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1) The new century was a new opportunity, he'd decided. If they survived Y2K, if the world didn't end, he was going to be a better man. Also if they survived Y2K he hoped never to hear the term Y2K again.

2) There were aspects of the fairy tale that Vincent was careful not to think about too much at the time, and later her memories of those years had an abstracted quality, as if she'd stepped temporarily outside of herself.

3) Her life in those days was so disorienting that she often found herself thinking about variations on reality, different permutations of events: an alternate reality where she'd quit working at the Hotel Caiette and returned to her old job at the Hotel Vancouver before Jonathan arrived, for example, or where he decided to get room service that morning instead of sitting at the bar and ordering breakfast, or where he did sit at the bar and order breakfast but he didn't like Vincent; an alternate reality where she still lived in the staff quarters of the Hotel Caiette, serving drinks to wealthy tourists all night, years passing. None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she'd landed in, so much so that she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her, other Vincents engaged in different events. [...] Imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War, for example, or where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn't been swiftly contained; an alternate world where the Georgia flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed.

4) An unsettling thought while standing in line for the commissary: when he dies in prison, will he die in the counterlife too?

5) [The] line, for Oskar, had been crossed eleven years earlier, when he'd first been asked to backdate a transaction. "It's possible to both know and not know something," he said later, under cross-examination, and the state tore him to pieces over this but he spoke for several of us, actually, several of us who'd been thinking a great deal about that doubleness, that knowing and not knowing, being honourable and not being honourable, knowing you're not a good person but trying to be a good person regardless around the margins of the bad.

6) "I know what you mean," Leon said. "It's the surprise that bothers me, personally, the way everyone I talk to seems shocked by the downturn in the industry." "Yeah, so, true story, one of our colleagues pulled me aside today, I'm not naming names, and he said, 'I just can't believe what's happening to our industry, can you?' And I'm trying to be patient with these people, I really am, but I had to ask him, which part is surprising to you? Let's break this down. What is it you can't believe, exactly? That people don't want to buy goods when the economy collapses, or that people don't want to ship goods that nobody's buying?"

7) Leon knew that he and Marie were luckier than most citizens of the shadow country, they had each other and the RV and enough money (just barely) to survive, but the essential marker of citizenship was the same for everyone: they'd all been cut loose, they'd slipped beneath the surface of the United States, they were adrift.

1) “what the ocean said to the black boy” they call me blue because they don’t understand how the sky work they call you black because they don’t understand how god work

2) "Counting Descent" I celebrate every breath, tried to start counting them so I wouldn’t take each one for granted. I wish I could give my breath to the boys who had theirs taken, but I’ve stopped counting

because it feels like there are too many boys & not enough breath to go around.

3) "James Baldwin Speaks to the Protest Novel" I want to see all of the complexity and mess and joy and distress of being a complex human being, which is to say a human being. Because isn’t this the problem? That we must write the most exaggerated versions of ourselves to show them something they have already chosen not to see? How can they think us more human if we don’t write ourselves as such?

4) "An Evening at the Louvre" why waste time sculpting when I could make you pancakes in the morning

5) "what the cathedral said to the black boy" close your eyes those stained glass shadows all we got is what we name ourselves otherwise I am just a room you are just body & we know how wrong that is

1) Video games have always been queer. Even games that appear to have no LGBTQ content can be played queerly, and all games can be interpreted through queer lenses. This is because queerness in video games means more than the representation of LGBTQ characters or same-sex romance. Queerness and video games share a common ethos: the longing to imagine alternative ways of being and to make space within structures of power for resistance through play. From the origins of the medium, to the present day, and reaching into the future, video-game worlds have offered players the opportunity to explore queer experience, queer embodiment, queer affect, and queer desire-even when the non-heteronormative and counterhegemonic implications of these games have been far from obvious. Through new critical perspectives, queerness can be discovered in video games, but it can also be brought to games through queer play and queer players, whose choices to engage with games on their own terms and for their own pleasures can profoundly transform the meaning of games and unleash their queer potential. In this way, playing queer, like queer interpretation and queer game design, can be seen as a transformative practice that reframes and remakes games from the inside out.

2) [All] video games can become platforms for playing at the boundaries of heteronormativity-or for disrupting and dismantling heteronormativity itself. The queerness in a video game may lie in the opportunity to resist structures of power, or partake in alternative forms of pleasure, or inhabit embodied and affective experiences of difference. Queerness can be found in how video games construct or disrupt notions of desire, temporality, success, meaning, life, and death.

3) Pong is a classic arcade game, later brought to a number of home game platforms, inspired by the sport of ping-pong. The original Pong is a rudimentary game; only the paddles, the ball, the net, and the score appear on-screen. It has no narrative, no characters, and certainly no explicitly LGBTQ content. By contrast, Between Men is all about characters, narrative, and what would likely today be called queerness. In her book, Sedgwick uses examples from British novels to articulate a system through which she sees male same-sex bonds forming via a triangulation of desire through women. Video games are not mentioned in Sedgwick's book, and the abstracted forms represented in Pong make for an unexpected match with the detailed stories and dialogue analyzed in Between Men. Despite their many differences, however, these two classics can be seen to speak to one another in powerful ways. The dynamic structures that appear in both works in fact closely mirror one another: the erotic triangle described by Sedgwick and the geometric movement of the ball bounced back and forth between paddles in Pong. Both can be understood as interactive systems through which desire is communicated, connection is built, and queer intimacy takes form.

