Balckwell Round-Up 2025
December 14, 2025
This year has been long and complicated. I spent a great deal of it alone in my house, which you’d think would give it a somewhat monotonous quality, but instead made it feel like a year of sharper twists and turns than any before. I lived an entire lifetime within those eight months I spent being forced not to work — an altogether different experience than the several years I spent choosing not to work.
Some of this is reflected in the unfinished writings collected in this, the second annual edition of the Balckwell Round-Up. This is the feature wherein I “round-up” all the fragments and scraps from the year that either never coalesced into a proper essay, or were excised from an essay during the editing process due to irrelevance or sheer stupidity. Some of these thoughts I consider genuinely interesting enough to want to publish in some form, and some are just amusing snapshots of my state of mind at a particular moment.
I’d like to begin with the introduction to a scrapped essay about The Book of Atrus, the first of three novels based in the universe of the 1993 PC game Myst. I explain the game a little in the fragment itself, but what’s important for our purposes here is Myst’s status as one of the short-lived obsessions that characterized my Homebound Period. During the two weeks I spent playing Myst and its sequel Riven, I could hardly think of anything else. My contributions to dinnertime conversation with my wife consisted exclusively of puzzles I had solved, and my ruminations on the nature of the Myst universe. After defeating Riven and making it about halfway through The Book of Atrus (which I did end up finishing months later) my enthusiasm abruptly died five minutes into Myst III, which sat unplayed and unthought-of on my desktop for a few more weeks before it was unceremoniously uninstalled.
Myst is a series of PC puzzle-adventure games in which the player clicks their way around mysterious islands, using environmental clues to discover new areas and manipulate various contraptions. The first game, released in 1993, takes place on the island of Myst, a strange amalgam of technologies, architectures, and natural phenomena depicted in a classically 90s CGI style. From the island of Myst, the player uses various books scattered around the island to travel to different “ages,” described in journals in the game’s library. Once in an age, the only means of escape is a “linking book,” which takes the player back to Myst.
These books are the creation of Atrus, a mysterious middle-aged man who transports the player to the island in the game’s opening cut-scene. Atrus has the power to create new worlds, or “ages,” simply by writing about them in a book. Unfortunately, his two sons, whom he initiated into the power of age-creation, became corrupted by their power, tyrannically lording over the various ages and eventually leading to the death of all their inhabitants. As punishment, Atrus sealed his sons inside prison books for all eternity. The two sons try to use the player to facilitate their escape, but at the end of the game, we can choose to betray them and allow Atrus to destroy the prison books themselves, thereby saving the day. What day exactly is being saved, however, is an interesting question to ponder, for Myst, and the various ages it’s linked to, are already empty and dilapidated, a fact that is not altered one bit by the game’s ending.
In Riven, the sequel to Myst, we are introduced to Atrus’ father, Gehn, who seems just as megalomaniacal and despotic as Atrus’ sons, showing that that the villain gene must have skipped a generation. Riven contains a lot less age-hopping than Myst, as we spend most of our time on the larger and more cohesive world of Riven, where Gehn has been imprisoned.
Nothing else that occurs in these games is particularly important for what I’d like to talk about today, so I will stop there. These few paragraphs have provided all the backstory necessary to discuss the novel, The Book of Atrus, set in the Myst universe and written between the release of the original Myst, and its sequel, Riven.
This concept of books containing worlds feels very emblematic of 90s edutainment; it almost makes one want to sing, “Take a look, in a book, Reading Rainboowww.” This initial premise is not explored with much depth in Myst, and only slightly more interestingly in Riven. It was only when reading the Book of Atrus that the full implications of this magical technology started to hit me.
What was to follow was a philosophical exploration of the book-linking technology that made Myst feel so utterly magical to me; however, when I set about trying to explain what exactly captured my interest so intently, words began to fail me. That being said, The Book of Atrus, a 90s Young Adult novel based on a video game, is so much better than it has any right to be, and is probably one of the best books I read all year. It has none of the pandering you’d expect from children’s fiction, and treats its subject matter with an earnestness and seriousness that is quite refreshing. The characters and the narrator inhabit the melodramatic and techno-magical world of Myst with no irony or detachment; there’s no “I can do what with a book?” but only a cautious and serious approach to the ethical and practical consequences of the ability to forge worlds merely by describing them on the page.
I don’t have much else to say other than to express my admiration for these wonderfully creative and captivating games and this one novel, which I will continue to hold dear to my heart as I ignore all their sequels and spin-offs.
