One year and two months ago, I posted an Instagram story asking people to swap postcards with me.
It seems ridiculous in retrospect. Friends in the US and Europe will be fine, but the Philippine postal system is unreliable at best, and postcards aren’t the sturdiest things. Most people don’t even know where their local post office is. And how much does it actually cost to send mail overseas?
But I asked anyway. It gave me something to do, and space to hope for keepsakes that lived outside the internet. Mostly, I remind myself that it’s a good excuse to write postcards — a process that’s meditative and soothing, never mind what happens after I drop the cards in the mail.
Half the time, it feels like sending signals out into space. But we’ve learned so much of the universe that way, haven’t we?
This whole endeavour, for example, taught me more about how international mail works, if only to answer the question of who foots the bill for a postcard’s journey overseas.
You buy the stamp — of course you’re paying for the process, was my knee-jerk reaction. But Singapore charges only 70 cents for postcards to international destinations, and that doesn’t sound enough to cover logistics, even if you imagine the postcard as piggybacking on bigger shipments.
As it turns out, most countries pay terminal dues for all these international deliveries, and the United Nations has an agency to standardise fees and procedures. Would you believe that international delivery dues are reassessed and updated every quarter?
In Tiny Echo, you play as a one-eyed entity wandering the bowels of a blighted land, delivering mail to spirits.
The only exposition you get is the slow scroll through the world above, before the game follows the letters down through a crater and to your character Emi’s desk. From there, you have to figure things out, mostly by pointing and clicking on various details of your environment.
The game doesn’t give you any stories, dialogue, or instructions. It doesn’t give you anything, really, beyond the surreal visuals and immersive music, and perhaps the occasional counter above your head to indicate how many letters you still have to give out.
I’m not trying to make excuses, by the way. I’m just giving a bit more context so it’s easier to understand why it took me more than an hour to finish delivering 13 letters in all.
You need to explore places, and you need to test your environment. There are puzzles—mostly straightforward ones, less about tricky logic and more about a willingness to try fitting available pieces together.
That need for willingness did me in, really. There was one spirit whom I met early in the game: every time I tried to approach, it would screech and Emi would stop dead in their tracks.
Maybe I need to do more to unlock this area, I thought, and proceeded to putter around the rest of the world. I opened paths by clearing massive skeletons; I nudged fireflies into the right crevices; I filled massive stone bowls with tears that a bystander taught me to shed. And still, always, the spirit would screech, and I couldn’t give them their letter.
In the end, completely by accident, I figured it out. My mouse slipped, and Emi moved further into the area where the spirit was. It turned out I just had to urge Emi forward through the screeching, and the spirit would accept their letter at last.
I got the message, too, but that didn’t mean it stuck.
The Monday after finishing the game, I had to go to the immigration authority to convert passes.
I queued up, passed the mandatory temperature screening and contact tracing stations, waited for my number to be called. Waited, waited, and waited. I watched people who arrived much later than me get their cases processed. Most seats were filled, as much as they could be with social distancing measures in effect; and then most seats weren’t. My phone ran out of battery. So did my Kindle.
At 5:30 PM, as the immigration officers were packing up, one of them noticed me and beckoned me over.
“What are you here for?” And then, checking my queue number and the procedure I’d come there for, not unkindly: “This takes less than five minutes to process. Why didn’t you ask at the counter when you didn’t see your number?”
I’d been waiting since 11 AM. We laughed a little about it — me, sheepishly; them, with utter bemusement. What else can you do, when you realise you’ve just witnessed a feat both impressive and totally unnecessary?
Well, why didn’t I ask? The simple answer is that I didn’t think I could, and maybe I didn’t even really want to.
Up until that day, I barely had it in me to exist, let alone to interact with the rest of the world. I’d come to the appointment in a daze, and for all my irate updates in various groupchats, the waiting time barely even registered.
I could have sat there forever, because it was no different from what I would have been doing at home, or in the office, or anywhere else: I would just be there, and the only thing I could recognise about that fact was its complete opposition to what I wanted, which was to be nowhere at all.
In Tiny Echo, when you deliver a letter, the recipient changes.
Emi seems to meld briefly with the spirit, at least enough to be transported into their inner world, where they sit in wait, inert. A short clip plays: the spirit opens the letter, and something in them awakens, emerges. You see a flash of the power that they hold. It feels like an affirmation.
Yes, they seem to say, I’m ready to be in the world again.
I don’t know what shifted, or why. Maybe the absurdity of the situation broke through. Laughing at myself as the immigration officer processed my papers, I felt the fog lifting. It didn’t disappear completely — it never has — but there was a little more space then to let the world in.
Trigger warning for mentions of suicide and self-harm
Indie game developer Angela He’s missed messages sets you up to fail, and that’s a good thing.
Developed for the Ludum Dare game jam, this gorgeous, atmospheric visual novel plays on user expectations to answer the theme “your life is currency.” From the game title to the initial setting, you’re led to believe that this will be another meditation on the surreality of digital relationships. Dropped in front of a laptop in the middle of your character’s college dorm room, the most crucial choice seems to be school work vs AirDrop flirtations with “goth gf’s iPhone.”
From a quick scan of reviews and comments online, everybody falls for it. On the first playthrough, nobody ever catches on, and the game doesn’t end the way it conditions us to expect.
The real question here, it turns out, is what we choose to pay attention to. Too late, most of us realise that the main character’s roommate, May, is suicidal — and the real challenge was spotting the subtle hints that might have helped her stay alive.
Like D.M. Moore writes in The Verge’s review, though, I don’t think the game means to penalise you for missing things the first time around. I’d even go so far as to say the game wants you to fail first, and that it wouldn’t have as big an impact if you didn’t.
