Reviews by kaemi

So there’s an alien in Alien, right? Oh no there’s an alien in the spaceship I hate it when things try to kill me and there’s nowhere you can run so super scary to be in those dark maintenance tunnels when there’s an alien you know that scene where it’s like. In Aliens there’s more aliens, it’s plural. Whenever Alien gets repackaged, this is what you find inside, even though the reason the movie remains with us forty five years later is the sense of place so insettling we recognize its fluorescent hum, a precise industrial mix of technology and decay perpetually makeshifted in clangs and hollows, an overbearing corporate unliveability recycling compressed air through advanced life support systems. Space, not as the infinite expanse, but as the unreachable loneliness of all that darkness. Floating through the final frontier in an earthmax drybulk carrier while oozing out the will to repair. These indoor worlds to which we’ve been condemned ripped out of context and scattercasted into void. Comlessions of the dissociative hyperorganism, less hivemind than writhegrind, driving us ever further and more fried into winding wherewithals resplendull with “polymers and a lack of blemishes”, nigh platonic “an object without history.” Plastic by any other name would taste as sweet: “You have to choose between Coke and Pepsi”, the end result of distributed processes best described as “hostile” and “takeover”, a sumless totality managed at three to five percent constant currency growth rate by “an investment fund headquartered on an abandoned planet.”

In this vacuum environment of “Perfect logic, total control, stasis built on a flawed foundation,” you carry onwards and downwards through cycles redshifted to dimness: “no reign lasts forever, past momentum is not enough to coast on.” Caught in the flow of days through rooms divorced from the meaning of light, waking and sleeping as two poles of closing browser tabs, all lifeprocesses stale into echoes of shadows, like gardening not as a vibrant immersion with environmental entanglements painting time in slow motion but as sterilized mechanical reproduction: “You cut away a few dried leaves and change the water in the fluid tank. The nutritional synthesiser looks to be in reasonably good shape but there are a few spatters around the output nozzle which you wipe down.” Trapped in a procession where songs tick by 249 times without ever sounding familiar, where calendars fade from you with all the dates you’ve notionally lived, “how few of them hold any particular significance to you.” A vibe which bleeds out into the text as it prints, recycles, prints tropes similarly unresonant: dutifully, nutrient paste; but of course, RoboAtelier 3D printers; empty bottles, plastic bags, torn wrappers; why not, a series of unsettling dream fragments.

So how to push all this towards new intention? Metallic Red tries invoking materialist despair into the digital disrepair. Tarot readings, redolent murmurs of the cascades of meanings coursing towards you, succinctly defined by holographic overlays, mediation ordination generating a tension between the unfathomability of influence either astrological or astronomical, uncertain if spirits or circuits determine how little flows through you. Mysticism’s yearn for the invisible to convoke inexplicably, connections of coulds still promising more than these moorings, worlds alive with divine secretions “hard for any of us to understand after hundreds of years of materialist philosophy” demanded to actuate “as real and believable a science as any other.” So we pursue this permutation dynamism into an initiation into mysteries, no like literally the mysteries, with all the gods electrified: “Simultaneously the initiates surrounding you take a step forward and each blows out the candle nearest them. Total darkness descends. Your head begins to spin as your eyes fail to distinguish anything. The laser pattern and the ultrasonics fire up again. You know that there are other waves bombarding you, low dose x and radio waves. Several additional inputs gathered from the week you’ve been staying in the site are being studied and processed. DNA and gut biome measurements, a machine administered psychological analysis. All being fed into a compute engine somewhere.” That somewhereness as uncapturable by hypermodernity, the future as this but more and more until gravitation crushes dreams projected on it, an endstate “jerking inwards … curving further, encircling towards you … seeming to bend in half and then continue bending further”, whispers an escape route from the progressional ennui that surprises by suddenly pressing us out into another mode all together, one that’s… hmm… there’s a really involved sequence about making salad dressing? You have a few conversations about ideas not really shared with you, the reader, surely they’re interesting to everyone else. There’s a hierophant whose religion you leave, or sort of can’t leave, but the game ends before that tension means something. Your father is someone, it seems; they tend to be, for better and worse. You can walk around a map, but the sense of place is, well, not quite Alien. So it seems: “The beginning was nothing, the end must be nothing too, but a more complete nothing.” No no, that’s too harsh, actually it’s fairly pleasant whilst passing you by, perhaps more like: “The automated systems which allowed the ship to dock without human intervention mean that you’re completely alone.”

