August 2022 Line Rider Roundup
It’s been another slower month, but I really appreciate how every release in this roundup is wildly different from the others. It really feels like we’ve come a long way, as a community, from when I first started these. I’ve definitely gotten a lot better at writing them - there are plenty that I look back on with no small amount of cringe - and of course I have no way of knowing how much this shift had to do with these roundups, but I hope this trend continues of people making whatever they enjoy and finding their unique artistic voice. Long live Line Rider!
Thanks as always to my guest reviewers - Ethan Li, Ava Hofmann, and Fern (from the channel Branches). Their work is greatly appreciated, even when we see Line Rider works from completely different perspectives. It’s good - if a little uncomfortable - for me to be reminded that my perspective is highly subjective!
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
🙌 = highly recommended
👍 = recommended
🤷 = neutral
👎 = not recommended
on a day like this one - Ava Hofmann
[cw: emotional abuse]
When I made Broken in 2016, a minimalist piece about depression and healing, I haphazardly stumbled into the emotional themes by accident while experimenting with alternative movement sync. For years afterward, I struggled with the feeling that this had been a fluke. on a day like this one, however, captures what it is like to truly heal in ways that 2016 me could never have imagined.
on a day like this one is a direct sequel to Ava’s January release My Pal Foot Foot [cw: animal abuse] and April release Know Thy Self [cw: transmisia, dismemberment, hanging], completing what Ava calls The September Trilogy. At the end of Know Thy Self, our main character, September, has been disowned by her abusive parents, and subsequently dismembered, after coming out as transgender. on a day like this one sees her having transitioned, now in a safe and supportive environment with a loving partner and a cat of her own, slowly putting herself back together. The exorcism she underwent to try to stop being trans haunts her as a nightmare, she plays guitar and sings on her own terms, and her mother calls her on the phone and makes her cry. We get a small but important taste of the healing process - September writes down the reasons she blames herself for what happened to her and throws the pages into the sea, decides she needs to set better boundaries with her mom, and finally opens the last box to re-attach her head.
All of this is communicated with astonishing elegance. The track is integrated with the drawings in beautiful, thematic ways, such as riding writing on a piece of paper, or bouncing off a phone as her mom calls. The secondary red color - loud and angry in My Pal Foot Foot, dark and bloody in Know Thy Self - has faded into a soft pastel pink, and expanded into an even larger presence than the black in on a day like this one. The comic book presentation style that blew me away in My Pal Foot Foot has been refined here - it’s not as chaotic and rough as Know Thy Self, but the linear nature of My Pal Foot Foot has been replaced with a meandering traversal that uses the moments when Bosh reverses direction to linger on visual moments. The camerawork is stunning, framing little drawn moments and bits of dialogue with impeccable timing, both for emotional conveyance and for clarity. A cutaway to fixed cam introduces September’s inner monologue towards the end of the piece, as she takes another step in the healing process:
I need to set better boundaries with my parents.
Somehow, I keep changing.
It’s terrifying.
But it reminds me: I am part of life.
It’s a quiet, unassuming, understated piece, and yet I find it amazing that a track like on a day like this one exists at all. Its combination of poetry, comic-book-style narrative, and powerful metaphoric imagery - and the way it conveys all of this in a gorgeous blend of movement, words, and drawings - it only could have been made by Ava, and it only could have been made in Line Rider. And yet, the capacity of this piece to convey the struggle of slow healing from trauma is beyond my wildest dreams.
It’s rare to watch a Line Rider track that is able to effectively convey a complex emotion. It’s even rarer for that emotion to be one that personally resonates with me. And one of the most challenging emotions to convey in art is the messy, human complexities of how it actually feels to heal. This is the first Line Rider track that I’ve ever watched that met me where I was at in my struggles with trauma, things that often feel hopeless, and helped to show me a path forward - if not concretely, at least emotionally. on a day like this one took my arm and gently reminded me that the first step towards healing is believing that it’s possible, and showed me a little micro-vision of what that could look like, at least for September. I’m grateful for that.
🙌
Fly Around - Branches
Fly Around is a work with so many charming little details that I could easily sit here and talk about an endless parade of individual moments I loved until this review became comically long, and still completely fail to get to the heart of why it’s a soaring unmitigated delight of a Line Rider track. So instead of doing this, I’m going to skip over all that and attempt to discuss the how. The mechanics of Fly Around are integrated so seamlessly and confidently that it’s easy not to notice them. Scenery and invisible lines are paired with offsled to make the bodies of sledders appear to fly through the air. Camerawork is used with multiriders to pan over to a second scene, paired with colored lines to create a fantastic sense of chaos in one moment, and for one hilarious joke whose punchline is delivered by a well-timed zoom-out reveal. Sections of plain, unscened track set to instrumental sections of the song phase right into little scenery vignettes depicting whatever Bill Wurtz happens to be singing about. The movement sync is joyful and playful - precise without feeling mechanical, chaotic without feeling messy, always hitting the right spot at the right time and striking just the right tone. What shocks me is how effortless it all feels - I doubt you’ll be thinking about any of this while watching Fly Around, it’s far more likely that you’ll be thinking stuff like “Whoa!!! Cool!!! Aw!!!! CUTE!!! YOOOOOO!!! Oooh!!! Nice!!!”
