TIFF

The Whole Hog

Decisions, decisions

Lia Matthew Brown

Lia Matthew Brown

— 5 min read
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The Whole Hog

Here was a TIFF. Nine for me — apparently I am logging, and am able to log, VR experiences on Letterboxd now! — and out.

Tangles — an animated adaptation of a graphic novel about a queer woman dealing with her mother’s early-50s Alzheimer’s diagnosis — was the best I saw. Children Untold — about a young girl in the immediate aftermath of World War II in Japan, who styles herself a boy to gain the acceptance and protection of a gang of like-circumstanced orphans — came close. Both were sweeping emotional epics that felt earned, landed their big-cry moments, and didn’t skimp on the cinema.

While we’re here: that VR experience, Lesbian Simulator, made my week. It’s bright and silly and surprisingly involved, and it was the first (and potentially) last time I’ve had VR goggles on my head, but neither the first nor (potentially) the last I’ve thought to myself, I’m a lesbian in the wrong body. Much to work through there, later.

On a more quotidian level: working for the festival (well, the Market) cost me a lot of movies over the summer. I’m hoping to catch up with some of them soon (maybe even in theatres!). The dinosaur one! The Matthew McConnaughey one! The one about the coyote!

And I’m looking forward to just, like, getting back to life, generally. Filling the coffers cost me a writing project (Zombie Survival Camp still uncompleted and, maybe, dead in the water) and any forward momentum on two short films I want to make this year. So maybe they’re a next year thing now; and maybe, that’s that question answered re: creative life. Jobs are so silly.

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Decisions, decisions

Here’s a thread from bluesky that got my attention. I swear I’m not sub-bleating anyone here, it’s just something I’ve spent a lot of the last decade (woof, my forties are over) thinking about. I’m going to embed and annotate but who knows how these things are ever gonna work on Ghost, so if your email looks funny, just refer to to the link above.

Don’t worry, the author himself will avow that this isn’t just about game dev, shortly.

Related/unrelated: I got the word “Decide” tattooed on my ankle (admittedly, in Dwarvish) about a dozen years ago. I thought that was a pretty badass thing to do; I thought it was a lesson I had learned at great pain. But any hope that my tattoo so would inscribe the premise of itself any more deeply than “thing I continue to struggle with basically every single day of my life,” well, that evaporated almost as soon as the blood dried up.

Honey, we are so fucked.

This sidles up to something I’ve been saying since the pandemic era, which is: sometimes you have to make a choice between two bad options. Two directions which both have unpleasant consequences, but which are the only two approachable directions.

Understanding this fairly clearly at the time (still do), I was also pretty quick to understand that there are folk who simply cannot do it. They can’t chose a sub-optimal path, even if sub-optimal paths are the only options. This might get to larger cultural things than just decisionmaking, but boy, there sure are a lot of people — and they generally fall into one category, but I’ll leave that aside for the time being — who think there must be an optimal solution, no matter what. There must be a way to win.

I feel so bad for those people, when I’m not busy being furious with them.

Committing blindly (which I also sometimes do, just to move things along) has a lot of risk and is pretty silly in the long term. But I also want to highlight the “make decisions and put them behind” you part, because that, right there, is what I struggle with. It’s not hard for me to identify the choice and to make it. But to take every subsequent step away from that choice point? When each step feels as, or more so, uncertain than the last? That shit is very difficult.

These two were the ones that really got my attention. The “returning to a old decision is time travel” idea, like there’s a great big CMD-Z in the space-time continuum, is… cuckoo bananapants. The linear progression of time doesn’t have an Undo button! Jesus Christ!

Back to those torturous, uncertain steps. Now that one is feeling the cost of one’s decision, there is literally nothing more alluring than the idea of going back to the choice point and switching the track. In my experience, this always ignores the cost of returning to the choice point, along with the lost time to walk the new track.

Like, sure, change your mind: happens all the time. We can’t be rigid and inflexible. But before doing so, at least tot up the actual reality of managing the change, rather than living in the fantasy of just “getting a do-over.” This ain’t a video game, man, even in gamedev. People got shit to do.

The Harry Potter Shit List

Updated September 22, 2026

  1. Lenny Rush
  2. Billy Barratt
  3. Rupert Grint
  4. Kit Harrington
  5. Nicholas Hoult
  6. Bel Powley
  7. Tim Horton’s
  8. Peter Serafinowicz
  9. Warwick Davis
  10. Lambert Wilson
  11. Anton Lesser
  12. Andy Greenwalt
  13. John Lithgow
  14. Janet McTeer
  15. Nick Frost
  16. Paapa Essiedu
  17. Simon Pegg
  18. Johnny Flynn
  19. Daniel Rigby
  20. Bertie Carvel
  21. Hugh Laurie
  22. Tom Felton
  23. Matthew McFadyen
  24. Riz Ahmed
  25. Mark Addy
  26. Michelle Gomez
  27. Keira Knightley
  28. Alex Hassell
  29. Iwan Rheon
  30. James McAvoy
  31. Ruth Wilson
  32. Bill Nighy
  33. Cush Jumbo
  34. The New York Times
  35. Francesca Gardiner
  36. Jon Brown
  37. Mark Mylod
  38. Casey Bloys
  39. David Zaslav
  40. J.K. Rowling

On a related note, this is extremely funny (given the subject matter).

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