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Feeling absurdly restless at work so for every like this tweet gets I’ll do one tweet about a piece of media that means a lot to me and why.
Anodyne: One of the few meta games that understands why people play and that asks us to see a moral system beyond its borders. Not merely clever, but heartbreaking and empathetic.
Cloud Atlas (the book): History sweeps over us all, but we leave our ripples. The good we does matters in ways we will never know.
Princess Mononoke: Alternatively bleak and redemptive, nothing captures the existential bind of environmental destruction like this.
Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me: a film that captures a pain I did not know I had, that rages at the indifference of a broken world, and gives its victims a powerful innocence and heroism.
Star Wars Revenge of the Sith: the slow violence of compliance and distance explodes with emotional, shattering force, making monsters of us all. Even knowing history will change, we weep.
Cibele: perfectly captures the crisis of identity that comes with relationships. Even loss makes us more whole.
To the Lighthouse: history and identity flow through us, waiting for us to push or pull. We can reconcile ourselves with all we could be, and become more beautiful than we ever dreamed.
Cool, cool, river: the whole album is good, but this song always breaks me. Speaks to an underlying spiritual hunger for connection that capital refuses to feed or even address.
Blue: I’ve sung along to these songs at every stage of life and they have always felt true. Lays bare all my contradictions and fears and asks “Will you take me as I am?”
Hyper Light Drifter: Fear is the mind killer. Death will come. The question is whether we will have enough love for ourselves to see it through, to make things right before we pass.
Creed: I too need to prove that I’m not a mistake.
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin: We must claim our darkness as our own and live both with and beyond it. Couldn’t find a cover where Ged wasn’t white so no picture 
Born to Run: a sweeping portrait of a community that covers all it touches with the empathic roar of rock and roll. The album that always reminds of what I have to lose and what I owe to others.
Wings of Desire: before I came out to myself, I felt I was all mind and no body. I looked at myself with shame. This film shows a body that is liberating, pain and healing all part of a encompassing self that rejoices in being.
Hour of the Star: a Brazilian film that follows the day to day life of a young typist. This covers immense slowness and mundanity with a compassionate and intimate eye. Modern life is just so sad.
Super Mario Galaxy: stares at the universe with wonder, imagining it as a place bound by sentient love. One of the things that makes me feel at home.
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: Kanye West’s legacy is uh… complicated to say the least. As a young religious person, his willness to lay out all his contradictions, to build up his image only to wreck it, but still to cry out for mercy, was completely revelatory to me.
Dark Souls 2: a fractured dream, a world that swallows you, a bleak vision of drowning selves, doomed to repeat history.
Pepperminta: an absurd, surreal, joyful film in which queerness and color explode across the concrete world. Makes me believe that anything is possible.
Final Fantasy VII: Cloud is trans and this game is about him coming out to himself. I don’t make the rules.
Understanding Comics: probably the first thing I ever read that could be called theory, this showed me how to think critically and make claims about the world. Absolutely huge influence on how I think about the world.
Majora’s Mask: moment after moment, the breath before shouting. The world is always ending.
Babette’s Feast: great art can be a moment, a meal, shared between those who need relief.
Orisons: A personal choice, since nymph is a friend of mine. But an absolute testiment to how we can be more than who we are told we are. Our bodies are our own. http://nymph-music.bandcamp.com/album/orisons
The Witcher 3: remarkable because, despite all the AAA trappings, it’s ultimately about letting go of control, trusting those you love to build a future you cannot see.
Cleo 5 to 7: love can make us forget time, make its threat fade, as we choose to live.
Age of Adz: having a body and being alive is extremely freaky ya’ll.
Mademoiselle Paradis: based on the true story of a blind aristocratic pianist. The final shot of complete liberation is consistently in my thoughts.
Tom Waits' Alice: Tender and harsh. The edge of a smoky evening, with caress of a lover's hand.
Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor: God is in alleyways, trenches, and sewers. Gods are in street corners, hovering over your shoulder, creeping around your feet. Poverty cannot rid you of your magic.
Clueless: Cares deeply about girls even as it is hilariously critical of femininity. Plenty of problems, but still basically a perfect film to me.
The National’s Boxer: One of my most vivid musical memories is listening to this album on repeat on a road trip to southern Utah. Listless lost time.
U2’s The Unforgettable Fire: Another memory–My father driving, through blurred rain, late at night. Me failing to sleep in the back seat. “Bad” blaring on the stereo. Both of us silently screaming “I’M WIDE AWAKE. I’M WIDE AWAKE. I’M NOT SLEEPING.”
Whisper of the Heart: Stretching beyond your means, knowing what you want, but not knowing why or who you are to want such a thing. A shattered self, exploding with life.
Pathologic 2: A web, both trapping and freeing. Eyes that stare and pierce. You can never ever ever ever be severed.
The Poems of Sappho: rattling bones that tell the truth.
Black Kite: Blunt and simple. History and memory and reality blur. Small acts of resistance are sometimes too powerful for life to bear.
Rothko's Chapel: Hope to actually go someday. Rothko's immense color is an eternal favorite.
Abbey in the Oak Forest: Very very difficult to pick a favorite Casper David Friedrich. But I'm going to do with this one for now.
Prince’s Controversy: Love every Prince album I’ve listened to, but for some reason this is the one that sticks in my brain. Taking the train and bustling to my internship bopping along to the title track will always be a treasured memory.
Super Mario 3D World: The perfect couch co-op game for me personally.
Fallen London: The first game I remember that let me be playful with gender. Revisiting it in College awoke long dominant feelings.
Mass Effect 3: I have no idea what I would think of it now, but the idea of giving the player unspeakably terrible power to emphasize their powerlessness has stuck with me since 2012. The first thing I ever wrote about games on the internet was about this.
The Passion of Joan of Arc: Have you ever felt unfathomably trapped by the very religious structure that first showed you divine love? Haha couldn't be me.
Matrix Revolutions: I too want to my trans powers to be so immense that psychically force my enemies to correctly name me before exploding them. Also movie good.
2001 A Space Odyssey: Cannot say anything about this that has not already been said. Feels immense in both terror and wonder.
Any 1975 album: It is impossible for me to listen any 1975 song without thinking of my best friend Soph. They inhabit a warm, friendly melancholy that gives me strange comfort every time.
Fiasco by Jason Morningstar: My most treasured tabletop memories come from playing this with my then DnD group last year. We easiest into a thrilling story that I still think about. RIP Alyssa.
Mahler's Tenth, and Unfinished, Symphony: There's an immense chord in the middle of this that is one of the most haunting sounds in classical music. All of history bearing down on you in terrible cacophony.
Sufjan Steven's Seven Swans: Speaks to me about faith more than almost anything else. Its final two tracks, the terror of judgement, with the uneasy freedom of redemption, are among my favorite conclusions.
Steven L. Peck’s The Scholar of Moab: A hilarious and heartfelt skewering of conservative mormon culture, with the powerless and forgotten at its heart. If you have any interest in mormon folklore, I could not recommend it more.
The Apartment: So sweet and sad. Always a delight.
The Magicians by Lev Grossman: this has the reputation of being Harry Potter but with sex and drugs, but really it’s “what if childish adults found the path to Narnia.” A poignant meta-text about the appeal and trap of escapism.
Mirror’s Edge: A favorite example of how games work narrative through play. The superficial elements of Faith’s story are shallow and trite, but the text written by her movement, subverting a sterile, urban environment to her own ends, is powerful and compelling.