This is because the real strength of Fly Around is the theming. It’s interesting to compare Fly Around to Xavi’s And the day goes on, a Line Rider track from last year set to another Bill Wurtz song. I am a big fan of And the day goes on, but it’s a much more direct literal interpretation than Fly Around - either a single line of the song is being depicted in isolation from everything around it - often directly referencing the music video - or the words of the song are simply written out on the screen. In contrast, Jade’s track has tons of interpretation and personal meaning layered on top of the song in Fly Around. It’s just as cryptic as the Bill Wurtz song it’s set to, but there are unmistakable themes of traveling/earth, flying/sky, transitioning/change, and remembering/nostalgia, all set to a backdrop of playful future-oriented optimism. Jade is extremely confident in her unique style of movement and visuals in Fly Around, which enables a free-flowing stream of ideas, including tons of clever jokes playing on lines in the song, as well as cryptic imagery of things like benches and drawings that keep cropping up in all her tracks. We might not know exactly what it’s all referring to, but it captures the emotions associated with the specifics of memory and the fear and excitement of moving onto the next stage of your life, especially as a queer person, with elegance, fun, and beauty.
🙌
Palaces - Ray
Guest review by Ethan Li:
[spoilers for Palaces, the video games Journey and A Short Hike, and the Line Rider track Mount Eerie]
Ray's Palaces is a striking track for me because of what its ending does with the track's arduous climb up the side of a mountain. After a slow grind up characterized by struggling and halting motion and by bouts of falling down and then crawling back up, a tumbling Bosh loses their sled and collapses face-up on a summit marked by a tattered flag. The track ends with the camera zooming out to reveal that our summit isn't actually the mountaintop - that Bosh, unable or unwilling to get up and keep going, is staring up the side of an even taller peak right in front of them. Oof. How do we make sense of what this track does here?
I think there are many meaningful and interesting ways to understand this (for example, if the tattered flag at the end is seen as an eroded representation of the strikingly similar flag symbol which Line Rider uses to indicate Bosh's start position in tracks, we could also read this as a story of Line Rider burnout), and I look forward to interpretive inspiration from the other reviews of this track in this roundup. The most interesting interpretation for me is of Palaces as an existential exploration of struggle and life+death - because three other works I love also represent and explore nature/mountain-climbing, danger/struggle, and life/death, and they all provide their own perspectives in ways that shape how I see Palaces. So I'll take a detour in this review to share what those works mean to me and what I think they say about death - in other words, what they say about life.
The penultimate chapter of thatgamecompany's post-apocalyptic desert-to-mountaintop pilgrimage game, Journey, mirrors the ending of Palaces. High in the snowy mountains, you're constantly being blown back by winds which slow you and even knock you down. As you trudge up a vast and steep hill studded with grave markers, the camera points up at the top of the mountain, looming so close and yet so far. Eventually you collapse face-first into the snow. You're freezing to death in a whiteout, with no remaining hope of reaching the mountaintop after your challenging journey. Depending on the game's multiplayer system, maybe you've just witnessed your companion collapse in front of you. Maybe you're falling side-by-side because the two of you were huddling together in an attempt to generate warmth for each other. Or maybe, having been abandoned long before, you're dying alone. But unlike Palaces, Journey continues past this end. You have an experience, which might be a hallucination or might be real, of being revived by the Ancestors and given a second wind to ascend to the mountaintop in the transcendent final level. Either way, after the end you are sent out through the sky back to the first level of the game. This is an opportunity to start a new journey and face the coming struggles, to build different relationships with other strangers on the internet, to make different choices, to die of cold over and over and find reasons along the way to do it yet again. Through your death and rebirth, Journey invites you to make your own meaning out of your life.
