STATE OF THE FIXT - YEAR 2
hey there, sport. it's been a minute, hasn't it? been doing good? eating your veggies?
all affects aside, it is, indeed, almost the second birthday of the web domain known as HYPERFIXT. it's really weird to think about time passing in that way! it feels like i've been yelling on the internet for a lot longer and having a website where i do it for a lot shorter. i guess both of those things kind of are the case, depending on how you want to hash them out?
looking back on what i wrote at this same time last year, it's kind of wild that i thought 2022 was a slow year, because wowza, 2023 was a slooow year. it's hard to approach how to even talk about it, really. i try to avoid getting too overly personal on here, especially in any negative sense - it feels like a pretty solid policy to devote my time spent writing to sharing a lot of positive passion for things i love, and i don't want this place to become some kind of weird fucked-up catacomb that preserves all my personal struggles and grievances in amber. i don't think the HYPERFIXT of five, ten, twenty years down the line will need to remember just how bad 2023 felt and i don't think my readers want me spilling my guts that publicly either.
without getting in deep and dissecting things, i'll just say that i've spent a lot of the past year trying to get my head in the right place to keep tackling this whole 'writing' thing at full force. it has not all gone as quickly or as effectively as i would like. to some extent, i do still feel like i'm operating this blog with my good hand tied behind my back.
when i can wrestle that good hand free though, boy, do i write! what started as a brief "sure, it's basically right in front of me, i'll give it a try" play session turned into a full-blown treatise on what i think is wrong with Bethesda games. maybe it's just me, but i think this one is only minimally shitty to Emil Pagliarulo and i take a bit of pride in that. going into 2024 (i say, in the fourth month of the year - bear with me), i want to be a little more spontaneous like this more often. i can't promise that anything will evoke the specific types of feelings that get me writing, but i want to keep an open mind and a peeled pair of eyes.
and for as much as it will forever, eternally bug me that i didn't write about SGDQ 2023, i crushed the AGDQ best-of list in like, 48 hours? and i'm way more satisified with it than usual in terms of its intended function of directing people towards cool things they might like? asking me to put anything on a list is basically begging to get stuck with choice paralysis for a week, but i think after a bout of personal burnout, i've gotten a lot better at following impulses and staying snappy about things.
take, for example, the last-minute under-the-wire entry to the year 2 lineup, written after the rest of this very article! BIONICLE was always one of those things that was on the backburner as a little too big to reasonably approach, but i decided to throw caution to the wind and write about the weirdest, most personal and niche angle into the franchise i could muster up, and i'm pretty proud of how it turned out. it's easy to be tempted towards trying to be the most comprehensive about everything all the time, but that's an easy way to burn out and i want to try more interesting, unique approaches to breaking up subjects like this.
and that happens to dovetail nicely into the elephant in the room for me. the thing that is currently sitting in the corner that i constantly feel just a little bad about most of the time. i'll have actual reader questions later on, but i do think all my friends are going to be a little too polite to ask me about this, so let me lay it out; why has it been a full-on year since my last overview for The Owl House?
there's a lot of factors at play here, and, again, i don't want to dwell too much of any of the negativity associated with not getting things done. the most immediate and present thing is that right around the time those updates stopped coming, a lot of shit went off the rails for me all at once. my plan was to enjoy a nice SGDQ, sit down and crush Tears of the Kingdom, and come back from that 'vacation' renewed and ready to go. instead, those things became more like a bit of an escape from things that were really bothering me, and it became really easy to kind of sink into just not doing things? quite frustratingly, i didn't even wind up writing about Zelda, because if anything, it was kind of too good to touch. you are not going to catch me writing thousands of words just to tell you that one of the most popular games of the year was really good and fun. it was, superlatively so, but that's not interesting for me to work on and i don't think it's interesting for people to read, either.
back to The Owl House overviews, though - another thing that happened was just that... the show ended? i mean, clearly i hadn't caught up to that point yet, but when you're pouring a lot of time and passion into talking about a show and the finale actually lands way earlier than you were expecting, it's easy to kind of sit with that feeling of "ah, the thing was good and it wrapped up and i'm satisfied". it felt a little too soon to be diving back into it so thoroughly, i guess.
