bloodborne || Kill Screen
Where Did the Fun Street Fighter Music Go? || Kill Screen
Masashi Hamauzu Piano Works δ・ε・T_Comp 1 || Video Game Music Online
The quote above is reflective of my general approach to writing, which is to perceive an analytic and/or discursive lack, and then enter from that angle. In a certain sense, this is the basis of all criticism. But apparently inseparable from my constitution is an argumentative spark. Sometimes this has been to my detriment, as any characterological aspect can be.
At its best, however, this “contrarianism” is insightful, and helps to form various pathways between apparently disparate fields and ideas. See, for example, my article for DEEP HELL, and how it uniquely forms a through line between Disney World, grain silos, Umberto Eco’s work, nymphaea, and . . . Demon’s Souls. Or my essay for Heterotopias, which compares the spaces within the earlier Metroid games to brutalist architecture.
In 2020, I felt that the subject of videogames was no longer interesting enough to be a topical go-to, and so, for the sake of expanding my range, I switched over to an alternate Tumblr blog which bears the same name as this Medium account. Then, in 2021, I migrated most of my posts over here. But Medium has long been in a place where the most visible articles, and perhaps the predominant associated audiences, have an intellectually thin and corporate bent; and, of course, the writing is done for free.
Thus: my Substack page.
Below are examples of my more recent writing to demonstrate its range and specificity:
Stop Hitting Yourself: A Brief Examination of the “Karen” Meme
Femboy Hooters as Consumerist Ephebic Sexuality
UFOs, Disclosure, and the Religious Impulse
What is Radical Music in 2021?
A Phenomenology of Gazes: Nope
The Obfuscating Effect of Contemporary Non-Materialistic Ufology
Secular Historiclasm, Moral Contagion, and Cults of Emotional Sacrifice
Strangled and Mangled: Classicism and Its Ersatz After Architecture’s Commodification
To be transparent: I’ve also maintained a Patreon page since 2016, uploading the totality of my material — visual art (including comic books), music, and writing — at the end of each month. If that sounds more appealing than a purely text-based subscription, I’d point you that way! I’ve created my Substack page as a way of consolidating and compartmentalizing my written work on a by-subscription basis.
The original Thoughts Thought While Walks Walked was, I think, ultimately one of the many byproducts of the pandemic and all of its stimulating effects. As I began to open new doors and admit a fuller range of my critical abilities, I started writing much more frequently and voluminously, and treading into areas which, beforehand, I might have considered nonsensical, off-limits, or not worth considering.
If you are interested at all in the topics covered above, and are looking for considerate, exacting, and particular writing on them, please consider supporting me with a subscription.
See you over there!