So as you know Edgar Allen Poe suddenly surfaced in Baltimore raving unto death, a mystery forever inexplicable, and this has thrilled generations of readers as apropos; we do so love a death apropos, it wreathes life with the faintest sense of poetry. Which proves enormously appealing to our everyman narrator slogging toward middleage to be born, so “tired of the day-in, day-out… of being overlooked and underappreciated. You deserve more.” A lot more more, it seems, wishing to swing the pendulum across the pit: “All you wanted was to publish a novel. Take it on tour. See your name on the bestseller lists. Was that so much to ask?” Cue Mephistopheles with bargain in tow, offering you either literary reverence or its opposite, monetizable fame. One does not write hundreds of thousands of words without the narcissistic insistence that the void should not be more eloquent, so I perused the literary option: “From a scan through the lengthy synopsis, you see it’s a multigenerational family saga of an American farming family that produces three children. The two sons become doctors and move to the city, while the daughter establishes a veterinary practice near the farm.” Needless to say I chose the famous option. This decision point layers in the game’s innovation on the tale, doubling the doublebind by binding you to whichever authorial attunement imbues your name with its resonances: “In the glass, your reflection stares back at you … you come to realize the glass wall permits you to see into another passageway… the path you did not take. It’s your split double, the one who chose to be literary.”

With the stage set for the artist’s struggle between their daily bread and their Last Supper, we promptly throw it out the window for a dizzying time travel caper involving three whole sets of Faustian twins sprawled across half a millennium, multiple explosions with a quantum of mechanics, and two separate attempts to come loose in time through legalese. If that all sounds complicated, then the thematic heft of these hijinks is more concise: the reward of success is the fulfillment of the attempt, otherwise you may as well drive a marathon, gets you to the same place. “The curse of mediocrity has returned. It’s like it was before that fateful day in Belyle’s office, when you desperately craved to write a novel. / No, you desperately craved publication - to be lauded and praised. The writing was always a means to an end. / Pen in hand, you stop waiting and start thinking. An idea peeks its nose up. One by one, you wrestle out the opening words of what might become a novel…” There is of course no point in having written a book if you haven’t written a book, so moral in hand we’re right back to where we started…

Where did we start again? Oh yes, Edgar Allen Poe. In celebration of his role in developing the detective genre, we’re donning a fedora as our “lips fidget with the toothpick”, ready to gumshoe nineteenth century Baltimore, gathering clues to uncover the circumstances of Poe’s death, which has gotten gnarled up with all the above. A few homages to Poe help settle the setdressing, with a lighthouse in line with his unfinished final story, a climactic confrontation with rival Rufus Griswold, a few lines of Annabel Lee lying around, and assuredly a raven, box ticked. What the story seems to miss most is the quality for which Poe was most famous, an overbearing pervasion of mood. The prose is frequently workman, even rather curt, only occasionally crafting up the effort expected of a work ardently enjoining us to our writerly duty of “Nurturing your dream with sweat and passion.” A shocking revelation withers on the line: “Belyle’s involvement is now confirmed. My suspicions about Poe’s ordeal have been justified. It sickens me to think Belyle may have played some part in Poe’s now-fragile condition." Ah yes, I see, it’s the demons; make a note of that, will you, Watson? When the writing does go grand, it can trip over itself by simply restating the previous sentence with gusto: “To your horror, the fountain pen’s ink is blood. The oily vermilion liquid congeals to a black crust across the dotted line.” This is a shame, because the author is quite clearly capable of arresting visuals like “knife-edged sleet” and “his now-crystallized froth made his mouth hairy with ice”, and maybe it’s a little silly but the sheer inventiveness makes it my favorite: “Blackened metal scraps lie about it like curled patisserie chocolate.” Honestly, I think the glue that keeps this juryrigged Poe/Faust/Jekyll/airport thriller hybrid humming along are these moments of gothic effusion, so I kept craving menace. With what we have, at least some humor makes a virtue of the dryness, with jokes ranging from the very broad ““And here’s your free whiskey,” the one nearest me says. She presses a voucher into my hands. / And so concludes my introduction to American Democracy.” to the little less broad “From the blast marks about the room, my powers of perception tell me this is the locus of the fire - it originated here.” I also laughed when, having read the literary precis, I thought gosh who other than Franzen is desperate to be Franzen, only for the game to namecheck him later as its caricature source.