The following fragment is, oddly enough, from an early draft of my essay about The Muppets. It has absolutely nothing to do with The Muppets, or anything else I wrote about in that essay, which is perhaps why it was removed from subsequent versions.
I mentioned to someone a while ago that, in a certain sense, I live in 19th century Europe. Most of the literature, philosophy, and poetry I read is from that time and place, and it colours my entire perception of the world. I often subconsciously think of the current world as some sort of aberration — as if the true state of things is how it was back then. This is neither a moral judgment nor a judgment of values. I don’t like 19th-century Europe more than I like the modern day. I don’t think it was better, and I’m not one of those people who feels we need to “return” to any particular moment in history. That’s just the world that feels real to me. And it’s strange to think that it’s over a hundred years in the past, and across the world.
I struggle to describe what exactly I mean by my feeling that the late 19th and early 20th century are the “default” state of the world. When I think of Japan, I think of the late Meiji era described by Natsume Soseki; when I think of France, I think of the Paris of Balzac, Zola, and Proust; when I think of Germany, it’s Hesse and Mann. But this is not only literary, but geopolitical as well. “19th-century Europe” doesn’t quite nail it; in reality, its probably closer to the period surrounding the First World War. Japan as a rising nationalist superpower; Germany asserting itself as a newly born nation; Russia emerging from the decrepit tsarist government; England unaware of its forthcoming descent from the throne of global hegemony — all of this, to me, feels like the state of the world from which every subsequent development is some sort of mutation. Like I said, this is not a qualitative judgment. It is simply a framework I have stumbled into due to my obsession with a certain type of literature that describes a certain era of world history.
This framework often makes me feel totally disconnected from the world around me: both the world right outside my door, and the general geopolitical milieu that one reads about in the news. All that may be what is happening, but due to its inherently changing nature, it doesn’t feel concrete in the way that this past situation does. You could almost say that the turn of the 20th century is my Platonic ideal of the world: all these countries in their Eternal forms, unmoved by the passage of time. This is, of course, all nonsense, but sometimes it feels imperative to describe one’s personal nonsense to one’s readers, in the hopes that it helps them make sense of something.
I don’t think there’s much to add to this following fragment; I just think it’s funny.
People often assume that old people are wise just because they’re old. That in their many years on Earth, they must have at some point stopped to think, and come up with some decent thoughts. But old people are just as wise or unwise as any other demographic; whatever thoughts you did or didn’t have during your younger years carry into your old age.
I say all this because Youtube recommended me a couple videos recently in the “Old Guys Giving Advice” genre, and their advice boiled down to almost the exact same platitudes you read in any self-help book. “Don’t worry what people think;” “Cut your ties with toxic people;” “You only live once;” that sort of thing. And it’s like, I know for a fact that these people did not follow this advice. No one follows that advice, because it’s not real. You can certainly think it, and desire to follow it, but none of it is particularly actionable. Most advice you just can’t do anything with. It’s just words. The struggle is trying to incorporate these ideas into how you actually live your life, and that process is far too complicated to boil down into a pithy phrase.
When I look at old people, I tend to see the younger person they used to be. I think about what they were probably like when they were 30 and 40. And I think, I wouldn’t have taken advice from that younger version of them, so why should I listen to them now? Just because they’re old? So many people get stuck in a philosophical rut and just live there for decades, and we only become less capable of change as we get older. If you don’t make it a practice to learn new things and develop new ways of viewing the world, you’re going to become a cantankerous old man. Heck, you might become a cantankerous old man anyways! It all depends how much your back and/or hips hurt.
Continuing the theme of utter frivolity, here are some words about breakfast and Canada:
The worst part of life might be eating, and the worst part of eating is figuring out what to eat. Dinner is easy, because you can make anything for dinner. Lunch is slightly more challenging; if you’re eating it at work, you have to plan in advance or prepare leftovers, and if you’re eating it at home, you have to throw something together right in the middle of the day when you’d probably rather be doing something else.
But by far the most challenging meal is breakfast, which is why it seems most people just don’t eat it. I, too, was once a breakfast-skipper, instead opting for two granola bars a few hours into my early morning shift. At some point, it occurred to me that I was the most miserable wretch on the planet, and the primary reason for this was always being hungry.
Breakfast is tough because even if you wake up hungry, you don’t wake up wanting to eat. You’re tired, for one, but also your mouth feels weird. Nothing tastes quite right. You can’t eat leftovers for breakfast, because none of those foods make sense. There is only a small selection of foods that make sense for breakfast: breads, spreads, cereals, grains, fruits, and yogurt.
