The IAN MARTIN Memorial Blog

THIS GUY GETS IT: LIVE IN ONTARIO

2026-07-08T00:00:00Z

At the end of June, my friend Dave Currie and I debuted our new chapbook, "This Guy Gets It" at the pre-small press book fair reading. It's a collection of poems about stand-up, sitcoms, and the comedy of life. You can buy a copy from above-ground press for $6 + shipping. Please do! Dave's poems are hilarious and clever, and mine I think are some of my best poems to date.


The graphic from the cover of our chapbook.

We had been toying with the idea of doing a loose book tour for this thing, and I had recently been asked to do a reading in Montreal, so I brought Dave along to the JRG Open Mic and we did our little show (which we came up with about 20 minutes before our previous show).


Dave and I on-stage.

The audience loved it, and we sold quite a few copies of the chapbook at the event. We've got some feelers out now for more shows around Ontario (Note: Montreal is not in Ontario) so hopefully you'll be able to see us very soon in (city names redacted until we confirm locations and dates). I really think we've done something special here and I'm excited to send it out into the world and get it in front of people.

As mentioned before, if you are outside of Ontario, or don't feel like leaving your house, you can always buy the chapbook and have it shipped to you.

EXPAND THE POSSIBILITY SPACE

2026-06-15T23:00:00Z

Originally wrote this for Manifesto Jam 2026, but I'm cross-posting it here for posterity and completeness, and because it was basically a blog post, followed by a 1-pager cheat sheet that perhaps more accurately feels like a manifesto.

Something I am interested in is possibility.

I like to look at a collection of all things and say, what is missing? What is not there, because someone said no, because someone was scared, because nobody thought of it? What doesn't get to be here, because it's technically incorrect to include? What isn't there purely by chance?

When I publish poetry, I write my name in all caps. I was tired of seeing lists of contributing authors and everyone either used Title Case or did the e e cummings all lowercase thing to their names. Absolutely nowhere is there a rule that you have to do one of those two things. But if you only ever see two things, you start to think maybe those are two only two things that could ever exist. Maybe you have to pick a side.

So I started publishing as IAN MARTIN, not because I’m shouting, or because I think I’m so important, but because why not? Who sez? Also it looks cool. I’m not the first person to ever do this, and I've come across some other people who do this, which is nice. It can be exhausting to be the only one. to be a weirdo.

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As something of a weirdo myself, I think a lot about casual exclusion.

By nature of being human, of suffering the curse called "being social creatures", we like to gather in communities. We like to create spaces. But bummer! All communities and spaces are unintentionally coercive.

Every space has implicit rules and limits: what kind of people show up, what people wear, what things people talk about, what shared values or philosophies emerge naturally as the group spends time together. Anything that isn't currently represented in the space is casually, accidentally excluded. What emerges is a space where some people don't feel welcome, or feel like they can't be themselves, purely by accident. There’s no one saying NO, but there's also no one saying YES.

The more you deviate from the "default" in any given space, the less included you feel. Say you're in a group and everyone but you has a blue hat. Maybe you feel pressure to get a blue hat. Maybe you get angry that you have to have a blue hat to be part of this group. Maybe you say this out loud, and everyone says what are you talking about, you don't have to have a blue hat, that’s silly. Now you feel like you’re an idiot, and you feel even more left out.

Even if you share the same interests, ideals, or aesthetics, even if you are on paper the same as everyone in the group in every meaningful way, you're still going to sometimes feel like you don't belong. This is unavoidable. Though it might help you to know that everyone else in the group has their own blue hat they measure themselves against.

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But IAN, you say, you can't make a space inclusive of everything!

I agree! But what you theoretically can create, even if just in your own mind, is a space that is specifically for confronting possibility. A space where anything can exist by nature of being thought of. You don't actually need to account for every possible thing, and you don't have to exhibit or inhabit every possibility. (And of course, I'd suggest excluding evil and hateful behaviours and beliefs. Unlimited possibility is not always good.) But you should be thinking about possibility.

