Joe Pinsker, writing for The Atlantic, on the dreaded Sunday Blues:

“This feeling, whether we call it anxiety, worry, stress, fear, whatever, it’s all really the same thing,” says Jonathan Abramowitz, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Psychologically, it’s a response to the perception of some sort of threat.” The perceived threat varies—it might be getting up early, or being busy and “on” for several days in a row—but the commonality, Abramowitz says, is that “we jump to conclusions” and “underestimate our ability to cope.” For most people, he reckons, the stress of Sunday is uncomfortable but ultimately manageable—and they end up coping just fine. (And just as with other forms of anxiety, some people don’t feel the Sunday scaries at all.)

This is a fascinating article in that it looks at something most people can identify with, but attribute to a multitude of different sources. From psychobiological to sociological, hypotheses run the conceptual gamut. I remember listening to Henry Rollins, no stranger to hard work, once blaming the feeling that set upon him on Sunday nights on “school damage.”

I was mulling it over today and concluded for myself that it’s the notion of a “weekend” at all that causes the feeling: if you’re hunting and gathering or farming or otherwise living life a little closer to the metal, you don’t think about things in terms of five-day work cycles. You do what you have to do when you have to do it. It’s an affordance of our modern era–where we work for someone else–that we standardize some amount of time off.

And as is noted in the article, a four-day work week would be very welcome indeed. Those feel positively luxurious.

Why People Get the ‘Sunday Scaries’

I nearly included “but no mention of Oni” in my last post about Marathon. Lo and behold, there’s a history of Oni as well.

Oni was a great game: amazing physics and combat, with a solid story. The promo shots (which never materialized into an actual game) as well as the Oni 2 scenes are fascinating. While some of the background textures in the levels always looked stark, the game still looks great in these videos.

Most interesting is that the console version was a bomb. It was a great Mac game, but it never took hold on the nascent Xbox… whereas Halo, well… That’s a different story.

I played a lot of Oni on the Mac. These people seem to like it, too.

Demon: The Untold Story of Bungie’s Forgotten Franchise

This is a great history of Bungie, the Mac game developer that brought us Marathon (and eventually published, in a sad turnaround, Halo for Xbox). I wasn’t familiar with the story of Bungie trying to sell itself to Apple after getting an offer from Microsoft. It’s hard to imagine a sale to Apple turning things around for the Mac as a gaming company, but it was the killer app for Xbox. In any event, I spent a lot of time playing Marathons 1 through 3 in college and thereafter.

Bungie’s Forgotten Decade

“A 97-Year-Old Philosopher Faces His Own Mortality” in the *Atlantic*:

In one scene, Fingarette listens to a string quartet that was once meaningful to his late wife. He hasn’t heard the piece since her death seven years earlier—“her absence is a presence,” he says in the film—and becomes overwhelmed with grief.

I worked in an art museum in college, and one of the exhibits was by Françoise Gilot. My grandfather came to visit me there and I showed him the exhibit. One of her pieces was titled “In the Absence of the Beloved,” and it expressed her feelings of loss of her windowed husband, Jonas Salk. The piece featured the likeness of a couple walking, viewed from behind, with a stark black rectangle covering the male figure. I gave a sophomoric tour of the exhibit and when I described the theme of “Absence” to my grandfather, widowed then for only over a year, uttered with an unmistakable, palpable “Oh.” He grokked what Gilot was trying to get at.

Link

I finally finished Taffy Akner’s Fleischman is in Trouble after starting it on vacation this summer. Some reviews:

NPR:

The great trick of Fleishman Is in Trouble is that it cons the reader into siding with Toby. Brodesser-Akner demonstrates how women get suckered into acquiescing to misogyny by suckering both narrator and reader — and then showing us what she’s done. When I saw her trick, I was floored.

Wapo:

But, she suggests, when you’re stuck, tightfisted, inside your own story — unable to imagine that how you experience others is really how you experience yourself — the most unknowable person may be you, after all.

Vox:

That’s the Taffy Brodesser-Akner trick, the thing that makes her profiles so clear-eyed and important, the thing that lifts her divorce novel head and shoulders above so many others in its genre: She is always willing to extend her empathy to people we are trained to believe are not worthy of our consideration. She is always willing to treat them as real people.

Fleischman does pull quite a trick: after establishing Toby as a sympathetic character, the narrator starts to sour on him a bit. And then we come to sympathize, quite surprisingly, with the ostensible source of Toby’s distress–his ex-wife, Rachel.

I had no idea that The Clone Wars was aired out of order.

STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS CHRONOLOGICAL EPISODE ORDER