Rather than mood, the game seems inspired instead by Poe’s most famous quality, high concept succinctness. It’s an enormous credit to the pace and focus of the work that the somewhat awkward mashup of ideas streamlines thrillerishly propulsive. While I would have liked more emphasis on the duality of lives debating the roads traveled, there is a satisfying dialogue between the doubles at the end which sculpts to a delightfully morose capstone: “You feel vaguely dirty signing your other’s book, cowardly claiming someone else’s compromises as your own.” Artworks are vitalities of another’s compromises comprising a destiny, so though this work’s are not the ones I might’ve made, I’ll still celebrate the ease in which it couches its furtive intensity, a stainless steel requiem for the individuality that dies with a writer, what strikes us in “the nurse frantically trying to explain something about a bombing victim’s last words.”

I’ve a bittersweet relationship with Penguin; the publisher, I should clarify, not the birds who can recognize the cry of their chicks among a colony of millions, who wouldn’t daydream being so precious? On one hand, they are indefatigable publishers of affordable translations of humanity’s deep heritage: they grab you in a dingy used bookshop like would you like to read a seventeenth century Korean fable highlighting an idealized Tang NeoConfucianism which directly enspheres Daoist and Buddhist interventions, only six dollars! And I go, it infuriates me it took this long for someone to ask. The problem is that the way they can afford to publish these works at scale is by maximizing their accessibility, which dilutes every other consideration which should feed into a translation. The Penguin house style features conversational prose compressing the alienations innate to voices of lost worlds into narrowband twenty first century convenience, and it’s like, if I wanted to hear ancestral modalities jpeged into crispcollapse, I’d read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.

Because isn’t the fantasy of reading The Epic of Gilgamesh summoning spirits from cuneiform carved into clay by our most ancient echo echoing their ancients’ most chthonic primordial hum, he who saw the deep, that faintest song over the abzu beneath the dunes? Instead this sandpapery shimmer of a surface you can’t delve below: “The rhyme scheme is off completely, and such a literal translation seems to have eliminated the beauty and meaning from the poem.” This fear animates Verses’ anxiety that you can’t taste the crying in the words. As a translator of artefacts, the game presents you with densities you try to click click uncover, pinning words’ butterfly wings to ekphrasis the noumenal horizon: from a Romanian starting point, a beauty outside our limited scope of worlding, we keep trying to wring out the juice to taste without desiccating: “If flowers: the tall grass” becomes “The flowers grow in tall grass”, literal into idiomatic, how much can we preserve through the distance between us? The fantasy that “I with my light enhance the secret world - / like the moon with its white rays / not diminishing, but trembling / multiplying the night’s mystery” as we enter alterior worlds, but the phantoms leap too high upon the cavern walls flickers of our dimming swallowed, myrrh murmurs crackle in our clenchfist strain: “You place your hands on the control board. Lines of text burst from the screen into your eyes. Your job is not to translate, but to make sense.” But we’re not a part of that world, are we a part of any world, how can we contain humanity, “and everything that is not understood / becomes even harder to understand / in front of our eyes-“ as the worlds unfurl without settling, kaleidoscopic unresolve in the overwhelming overflow of information cascading the contained through translation’s unstitching, words failing to live up to their signified as you dutifully drain them to safely flaskable: “lawn: sort of a misnomer; it’s mostly dirt packed from hundreds of years of walking. / tower: the shortest structure in the compound”, words like fences failing to imply the ranges within.

As the anxiety of translation overbursts its bounds into paranoia blossoms, the garland which vivifies Verses’ sinuous elusions, heady scifi extravagances literalize the looming losses to prevent collapse to mystic whispers. The more our translator disintegrates before failing to render the impossible otherness desired real, tangible, tastable, the more they’re forced into themselves, the less they imply any correlate otherness nonreal, nontangible, nontastable. Human vats gestating raw flesh, the bodily as humiliated into literal purpose metamorphosis of the translator failed, butcher’s twined together in increasingly medical language’s reductio ad abcessum: “Material composition: Human skin, fat, muscle, epidermal appendages incl. sebaceous and sudoriferous glands, as well as choristomatous lacrimal glands, connective tissue/cartilage, fragments of bone, vascular structures, and neurologic tissue.” Physiological insistence encaging all that happens within to a one to one correspondence with the overtaxing latination, words as caches of hyperdetermined technicalisms ready to be uncompressed into the fullness of reality, tangible and technical equally, a precision endpoint precluding our yearning ambition to be “a living thing inside of something dead, like the terminal, like the data.”