4) At the end of the long, hard struggle in Portal, there is the promise of cake-a girly prize made by women's labor to reward women's labor-but that cake is the very epitome of deception.

5) Specifically, to de-gamify is to strip away the game-like structures already imposed onto life and to remake the world without the imposition of those structures. This process takes place in three steps. First, de-gamification entails identifying instances in which society has already mapped game-like systems of goals, achievements, points, etc., onto human experience in an attempt to regulate, normativize, and exploit that experience. Second, de-gamification entails breaking down those structures and liberating the human experience that they oppress. Third, de-gamification entails creating opportunities for exploring-and thereby playing with-those experiences outside of the game-like structures that have been imposed upon them. This last step speaks to the complexity and even contradiction within the work of de-gamification. At the same time that de-gamification tears down game-like structures, it also facilitates play, which is itself commonly understood in game studies as being fundamentally bounded by rules.

6) I close by reasserting this intentionally incendiary conjecture: that if we accept failure as fundamental to games and we accept failure as coded as queer, all games become queer, in a non-representational sense. This does not just apply to games in which players willingly blow themselves to pieces. If we accept the premise that no game can exist without failure, then no game can exist without a mode of experience that might be called queerness.

7) When we, as players and scholars, talk only about fun experiences, we exclude from our discussions all of those moments in otherwise enjoyable games when we in fact had no fun. We also shut out of sight all of those games we have picked up and played for only a few hours, even a few minutes, and never played again because we found them boring, frustrating, or bad. These too are meaningful experiences, meaningful games, games worthy of attention, not because they are good but because their badness is itself a rich site of meaning. Attending to no-fun-ness allows us to return to these moments of interaction previously dismissed, discarded, and forgotten.

8) On the surface, it would seem that speedrunning and slow strolling are opposite approaches to playing video games. Speedrunners run; slow strollers walk. Speedrunners play to achieve a goal as quickly as possible, by necessity ignoring the nuances and distractions of the game world; slow strollers take their time, soaking in a game's details and tangents. Yet, crucially, what these forms of play have in common is that they both enact alternative-and indeed queer-relationalities to space and time. Both speedrunning and walking simulators resist the standard logics that determine how players should move through video games and at what speed.

9) If this is the future of video games, the future of video games is queer. Queerness describes a way of remaking the world as well as a way of desiring within it.

1) Cape Breton used to export fish, coal, and steel; but in 2005, its main export is people. It's not a unique story in Atlantic Canada. Nor is it a new one. Every Cape Breton family has had its share of empty chairs around the table, for a hundred years. Fathers, siblings, cousins; gone to the "Boston States," gone to Ontario, gone to Alberta—gone to be cheap labour where booming industries demanded it. The only message we got about a better future was that we had to leave home to find one. We did not question it, because this is the have-not region of a have-not province, and it has not boomed here in generations. I need to tell you this—there is no knowing Cape Breton without knowing how deeply ingrained two diametrically opposed experiences are: A deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently we have to leave it to find work somewhere else.

2) "How's the dead hour treating you?" "It is quiet, why?" "'Course it is. It's the Newfoundland radio hour. Everyone is sitting in their trucks." "No mistaking that, I guess." "Aren't you from there?" "No. Cape Breton." "Same thing." "Excuse me, two different places! They're accordians and codfish, we're fiddles and lobster." "For god's sake."

3) "These young ones! Spending their money like fools." "That's not true now. I works hard for my pay!" "Jesus, got to enjoy life a bit too." "Wife's got the house she wants." "Houses too big, brand new trucks, piles of toys—you're only digging a hole." "Ha. Yeah, a hole that's full of oil for a hundred more years." "The Grand Banks were full too." "Jumpin' dyin' Jesus bah we's on a dory is it! The Grand fuckin' Banks is it!" "All I'm saying is you only knows the good times, don't you. Let me tell you my son, that don't last. You can't make it. It's not up to you." "..." "Ambrose—were you a fisherman, before?" "I'm still a fisherman. I'm just here."

4) "Doug, why are there so many of us here?" "Who?" "From home. Why are there so many of us here. Why here?" "Why not." "Well, people could go anywhere. But we're all here instead." "This is where the jobs are." "I know not just us. Half of Newfoundland is here. The U.K. The Philippines. But still, you could go to Toronto, somewhere else." "Toronto! And what am I going to do in Toronto! Why didn't you go to goddamned Toronto!" "I know. I know! I know I couldn't pay my debt there. I'm just... thinking. Do you think this place makes people better or worse?" "Wha??" "Well, camp's not a normal place, is it? Nobody likes it here. Everyone wishes they were somewhere else." "I've seen worse. Got a bed here, food. And the money." "Do you like it here?" "Doesn't matter." "Doug?" "What." "What did you do before you came here?" "I did it all. I did everything." "Were you a coal miner?" "Jesus, was I a coal miner? Coal, fishing, steel... But that's all gone, isn't it."

5) "You draw comics? You should make a website. Me and my friend have a comics website." "Really? How do I do that?"

6) "Did you hear about those ducks?" "Ducks?" "Yeah. Like three hundred of them got stuck in a tailings pond down by Syncrude or somewhere." "Really? Ugh, I used to work there."