and lastly and maybe even most importantly... i just got the sense it was a lot of work for something that wasn't really resonating with people? all my friends who were already into The Owl House already knew all of these reasons i loved it and didn't need someone to impassionedly make the case for why it's very good. all my friends who weren't into The Owl House didn't seem to go out of their way to start watching the show (and i totally get it - i am historically, cataclysmically bad at taking recommendations), so to them, it was a lot of very dense reading about a show they weren't following. it's definitely a little selfish of me to want any particular kind of response, but i had certain hopes for what might happen if i did deep-dive coverage of something i really liked, and it didn't seem like that was panning out quite to the extent that i wanted it.
i can't necessarily say that The Owl House overviews are going to start right back up tomorrow or anything, but i can at least say i do intend to see that project through to the end at some point, even if it might take an undocumented re-rewatch of season 1 to get the gears turning. one thing that i feel like i have gotten better about over the last few months is wrangling together my set-up, my log-ins, and my workflow in a way that'll hopefully be more conductive to getting things done. no promises on an exact timeframe, but i'm in good spirits about coming back to that corner of the site one day, especially because last we left off, things were about to start getting really crazy good.
of course, getting things in order like that and trying to be more proactive about finding new subjects to write about has also opened up some interesting new doors. i can very, very confidently say that i want to write a piece on the recent fan-favorite anime Delicious in Dungeon (aka Dungeon Meshi - wow, someone should make up their mind about which title to go with, or find some funny way to incorporate the duality of localization into their blog post...) and that the only thing really stopping me is the fact that i want to see the season through to the end before putting my thoughts down on it. this one will probably be a one-off, to avoid the kind of burnout i got doing episode-to-episode reviews and because i think the show's pace just doesn't lend itself to that format, but i'm honestly kind of raring to go on that one.
another coming attraction is that toy photography stuff i was already talking about a full calendar year ago. my collection has actually kind of exploded (positive) throughout 2023, and i've been toying with a gallery page on-and-off for like... six to eight months, at this point? i do keep buying new things i then have to go photograph and document and add in, but those two points are currently pretty close to intersecting on a graph. it's not something i get to flex a lot, but i do enjoy doing photography, so it might be cool to find other avenues to explore there.
other than those more specific goals, i think my direction for 2024 is just to try and be a lot more open-minded to finding new stuff and latching onto new ideas. i will still stand by my stated prime directive of only writing about a thing if i think that it'll be interesting - 2023 was full of media that i absolutely adored, but never quite found an angle into other than "it's pretty good, isn't it?" - but i'm trying to try new things more often, across the board, whether it's just going for it on watching a new show or deciding that my idea for a post doesn't have to be perfect to be worth writing.
in terms of really, REALLY big picture stuff? i'd obviously like to be more consistent, but that kind of goes hand in hand with a lot of the struggles i had with mental health in 2023. my goal is still eventually to hit a point where new things are happening here often enough for it to really have a following, but i also recognize i need to work on being nicer to myself when i'm not quite there yet.
if nothing else, thank you to all the people who've still believed in this scrappy little web domain even when things have not been going so well for good ol' HYPERFIXT. i've had my ups and downs with it, but i feel like i have a clear enough vision of the next few steps to end this particular year-in-review on a high note. come what may, you cannot stop me from posting.
and i can't stop you from posting! just like last year, i've gone ahead and gathered up some questions from close friends of the site to answer here - enough to try and organize this into two parallel lists, about the site and about matters of personal taste. maybe it's a bit of a weird process when my readership currently consists of people who can just ask me all this stuff anyways, but this is official, etched in digital stone. these are the HYPERFIXT answers to these inquiring minds, circa April 2024.
SIDE A // THE SITE
WHAT SITE FEATURES ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF?
there's a lot of features i'm pretty proud of, even if some of them are definitely slapped together with a very rudimentary understanding of HTML and CSS. if i had to single something out, i think the font picker on the left-hand bar is the thing i'm proudest of. it's not perfect - i would eventually like to go back in and refine the parameters of what text it grabs a little more cleanly - but it was a very common point of feedback for people that Audiowide is stylish, but a little impractical. i feel good that i was able to find a solution that's quick and dirty and instantly makes it work if you need something a little easier on the eyes.
in a more hypothetical sense, i really like the idea of the microblog, but as you can probably tell, it doesn't see an awful lot of use these days. i think it'd be really useful to have a sort of fire-and-forget sidepiece for assorted jokes and site updates, and i like the labelling system i've devised, but the issue is that it still runs on the same raw HTML editing that the rest of HYPERFIXT is built out of, so it comes with all the high-level web design baggage despite its intentionally smaller scale. i think one of my goals for the next year is finding a better solution for that - it might get replaced with some kind of RSS feed, but the issue is finding a platform that it can pull from in our modern age of Every Platform Is A Garbage Fire.
