Tetris

Tetris does not bother to offer its players the mercies of explosions or of dead aliens or of graceful, leaping arcs. Just blocks and more blocks, an unforgiving rain as predictable as the mounting seconds of the petty pace that creeps to our last syllables.

The sharply cornered right angles of the game’s shapes, and the Russian folk music in the game’s typical score, contribute to the atmosphere of cold, mechanical inhumanity (at least to American ears). In the New York Times Magazine a few years ago, Sam Anderson wrote:

Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.

All of that is true about Tetris, but if it were all that is true about Tetris, we would not find the game so captivating. Tetris might be the purest distillation of what a video game is. Devoid of story, character, navigation, even metaphor, Tetris isolates an interaction among player, machine, and screen and commands our attention with it. Nothing about what is best aboutTetris translates to another medium.

Dutch songs

• Jaap Fischer - "Sprookje"
• André Manuel / Krang - "Kraaien"
• Frans Halsema & Jenny Arean - "Vluchten kan niet meer"
• Wim Sonneveld - "Lieveling"
• Boudewijn de Groot - "Strand"
• Stef Bos - "Wodka"

Ray Bradbury - "We'll Always Have Paris"

The Visit

[about a young man who had a heart transplant, and the mother from the donor]

    She might have cried out, but did not. She might have exclaimed something, but did not. Her eyes were also shut now and she was listening. Her lips moved, saying something, perhaps a name, over and over, almost to the rhythm of the pulse she heard under the shirt, under the flesh, within the body of the patient young man.
   The heart was beating there.
    She listened.
    The heart beat with a steady and regular sound.
    She listened for a long while. Her breath slowly drained out of her, as color came into her cheeks.
    She listened.
    The heart beat.
    Then she raised her head, looked at the young man's face for a final time, and very swiftly touched her lips to his cheek, turned, and hurried across the room, with no thanks, for none was needed.


All in all, not bad stories, but nothing special either. Finished about 75% but did not care enough for them to read them all.