Benjamin Rivers

After 10 years of living in our current townhouse, we’re actively looking to move. Of course, moving is never fun, but I am looking forward to a new space. We’re aiming to get a smallish detached house somewhere within the city, but in a completely different and quieter neighbourhood.

I grew up originally in a typically suburban Canadian house, but then moved into a tiny apartment (in a new province) when my family split apart. I remember the shift of having a huge backyard to run around in, and then suddenly having life compressed to a series of four small rooms.

In many ways that shift, and the distress of that family split, has lived with me all this time. I am frequently obsessed with optimization, planning, and harbour an over-consideration for others — all byproducts of some difficult years spent in that tiny space.

Only recently, because of our current project, have I realized that when I can spread out, when I don’t self-constrain, I can genuinely flourish; I can do a lot more than I thought I could.

I think I can be a better person when I have a bit of a yard to run around in.

It appears that mangaka Inio Asano is referencing 1996 PS1 horror game Twilight Syndrome in his new series, Mujina into the Deep.

Twilight Syndrome is a side-scrolling horror title that mixes 2D, animated sprites with 3D environments to tell fairly linear, spooky tales. In it, three classmates sneak into their high school to investigate various urban legends and ghost stories.

I played this game back in college as far as I could in Japanese (I didn’t know any then) with my wife (then girlfriend), who could read the game’s kanji. Its earliest chapter features a scary ghost girl and a bathroom, which is a standard Japanese horror trope.

It scared the absolute shit out of me.

That game was stuck in my mind for years and would form the base inspiration for our first (and still most popular!) commercial game, Home. After playing that PS1 disc, I couldn’t get the idea of 2D, side-scrolling horror games out of my mind!

I love stories about scary things hiding amongst everyday places like schools and offices; about urban legends, local tales, and things just lurking around the corner that are better left forgotten.

In high school, I wrote a very cheesy novella that was, essentially, Twilight Syndrome — except in my overwrought story, it was also a clumsy teenage romance. (The loss of any backup or copy of this early foray into writing is a deep wound, let me tell you.) So when I discovered this game, it was like fate.

Twilight Syndrome’s developer, Human Entertainment, also holds a special place in my heart. They were a constantly-evolving Japanese studio that produced many hidden gems and concepts that have often gone overlooked. Sadly, they are no longer around as a studio, but their DNA can be felt throughout the industry if you’re paying attention.

And, clearly, Inio Asano is a fan as well, because who would reference such an obscure PS1 horror game in 2024?

What is it about bittersweetness that has such a profound and lingering effect?

Nancy and I are deep into the anime series Frieren: Beyond Journey’s end. It’s a story (from the manga of the same name) of an elfen mage and her life after she completes a world-changing quest with a party of adventurers who, she realizes, became her friends.

Since Frieren has lived so long compared to humans or other people, she has a different and somewhat detached perspective on the world around her. The show is gorgeously animated, but what makes it so impactful is that within its stories, characters gain deeper understanding of their situations and relationships.

And in those quiet moments of realization, we get fantastic hits of the good stuff — profound bittersweetness.

It has humour and danger and fun moments of power fantasy, but Frieren’s most powerful minutes are when we see a character smile or look wistful, the music swells, and the plot that has been weaving comes together, and they finally understand some heartfelt lesson or a connection they mistook as something else.

It’s an emotion I’ve chased throughout my career with varying degrees of success, and I love it.

Rose stepped through the coffee shop’s front door, letting its light, wooden frame bounce against the jamb behind her. She looked around, seeing about a dozen customers sipping drinks or tapping away on laptops, oblivious to her presence. Relieved that the place wasn’t completely packed, she stepped off to one side towards her favourite spot by the window.

She unfurled her silk, pearlescent scarf with one hand while she placed her small, leather backpack down on the chair that she had occupied so many times this year. The movement was so automatic and smooth by this point that she barely registered it, instead focusing on the drink menu that hung on a wire behind the counter.

A faded black tablet composed with artfully-spaced, plastic white letters, the menu reminded her of the monolithic refrigerator her aunt had in her big, suburban kitchen. It was always cluttered with magnetic letters that Rose’s little cousins would keep hiding on each other, until one of them inevitably cried out of frustration. When Rose first moved to Canada from Hong Kong, she’d sometimes use those letters to practise her English spelling.

She hung her jacket on the back of the chair, grabbed her small wallet out of her backpack, and stepped towards the counter behind another customer — a tall man with stylishly cropped, grey hair, a thin frame, and an extremely fashionable, short jacket. Rose liked that this cafe always had interesting-looking customers; it made the long waits easier.

Sometimes, the people who would become her clients took forever to show up. They’d usually blame it on the city’s beleaguered transit system or the weather. Sometimes, even on a sunny day, they wouldn’t show up at all.

The grey-haired man stepped away with a paper take-out cup and Rose swore to herself: no coffee today. She needed something with less caffeine — for real, this time.

Tonight, I can’t screw up again. I have a lot to do while I’m sleeping.

I’m an middle-ager who grew up before the web, and who learned HTML as his second language after English. I’ve had accounts pretty much everywhere, and I’ve always maintained a website of some kind (either personal or professional). The idea of owning your own content isn’t new — it’s what I always knew the web to be.

Thanks to some friends, a steady diet of podcasts like The Vergecast, and my own fatigue at the increasing enshittification of social media, I’ve been reading and thinking about the IndieWeb movement and POSSE (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) a lot. It sure made a lot of sense — it’s the way we’ve always done things!

So I thought I’d try micro.blog as a way to have a home for a personal blog, separate from my indie game studio’s own blog, and way to get those thoughts out easily to others. As I write this, my Mastodon, Bluesky, Medium, and LinkedIn accounts are supported. As Threads joins the ActivityPub protocol, I hope to be able to cross-post there too.

It’s funny, but the final straw that made me want to jump into a proper, POSSE-friendly blog was that scene from David Fincher’s The Social Network, where the movie version of Mark Zuckerberg is drunk-posting on his LiveJournal while he hammers out the code for Facebook precursor FaceMash.

Just look at that gorgeous Sony Vaio laptop

I totally had a LiveJournal. I had one even as my career in videogames was beginning — and I was reminded this not too long ago when I was auto-prompted by LiveJournal that my ancient account would be removed for inactivity. I forgot it even existed, and that it was active!

Was there anything truly embarrassing on there? Did I drunk-post something terrible back in 2008 or so? I managed to gain access to my account and was greeted with the backdraft of naivete and mundanity that so often lingers in the abandoned writings of our younger selves. Thankfully, there was nothing questionable, but I did feel a pang of nostalgia at reading an old post about jamming on game ideas with an old friend.

For so many reasons, that felt like several lifetimes ago. It was, really, when you consider all that’s happened in the world since 2008.

So ever since that moment when I re-watched The Social Network (still a 10/10, by the way; even though accuracy isn’t its strongest suit), I’ve been thinking about blogs. I’ve been thinking about LiveJournal. And now here I am, writing a blog post like it’s 2008 — except now I’ve been married for almost a quarter of a century, run a business that employs people, and only get calls for funerals now, and not weddings.

Let’s see where this goes, shall we?