Really, though, all these coalesce into two categories of meal: a plate of bread, or a bowl of cereal. (Yogurt fits into the latter category.) Yes, there is the “classic breakfast” of eggs, sausages, bacon, etc. but we’re not dealing with people who cook breakfast at the moment. That’s basically a whole separate thing…
For a long time, I gave absolutely no thought to what it meant to be Canadian, and for a while after that, I considered such questions of nationality to be anachronistic and arbitrary, since after all, are we not all one people, etc etc. And at the present moment I can still say that attempting to define Canada or Canadians in any simplistic terms is a foolish endeavour — however, what kind of man would I be if I refused to take on endeavours merely because they are foolish?
Alas, the foolishness of this endeavour proved too much for me in the end…
I wrote the following after getting mad about a comment someone posted on the internet. This person was expressing a sentiment I had seen far too often expressed in certain circles, and it made me upset. I’m not upset about it anymore. In fact, I don’t read the things people post online anymore, and I’m much better for it. However, upon reflection, I think this little rant has some merit to it.
Why is it that nihilists are always so obsessed with the Buddha? It feels like every time you see one, they’re trying to use their misconceptions about Buddhism to justify their worldview, as if the fundamental tenet of Buddhism is “do nothing.” It doesn’t take much research to learn that the most fundamental tenets of Buddhism are far more concerned with rights & virtues, such as the five precepts:
- Don’t kill things
- Don’t steal
- Don’t commit adultery
- Don’t tell falsehoods
- Don’t do drugs
Those first three are in the Ten Commandments as well, pretty much word for word, and yet you don’t see Western nihilists invoking YHWH to justify their philosophies… in fact, they’re more likely to rant & rave against him in the form of the Demiurge.
I suppose we can blame Arthur Schopenhauer for intractably linking Pessimism and Eastern Mysticism in the European imagination, although he was much more likely to speak of the Web of Maya than anything Buddhism-related, and even that was just as a symbol rather than a proper philosophical principle.
Doing nothing is not what the Buddha taught. You don’t have to read very far to learn this. To believe such a thing is fine; to espouse it constantly is wilful ignorance. Look, I’m not even that big of a fan of Gautama Buddha, or Buddhism in general. That’s just my personal feeling. A large part of that is that I don’t relate to the cosmology of the whole thing — which makes sense, because I was born as a European white guy in Canada in the late-late-20th century, and learned about Buddhism as a teenager (and even then, not very well.) And thus, I don’t see why people feel the need to co-opt the Buddha into their worldview as a grasp at legitimacy for what is, in the end, unadulterated nihilism.
Nietzsche is fine! Take him along! He said enough stuff that you can always find a nice quote for whatever it is you’re doing. Schopenhauer is another great one; I’ve got mountains of hilarious Schopenhauer quotes from my depression days. If you think life is legitimately not worth living, for any reason, he’s your guy. The Buddha is not. He didn’t preach that life is not worth living. Instead, he would say that life is an opportunity for cultivating virtue. That’s what this whole thing is about. Is a full-time unemployed gamer cultivating virtue? No. He’s not helping anybody, he’s not praying to the Buddha, and he’s not meditating in the hopes of achieving samsara. He’s just playing video games. He’s opting out of the world. That’s fine; he can do that if he wants. But he’s not emulating Buddha.
The main difference between Buddhism and Nihilism is, of course, that Buddhism requires believing in something. This belief is what motivates the following of the five tenets, as well as the many other demands Buddhist practice makes on a person. If one is actually attempting to reach Buddhahood, one has to transform these beliefs into universal compassion. Gautama Buddha did not just sit underneath the Bodhi tree until he departed from this dear old world; he gathered a bunch of people and tried to teach them what he’d discovered, to save them from this cycle of death & rebirth. His example is what inspires Boddhisatvas to stick around in order to help others on their path toward Nirvana. It’s not every man for himself out there! You’re not going to achieve Buddhahood just by sitting around playing computer games.
The truth of the matter is that nihilists mainly invoke the Buddha for fun. In their mind, he’s a guy who people think was smart or enlightened, who taught that the World Sucks and you shouldn’t do anything about it. And that’s the perfect kind of guy for their purpose of justifying why they don’t want to do anything.
Look, it’s fine to be depressed! And it’s fine to hate the world. A lot of the time, it’s perfectly reasonable to do so. But there’s no need to construct a whole worldview around it — that’s how you get trapped. You make your pessimism a fundamental part of your identity, and thus make it impossible to be “you” while being happy, unless your happiness is derived from sticking it to the world by fucking off and playing video games all day.