WILL YOU EVER COVER KAMEN RIDER?
man, one of these days, i wish! Kamen Rider is a weird one for me in that i care a lot about the aesthetics of it, but my extent of watching it is like... a bootleg Decade DVD i got in 2012? that time they uploaded Reiwa The First Generation to YouTube? i mean, obviously i've seen Shin Kamen Rider, but that's kind of off doing its own thing.
i do think i briefly considered covering Black Sun at one point, given it got an actual subtitled release that's not hard to find, but i haven't really broached the world of gritty dramas like that when it comes to my writing - i don't know that i can convey the emotional intricacies of finding out that Kamen Rider's doing a bunch of ketamine. a lot of the more traditional series sound very enticing to me, but i'm not well-versed in the particular hoops you have to jump through to find them out there on the internet and i'm always a little worried deep down that i'll see through the facade and realize i'm watching a Japanese toy commercial from over a decade ago if i put on OOO or something. in all honesty, though, Kamen Rider is one of those things that is constantly looming just out of the corner of this site's eye, and the dam could break any moment.
DO YOU HAVE ANY INTEREST IN DOING A FOLLOW-UP TO THE HALO ESSAY AFTER WHAT'S HAPPENED WITH MICROSOFT LATELY?
i've gone back-and-forth on doing a follow-up, actually, but i think the answer, at least as of this writing, is that it's kind of too far gone to get a grip on it again. that essay really got thrown together as this monstrous Frankenstein of all my gripes about the Halo fandom under some very specific contexts, and i think it was in the process of writing it that i understood that the issues there could be a window into broader issues with the gaming industry as a whole. i think that all things considered, i had a pretty fucking good grip on the trajectory things were on back then? like, not to just brag about how right i was, but i feel like i was really right.
as an individual game, Halo Infinite is like... i don't even know how to start with it, really. i do feel like it's as over as people say it is, but i don't want to say that because i don't think most people are being introspective or realistic about why it's like that right now? like, the community manager at 343 literally said that selling a $20 skin "dug them out of a hole". the game, as it already did, continues to have incredibly good fundamentals, and they keep making it better, but i think it's clearer than ever that they're working with a skeleton crew and i legimitately do not think there's any winning move to make the next Halo game a hit, especially when you have a fanbase that's still primed to lash out so much.
with Microsoft as a whole... where to start? like, seriously - Halo was my 'where to start' and i think i said my piece about it, which largely panned out to be a pretty accurate diagnosis of why that game was set up to underdeliver from the start. when it comes to the broader issues that have arisen from Microsoft's massive consolidation of the gaming industry, i don't think i have that same ground-level frame of reference and i also don't think i can say much that hasn't already been said about how fucked the whole scenario is.
WILL YOU EVER COVER ANYTHING SPIDER-MAN?
i almost feel like by sheer gravitational force, i'll almost have to one of these days, right? i'll wake up and realize i'm halfway through writing about something featuring that spidered man. my first instinct when thinking about this question is almost to kind of shirk away from it a little bit. i think the best way to put it might be that i love the platonic ideal of Spider-Man - he's a cool guy with a great rogue's gallery and some very compelling stories, who wouldn't like that guy? but i've never really been a very avid comic book reader and what i know of Peter Parker's twenty-first century exploits don't exactly fill me with the most confidence.
but then again, i'm also pretty much constantly engaging with something Spider-Man. Across the Spider-Verse is, again, one of those great pieces of media from 2023 that slipped through the cracks because i don't know what to say about it that hasn't been said. the Insomniac games have also proven to be surprisingly good? not so good that i'd say people have to play them - they're still very much a set of okay open world checklists that are primarily carried by satisfying movement and brand recognition - but their way they've interpreted the mythos is low-key one of my favorite angles we currently have for the webheads. granted, i haven't been able to gracefully make the jump from PS4 to PC, and i'm not in any hurry to shell out for a PS5, no matter how many symbiotes they tempt me with.
i hear they also make live-action movies about this guy now? not that i'd know anything about those, or a certain goblin mask i might have offhandedly collaged into a visual signifier for a little while...
anyways, i don't currently have anything that i'm going out of my way to cover, but also, as i type this, i can tilt my head about 10 degrees and see three different bits of Spider-Man merch somewhere on this desk, so... yeah, probably, right? just statistically speaking?
