a spirited defence of failing and failure

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hi!

Hello! Happy Silksong Is Actually Getting Released On September 4 to all those who celebrate!

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, the TL;DR is - there’s this game called Hollow Knight, which is nightmarishly tough but very, very fun, and which came out in the 2010’s. Because it did really well, the indie studio behind it announced that it would release a sequel, Silksong, as soon as they could.

Then they went silent. For six years. Just did not say anything to anyone for year after year after year, to the point that everyone began wondering if maybe “Silksong”, as a concept, had been some sort of mass delusion.

Anyway - yesterday the studio did a livestream, more or less out of nowhere, and used it to say the game’s coming out in two weeks. Also it turns out they took this long to make it because they were just having too much fun so things just got out of hand? Very silly and very heartwarming. Bless them.

Oh and since I’m chatting video games - if you’re looking for something to play, may I recommend Inscryption? It’s a - about to really lose all non-gamers here - deck builder with roguelike elements, though not a full-fat roguelike either. It’s…spooky? And quite creepy at time but, I should say, never actively scary.

I’d recommend googling as little as possible about it as it starts off as a pretty straightforward game then…stuff happens. Mucho stuff. It’s a weird game. I’d never played anything like it before. I’m not done yet but I’ve been having a lot of fun. Maybe you would find it fun too!

That is all. Thank you.

A column

Granted, there are few adults out there who need to be able to do the splits in order to live a life they deem to be truly fulfilling. Unfortunately, I am one of them. I do trapeze and pole dancing and feel passionately about both of them. They're hobbies, sure, but ones I take seriously. It doesn't really matter that I'll never make a living out of either of them; I just consider them to be important parts of my life.

This is why I spent much of the pandemic doing splits training. When I got back into doing exercise, in 2018, I was stiff as a board, but many of my joints became more flexible pretty organically. My back flexibility got better, and after a year or so I was able to touch my toes again, like kids do in the playground to impress each other.

My splits just didn't shift, though. I came in with joints that allowed me to, at best, open my legs at a right angle, and none of the stretching we did in class got me anywhere. Because I had nothing else to do with my life during lockdown, I decided to work on my splits a little bit, every single day. That's what you were meant to do, apparently. With enough discipline, you could get the joint to open up more.

I did my stretches day after day after day, until the world reopened, then I went back to the studio, and do you know what happened? My splits hadn't budged. I could warm up intensely, try very hard, look down and still only see a perpendicular angle, spread out on the floor. It was quite deeply displeasing.

I am, for the time being, on a bit of a hiatus from my circus school, but keep getting better and better at pole. Soon, I'll be able to join the most advanced classes most places can offer. That's neat. What isn't is that there is a hard ceiling to my progress, and soon I will hit it. The better you get at pole, the more often you have to contend with moves and shapes that require quasi-superhuman strength and flexibility.

I've mostly nailed the former, but the latter escapes me. What this means in practice is that I'll never, ever be able to do a spatchcock on the pole, or Russian splits. I've been working on my plus sign recently, and even that feels like something I won't ever be able to fully do. I faced a similar problem in my trapeze class earlier this year. My - lovely, waspish, very queer - instructor showed us a move and I tried to recreate it but I just couldn't get it to look as good as theirs.

What was the problem? Could they maybe take a look and tell me what I was doing wrong? As it turns out, the answer was: "babe I'm sorry, you're doing it right, it's just that your splits are shit". I laughed, they laughed, we moved on. I probably should have been annoyed but I wasn't; at some point in the past few years, I decided to make my peace with the fact that I will never have my splits.

I go to classes where most students have them, my inability to get them means I'll never be a perfect pole dancer but, fundamentally: that's fine. That's life. You just can't always get what you want. Sometimes you may even work really hard and for a really long while to get what you want, and it still won't be enough. Learning to deal with this quite primal form of disappointment is, I increasingly believe, an important part of being alive.

It's also why I worry about generative AI. Did you guess that's where I was going? I worried about my introduction having the subtlety of a herd of buffaloes coming your way, but sometimes it is what it is.