The IAN MARTIN Memorial Blog

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

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"