SIDE B // THE MIND
WHAT WAS THE MOST EPIC SWAG MOMENT OF 2023?
depends on the context we're working with! despite all my ramblings about how it was a difficult year for me, there were many things i would label as not just epic, but epic swag. if we're talking about things that immediately happened with regards to HYPERFIXT, i was pretty satisfied with the feedback i got on my Starfield breakdown. that one really did come completely out of left field for me, it was a very manic few days of writing, and it felt like people resonated with what i had to say, to the point where i was encouraging people to create their own sites to house some of the thoughts they were bouncing back at me. as a writer, the ultimate treat i can receive is to make someone else put down a bunch of words because of something i said.
in the broader media landscape, there were a lot of really good things going on in 2023 - as i've referenced repeatedly throughout this article, things so good that i had a hard time cracking the code on how to write about them. i actually had an article idea around November of 2023 where i was going to do some very, very brief writeups with a sort of awards show 'framing device' to reward the things where all i could say was "it's really good". that didn't come together, but just to run down a quick list of candidates;
- i got over a lot of theater-based anxieties to go see Greta Gerwig's Barbie and it was totally worth it. yes, i know it's a bit normie of me, and it's not a perfect representation of intersectionality and feminism, and literally everyone saw it so you don't need me to say this, but it was a surprisingly insightful use of a major branded platform and i'm obsessed with the production design and costuming.
- the main thing that kept me from writing about Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is that my primary familiarity with the source material is through the Edgar Wright movie and not the comic. regardless, absurdly good show. goes off the rails in a way that's so wildly additive to the original story. i think any creator who wants it should get a Takes Off pass to get highly introspective on their own body of work, and ideally the budget to get Science Saru on it as well.
- absolute all-timer hall of fame year for video games, which is nice when it seems like the whole industry is about to go through hell for a few years. i thought Tears of the Kingdom had game of the year in the bag, but then in comes Baldur's Gate 3, and they're both such wildly different approaches to player agency but they both feel like the absolute pinnacle of interactivity in their own unique ways? those are just THE big ones too, don't get me started on Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
THOUGHTS ON THE POKÉMON SCARLET AND VIOLET DLC?
i did kind of end that initial review with the vibe that i was going to get around to those expansions, huh? truth be told, i haven't actually played the DLC; i went through a brief bout of untreated Pokémania right at the turn of 2024, but i wound up being pretty indecisive about how to treat it and i'd moved on to other hyperfixations before i could seal the deal on that purchase.
i'd initially put it off waiting for both halves to come out, and by the time they did, it was just kind of low on my priority list. i think one impression i got from following these releases from the outside was that these two expansions didn't feature much of the base game's cast, which was really a bit of a shock to me, given how i think those characters are one of the game's biggest strengths? it's my understanding that the epilogue has fixed a bit of that, though, and hey, props to them for actually doing a distribution event that feels enriching, surprising, and isn't tied to being inside a GameStop.
if i ever get around to playing the DLC, i'll make it a point to write about it, but just to cover some surface-level impressions, they seem cool! for as much as i'd probably miss Arven and Nemona, it seems like they introduced a lot of interesting and compelling characters. the settings both seem to have their own really distinct vibes separate from Paldea, right down to unique flourishes like their wild encounter music, which i appreciate. i didn't pay super-close attention, but i've heard a thing or two about photography minigames? Ogre Oustin'? a machine that lets you walk around as your Pokémon for no particular reason? and those all sound like the types of weird superfluous features that i crave in a Pokémon game. the movement in Scarlet and Violet was already pretty innately satisying to fiddle around with, so i am very much in favor of giving players more reasons to fiddle.
of course, one of the biggest benefits to Pokémon's pivot to DLC has been getting new monster friends on a more regular basis, and there's a lot of really good ones in these expansions. i'm admittedly not huge on Ogerpon - i think its weird armless body-type just feels a little too cluttered - but the idea of doing a whole set of legendaries based on the folklore of Momotarō is inspired, as is flipping the script and making the oni the heroic one. more importantly, though, Dipplin and Hydrapple. Dipplin and Hydrapple. the Applin line is already an absolute all-timer of a Pokémon design, and for it to get not just a third split evolution but an even more powerful form beyond that? beautiful. no notes. my perfect boy.
