ME: "Oh boy! It's the end of the year! It's going to be super simple to wrap up everything at work in a timely manner!"

WORK: "lol. lmao even."

Anyway, I've consumed a truly lethal amount of caffeine this week and averaged about three hours of sleep a night, but I think I am actually done with everything that needs to be finished before the end of the year. (In related news, I was grimly mulling over something today, and then I thought, Self, you've averaged three hours of sleep a night this week! You are not in your right mind right now! You don't need to re-evaluate a single thing in your life today! Today is a day for head empty, just vibes!)

Wake Up Dead Man (2025) -- This is a deliberate throwback to a very retro style of murder mystery, and I enjoyed it on the same terms I enjoy Agatha Christie novels (i.e. dumb as hell if you think about it too long, but very satisfying in the moment). It's also a piss-take on a Passion Play, which is fun if you're familiar with the format and usual characters.

Unfortunately, it has a distractingly weird portrayal of American Catholicism, complete with a priest who has apparently inherited the same parish as his grandfather? (Even aside from the priestly family, that kind of appointment would be pretty weird within the ecclesiastical bureaucracy.) And then we have that same priest delivering all these off-the-cuff fire-and-brimstone sermons from the pulpit, which is not...really the vibe in the Catholic liturgical calendar but which can be the vibe in the Wild West of evangelical Christianity. Surprise: director Rian Johnson is not Catholic but was raised in an 80s evangelical household. Yeah, man, me too, but despite that, I'm aware the Venn diagram of Catholic and evangelical institutional cultures does not have a ton of overlap.

Actually, I suspect that Johnson wanted to replicate a very typical kind of English mid-century murder mystery, which necessarily involves the Anglican Church. But there's no way you can transfer a murder mystery set in an Anglican vicarage to the United States; there's literally nothing in the pantheon of U.S. Christian institutions that equates to that specific host of associations. I can see why Catholicism might have seemed like an acceptable substitute at first glance, but the movie is so unnecessarily wrong about such little stuff that it kept breaking my suspension of disbelief.

On the other hand, Josh O'Connor excels in the lead role and nails the very specific personality of every young Catholic priest I've met in my life. So sometimes the movie achieves a moment of real, lived reality, and sometimes it's just lazy and generic and incurious.

Mass Effect (2007, PC) -- Beat it! It took me about 22 hours, and I did pretty much everything. I followed a mostly renegade path, which was unpleasant and sometimes lazily integrated with the game's plot. On the other hand, I liked that the game's writing doubled down on xenophobia and amorality in the grand finale, especially in Anderson's concluding speech about humanity taking control amidst a power vacuum. Gross but appropriate! I sacrificed Ashley at Virmire -- even though I think Ashley's character arc over the whole trilogy is fun and a lot more interesting that the stuff going on with Kaidan. (But, alas, I sacrificed Kaidan during my first playthrough, so I thought it was only fair to sacrifice Ashley this time.) Saved Wrex, of course, as he remains the standout character in the cast. I romanced Liara, somewhat reluctantly. The romances in this game are pretty bad, and I salute my younger player-self's purity of purpose in refusing to romance anyone at all. On the whole, I had a fine time, but Mass Effect has not aged particularly well. Its innovations have all been appropriated and refined in other games (not least among them its own sequel), and so now it just seems kind of clunky and hammy in its execution. I kind of think...Dragon Age is the better Bioware series?

Inscryption (2021, PC) -- After I uninstalled Mass Effect, I did not want to start a new game, but I did want to enter a game-playing fugue state. Enter, stage left: Kaycee's Mod from Inscryption, which is basically an endless version of the Act One card game. It took me 21 failed runs before I managed to beat the first iteration of the game, so everything is clearly going great. As a vehicle for dissociation, sacrificing squirrel cards has entered a pleasantly Tetris-like zone for me.