If we all think collectively about possibility, if we think about every little thing that can be possible, what we do is expand the possibility space.

Expand the possibility space is a phrase that's been bouncing around in my mind a lot lately, especially when I’m in an artist's malaise, a writer's block, feeling like art doesn't matter. It's full of potential. And I think even if you feel like the stuff you do sucks and is pointless and no one likes it, it can be helpful to think of creation in terms of the collective – by creating weird shit, you empower and inspire others to create weird shit.

The possibility space is kind of like the collective unconscious; it's the metaphysical well that all human creative work draws from. If you drop something in there, now it's accessible to anyone. And the wider you make this well, the further you dig, the more there is for everyone to draw from. We don't want to get stuck with the same old three ideas clanging around in there. Then everything would be the same.

And I guess I'd also liken it to the multiverse theory – there are infinite possible things, infinite possible ideas, combinations, and changes to make. Like how I write my name in all caps – that is a small, seemingly insignificant detail, but it's something that can be changed, something that can be confronted and questioned. The more we recognize everything as changeable, malleable, the more we open ourselves up to possibility.

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So how do we expand the possibility space? Here are some ideas to get started:

Look for what's missing. Instead of doing something, do the opposite. Ask why it's the opposite. Are there other possible opposites? What if you stop looking at things as opposites?

Look at the people around you. What are they doing? What are they not doing? Are there any girls with brown hair wearing jeans? If not, why? Is that a rule? Or just a coincidence? Something you made up? Maybe they just live in a different city? Maybe you can be the first?

Look at the art around you. What is popular? Who is it popular with? What is unpopular with that group? What genres and aesthetics are people mixing? What is no one mixing? Why does it seem like certain aesthetics are only popular with certain types of people? Can a girl with brown hair make a puzzle platformer?

If you're making art for a particular audience, what in-group signifiers are necessary to get them on board? How much can you push back on or away from what is familiar before you alienate the people you're trying to reach? Who even is your audience, if they don't like the stuff you like? Does that matter? Is there value in art you don't aesthetically vibe with? Can a girl with brown hair make a game about having brown hair that no one else with brown hair relates to?

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What if you create something so esoteric no one likes or relates to it?

That could happen. But creating something that doesn't appeal to anyone creates possibility. The possibility that it does, actually, appeal to someone. The possibility that someone could hate it. That they go and make something else. Or someone sees you doing your weird thing and thinks yeah okay I guess I'll do my weird thing now, even though it's not really the same, and maybe you think it sucks. Who cares. You expanded the possibility space. That's a win. A win for who? Who knows. Some other weirdo.

Expand The Possibility Space Cheat Sheet!

If you're out of ideas, or angry at the world, or just want to try something new, here are some pithy phrases to inspire and guide you.

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ELIMINATE DICHOTOMIES. Think of a third thing. A fourth thing. There's actually a lot of things. Don't get stuck fighting losing battles. Boy games or girl games. Casual or hardcore. Wholesome or edgy. Gameplay or no gameplay. These are enclosures. These are enemies of the possibility space.

FIND WHAT'S MISSING. What aren't games doing? What are games not allowed to do? What have we written off? What do we expect from a genre, an aesthetic, a scene? Get out of your scene. What else is out there? What is there room for? Who is allowed to make what? Who still isn't making something, even if they're allowed, and enabled? Can a girl with brown hair make a puzzle platformer?

TRY THE OPPOSITE. If everyone is petting the dog, don't pet the dog. If games are supposed to be fun, make one that isn't. If someone killed gameplay, bring it back to life. If everyone stops petting the dog, pet the dog. Try a new animal. A vegetable. A golf cart. Pet the golf cart. Fuck the golf cart. Make a game where golf carts are extinct and sex isn't real. You might like it.

DON'T ACQUIESCE TO MEMES. Relatability is a dead end. Ignore Redditisms. No more kill it with fire, no more heckin doggos. No more bisexuals sit funny, no more orange cats are stupid. No more pet the dog, no more kill gameplay, no more be gay and do crimes. These are not rules. These are just possibilities someone already found. Find something else possible.

