Hello, this is i am david brothers’s newsletter!
An awkward name, but is it a memorable one? Will I be able to hit a weekly pace? What kind of newsletter will this be? How stripped back and lo-fi can I make it? Let’s find out together.
—
Here’s some stuff I liked recently:
–Mon Oncle (1958). Banger comedy. Wish I heard of Jacques Tati as a kid.
–Friendship (2025). Banger comedy for completely different but also similarly awkward reasons.
-David Byrne’s American Utopia concert film, directed by Spike Lee. Team Beloved stays winning.
-Shinsuke Nakamura’s King of Strong Style: 1980-2014. Please…please…let Nakamura be Hiroshi Tanahashi’s final opponent.
-Charlie Huston’s Catchpenny. This guy’s prose is really pleasant. I’ve been a fan for ages.
–Death Stranding 2. More on this soon.
–Absolum. Someone said “influenced by Streets of Rage 4 and Dragon’s Crown” to me and I woke up a week later with hours of co-op time logged with a friend. Great game. Had to make myself put it down at one point.
-Katsuyori Shibata vs Yuji Nagata during New Japan Pro Wrestling’s 2014 G1 Climax 24. Black trunks forever, but Nagata really brings it.
-I got a bike, after eight years without one. Turns out the wind in your face is still a great feeling!
—
This is some stuff that’s been on my mind:
The ways we experience video games and difficulty is something that’s really interesting, in part because the specific ways we usually discuss it online are kind of insufficient to me. It makes for a strange experience as a reader, with tomfoolery like arguing against an essay you vaguely agree with because the way they approach the subject is repellent. Crossing your arms, “Not like that.” And so forth.
As an example (with peace and love!!), I didn’t much like this essay on the Innerspiral blog by Alli, titled “Difficulty Isn’t Everything.” It sorta lost me by the end of the first paragraph, but I saw it through to catch the perspective and follow the conversation. I did like this essay on a tangentially related wave by Chris Person on Aftermath, “I Love Silksong Even When It Bugs Me”, which is about a friction in game I don’t even plan to play. (I didn’t really play the first one.)
I think “I Love Silksong Even When It Bugs Me” succeeds by drilling down into specific experiences in Hollow Knight: Silksong, while the other essay falters due to being so broad that it just barely coheres. “Difficulty Isn’t Everything” has an aside about how difficulty is the result of capitalism and we shouldn’t prize it so highly accordingly, and that’s not wrong, but it ain’t exactly right enough to be true, either. It feels a bit like arguing against the worst possible person’s points on a subject, like a weird detour in an argument I’d like to understand better.
I liked one, disliked the other, and sharing both of them with friends who share a variety of perspectives with both pieces led to an hour or two of good conversation about disability-related accessibility and basic access, elitism, difficulty, personal capabilities, and the importance of arguing your points well, rather than trying to cover everything in one big whack. I came away feeling the same away about the pieces and their perspectives, but bouncing those ideas around with my own and those of my friends for a while made for a very enlightening and good time.
I think these two were a good point of comparison because they aren’t talking about the same thing at all, outside of the general idea of a conversation about difficulty. It’s more like, these two are tackling difficulty from different angles, and one was successful than the other for me in ways I didn’t expect, due to my lack of familiarity with Hollow Knight.
I think the crux of my dissatisfaction with the overall difficulty argument is that, for the most part a lot of it feels like jabbing at easy targets or strawmen, as if normal people don’t play these games too. It doesn’t always feel like a real argument online so much as a bloodletting where two sides take aim at the worst of each side. It’s good to get granular on this conversation. I think difficulty as a concept is frequently so broad or personal that we aren’t always talking about the same thing either, but I’m grasping the argument better than I have been. I plan to keep reading essays from both sides and seeing how things go, because I heard once that if you keep touching a hot stove, you eventually develop an immunity.
Me, I just think it’s good if there’s games for everybody, including games that are made for people who need to be punished in order to have a good time (sickos, with peace and love). That game Absolum that just came out, it has an Assist Mode with some pretty nicely varied options for making the game easier/more exciting for yourself, which was cool to see even though I mostly just play with default settings on almost every game. It does a good job of cleanly expressing what kind of game it is and who it’s aimed at, even if it doesn’t scratch the same sicko itch as, say, Sekiro.
—
Picking this thread up again a few weeks later, because I started writing this newsletter in the summer when I watched Mon Oncle and am finally finishing it in the fall:
After spending an hour streaming Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice for the first time in a while, just running through some familiar challenges and exorcising a long day, a different difficulty-related question came to mind: what makes the difficult games still fun once you’ve learned the fight that was so difficult in the first place? Sekiro is still a challenge, but now I fight Isshin Ashina on purpose for fun, not because I’m trying to climb his mountain and complete the game. There’s something that draws me back to this game in particular.