WHICH POKÉMON WOULD YOU MOST WANT AS A PET?
i feel like i have to just go with my gut and start rapid-firing answers, otherwise this anniversary article will be out in like, June, somehow. weirdly enough, i feel like some of the Rock-types would make pretty good pets? like, they're alive and living and have needs, but they're also rocks, so there's not necessarily a lot of biological necessity there. Nacli comes to mind, would love to have that little guy helping me out in the kitchen. Grass-types are similarly cool; my mind's kind of going to Cacnea, but no, that'd be really hard to snuggle. Smeargle's like a dog who can paint and that's cool, i'd love to see what kind of artistic expression a dog creates. my all-time favorite is Electivire, but i don't think that'd actually make a very good pet. would keeping a Porygon on my computer count as pet ownership? maybe i need to come back to this with a clearer mind and a full checklist in front of me one day.
TOP FIVE HATSUNE MIKU DESIGNS FROM PROJECT VOLTAGE?
in no particular order; Normal, Ground, Poison, Fighting, Dragon. well, no particular order, but Poison is best. i'm not knee-deep in the Vocaloid scene, but i really do think this whole promotional campaign is an excellent idea and people need to be giving Hatsune Miku more fun themed outfits basically all the time. i never got around to listening to all the tracks (Mitchie M is the one Vocaloid producer i can actually remember by name, and their track came out pretty early into the campaign) but i really should at some point, because they were on a pretty good roll with sampling the music of Pokémon in fun interesting ways.
WHICH BALDUR'S GATE CHARACTER WOULD MAKE THE BEST ROOMMATE?
do you want me to be happy, or do you want me to be pragmatic? i think the most clear-cut, straightforward answer is Karlach. her vibes are immaculate and she's big and strong and can help me lift heavy things. i feel like she'd be an exceptionally chill hang and she'd be really good about boundaries and such. Wyll is also probably pretty chill, but he's also like, an upper crust city boy and a LARPer, so there's some baggage there. Astarion is weird for me because i think a lot of people feel a sexual or romantic attraction to his bad boy attitude, but for me it's like... i want to fix him up but it's incredibly platonic. he'd probably be a nightmare to live with 24/7 but he's got the best stories, y'know? Shadowheart is alright but everything's gotta be about Shar so no thank you. i respect Gale but i just don't think i have any social chemistry with him and he'd probably try to show me wizard shit all the time while i'm trying to do the dishes. Lae'zel would just make the space super aggro all the time and i don't need that in my life, but maybe she'd be like, really driven at keeping the "creche" in good shape, and i bet she has the craziest workout tips.
WHY DO YOU THINK BUCKET HATS LOOK GOOD?
listen. hear me out. listen. every item of fashion has its time and place. do i think a bucket hat is the coolest or sexiest or sharpest thing to wear? no. does it have its utilities? absolutely. there's a comforting retro kitsch to the bucket hat that reminds me of the turn of the millennium. there are absolutely better and crazier pieces of apparel from the era, but the bucket hat is practical and attainable. the bucket hat does not judge, does not shackle you to a particular style. sometimes i personally just want to dress very specifically like i'm about to go watch somebody else skateboard.
WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF WHEN YOU OKAY SO HE SAID YES WOULD GO?
oh, of course, i'd 100% so totally and also then so go okay into that why that okay go to he said when. 100%!
and with that, another... year? volume? volume sounds cool. HYPERFIXT vol. 2 draws to a close. it's pretty obvious at this point that 2023 wound up spiralling out of control for me a little, but nonetheless, i can still look back on what i did with this site and say i feel good about what did go up. i'm getting better at tapping into an editorial voice and i have a pretty clear vision of where i want to improve in 2024. as always, i want to thank all the friends and family who put up with my weird niche aspirations. to everyone who believes in me, who tells me i can pull this off, who nourishes me to keep coming back at this with renewed spirit - your support means the world to me. happy birthday, HYPERFIXT, and happy Dungeon Meshi Thursday. catch you on the flip side.