MAKE STUFF FOR NO ONE. Mix a genre you love with a genre you hate. Try an aesthetic you loathe. Do it in earnest. Make a game that sucks. "Who could ever possibly like this?" Imagine that person. Forge an evil experiment. Punish your players’ expectations. Make something you regret.

SELL THE IMPOSSIBLE. Take it seriously. Don't make novelty the punchline. Sell your audience on the merits of the undiscovered. Commit to the bit. Treat the impossible as banal reality. Make the unusual usual. Stand up for your weird ideas. The things you believe are not a joke.

UPDATES?

2026-06-10T00:00:00Z

In May I made a little game poem for smilejam. It's called IF WE COULD FIND THE SOURCE OF ALL HUMAN MISERY,. It's about an early childhood memory I have of getting punched in the face, made out of memes I have saved on my computer.

And just yesterday (technically early today) I dropped something for Manifesto Jam 2026. It's called EXPAND THE POSSIBILITY SPACE, and it's a set of thoughts on creating stuff that no one wants or asked for or understands or likes, just because you can. I might post it here in full as a blog post, since it's basically a blog post I put in a pretentious little PDF with illuminated letters because I thought it was funny, and because I needed a file I could upload to itch. Anyway, until I do that, you can get it on itch using that handy link I put in a few sentences ago.

I've been feeling burnt out and over art as a concept, so these two jams were a lifesaver and got me excited about writing and creating again. Don't read that as a guarantee of anything, I might go back to being depressed tomorrow. But hopefully this creative fire stays lit for a bit.

UPDATES!

2026-03-01T00:00:00Z

Back in January, I read at a very fun event called Last Poet Laughing. I competed against 4 other poets to read poems across 5 rounds, where each round, the first poet to laugh is out. I tied for first place, because I hate to laugh.

In February, I participated in Cookie Cutter RM2k3 Jam and made a game called FAT BOY RPG: ORIGINS. RPG Maker was a big reason I got into and stuck with game design, and it was very fun to mess around with an old engine and see what everyone else came up with. I miss the sense of community and weird remixing that came out of those engines. Thanks to John Thyer for running the jam and thank you to everyone who made games. It reminded me that I like games and making them.

I've got some secret stuff on the go, and I have some fun stuff to announce soon, so see ya next time...

NO HOMO, THOUGH

2026-01-05T23:00:00Z

The thing about Nate from Baby Steps is that I want to have sex with him. I like fat nerdy guys. He's not even that fat, but we live in a post-Ozempic era where a guy over six feet with a little extra something-something might as well be a beached whale. (Even before Ozempic this was a common enough view, but the window of acceptability has shrunk even smaller.) But the game does not let me have sex with him. Instead, I make him walk, and I make him fall. Painfully.

It's not necessarily rare to find a game with a fat loser who we subject to pain for our pleasure. But the result is often arcade-y and without intimacy. Lara Croft, in the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot series, is infamously subjected to brutal death animations, orgasmically moaning her way through impalements, crushings, and drownings. This is hot, because the root of heterosexuality is violence against women. Gay guys are not allowed to have this sort of fun, unless it is categorized as "disgusting fetish content" that is not allowed at Pride.

But it's also hot because of our proximity to Lara. We control her. We embody her. But she's also under our protection. We guide her. We control her. We're the ones leading her into danger or around it. And we spend hours with her, growing more attached. In Baby Steps, that object of affection is Nate.


"The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator's look." – Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Nate's clothes and feet get dynamically filthier the longer you drag his ass through the dirt. You can lift and rotate his feet and put them directly in view of the camera, admiring your handiwork. His boobs and butt have subtle but insistent jiggle physics. And of course, there's the pathetic groans Nate emits when you purposefully make him fall 100 metres onto a wooden beam. It's less harrowing than a Tomb Raider death scream; if anything, it's endearing. But it still lends a certain sadistic joy to flinging him onto a bed of sharp rocks.