FromSoftware is good at making fights that are always a threat, but once you grasp the threat, you can dance around it. Ten, fifteen minutes into my stream, I was remembering old tricks, taking big risks that would mostly pay off, and making things harder on myself with different items. I mostly play without buffs and just swordplay, but I wanted to mix it up and play with some effects more. I kept falling back on old tricks or finding out that my big idea was actually just a good way to get triple smacked by the Corrupted Monk.
It’s still punishment, but punishment of a different stripe, right? The risk of taking a big L is always going to be there, but the nature of the achievement when you win has changed. I don’t think you can separate the knowledge check and DPS check aspects of these fights. “Do I know what’s going on enough to survive the fight?” and “Can I do enough damage to kill the boss before they kill me?” are still the foundation. But completion adds a third pillar.
Honestly, it’s probably similar to the ghosts in Mario Kart or something. “Here’s what I did last time. Can I do better this time?” Doing a 5K again and again, shaving time. It doesn’t quite feel like that, but it’s gotta be in the ballpark.
Anyway, it turns out Sekiro is comfort food, similar to Tekken. I felt good after playing in a way that I usually don’t even after playing other games that I enjoy greatly. Great games to toss on for five, ten, twenty minutes or a few hours after work on a Friday night. Speaking of, my, look at the time…!
—
Okay, here’s some more stuff to check out:
-I like Ben Passmore’s work, and his new book looks good. Cheryl Klein speaks to him at PW in brief about his new book. Check out his Instagram too, he does this weekend culture Q&A bit that I try to catch each week.
–Final Fantasy: The Ivalice Chronicles came out recently. It’s great, a worthy remake/remaster of an all-time favorite game. I’ve been playing it on Tactician difficulty, less for sickos reasons and more because I think FFT is probably my all-time most-played game outside of the Madden franchise circa ’94-’08 and NBA 2k ’10-’16 or so, and switching it up sounded nice. I breezed through Dorter Slums, a notorious early difficulty spike, and then got bopped in a random battle right afterward. I’m having a great time. It’s like putting a puzzle together in a new configuration but still quite achievable. I hate grinding, so I’m really discovering the limits of my cleverness. I don’t think I’ll get spoiled on this one, so I’m really spacing this one out, just doing a couple battles a week.
Do me a solid and pick these up:
–Good Devils: Don’t Play Fair With Evil one-shot: Since 2021 or so, Nick Dragotta and I have been doing little comics, homages to our faves and fresh tales both. We put them together in a package called Good Devils, named after the opening story in the mix, and Image Comics published it. We’re grappling with Fist of the North Star and ducking Hajime no Ippo in this one. Get it from your comic shop, as an ebook, or on the Hoopla library app, my main way of reading comics. I chatted with James Boyce of the FAQs Project about it, and Nick and I both talked to fellow Team Beloved MVP David Harper for Off Panel.
–Perfect Crime Party: This one is a collection of stories about the perfect crime. Not a murder you get away with—softer stuff than that. It has a short story that was drawn by Alissa Sallah and written by me, and comes via Iron Circus Comics. You can check out more of Alissa’s work on the VIZ one-shots platform. She did one called “Sun Tribe: Waffle Shack Index” that’s a lot of fun. Our two stories are very different from each other, too. She’s got range! Follow her on instagram.
–All-Negro Comics: This one was edited by Chris Robinson, and published via Image Comics. I contributed an essay to it, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it at all. You can listen to a podcast conversation between Chris Robinson & James Boyce of the FAQs Project here.
Here’s something that really blows my mind:
Years ago, I was on staff at Image comics, and one duty I ended up with was running a magazine called Image+, sort of a catalog/preview/hype machine. We did a launch party for it at the then-newly founded Cape & Cowl Comics in Oakland, California. It was a nice time, and certainly the first time I was the center of attention in that specific way.
Years later, ten of ’em in fact, and Cape & Cowl is celebrating their anniversary on November 8th, and I’m re-invited! Nick Dragotta and I released Good Devils: Don’t Play Fair With Evil via Image Comics in October, and it seems like people dig it. (I’m hoping we eventually do Absolute Batman numbers, personally.) Nick’s coming to town to celebrate the release, and Daniel Warren Johnson and James Harren are coming with him.
Cape & Cowl puts on a good show. I’ve been behind a table at two of their Cape & Cowl Cons, been to a couple drink & draws, and did a big signing there with Chip Zdarsky for Time Waits. (We wrote that one together. Marcus To drew it.) I’m looking forward to the event and hanging out over there a bit more. It’s an easy bike ride for me.
I’m saying, check out these promo posters:
Look, ma. I made it. Sometimes life is good.
Does helping people make you feel better?
The Alameda County Community Food Bank is going to be pretty crucial in the Bay Area this winter, I think. Check them out here and look around for a local org that serves a similar purpose. Somebody out there is helping, and can help you help others.
—
That’s it.