meg.gg

Author: meg

  • sagebrush

    The hills where I grew up are on fire.

    It’s not such an unusual story in the West, certainly not now; some hills somewhere are always on fire. Chances are good they meant something to someone.

    But these are my hills, the ones I hiked with my parents, with my friends, by myself. I haven’t spent much time in them in a while. I moved states, moved back, live across town. They’re still my hills in the way your parents are still your parents even after they pass.

    They were filled with sagebrush, and grasses, and arrowleaf balsamroot. The smell is magic, the warmth of earth and dry grass. The smell of sage, not sage the bay leaf but the hearty silver brush that to me makes the West, sweet herbal smell intoxicating at the slightest touch. I laid on the ground and peered in at their gnarled trunks when I was a kid, imagined what it was to live beneath their fragrant boughs.

    The sagebrush where I grew up is on fire.

    It took me a long time to see this high desert as a beloved thing, thinking though all my younger years that I would rather live in the rainforest, on the coast. I tried it, and no. The sagebrush is for me.

    Sagebrush is a tough plant, prepared for rain or blistering heat. At a young age, though, like most living things, it has a harder time. No gnarled trunks and deep roots to fasten it in place. It gets crowded out by that hated Eurasian invader cheatgrass. It gets trampled by a hundred thousand hooves, by cattle grazing. A mature sagebrush is a tough old thing because it survived its tender age. There’s no way around it.

    The hills are black, and they loom over the city as a terrible reminder of what we’ve done. Hills we protected, we cherished, we took for granted. Now they look like the hood of the Grim Reaper, peering over the horizon.

    I murdered my lawn and replaced it with native plants, with drought tolerant species, with weeds. I got surplus sagebrush plugs from a conservation program, and now I have four stalwart sagebrush of my own. I like to run my hands in their leaves, to make myself smell like home.

    The hills are on fire, and this time next year they’ll be full of the invasive grass that burns like a bed of matches. They’ll crowd out any new sagebrush starts, push everything but their own kind into nonexistence. It makes my own sagebrush feel like precious things. These are my captives, like a rare species in a zoo. It feels like they’re safer here than in the hills.

    It’s nauseating to consider, not just my own nostalgic loss but the loss as a whole. I heard about the loss of Boise goldenweed, a kind of plant only just recently recognized as genetically distinct, its footprint in the world mapping similarly with the outline of the burn. To think, how many times did I walk past such a special thing and not notice?

    We all notice things in their absence. I think about the wildlife, the birds and trees and insects, the things that persisted in this place the way I persist. A human makes a bad choice, lights a bottle rocket or drives a car over dry grass, and there is no explaining the aftermath of fire to the fox that lost its den, the quail their nests. We do this a thousand times, again and again and again. We are the gods of destruction to everything around us.

    In the long arc of existence, though, all of nature is a god of destruction. This is not the first time fire has roared through these hills. It won’t be the last.

    The West is resilient, in its nature and its people. There are already conversations about how to restore the burning hills. It won’t bring back all that was lost, but somewhere down the road, there could be another girl wandering the trails, laying beneath the sagebrush.

    I hope so, anyway.

  • things i love: esoteric ebb

    It’s easy to talk about things I dislike, but it’s equally (more) important to talk about things I love. So welcome to Things I Love, reviews and meditations on all the good things keeping me going.

    Today’s thing I love is a video game, an RPG, and like all good RPGs it plays like someone is gently telling you a story that changes every time you interrupt.

    Esoteric Ebb, developed by Christoffer Bodegård and collaborators, takes place in the city of Norvik. You are The Cleric, or a cleric who is also a rogue, or a cleric who is actually a god wizard, or a cleric who is also a fascist struggling with his masculinity, depending on the choices you start making before you get into the story. It is your job, Cleric, to investigate a possible act of terrorism; someone has blown up the local tea shop five days before the very first election. There are opposing political factions in play. There is a mimic.

    Your character traits, the things you selected for or against – my first run-through was a strong as hell constitutionally fortified cleric with nothing between his ears – are themselves characters with their own motivations and political inclinations. You have spells that can enhance or hinder the success of interactions. As you work your way through objectives, you are given choices between different bonuses that are flavored to match the different traits.

    There are also women; a brash capitalist, a one-with-nature elf who is sort of a mushroom, a brawny hired muscle who really hates being Charmed, a flirty bar owner. A very political teenager. A literal angel.

    These are all parts of what makes the game compelling to me. You can find more information, including access to a discord server and the soundtrack, on the game’s website.

    I love the music choices, the way they set a distinct feeling of the story. In a story that borrows bits and pieces from a lot of traditional fantasy (and Dungeons and Dragons), Bodegård could have gone with something containing significantly more lute. He didn’t, though, and the soundtrack helps the player understand that while there are parts here that will feel familiar to anyone who’s played D&D, this is a different place.

    No one is perfect; there are no perfect choices, and at times the player might find they bend the ideology they’ve attached to in order to justify an action. Sometimes capitalism is the best way to ultimately benefit the workers’ party. Sometimes you have to go along with what a shady character suggests because that’s the only good option. Ideals are meant to be tested, poked and prodded.

    One of the themes that sticks out the most to me is about the reality and importance of mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes of varying consequence. Everyone should be given an opportunity to fix them. Even the mistakes that were devastating, that have created long-lasting divisions, are not permanent. They can be forgiven. It isn’t that to err is human; in Ebb, erring is universal.