If Nate were more svelte and womanly, all of this would smack of fetish. But being a man, and not a traditionally handsome one at that, Nate is not a culturally recognized target for fetishistic desire. We are subjecting him to ridicule. We are punishing his lack of masculinity. We are not to find his predicament desirable. We are not to find his huge rack enticing.


The Woke Left's answer to Sydney Sweeney?

I think, pretty routinely, straight guys create gay fetish content simply by accident. It's funny to subject a guy to grotesque, homoerotic, and emasculating scenarios. It's funny to put an ugly fat guy in a situation where you would normally find a sexy woman. It's funny that Nate has a huge jiggling body, it's funny that he's in an unflattering onesie, it's funny that he's constantly being harassed by skinny fit men with huge swinging dicks while he's about to pee his pants. Jackass has resonated with many queer and trans people over the years.

Video games are an extra hostile place lately for queer and trans people, with recent crackdowns on "inappropriate" and "sexual" content on game storefronts. (Heteronormative desire runs rampant as usual.) Something like Baby Steps sits in an interesting place, since it's not really queer or sexual, but it's so very clearly charged with that potential. Fetish at its core is a sexual interest in things that are not sexual. So how do you police "non-sexual" sexuality? Queerness remains, even if it's denied sunlight. You just end up looking for it in weird places. I can't have sex with Nate, but I can hurt him. No homo, though.


"I'm Fragile, but not that fragile."

Ultimately, Baby Steps is a game about the perils of masculinity. We aren't punishing Nate for anything: he is punishing himself. He is unaccomplished, deeply insecure, unwilling to ask for help, constantly comparing himself to others. He presses on up this treacherous moutain because he has to prove that he is worth something, that he can stand up and be a man. But what is gayer than being a man? Surrounding yourself with other men? Obsessing over their huge, swinging dongs?

I once wrote in a poem that everything I like is a joke. If you have any sort of non-normative desire, there's a hope that you can hide it, or get out in front of it, or otherwise lessen the burden of being a weird little freak. But at the end of the day, you are a weird little freak, and that's fine. It's not a hard club to get into.

MORE NEW POEMS + A GAME

2025-04-29T00:00:00Z

More news from me!

I have 2 new poems up at BAD DOG Mag for the April issue.

And a few days before that, SweetHeart Squad posted our latest game, Taxi Quest 67. It's a short narrative game about a boat trip, and whether a boat trip can be a road trip. It's a fourthquel to our Taxi Quest trilogy, and we made it over a few months for the Road Trip Game Jam. Really happy with how it turned out, and how we keep expanding the Taxi Quest universe. Check it out.

NEW POEMS + UPDATES

2025-04-14T00:00:00Z

I have 3 new poems (and a truly awful selfie) up at Discordia Review today!

Earlier this month, DOMINO CLUB dropped a new set of games, one or more of which I may have contributed to anonymously. I'm not saying which ones. But they're all very cool and good, and you should check 'em out. I'm always impressed at the stuff everyone comes up with.

In other news, I've been getting back into music and I did a decidedly weird remix of Sugar Ray's "When It's Over". Other than that, I'm just ~~rotting away~~ plugging away at a game you'll all be seeing very soon. And maybe more music...

NEW POEM + A REVIEW

2025-03-31T00:00:00Z

Hello to the fans. Just a quick update today with a couple cool things from this month.

First: I have a poem in the newest issue of Sumac Literary Magazine! It's called "MY PHONE THINKS I LIVE IN MONTREAL". My phone does genuinely think I live in Montreal, presumably because I use a Quebec-based mobile provider. I don't live in Montreal, but I do visit.

Second: This was from a couple weeks ago, but Discordia Review published a very kind and thoughtful review of my 2022 chapbook, EVERYONE IS MY ENEMY. And for the record, I agree with them -- I should have a book! I'm working on it!