That we technologize word into data at the next layer of informational amphibology should unsurprise Riemer’s readers, and with a blink the impenetrable surface hardens to a screen: “Virtualities surface on the screen, each only briefly. Posthuman analogs flickering once before going out permanently.” Translation happens through intimate grappling with a terminal, with its visual overlay of an anterior phantastation: "After a moment of dark whirring, your terminal’s screen alights with green dotpricks that gradually cohere into a landscape.” The landscape as unreal to the touch as it is to your eye, standing there in a forest feeling like every decade you’ve endured this earth has been a waste because not one of these profusions you can name. No understanding of their uses, no memories of their presence, no distinctions to transubstantiate the host fleur de less, nothing but shape and color an infantile morass below object permanence. I see flowers; someone else understands “oxeye, yarrow, arrowhead”, colors beyond the yellow I beseech secondhand. “You stand before a strobing monitor. Cathode green on dead pixel gray.” I belong inside boxes, everything I love is in them, “Memories bathing in warm fluid the color of elemental iron”, and why should I be attached to an outside which is after all outside, placed there by the confines I have considered shelter, from who and what don’t ask, just bask, a quiet you can keep for yourself, ataraxic reduction to… “disaster: obliteration. Image fragmentation. The recording apparatus is destroyed, viscera spatters. The brain has become soup. All connections lost.”

These connections which keep reminding you of attachments, there is another end you can reach through them, become a part unapart. World resonous with so much more than your noise deviance can ever contain, though voracious you want to be filled, be more than “a mind in a box, ruined. / You eat until, finally, full.” Reduced once more mereness, the amness of your shambling purposeable, mere genetic continuity that cannot retain any ancestral electricity to live: “There is no space for understanding, for an idea to survive: everything is concrete, grotesque, without identity.” Gods wither to gold in the deemblematic embolisms: “altar: gold glints through the dust.” As apostates, could we just relent to the box, comfortably bound in some annex never appended to the text, not translation but ablation, steady okaystate to decompose: “The work happens in a wooden box. The product of the labor is removed, and the work continues. Where it goes is none of our concern; maybe it would hurt us to know. But it’s impossible not to wonder.” One day they will wake and find you corpse and nod.

The lifethirst outrage that reacts at this precise second to violent revulsion strikes Verses’ emotive match, the needing to exist in the problematic as potential to personhood, not to be cauterized from its coterminous cohabitation, two spirits in the oneness of the word: “Identity: there are still problems here, but the problems want to be solved; you can feel their desire to unravel.” Even in the absence of solution, the need to be seen concrete, more than digital figments blurring in and out of cataract impermeability as “only avatars whizzing past & extinguishing themselves on a black screen”, distressed fire to burn through the “tumor in the viewer’s eye” that remains “intact. Self-contained. A safe recording, until it rots” to reach beyond the vestige, impetus to break free from your isolation’s unpotential, resistance as violence against reality as inert opacity of the witness who cannot will into the seen, the seething outside yourself: “You rub your eyebrow with a fist. And against the inside of your eyelid, like the wall of a cave, play the bodies, the spray, neither solid nor quite liquid. Flesh still half-frozen. Transmuted slush. The rods, the cells, the void.” Actualizing the push beyond the pressed into print our arc evolves us from “A creature filled with ideas and nothing else” to someone “here to construct an understanding, not for yourself but for others. You are here to create a record from which you yourself will be struck.” Defined into the act, you overcharge the signification with its significance, whichever you choose outside your limitations, words as signposts to where a greater collective humanity lies in defiance of the anodyne fleshsufficience, flesh as suffusion of sense: “Light hits your eyelid and scatters, illuminating blood and skin. / You dream of a pink mist and awaken inside one.” Acquiescence of suffusing metadata as moral determinative of the datum we must determinate.

