How To Enjoy Halloween When Everything Is Horrifying

And stay tuned for a small, stupid, fun thing soon.

Hello! Happy (Almost) Halloween!

As I think I wrote last time, I was a bit under the weather the last week, so I’ve been slowly coming back to life after having to cancel shows and put off work that would be fun to do. I apologize if I’m a bit loopy. That said, having a Saturday where I spent 80% of the day in bed and was able to sleep without waking up every few minutes was kind of a nice change of pace. I recommend that to those who practice.

Oh, before I move on: I’ve got something cool coming later this week that I’m excited about. It’s stupid, and it’s going to appeal to maybe eight of you reading this, but I’m excited. Stay tuned for the lowest stakes, dumbest thing.

How To Enjoy Halloween When Everything Is Horrifying

Halloween is such a weird holiday.

Yeah, Thanksgiving and Christmas and every other holiday can be ruined by bad news, personal and political. Hell, Thanksgiving is famous for being the day when theoretical family members fight over assumed differences. There are multiple articles every year about talking to your family about politics, and each one basically amounts to, “Don’t do it, but also go ahead, but also don’t.”

But Halloween is a holiday about fear. It’s a holiday about death. And it can feel a little weird celebrating said day when others in the country are facing real fear and a lot of death. True, this is always going to be a problem, whether I’m happy with the direction of the world or not. People will always be living in fear somewhere, and there will always be holidays that seem to be ignoring someone else’s pain. Dogs campaigning against the 4th of July could be a powerful lobbying arm of the country if they only had thumbs.

It’s strange celebrating a holiday about horror while seeing real horror on the news every day. It’s strange to put on a mask and say “boo” when men in masks are literally jumping out of doorways to snatch people away. It’s strange to give out small pieces of candy to children the day before the country cuts off SNAP food benefits for hungry people.

That said, Halloween is about the strange. It’s about the uncanny. And it’s about the idea that there’s more than this, whether that be spiritual or just the passage of time. As the old, classic epitaph goes:

Remember friend as you pass by

As you are now, so once was I

As I am now, soon you may be

Prepare for death and follow me.

All this too shall pass. As the man whispered in the triumphant general’s ear, “All glory is fleeting.” Sadly, that includes us. Happily, that includes the assholes who’ve made lives worse for others because they’re as hollow as a cartoon ghost, but without the smile to let us know that being dead is great. Those jerks? They’ll be dead someday and, over the course of time, their headstones will be washed away to nothing but rounded, flat rocks.

It’s not that celebrating Halloween is important. Who gives a shit? But the holiday isn’t just about enjoying fear or wallowing in it. It’s seeing the path through. Most horror movies end with the bad guy having something horrible happen to them (or at least, before the post-credits twist). Most haunted houses are filled with unfinished stories waiting to be completed by another hand. Those stories scare us, but they also create a lot of yearning. Or at least an emotional stretch somewhere deep inside to understand what’s happening.

You’re allowed to look at fear and laugh at it. You’re also allowed to see that the real scary things in life are just regular people in nice business attire. It’s probably healthy to exorcise the demons of fear through the catharsis of Resident Evil. Watching the movie Weapons won’t solve the real problems facing kids in schools, but that doesn’t mean you don’t care about those issues. And metaphors are how we as a species understand different concepts better.

Or maybe it’s that monsters, real and imagined, would not want you to celebrate Halloween. I mean, as much as we talk about those monsters mashing, I feel like nobody would hate people having a good time more than Dracula. And Frankenstein’s creature essentially exists in two modes: Giant goth teen that wants you to feel bad or giant angry man who wants fire to go to sleep. Neither are big party animals.

Hardcore religious leaders would love it if you didn’t celebrate Halloween. Right-wing politicians would love it if immigrants were too terrified to go outside with their children on Halloween. The news media would love it if Americans were too scared of each other to trust their neighbors’ candy choices on Halloween. Living in fear is ironically the way they want people to be on Halloween and every other day.

So perhaps taking the fear on, laughing at it, becoming the fear, even for a moment, is worth it. Also, if you have kids, it’s probably also a cool holiday for other reasons. Maybe I should’ve led with that.

I Wrote About the 40th Anniversary of the NES for The Guardian

The great British video game writer Keza MacDonald was nice enough to ask me to contribute a piece to the Guardian’s coverage of the 40th anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System. The original NES. The “old” Nintendo, as if every other Nintendo that’s come out since isn’t already old. They’re all old. We’re all dying. I’m going to end up in a public workhouse/retirement facility trying to tell some confused robot to enter the Konami code into Contra before.

But that’s for later. For now, I hope you enjoy this little bit of writing I did about one of the most important pieces of technology of the 20th century. I mean that both emotionally and literally. Without that Nintendo Entertainment System, who knows where I’d be. Happy? Maybe. Satisfied with life? Perhaps. Enjoying existing? It’s possible. But would I trade it all for a good video game? I don’t know; this theoretical is starting to become untenable.

But I hope you enjoy the article. It was fun to write and fun to re-experience those memories of what were theoretically the “good old days.”

I Talked About One Of My Favorite Games Of All Time With Jared Petty

A short one, here. Jared Petty is one of the great video game people who hired me at Limited Run Games to do my parody novelization of Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties. Which is still available now and its royalties this quarter are just enough to pay for my family’s Christmas gifts, so feel free to keep helping out there.

For a while, Jared had a podcast slowly breaking down the 100 best games of all time. A few years back, I was on the show talking about Silent Hill 2 (which I also wrote a book about because I’ve basically got one magic trick). This time, I talked about Planescape: Torment, which is a game that mattered a whole lot to me as a teenager.

It’s still one of the best RPGs ever made and it’s creepy enough to fit that Halloween theme, so go for it.

Some New Halloween Stuff For You, The Reader

One of my jobs is getting paid money to make stupid jokes about video games, a position that I take as seriously as possible. And since it’s the Halloween season, I thought I’d post a couple of the less topical bits that involve slightly more horror-forward things. As usual, my favorite part is

the people online who don’t ever know that I’m joking and therefore get very, very angry at me.

I’m Officially Banning Caved-In Faces In Horror Media

Super Mario 64’s Haunted House Level is Worse Than Its Water Level

And, just for the fun of it, here is my favorite Halloween thing I’ve ever written:

I Wish I Went Before Mary Shelley in This Storytelling Contest

Any Recommendations?

Are you folks watching anything? Listening to anything? Anything Halloween-y that you want to add? Whatever you want to say to me, you better say it now and you better say it here.