The Corpse Brigadier

I.

I've returned, unfortunately, to "bad sleep hygiene" habits, which means I've been going into the office at midnight hours, which means a lot of walking through empty night-time streets. I've also been playing lots of Disco Elysium, in which the hubbub of each day gradually subsides into a silent and still 2 a.m. And because I'm sleep-deprived, my little mind keeps dredging up similarities between that game state and my consciousness of the real world.

I walked past a closed gas station last night, but the gas pumps had little screens with constantly looping advertisements, and thus there was an uncanny Doppler effect of a ghostly jingle growing clearer and clearer as I approached the gas station and then slowly fading out as I moved down the dead block.

"This is a real Disco Elysium vibe," my brain informed me.

"Shut up, brain," I said, "and no, it's not."

II.

I was talking to my brother about Disco Elysium during sibling chat this weekend. He apparently played it for ten minutes and then abandoned it because he couldn't figure out what to do.

"Did you ever put your clothes on?" I asked cautiously.

"Probably not," he said. "I just remember being very bewildered by the whole interface."

"Well," I said, "if you ever play it again, you can hit the TAB button, and the game will show you what objects you can interact with."

"Mmm," he said. "I'm thinking now of The Besties, and a story that they told on that podcast about one of them being on an airplane and seeing another passenger trying to play Animal Well, only the guy playing couldn't figure out how to jump, which is just a simple button press, so he just spent thirty minutes unable to exit the tutorial screen. And the Bestie thought about leaning forward to tell him how to jump, but then he thought, no, if this guy cannot figure out how to hit the jump button, he is not going to enjoy anything else about Animal Well. And that's probably me and Disco Elysium. If I can't figure out how to put on my clothes in the first ten minutes of the game, it sounds like I'm probably not going to enjoy anything else about the game."

III.

I was sitting outside a cafe today eating a Caesar-salad wrap, and one of the people I was with was telling the rest of the table about being an American with Greek friends, and all of her Greek friends identify as being firmly anti-communist (for obvious historical reasons), but then she'll tell them about current left-wing politics in the United States, and they'll just stare at her in mystification and say, no, none of that is leftist, you're just describing moderate centrist positions now. She enjoyed blowing their minds about the U.S. debates over Zohran Mamdani in contrast to his actual policies.

And I sat there and firmly resisted the impulse to say, oh, yeah, exactly, I'm playing a game right now made by an Estonion team, and their perspective on political ideologies is so blisteringly acidic and so different from what creators in the United States or Western Europe would be making, I love Eastern European takes on leftist political ideologies, it's so furious and affectionate and mocking and grounded in a different lived experience of history, because I have self-control, but I did have to concentrate for a minute on staying silent until the impulse passed.