Maybe They Weren't Thinking About Me At All.
The official Deltarune Spamton Sweepstakes page is absolutely fascinating. It makes me so nostalgic for the Internet around the turn of the millennium, when there were countless maze-like personal websites filled with spinning GIFs and music files and weird little secrets.
The Internet's a lot more polished these days; it's easier to avoid viruses, and to find what you're looking for. But it's so much less fun and less personal, now that everything's commercialised and clustered onto a handful of sites.
I'm so programmed not to click on banner ads; it took real effort to tell myself 'no, the banner ads are part of this, there's obviously going to be more Deltarune content behind them, you should click on them.'
I love the entries you can uncover from Noelle's blog (and that she's a Livejournal/Dreamwidth-style blogger!). The stories of being unsettled by game glitches or assigning a weird significance to them; I was like that as a kid. My brother and I would obsess over glitches in the Sonic the Hedgehog Master System games and try to uncover the secrets behind them. There were no secrets; they were just glitches. But we were convinced there had to be some hidden meaning, some secret room they were pointing to, something for us to find.
There's something so magical about videogames when you're a kid, before you really grasp that everything in there was intentionally programmed in, and there's only so much they can feasibly contain. There were whole unfathomable worlds in those discs and cartridges.
As an adult playing Final Fantasy VIII, when Squall falls asleep and you start playing as Laguna, it's a weird event, but you accept that it's just part of the story. As a kid, I thought something had gone wrong; I thought the game had decided to make me someone else by itself; I was afraid of saving in case I never went back to playing as Squall. The game could have done anything; the story could have gone anywhere.
Anyway, going back to the sweepstakes! Although I love the videogame tales, my favourite of Noelle's blog entries isn't videogame-related; it's this entry about Kris.
Kris and Noelle's relationship is absolutely fascinating to me, and it becomes more so with everything we learn about it. Their strange childhood friendship that it doesn't seem Noelle's ever known how to interpret. The unkind pranks Kris plays, the odd sense of distance and loss between them. And then Snowgrave.
I don't know when we'll get to play more Deltarune, but I can't wait to find out more about what's going on. I've got so many questions about that game and just how deep its shadows go. In a way, perhaps it's managed to capture a little of the unknowable magic of games when I was a kid.
The Internet's a lot more polished these days; it's easier to avoid viruses, and to find what you're looking for. But it's so much less fun and less personal, now that everything's commercialised and clustered onto a handful of sites.
I'm so programmed not to click on banner ads; it took real effort to tell myself 'no, the banner ads are part of this, there's obviously going to be more Deltarune content behind them, you should click on them.'
I love the entries you can uncover from Noelle's blog (and that she's a Livejournal/Dreamwidth-style blogger!). The stories of being unsettled by game glitches or assigning a weird significance to them; I was like that as a kid. My brother and I would obsess over glitches in the Sonic the Hedgehog Master System games and try to uncover the secrets behind them. There were no secrets; they were just glitches. But we were convinced there had to be some hidden meaning, some secret room they were pointing to, something for us to find.
There's something so magical about videogames when you're a kid, before you really grasp that everything in there was intentionally programmed in, and there's only so much they can feasibly contain. There were whole unfathomable worlds in those discs and cartridges.
As an adult playing Final Fantasy VIII, when Squall falls asleep and you start playing as Laguna, it's a weird event, but you accept that it's just part of the story. As a kid, I thought something had gone wrong; I thought the game had decided to make me someone else by itself; I was afraid of saving in case I never went back to playing as Squall. The game could have done anything; the story could have gone anywhere.
Anyway, going back to the sweepstakes! Although I love the videogame tales, my favourite of Noelle's blog entries isn't videogame-related; it's this entry about Kris.
Kris and Noelle's relationship is absolutely fascinating to me, and it becomes more so with everything we learn about it. Their strange childhood friendship that it doesn't seem Noelle's ever known how to interpret. The unkind pranks Kris plays, the odd sense of distance and loss between them. And then Snowgrave.
I don't know when we'll get to play more Deltarune, but I can't wait to find out more about what's going on. I've got so many questions about that game and just how deep its shadows go. In a way, perhaps it's managed to capture a little of the unknowable magic of games when I was a kid.