Anyway, that's it for now. I have a couple game projects on the go right now that you'll probably see next month, and some upcoming poems... so "watch this space"!

EVERYTHING AT EVERY ANGLE ALL AT ONCE

2025-02-06T00:00:00Z

I was playing Lorn's Lure last month and at some point, I saw something worth taking a picture of. So I did.

Then I started taking more screenshots. Maybe because they looked cool, maybe because I wanted to show them to people. Maybe to prove that I played the game, made all those crazy jumps. Maybe so I could write a blog post and get lots of attention and praise and clout. Sometimes I have trouble conceiving of doing things for my own enjoyment, rather than as fodder for showing off online.

But then I started thinking about what those screenshots were worth. Anyone who plays that game will see what I saw. Video games are a visual medium. When you play a game, you're most likely going to encounter a certain scene from a certain angle. That's what the developer wants. They want you to show you something cool, or show you where to go, or tell a story.

When you take a picture of the Taj Mahal, or the Eiffel Tower, you're seeing it the way it was intended to be experienced, from an angle that the designer knew you would see it. It was built to be seen. Taking a picture of the thing yourself is pointless; you can just google it and find infinite pictures from infinite angles. So you ask a stranger to get a picture of you standing next to it, to prove you were there. Vacation photos are about proof.

I don't usually remember to take pictures on vacation. I don't have a lot of pictures of me, because I'm either alone, or I forget to ask, or I don't want to ask because I feel kind of weird about myself, my body, photos of me, and asking anyone for anything for any reason. When I do remember to ask for photos, it's almost always to do the post-ironic pose of pretending to hold up the Tower of Pisa, except in front of completely upright structures, or sometimes just nothing.


These were taken almost 10 years apart. Same jacket, same bit.

Sometimes I force myself to take pictures to help me remember. I don't have a great memory, especially when I'm, say, depressed and isolated and working remotely and avoiding social contact. I want to remember the good times. Mostly I get shots of people's backs while I trail along at the back of the group. To prove that I was out somewhere, with people, but what it shows that I'm always hanging back, always on the peripheral. Just watching, just tagging along.

I still haven't seen Breaking Bad. I just didn't get into it, and then suddenly it was everywhere, and everyone had seen it, and then the hype died, and then there was no reason to see it because everyone stopped talking about it. Maybe I will watch it one day. But a part of me just thinks – why bother? Everyone else saw it, and I know all the memes just by being online. Does it really matter if I see it? Do I want to? Will it complete me as a person and validate my whole existence? Will it be kind of fun and interesting?

I've been lucky to travel, but there's still so much of the world to see. But do I really want to see what everyone else has seen: the grand monument, the tourist trap, the inside of the resort? I saw the Mona Lisa, but it didn't feel like anything. I have a much fonder memory of going to the same tapas place every day in Barcelona to eat pretty much exclusively slices of ham and cheese. My friend and I referred to it as "our" tapas place. It was basically identical to three others on the same block. But it was ours.

When I take screenshots in games, sometimes it's just for me to remember. Sometimes I want to share them. I want other people to see something cool, or funny, or weird. Even if it's something really obvious, something that everyone has already screenshotted. The act of me taking a screenshot, of me sharing it, of who I'm sharing it with, is unique. It's not to prove anything. It's for us. It's for me.

I'm never going to play every game, or visit every country. Some of my trips won't matter to me and some I'll remember forever. But a part of me is always yearning to see it all. Every single thing in the entire world deserves to be seen from every angle, to be photographed an infinite number of times. Some of it won't. It makes me kind of sad.

Only one person I know has played Lorn's Lure. It's a really fun, atmospheric game, although diabolically difficult at times. I still haven't beaten the final level because I got too mad and stopped trying. But I want people to play it and see how beautiful and satisfying it can be to forge a path through the emptiness. If it doesn't sound like your cup of tea, though, at least you can see what it's like, and maybe recommend it to a friend. There are an infinite number of places to go, and if someone gets to see something cool, just once, maybe that's enough.