If translation allows us communion with need as continuity with the strivings of those who once spoke a reality you desire, then this rebellious urge derails against the limitors, box occluding the “overabundance of nearby metadata” that contextualizes words into a subjectivity superior to the overbearing abstractions of an objectivity which proposes you purely an object that could never include you, per our antagonists: “Context is poisonous, Eca. This remote laboratory, the clandestine nature of your work, is to prevent even a mote of extraneous information from seeping in. Cultural, ideological, linguistic poison. Your analysis must remain objective.” Analytical lattices which plug “directly into the terminal” to “suggest the sample’s placement” constrict us into a deposition decay that sees less and less outside its depository display, eyes increasingly indistinguishable from the holographic overlay imposed until we’re so inculcated to a calculated anneal that “externality comes apart like something wet. Then the truth reveals itself to be a nutrient or a poison. Then the message reveals itself to be something excreted from the speaker. Then the sun goes away and the rain comes and you and I freeze in it, the translucent bluishness of our skin. The rain falls and we are ever uglier.” Whatever was meant antecedents no me in it, only molder.

This tension against the inertness of ghosts a ruin resplends resolving into which resonation? I don’t know, the military entertainment complex? Dutifully, one ending has you rewield your monstrousness against the impending military “cleansing” of the zone. Aliens, at one point the game gestures, almost ironically. Here the game falters too slight, too ramshackled from myriads winked together to foster an inhabitance capable of generating genuinely internal antagonisms worth wrestling thematically through the metaphor of translation. Most passages hasten a jot or two, nodding towards where they might combine sublime, but quickly recede into the quickening pace of the game’s not so much descent as cocaine freefall into madness. As if in recognition of this race to outpace an internal metronome to cohere from fragments a fullness of focus, the few ideas of which it is very certain, like the eye as fragile membrane between the soul and source, are repeatedly emblazoned lest they not crest the waves, in case without this spine we might gelatin likewise gestation beasts: “Your eye has not ceased to function - it is transmitting non-energy to your brain, a signal expressing absence” we are told, “Your eye has not ceased to function - it is transmitting non-energy to your brain, a signal expressing absence” we are told, “You fall through the floor of material existence, of time. The speed of your descent makes your skin ripple. You feel it even in your dead limb, see it play across your dead eye’s retina.” The narrative thread heaping on the urgency, your devolution to a cessation beyond translation, never quite outshines the interstitial gestures, and it’s like, if I wanted to read about the uncanny unfulfillment of the moment to moment interpolation of influence as existential disclaimant crisis, I’d read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Precisely this yearning, though, to fall through the floor of material existence, and its contraposition of a lineage of material extrusion sanctified through poetry’s translucent filminess between image and immanence, pulses Verses past this impasse towards a haunting geschlossen superimposable on the supernal secret of the verses unvocal in “your tongue about your mouth, preparing to enunciate properly”, a certainty enclosure cataclysm in which you wake woundably unwithinable: “Long after everything had ended, there were still mechanisms without purpose, places without names, faces without features. The world was without conceit. All lingering ideas had been eaten from our heads. / Finally and blessedly all blood was lost and the wound of our existence emptied and putrefied. The traps we had fallen into, invisible, placed throughout our history and indistinguishable from the air around them, had sprung, and the atomic motion of everything slowed until there was an impermeable darkness.” In this wound of existence, its collectivity desiccation, “Ruin and death / exodus / and the path to / deliverance / closed”, we crawl close to the magnificent desolation which my favorite Romanian poet once consecrated: “Instants whose eyewink / no brightness sleeps. / Increate, in every place, / gather yourself, / stay.”

Perhaps this glittery despair overdetermines into an elsewise eclipse. “The samples you’re working with are dimensional; they can reveal one facet or another depending on how they’re approached. You have an opportunity here to impose your will on the analysis in a way that results in a more thorough experience.” So then I can ask you this: “For this initial calibration test, I’d like you to tell me anything you can about the object within the lattice without having seen it first. By eliminating preconceived notions, we can ensure the data is objective.” Is that where you’d rather wither? Which is your favorite translation of Beowulf?