See, the beauty of missed messages is that it gives you a safe space to experience this failure and learn from it. Various reviewers have discussed how He’s game feels less like a game than a journey, and that strikes me as a great way to highlight one of the reasons I love indie games like this. Indie games don’t face the same pressures to impress or earn as, say, mammoth franchises or flagship titles. This means games like missed messages have more room to focus on quiet moments, explore complicated themes, and take offbeat approaches.
In this case, I think highlighting the difficulty — and the importance — of “paying attention to the ‘bigger picture’” is just one part of it. Most reviews of the game have already pointed out how difficult it can be to spot subtle cries for help. What stood out to me more, though, was how hard it was to do enough — to even know if you’d done enough — even after you’d seen the signs.
What I mean by this is, I knew May wasn’t in a safe headspace on my first playthrough. She thanked me for being her friend, for crying out loud. I asked her if she was okay; I offered to talk to her about it; she admitted things were kind of rough but said she would be fine. All throughout, I knew something was wrong and thought I was picking the best of the dialogue options offered.
But in the end, I still went off to meet AirDrop person. Perhaps worse than most players, I went off thinking I’d done enough — or at least that I’d spotted the crisis, and had done enough to give me time to come back and help more later, if needed. Only, like most players, I didn’t get a “later.” My first run of the game still ended with a couple of missed messages and a note taped to May’s door telling me to call the police.
Considering the gravity of its chosen subject, missed messages deserves a special shout-out for never being preachy or melodramatic. The script feels natural, even intimate — which is great, since this game runs mostly on dialogue and internal narration. I’ve been May and the main character both, at various points in my life, and it’s a testament to the writing that most lines felt so specific and familiar.
The game blurb asks players, “How will you spend your time?” For the experience of playing through a well-crafted story, as well as the artful exploration of how we choose to care for others, missed messages strikes me as a good answer.
On days when I could stomach a future in biology, I would think of becoming a botanist.
This wasn’t out of any particular love for the subject. Our botany lectures were fine albeit mind-numbing, and I hated introductory taxonomy as much as anybody. But there’s a material immediacy to biology that has always appealed to me, and botany seemed the best way to sink my hands into the pulsing heart of living things without having to wade through too much bone and blood and viscera.
I wanted to feel, you see, but I’d had enough of the messes that entailed.
Plants have always been easier than people.
When I was small and the first terrifying, incomprehensible fits of anxiety started, I would hide in the terrace of my grandparents’ house. I’d squeeze into a corner — hoping, maybe, that the pebbled granite would dig into my skin deep enough to give the panic somewhere to drain through.
Sooner or later, my grandmother would come to water the plants. Sometimes she took my hands, ran some water over them to clean up the scrapes. Sometimes she didn’t. Either way, at the end of her rounds, she’d pick me up and take me back into the house. Calmness, for me, still starts as shades of purple, like the bougainvilleas I’d watch her tend on the worst afternoons.
In the long summers during high school, when I had to learn and relearn how to be home, I’d bring in some calamansi from the tree outside and watch my grandfather squeeze it over the pancit he’d always have for merienda. He’d give me an extra fork so we could share, and I’d always decline because tiny decisions like that used to feel like the only way to bring my life to heel, but the offer would settle my nerves, anyway. Sometimes we talked; sometimes we didn’t.
When I think of the home we used to share, there’s still that skip and stutter, straight from the extra calamansi I used to roll across the tabletop, the leathery skin of it sticking a little on the glass. The settling, I think, I’ll have to relearn elsewhere.
I don’t know if I can do that here. This place is as far from blood and guts as you can get, but that doesn’t automatically mean solace, does it?
Sometimes I wonder about wandering, how much and how long before it crosses into an unsalvageable rootlessness. If not here, if not in any of the places that came before, then where?
Maybe it’s too early for an answer; maybe it’s too late. In any case, we visited the Gardens for the first time in months today, and it felt good to breathe in flowers again.
The relentless hustle of startup culture, or the crunch of game development, or whatever synonym other tech-adjacent industries like to use for the endless grind of work, all rest on the metaphor of the worker as a single-minded machine.
When I stumbled on this article, then, I had to laugh:
An interesting detail from the study is that this finding only applies to “biologically realistic neuromorphic processors.” That is, most other artificial systems don’t run into this problem. Rest — or some analogue of it — becomes necessary only when systems try to mimic human brain function.
What is it about the way we think? Setting aside considerations of biology and chemistry, why does human thought require sleep?
Rest is strange in the grip of a pandemic.
Most of us are presumably confined to our homes, and on paper that sounds like an occasion to relax. It isn’t, of course: fear and anxiety are constant; some people have to grapple with childcare duties, uncomfortable home or family situations, loss of income, the need to risk their health to survive, the dissolution of boundaries that tends to occur with extended remote work arrangements.
No wonder so many people are having weird dreams or keeping odd hours.
“Has your sleep been messed up too?” a friend asked me recently, when we met up to check on each other’s sanity.
We’re both uncomfortable with rest, it turns out. The circuit breaker (CB) was a time for paranoia and unease, not just over the virus but over what actions might be penalised in the country’s attempt to contain the spread.
Early on, she’d helped friends move out of their flat and belatedly wondered if that counted as a social visit to another household, leading to a whole month of fretting. She had been sleeping at 4 AM. These days — a week or so into Phase 2 of the post-Circuit Breaker period; months (for her) and weeks (for me) into excruciating job situations — she’s been trying to sleep before midnight.
“I slept at 8 AM,” I offered. That was one time, and anxiety is ultimately easier to endure while unconscious, but in any case, it made her feel better.