I don’t even mind nihilism, truly. It wouldn’t bother me if it wasn’t for all this moralizing and hand-wringing they do. Just admit that you’re depressed and bitter. You don’t need to tell me that you’re depressed because “wage labour is slavery” — just say you don’t want to work. I don’t want to work either, a lot of the time. Don’t tell me that the people who manage to find meaning in life are “NPCs with no thoughts” — just admit that you don’t understand them.
The following is an attempt at a scientific investigation of the “thriller” genre, based on one novel that I mostly skimmed:
There’s a reason I don’t often read thrillers — it’s because I don’t like being thrilled. In fact, I can’t imagine many things worse. Being thrilled is simply not enjoyable to me, and neither is being kept in suspense. This is why I read books where nothing happens, or books that I’ve already read before. Even during a non-thrilling book, I will often flip forward a few pages during uncomfortable moments, in order to find out how the situation turns out. If I am in suspense, I become so distracted by the suspenseful feeling that I simply can not pay attention to the words that I’m reading, and therefore can’t get any enjoyment out of the book.
(I feel this way about real life too; I hate not knowing what happens next. I call the feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen “anxiety,” and categorize it as a negative emotion.)
Thus, when I spent last night reading a thriller that my wife borrowed from her co-worker, I ended up skimming a lot. It didn’t help that a lot of the writing was bad and annoying, but the main reason was that I had interest in only one thing: how the premise was going to play out. The characters were boring, the prose was obnoxious — at least half the paragraphs were made up of a single sentence (or sentence fragment) — and the thematic core of the novel was fairly bland. So when I say that I read the whole book in one sitting, this is not a compliment. The faster I read a book, the less I liked it. It means I wanted to get it over with.
But, in interest of fairness to the Earth, I decided I should spend some time properly reckoning with the thriller genre. I have my own personal preferences regarding the type of novel I like, but there’s a place for all kinds of things in this big old world, thrillers among them. I am constitutionally unfit for enjoying thrilling books, but perhaps if I pull myself out of my own nerve-wracked body, I can find something to appreciate about the genre.
I’ve been called a snob and an elitist in the past, which I don’t find particularly fair. I have preferences, just as everyone does. I enjoy novels with particular qualities that speak to me and comfort me. There are far more novels I don’t like than those I do, and yet you won’t find me anywhere on this website talking about any of them! I save my words for things I can appreciate, and try to ignore the rest.
In order to make any headway in our investigation, we have to operate under the premise that being thrilled is good. At the very least, we can say that the purpose of a thriller is to thrill, and that it is good for something to fulfill its purpose. But what does it mean to be thrilled? It is not only to have action fill every page, and to wonder how our hero will navigate their way out of this particular scrape. There must also be a long-term thrill: the thrill of an unfulfilled premise. Something has happened, presumably near the beginning, that needs to be resolved, and we will only find out how this is possible at the very end. It is important for the premise to be extreme enough that we find it hard to imagine how it will work out. We might have a hazy idea of how it might have to go, but it’s difficult to work out all the details.
Now it’s important to note that our hero is our hero only because of his place in the story, and not due to any particular qualities they may have. In fact, its probably best for them to have as few qualities as possible. Two is perhaps the minimum; one would be a tad extreme. These qualities inform the “problem” of the premise, and the goal that propels the hero toward the resolution.
What was going to follow was an explanation of the particular thriller I read as a “case study,” but, in a fit of irony, I got bored.
The following is a personal reflection about money that I wrote during the middle of summer, when all I did was reflect on personal matters. I didn’t post it because I really didn’t want to talk about money on this website, but in retrospect, it is perhaps of at least partial interest.
I’ve been thinking about retirement lately. When you’re off work due to injury for weeks upon weeks, you’ve got to think of Something. I don’t often admit this, because it doesn’t fit the style of person I try to be, but I think about money a lot. I started thinking about money in the hope that I could think money into oblivion — by which I mean, I felt that if I could figure out the secret to spending as little money as possible, I would one day find myself in a position where I wouldn’t have to think about money anymore. This, of course, continues more than a decade later to backfire in a spectacular way, as I find that there is always another reason to Think About Money.
At a certain point, my goal shifted from spending as little as possible so I could work less, to spending as little as possible so I could save it for Purposes. This coincided with the point at which I realized that I will probably live for a lot longer than I imagined I would at 21, when I figured I would develop sympathetic asthma from reading too much Proust and pass away in bed around 35. It also coincided with the point at which I realized that I wasn’t going to have to be alone this whole time.