I HAVE BEEN AWARE OF THE KILLER SINCE BIRTH

2025-01-29T23:00:00Z

Last year, I played Manhunt for the first time. It's simple and to-the-point, both in concept and execution: You're a serial killer who has to kill other serial killers to survive. You start the level, sneak around and kill everyone, then you leave. You do that 20 times and the game ends.

Manhunt was, obviously, the subject of controversy. It was banned in multiple countries. It came out the same year as Jack Thompson filed multiple lawsuits regarding Grand Theft Auto III, a "murder simulator" that was warping the minds of children everywhere. Manhunt is an obvious response to that accusation: it's an actual murder simulator.

Everything about Manhunt is bluntly provocative. The difficulty settings are called "Fetish" and "Hardcore". The enemies moan about how murder makes their cocks hard. Former Rockstar employee Jeff Williams said the game "just made [us employees] all feel icky. It was all about the violence, and it was realistic violence. We all knew there was no way we could explain away that game. There was no way to rationalize it. We were crossing a line."


Yes, that tattoo says "DRUG SLUT".

Playing the game in 2024, it's pretty fucking tame. We live in a world where Naughty Dog employees watch gore videos for reference. Lara Croft moans while getting brutally impaled on rusty metal. And okay, it's not a game, but I watched Terrifier 3 last year in a Cineplex theatre; the threequel to a cult gore VFX flick made over $50 million domestically. This is the desensitization to violence everyone keeps talking about. A million lines have been crossed. The slope is slippery with blood.


Don't worry, Art isn't real. He can't hurt you.

I think a lot about why I go out of my way to see gross, violent, cruel stuff. Maybe I want to prove I'm tough, maybe I want to prove I'm not desensitized. Maybe it's funny to me, maybe I get off on it. But watching James Earl Cash slice off another serial killer's head, watching Art the Clown gleefully disembowel another innocent bystander, it feels like maybe I'm catching a glimpse of something, peeking behind the curtain. Something about this impossible bloodbath feels real. It feels like proof.

"In a video game every single fucked up thing can happen and nobody cares." says an unnamed NPC in Pipey Quest, the game-within-a-game inside The Ballad of Swishy. "Other mediums try to lie to you by having things happen logically, and by forcing characters to act believably. Believability is a way to get away with something, it launders, or escapes from, all the evil and fucked up things that happen."

People on social media who think that Terrifier 3 is just a worthless disgusting gore flick for freaks (and maybe it is) were briefly obsessed with saying "but, at least it has a realistic depiction of PTSD". The movie is, in part, about how no one believes Lauren. No one believes that this girl is a victim of a supernatural clown. No one believes her that he's back. She's hallucinating, she's traumatized. But when the bodies start piling up, the curtain is pulled away. The evil is revealed. It's been there the whole time, killing people. You just didn't see it until now.


"I have been aware of The Killer… since birth."

One of my favourite videos on the internet is a supercut of Wendy Williams talking about "The Killer". In her mind, The Killer is a mysterious figure who is out there, always watching, ready to take you out at a moment's notice. Wendy keeps a bat from Yankee Stadium in her drawer, she avoids letting the ends of her scarf dangle. You never know when someone is secretly The Killer in disguise. We are all potential victims. We are all, potentially, The Killer. We laugh because it's fictitious and absurd. There's nobody actually waiting around the corner, not physically. But deep down we know what she means.

During Britney Spears's public battle to escape her conservatorship, Wendy said the following: "How dare you, Mr. Spears. You had me fooled. And you too, Mrs. Spears. Death! To all of them." The audience gasps, shocked. We don't like this kind of impulsive, raw violence. We don't want to hear it out in the open. We don't want to believe we're all capable of thinking that, or doing that. The violence of the Spears is bad, too, but it at least had the decently to stay behind closed doors.

You may have heard about that CEO who got shot. Respectable people did not cheer for his death. Violence is not the answer, they said. They sidestep, of course, that the CEO himself committed violence on a huge scale. But it was indirect violence, it can't be proven, he's just doing his job. It's abstract. He didn't take pleasure in it. It was for a reason, a profit motive. His behaviour can all be explained rationally. It's the shooter who behaved violently, irrationally. He crossed the line.


