♱°·.·°GAEL:
banner
underreallife.bsky.social
♱°·.·°GAEL:
@underreallife.bsky.social
videogame critic, university student, serious web design aficionado — "nothing human is alien to me" ♱ he/him ♱ underreallife.neocities.org
Pinned
hey what's up, new underreallife.neocities.org update! ♱
Reposted by ♱°·.·°GAEL:
I know a lot of you have already heard or read about BDS Movement's call against Microsoft, and felt weird and bad about it all, but decided to move forward as normal because of some degree of ambiguity.

"What service is Microsoft providing?"

Here it is, clear as day. A direct line to death.
August 6, 2025 at 9:01 PM
Reposted by ♱°·.·°GAEL:
Work is stupid and pissing me off please
Play my games (now re-listed!): coleo_kin.itch.io
Buy my book: emreed.net/more_bugs
Enjoy my cool blog: hotelpaintings.neocities.org
MORE BUGS, a novel by Em Reed
emreed.net
August 5, 2025 at 8:46 AM
In Search of Lost Time is rewiring my brain so aggressively the state is about to revoke my right to drink, drive, and vote
August 1, 2025 at 9:16 PM
"Piracy harms small creators" but then a small creator publicly expresses fear over people losing access to their recently censored game and pirates are like "Oh yeah, don't worry about that, we have multiple versions of it available" lmao
July 28, 2025 at 2:39 PM
Imagine tagging your games as NSFW specifically so that people can easily filter them in/out and then having this very same courtesy weaponized against you to delist your gam
July 25, 2025 at 11:46 AM
Me, preaching to the biggest choir on Earth: It's okay to enjoy slop. You don't always have to do masterpiece after masterpiece, you know. I mean, there's nothing wrong with turning off your brain sometimes! You are *allowed* to exclusively watch children cartoons. You are valid
July 22, 2025 at 11:36 AM
Somewhat old game studies books love to do this bit where they bemoan a stunted discipline infested with intellectually grifty literary theorists applying their own medium-specific methodologies to videogames. Like we had Empsons and Auerbachs refusing to discuss the magic circle
July 19, 2025 at 10:51 AM
"Headcanon" this, "fancanon" that. Both of these concepts are predicated on the same fruitless and misguided mode of engagement with media. Fine if you are a socially deprived teenager; otherwise, what are you even doing, man
July 7, 2025 at 8:45 AM
Just submitted my undergraduate dissertation on Russian Formalism and the New Criticism (it was good). I was fairly critical of some of their principles/methods, so just know every time I read bad takes about criticism or "media literacy" online now, I am taking extra damage
June 22, 2025 at 9:17 AM
Puns/pop references in academic paper titles are fine, but I can confidently say none of them have ever come close to the level of gets-me-every-time that results from googling Cleanth Brooks' famous essay on Macbeth
May 9, 2025 at 10:00 PM
gamers when linear level design: deceitful, condescending, predictable

gamers when linear level design but in the shape of an open world with cocomelon-worthy levels of pavlovian escorting: yayy :D
May 2, 2025 at 7:34 PM
advice to new critics: make sure to comment on the author's irresistible boyish charm and refreshingly oblique proximity to revolutionary politics
May 1, 2025 at 11:02 AM
Few things as cynical as fans playing house as shareholders, asking who would even buy a "woke game", worried about sending an insufficient offering to a god whose only concern is profit. These game companies can't offer you salvation, only the thirteenth iteration of a 00s game
April 15, 2025 at 8:45 AM
Gamer whose idea of peak videogame beauty is a crusty hyperrealistic AAA from the last couple of years discussing a genuinely gorgeous altgame: This game sure is HIDEOUS. So much so it makes me want to KILL MYSELF. But, hey, bear with me for a second here: that is *the point*
March 17, 2025 at 5:14 PM
"The Weirdest Game You've Never Played" sort of coverage is so inconspicuously cynical—a self-fulfilling prophecy predicated on a cannibalistic cultural ecosystem that nonetheless manages to retain a vaguely curatorial, artistically open-minded appeal
March 16, 2025 at 11:19 AM
Ninja Gaiden (1988)
March 15, 2025 at 7:55 PM
And here I thought Life is Strange: Double Exposure haters were mostly driven by immaturity and nostalgia! I mean, sure, they are, but for me it went from hilariously bad to excruciatingly terrible way too quickly. Somehow, the series meets new lows
February 28, 2025 at 9:55 AM
Jameson's prose is to some other theorists' like a desperate sniff of your own wrist when you enter a place that reeks of urine
February 12, 2025 at 6:42 PM
Reposted by ♱°·.·°GAEL:
Gandhara: Buddha no Seisen #PC88 cover art scanned at 1200 DPI archive.org/details/...
February 12, 2025 at 10:00 AM
Gamers do love playing house as armchair stakeholders, don't they? While barely able to articulate half an aesthetic argument, when it comes to confabulating the dumbest market analysis possible, they will rarely disappoint
February 12, 2025 at 2:22 PM
It's always funny seeing the nuance warriors who believe value judgments about art invariably represent an objectivist, mercenary approximation to art commentary making endless category errors when they appeal to those same value judgments in order to sustain their definitions of TRUE art
February 7, 2025 at 1:48 PM
Reposted by ♱°·.·°GAEL:
January 16, 2025 at 6:08 AM
Reposted by ♱°·.·°GAEL:
Some important context laid out in the comments on the PMG video. Not only are western capitalists profiting from the abuse and exploitation of workers in Indonesia, but western imperialism destroyed their local labour movement and created the conditions for the abuse to persist.
January 12, 2025 at 11:41 PM
with all due respect, i have been keeping track of this guy's movements in my notebook for years and i'm pretty sure he did say that
No source for this quote among Orwell's writings has been located, and the earliest published source of this phrase found dates to 1982.
quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/24/t...
January 12, 2025 at 3:15 PM
My favorite uni semester is about to end. Incidentally, it asked of me to put an unprecedented degree of creativity into it so here I am, having just finished an essay about Russian Formalism and videogames. That shit's getting adapted into a script in the future for sure
January 12, 2025 at 2:53 PM