Neither of these were actual “points,” but instead vague periods of time during which I was dragged, fussing and screaming, towards adulthood.
Since two people living together have got to do Something, we decided to save up for a house. We figured, the state of the market being what it was in that sorry excuse for a Place to Live we called home, we might be able to scrape together a down payment in 10-15 years, assuming that prices didn’t continue to rise by about 100,000 Canadian dollars every six months. This wasn’t a realistic goal, but like I said, you’ve got to do Something.
Two things then happened. First, we moved to Saskatoon. Then, for the first time in my Long History, I got a full-time job. Within a year, we were able to afford a house that cost about 1/6th of its equivalent Back Home. At almost exactly the same time, I injured both wrists pulling up the carpet and underlay of an entire wing of a hotel, and had to go on leave for a while. For almost the entire time we have owned and lived in this house, I’ve been sitting in it.
It’s a great house! It’s got a backyard, a kitchen, a living room, some bedrooms, and a completely empty basement for the cat to play around in. I just throw a red ball across the room back and forth and he sprints after it like a maniac. Sometime he reaches the ball with such velocity that in attempting to pounce on the ball, he does a complete somersault over top of it. In the evenings, we let the cat roam around in the backyard while my wife tends to her garden — this garden being the foundational tenet on which the dream of home-ownership was built.
Since I’m home all day, and someone at home all day has got to do Something, I’ve been thinking. And since I have exactly what I wanted, I figured I better get started worrying about the next thing. This began with tormenting myself day in and day out about the idea of children: whether I wanted to have children, whether I ought to have children, whether I would regret it if I did or did not have children. I had always had this vague dream of having children, which occasionally transformed into a vague nightmare about having children, but like saving for a house in Vancouver, this was all just pure whimsy. Now, faced with the unrelenting reality of children as a concrete possibility, I cower in terror. I’ve learned from experience that if your primary mode of approaching a topic is to cower in terror, it’s best to just set it aside for a while.
And if a man has a house and a cat and no children, what’s next for him to do? I mean, he’s got to do Something. And since I enjoy (in a certain sense) endlessly perusing the horrendously amateurish spreadsheet in which I track our personal finances, worrying about money seemed like the next best thing to do. And if you’re not worrying about saving for a down payment, why not worry about saving for retirement?
At some point, Youtube offered me up a news clip about a man who had “retired” at age 39. His secret: living in Regina. I don’t live in Regina, but I’m pretty darn close. If a guy in Regina can retire at 39, surely a guy in Saskatoon could do something pretty similar. After watching too many videos about so-called “early retirement,” there seem to be only two or three principles, which, seeing as it won’t take up much of our time, I may as well share with you right now.
Principle One: Don’t spend a lot of money
Principle Two: Use money to pay off debt fast (if you have any)
Principle Three: Invest money in low-to-medium-risk index fundsThat’s really the only useful advice that any of these people will give you. Anything after that is a whole bunch of grifting: MLMs, “passive income,” crypto, and various other get-rich-quick nonsense. If anyone has a Youtube channel about the topic, the chances are that their Youtube channel is in fact a means of using you to fund their retirement by co-opting you into their scheme.
The more I looked into it, the more I realized that I don’t have that much interest in retiring “early.” I don’t even dislike my job! I just wanted to know where I should hoard my money, dragon-like, so that one day I can… I don’t know, have some more money?
As soon as we approach the matter from this angle, the entire house of cards falls apart. Why am I bothering with any of this? I was already saving money, simply by not spending it, because I didn’t want anything! I was already paying off my debts quickly and investing the money I saved into index funds, because, I don’t know, my dad probably told me to do it a long time ago and I just figured he knew what he was talking about. This entire new strategy involved doing the things I was already doing, but with more extraneous thinking.
To which I say,
“Bah, humbug!”
I’d like to conclude this trip down fragment street with the fragment to end all fragments: the final paragraph that ended my period of personal reflection in a storm of recursively reflexive reflecting, and which also serves as an example of the way many of my unfinished essays tend to end. This paragraph served as the death-knell of an essay titled “My Big Problem.”
When I sit down and think about this, I start to wonder: is any of this fucking real? Or is the entirety of what I’ve just written in my head? Does anyone care what I do at all? And if they do, does that have any impact on any aspect of my actual life? When I think about the people described in the above paragraph, I wonder: do they actually care about such things, or are they just really bad at making conversation? Are their judgments actually directed at me, or do they just derive joy from expressing opinions? Which is to say: am I completely neurotic? Why must I be at the centre of all these judgments?
And finally: who cares!?