    There are a lot of comparisons drawn between Ebb and Disco Elysium, another catastrophically good RPG that I will absolutely write about at length later. Indeed, Bodegård talks about his game as being a kind of love letter to Disco. It is described on its own site as being a “Disco-like,” the first time I’ve seen a developer self-describe in such a way.

    The thing about these two games is that Disco Elysium and Esoteric Ebb are asking you to live in different headspaces. 

    Disco asks you to exist in a world that is, at its core, broken; even in a broken world there are murders to solve, there are people living their lives the best they can. At every step you are shown the corruption and malice of a system left to rot. You are a broken person but, depending on your choices, you can try and solve one single problem. You can do your best in a bad circumstance.

    Ebb, then, asks you to exist in a place where there is the promise of something better, of a way to fix what’s broken through admittedly imperfect means. You are a person with a great many faults and failures, but conversely it is the world around you trying to make things better. You can (again, game choices) aid the work of idealist pro-worker Azgalists, build a relationship with a goblin queen trying to do right by her people, try and ensure the elections happen without problems. There is something optimistic about the tone of the game, even in its darkest moments.

    I suspect it’s that tone that causes some Disco fans to regard Ebb as being less compelling. There are plenty of valid criticisms, and at times the writing in Ebb can be more simplistic than in Disco. I think the fundamental flaw with comparing them, though, is there’s often an unspoken idea that when you hold up two objects, one should be better than the other. This isn’t the case to me; I love both games for similar and different reasons. Disco Elysium embraces a revolutionary spirit – the system is broken, what you do won’t necessarily fix it, do it anyway – and Esoteric Ebb is focused more on the ideas of collective progression – there are many at work to make a difference, you must choose to help progress along in spite of its many flaws. Those are both ideas that are worth examining and understanding.

    The two things Disco and Ebb strongly have in common that make me love them both are these: the power of introspection, and the importance of relationships.

    Knowing oneself, strengths and flaws, helps a person make better choices. You play to your strengths, you find ways to get around the weaknesses. When your Strength is 6, chances of you passing a roll rated to 34 are pretty goddamn low. But there’s an option for Wisdom, for Constitution, maybe there’s a spell you know or an article of clothing you have that will even the odds.

    Relationships give those choices meaning. You fail a check, an interaction doesn’t go the way you’d hoped, you’re compelled to find a way to fix it or deal with its consequences. A check is successful, and a new moment of understanding blossoms in its wake – your goblin associate thinks more highly of you, you secure a date with an attractive woman, you befriend a snail. The world you’re exploring is made real by the things you learn about the other characters, by digging deeper and taking risks. You love them because of your interactions, the way you understand them better over time.

    I’ve seen posts from newcomers to both games asking “what stats make the best playthrough” and seasoned players explaining that it isn’t that kind of game. That’s what makes a game like Ebb, or like Disco, so appealing and thrilling to me. You’re telling a story in collaboration with the creator. You’re making choices about the direction of the story, and the creator, in turn, reveals little treasures of experience accordingly. These are games of intimacy, not optimization. There isn’t a loot crate to be had at the end of the story. The game was the friends we made along the way.

    There is a moment towards the end of Ebb where, without spoiling it, a character reckons with the ways their choices have created harm. In a lot of storytelling, there might be fighting in that moment, violence, retribution. Instead, though, there is space for reflection. There is a kind of forgiveness. Mistakes happen, and in the spirit of all RPGs, there are choices to be made in response.

    There’s also a perpetually-drunk Sphinx.

  • no toasters here

    You won’t find any use of GenAI or agentic AI on this site. That’s deliberate: I write compulsively, as a coping mechanism, as a way to process my own thoughts. Letting some sycophantic computer program make words for me is antithetical to why I value writing in the first place.

    To be a writer, ultimately, is to be a person who writes words. That’s it. You can be a hobbyist writer, a professional writer, a technical writer, a creative writer, on and on. Maybe you get paid for the writing, maybe you don’t. The main theme is that you *write*. Giving over your ideas to a machine made up entirely of other peoples’ parts is not writing, it’s mimicry.

    If you can’t be bothered to put energy and effort into the words you write, you cannot possibly ask someone else to read them. That’s the social contract of written communication; we are making an exchange right here, right now, as you read this. I have made these words appear in this sequence, and you are taking the time to see them, to digest them. I could never ask someone to do that if the words weren’t mine, if I haven’t extracted them from my own brain and deliberated over their use. AI-made words are the literary equivalent of eating packing peanuts – you could, I suppose, but what the fuck are you supposed to get out of that?

    Because here’s the thing: I *like* writing. Not just the object, though there is some satisfaction to looking back and seeing I’ve spat out some 70,000 words in a neat line, enough that my printer would eat a ream of paper to make them live in the physical world; I like the act of writing, of running my hand over an idea or an image in my head and then doing my best to describe it. I’ve written words that no one else will ever see because I murdered them, took them from their flock and discarded them. They were still mine, I still made them. I’ve struggled to get description just right, to find something that fits the palate. The struggle is the point, the burst of inspiration is the point. The times where I knew they weren’t perfect but I could come back and fix them once I had a better view of the whole thing? That’s the point.

    Where are you supposed to get that from a thing that can’t figure out how many “r”s there are in “strawberry?” Where is the thrill of trying a word that doesn’t seem like it will fit but then it does, it does! How are you supposed to take pride in a thing a toaster made?

    If that’s not for you, if you think there’s originality to be had in text made of someone else’s labor, if I’ve hurt your feelings, then that’s alright, I guess. There are a lot of websites out here, go see if someone else has something for you.

    But if you’re interested in seeing more, in sticking around, well. We have such sights to show you.