Mike Godesky

Not gonna lie, this weekend was a bit of a downer just because it’s always a little sad still being single when everyone else is celebrating Valentine’s Day.

But then I remembered that the Dow is over 50,000. And that picked me right up.

I don’t know why I was ever concerned about anything else.

liberal walking into the car dealership: i want the second shittiest car you have. i will buy it for literally any price

“Stop including me.”

Irish folks when white supremacists talk about their “common culture” with the English:

Counterpoint to Elon: why do we want *anyone* to die? Like, for anything?

Also, the Irish were definitely not included in the original project.

a close up of a man 's face with the words it got too real below it ALT: a close up of a man 's face with the words it got too real below it

Playing the Emily is Away games:
“Cool, check out these fun, nostalgic aesthetics!”

2 hours later:

What’s even the point then?

It’s so funny seeing video of TPUSA’s halftime show that’s just people standing on a generic looking stage trying to lip sync vs the Bad Bunny show with elaborate sets and choreography.

It’s like the episode of The Office with the two Xmas parties where one of the parties just feels like a meeting.

So when Max says, "I'm not going to make another impossible choice between two shitty futures," that hits deep. And far from making your previous choices irrelevant, I think it demonstrates character growth that could only come out of having already stood in that position before.

And admittedly, I may have been primed to appreciate this more as a result of the time in which it was released. Double Exposure came out literally a week before the 2024 election, and I had spent the past year weighing the ethics of choosing the lesser of two evils.

So it actually feels very meaningful how Double Exposure sets up a situation that makes you think they're recreating the choice from the end of the first game, only for Max to reject both of the options with which she is presented.

But this is a simplification of reality. Most of the choices we make in real life are much more complex and nuanced than a simple binary. And yet, we are still often presented with important decisions as though they were simple binaries.

This works great for a medium like video games where every narrative branch needs to be scripted in advance, and it also generates a lot of conversation as fans get to discuss what they chose and why that was the right choice.

After four previous Life is Strange games and countless other similar games by developers like Telltale and others, we all kind of know what a game like this looks like. You're presented with moral dilemmas where you have to choose between two difficult options.

I also think Double Exposure is doing something interesting here that is commenting both on this genre of choose-your-own adventure style games and the nature of choice itself.

I appreciate the restraint of *not* bringing Chloe back immediately and allowing this space for Max to reflect upon the weight of her past decisions. I love tragic, haunted Max. This all just makes her extremely relatable.

First, on the Chloe thing. I think the breakup makes total sense given their personalities and what they're dealing with, and it makes the story all the more tragic knowing that Max sacrificed everything to save Chloe and still ended up alone, but Chloe still has her life even if it's not with you.

Having now replayed Life is Strange: Double Exposure... I still really like it. So below is my case for why Double Exposure is good actually, and all y'all haters are wrong.

it looks better this way

Also, I appreciate that even when she's getting angry, Zoe Bee still comes across as just absolutely God damn delightful.

Zoe Bee and Mr. Beat Interview Each Other YouTube video by Mr. Beat

This is an older video, but I just came across it yesterday. It's kind of long, but in the segment at 1:23:15 where they react to a PragerU video on book bans, Zoe Bee talks about something that I really need more people hear:

LITERATURE THAT MAKES YOU UNCOMFORTABLE IS GOOD ACTUALLY! 👏👏👏

True Colors imagines one of the most outlandishly fantastic concepts in the entire Life is Strange series. What if a walkable community existed in the United States?

“But this story didn’t need to have a sequel!”

Yeah, man. Nothing NEEDS to have a sequel.

I feel like the Marvel has fundamentally broken people’s brains in terms of how we talk about storytelling. Shared continuities, dramatic entrances, space opera, and yes, even post-credit scenes all existed before the MCU.

finally a good dating app

Life is Strange 2 is part of a growing body of stories since 2016 that feature harrowing journeys to cross a border in order to escape the horrors of life in the United States.

People complained so much about the politics in Life is Strange 2 being too cringe and on the nose, but the inciting incident has only aged in that today the trigger happy officer who pulls a gun on some kids would be masked secret police likely recruited from a literal neo-Nazi group.

So now I'm stuck in this infinite logic loop, and the only way to break it is to just save Chloe and live with the consequences of my decisions. I choose to save Chloe because I have already chosen to save Chloe. I have only ever saved Chloe.

The reason to let Chloe die is to save Arcadia Bay. But if you save her, then there was never any storm to save Arcadia Bay from in the first place. Which means you're just letting someone die. Which means I should save Chloe. But that endangers Arcadia Bay, and now we're back to where we started.

And I realize I'm overthinking it at this point because I understand that the choice being presented is simply Chloe or Arcadia Bay. But then I think about how time travel effects all of this.

But games like this add the wrinkle of, "What if the one person on the other track is someone you care about?" What does it say about us that 55% of players are willing to just raze Arcadia Bay to the ground because Chloe is our bestie?