This is another screenshot of Manhunt, which I've included here to break up the text and to remind you what I started talking about in the first place. Also, you have to hide bodies in the shadows, and shadows are often in corners, so I moved these two bodies here because I thought it was funny.

When you see a villain on TV, or in a game, it's tempting to laugh and say it's not realistic. It's unbelievable, it's exaggerated, there's no one that evil in real life. I said the same thing to myself the other day, watching a show that depicts an abusive husband. Then I remembered, no, I've known someone exactly like that, maybe worse. It's nice to believe there isn't anyone like that. Until you meet The Killer, he's fictitious and absurd.

In Manhunt, the big bad guy is a film director who's gone rogue and started a snuff film ring. According to Snopes, snuff films don't exist. The idea that there is a co-ordinated network for the production and distribution of materials built on the deaths of innocent people is simply unbelievable. A conspiracy theory. Eve Sedgwick once asked AIDS activist Cindy Patton about the rumours that AIDS was invented by the government to kill gay people. Patton replied: “Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things – what would we know then that we don’t already know?”

What would a grand conspiracy tell us about the structural forces at play in America that we aren’t already aware of? What if bad things happen to good people? Does there need to be a snuff film ring, a supernatural clown, or can we accept that in less direct and obvious ways, an unbelievable number of people die brutally and horribly every day for the benefit of someone else? What if Art the Clown was president? What if The Killer is on the loose?


Sorry about the jumpscare.

In Twin Peaks, there's a character called BOB. He's what I think of when Wendy invokes The Killer – BOB is a vessel for, as one character puts it, "the evil that men do". Whenever someone commits an evil act, they become BOB, or are possessed by BOB, or are BOB, or represent BOB, or maybe they're just themselves and BOB is an excuse, a scapegoat for their behaviour. Sometimes the only way to cope with the absurdity of evil is to dress it up, make it a caricature, imagine that it's BOB hurting us and not someone we love or trust. We laugh because it's not real, it happened to someone else.

By the way, I finished Manhunt. It was fun. It's an elegant, minimal stealth game. It plays quite well despite being over 20 years old. It's interesting as a cultural artifact, a sort of time capsule of 2000s edginess. It's also kind of janky and tedious in places, and juvenile, and shallow. But if any of that sounds interesting to you, it's definitely worth a play.

(Note: The Steam release of Manhunt is broken, though it can be fixed with community-made patches. Someone online said that the Steam copy is broken because it's a pirated copy, which would mean that Rockstar uploaded a pirated copy of their own game to Steam. Allegedly. I think that's funny.)

Anyway, the violence in our games, our movies, our TV shows – it's all real! It's all happening right now. You aren't imagining it. It's senseless, gratuitous, and completely unnecessary to the plot. But it's happening. Art the Clown is out there. Manhunt takes place in your backyard. Maybe you can't stomach it or maybe you can. Maybe watching it is pointless because you know how it ends: a lot of innocent people wind up dead.

THE INAUGURAL "BLOG POST"

2025-01-29T00:00:00Z

Hi. This is just a post to say that there will be more posts, and that's that.

The IAN MARTIN Memorial Blog

THIS GUY GETS IT: LIVE IN ONTARIO

EXPAND THE POSSIBILITY SPACE

Expand The Possibility Space Cheat Sheet!

RECOMMENDED READING

UPDATES?

UPDATES!

NO HOMO, THOUGH

RECOMMENDED READING

MORE NEW POEMS + A GAME

NEW POEMS + UPDATES

NEW POEM + A REVIEW

EVERYTHING AT EVERY ANGLE ALL AT ONCE

RECOMMENDED READING

I HAVE BEEN AWARE OF THE KILLER SINCE BIRTH

RECOMMENDED READING

THE INAUGURAL "BLOG POST"