What’s terrifying about babies is how terrified they scream. Beyond the voice’s breakingpoint and still the shrillhoarse shreaking. Listening to them, you just kind of wonder, is it this bad, this whole, you know? Not just that I’ve learned subtler ways to cope with being cold or hungry or alone in a darkness that I don’t know will ever be broken, but worried that it’s worse, that I’ve lost the intensity of these feelings through ineluctable repetition, the fullest misery of our damnation has been worn away, left with whatever ashes we adapt to adulthood: “You cry at the top of your lungs, the realization that you are alive and singular dawning on you for the very first time. It's okay, though. This thought will only haunt you for the rest of your life.” Belying the child crying for their mother is the reality she could not return, our coherence of any desire to live depends on flickering contingencies which do not take them with us, when they go, we are here to be alone inside ourselves, inflictable.

Tension between universality, the empathetic recognition of the baby’s suffering that accords with our own having traveled that road, and individuation, whatever eternal return condemns you it is you who must undergo everything incurred, deathmarches us through the pervasive we permutate: “the normal processions must be carried out. If this is somehow new information, congratulations: a lifetime of disappointment and pointless information awaits. How is it, being born? Do you feel ecstatic? Elastic? Life is something we must all come to terms with at some point in time.” In a rapidfire game of life, Conway’s or Milton Bradley’s, we are whisked through each progressive phase of the ineluctable, accumulating idiosyncrasies primarily in the flinches from them. From “Childhood is a process of aches, pains, and frequent misunderstanding” to “Now, time is slower and bare walls are more noticeable. Like that chip in the wall you forgot to note on your security deposit” we are swept along a sweatprocess that leathers us unrecognizably stretched over the brainbloat accumulated by decades of reasons and wouldbe answers, none of which trigger a transcendence to wrest us from the ungravitas gravity: “Life is a cascading, measureless list of somehows.”

Whoa, you say, that’s pretty deep dude, and the game makes the same snarky snidestep from its subject, with wacky asides like how many McDonalds does it take to make the best of all possible worlds or skateboard tricks you land in a fireball to obsequious applause or “The clown is an affront to God, a pitiful mortal unaware of what is good and just in the world. Clowns represent full depravity and unchecked hubris.” This flippancy deadpans the drama to dry out the soppy philosophizing, which works to the extent it keeps the tone amicable, but somewhere between the game installing updates midstream and interrupting you with zany lists and buckshots of cheap jokes and nonsequitor noneliners, the veering starts to feel Wink Wink Clever again, only in the other direction, and you’re like, okay, you clearly have something interesting to say, could you please just say it.

Which is a shame, because, when it does just say it, the writing radiates clarion certainty not worth shying from. The delicate balancing act between encapsulating universals like “Cinema is verite. Our needs are our mechanisms. Truth must be discovered in order to be truth. Discover the want and want the discovery. / We are gelatin like the Earth is clay. The fact that a question exists at all is beautiful.” and the heartbreaking simplicities that sufficiently fuel any given soul like “There is gestalt in survival” create generative confliction perfectly capable of carrying the game’s moue molting to a grin. Unexpected little ruby pops like “gentle fortress of claret and peel” or “Heat emanated like a broiler skillet spider” italicize a lived particularity that niches connections within the textbook infodumps and vague gestures at “capital-S Somethings”.

Zaniness undercutting the narrative also proves redundant, because this undercut is precisely the climactic fulcrum that poignancies the narrative’s switching tracks from the connaturalist aggrandizing of the psychological into the anthropological to the emotive underscore of the narrative’s soft pulse: “You stare at the conveyor belt. People need to do what they can to survive. Life has beaten us down so much. I want us to be okay.” Choosing not to resolve the tension between the universal condition and its lived particulars into a nihilistic hauteur but rather a gentle awareness of the fragile interstitially stitched together psyche, the one of one that is “here in spite of all my challenges, my choices, and my mistakes. I am human. I am real. I am necessary. / And yet, even by telling you all of this, even by including that preamble and this vast, quite-encompassing magnitude of a description, I am more than any of these binary truths or lies alone could ever hope to describe or contain: / I am multitudes. / I am complex, the in-between. / I am synthesis.” Compiling all your choices throughout your playthrough into a description of you, the specific player, that creates a surprisingly deep portrait of how you dwelled within overhaunted confines, the liberative immelman out of the inexorable to its inness and ability justifies the central conceit into a call to, if not action, then at least reaction, reagency at last: “Let’s hold on a little bit longer. Let’s change things. Let’s scar.”