Adam Robinson-Yu's island-exploration/mountain-climbing game, A Short Hike, approaches life and death from a very different angle. Claire, a teenage bird, is taken to an island as a summer trip away from the busyness of the city. Eventually she decides to climb up the island's mountain in order to look for cell reception - previously she'd just been waiting for a phone call at her cabin on the island. The final stretch up the mountain turns out to be difficult, even a bit dangerous due to the freezing temperatures at the high altitude, but eventually Claire reaches the top. As she sits, relaxes, and looks around, we tune in to the sounds of the world in a way we hadn't before - we listen to the bird calls (which remind me of the bird calls left behind at the start of Palaces), the mountain, and the wind. By now Claire has completely forgotten about cell reception, but her phone suddenly rings and she receives a call from her mother. We learn that Claire was looking for cell reception not out of any lack of interest in the nature and people around her, but instead because she was preoccupied with anxiety about losing her mother in a surgery that day, and about her mother being alone in such a situation. She still isn't ready to accept an inevitable future without her mother. But through Claire's wanderings around the island, she/we explored the surrounding trails and lands; and she/we talked to, helped, shared vulnerable moments with, learned from, and played together with the unique people she/we met along the way. These engagements and detours are what makes A Short Hike so fun to play, and they're what Claire will remember at the end of the day. To wrap up the phone call, Claire's mother encourages Claire to catch a transient updraft at the summit - to ride on the wind even higher than it seemed we could climb, leave the summit we spent so much effort ascending, and glide down around the island while taking in all the people and places we visited before we end our trip and return to the city. A Short Hike gives us an opportunity to imagine (re)orienting ourselves in our impermanent relationships with nature and other people - to shift our attention toward the things which make life livable and meaningful, especially with an awareness of the inevitability of their endings.
Branches's Mount Eerie also does a lot with living, life, dying, and death - more than I want to try to squeeze in here, so I'll just refer you to Ava Hofmann & S's guest review of the track. Go (re-)read it now before you continue, so that I don't have to include its full text in my review here! For reasons Ava & S present in their review, Mount Eerie powerfully represents the fleeting nature of life together with various modes of non-living existence and transformation - processes not only after death, but also beyond a traditional life/death binary, such as for weather and rocks more concretely and for our continuity with the universe more abstractly - in order to build a profound picture of how beautiful it can be to exist in the world if we recognize the totality of change-as-nature and existence-as-change.
With these readings of Mount Eerie, A Short Hike, and Journey, let's return to Palaces. Just like cherry blossoms, which are commonly associated with 物の哀れ (mono no aware, which might be understood in English as an awareness and sensitivity to the transience of everything that exists, and a feeling of bittersweet poignancy in that recognition) because of their short and intense presence every year and the fragile beauty in how their soft pink petals fall, the petal falling from the flower in Palaces points us to the impermanence of things. So too does the fraying of the flag at the end: the flag is part of this world, and so it is in a process of decay and transformation. And we might recognize other changes, too: Bosh runs out of their capacity to keep climbing, and their sled falls down the steep side of the mountain, leaving them prone and exposed to the elements at the summit. The smaller peak, which once was someone's goal to climb and plant a flag on (and perhaps was a goal for Bosh to climb), can no longer motivate Bosh's journey here - they've reached the peak now, and they might even be stuck. The mountaintop, which could have been a goal for Bosh to climb, has now changed into a reminder of the limits of striving. And with Bosh still alive and staring at the mountaintop, the track ends, as if to ask: Since this is the end of a journey filled with struggle (and maybe pain or even suffering), how will you find meaning for yourself? Since your situation has changed, how will you change? Since you are alive, how will you live/die?
🥀🏴⛰
Palaces sits in a similar place for me as vsbl's Cold Death [cw: suicide] and Ava Hofmann's My Pal Foot Foot [cw: emotional abuse, animal abuse], in the sense that all three raise some pretty heavy questions, and all three make me eager for future tracks from any creator to thoughtfully explore the many dimensions of those questions. A great example of this is what Ava did with her September Trilogy project, which concluded with this past month's on a day like this one (reviewed above). I'm excited for whatever Ray might offer next on the theme of existence.
Guest review by Fern:
Maybe I’m too optimistic in our current hellscape of a society, but when I watch Palaces I don’t focus on the defeat or supposed death of Bosh; what gets me is that after Bosh dismounts, there is a verbalization — the singer holds back from saying anything aloud up until this point, prior to which there are only restrained electronic-ambient piano textures to set the scene for Bosh’s uphill struggle. There’s a way that this carefully-timed placement of lyrics at the piece’s conclusion feels like a coming-to-terms or an explanation for what we just watched. Have you ever kept persisting at something but have only been able to describe why you kept going after you stopped? Or perhaps, was that articulation what gave you the ability to clearly approach an unhealthy situation so it could be ended?
Though the track’s ending reads as extremely bleak if we interpret Bosh’s sledding to symbolize the futility of one’s entire life, interpreting the track’s story beats as a representation of an impermanent endeavour or situation, for me, is both more interesting and more hopeful. An example for our system is the making of the Line Rider track Mount Eerie. While making it we could not describe the reason for our obsessive continuous creation of the piece, but afterwards, when we gave ourselves enough space to zoom out and view the piece as a whole, we realized, “Oh, this is about transness, and I’m a trans woman. That’s why I kept going at it.” Funnily enough, Bosh’s movement in Palaces (which may I say, is some of my favourite I’ve ever seen, due to how delicately a struggle is conveyed) bears strong narrative and emotional resemblance to the mountain climb segment of Mount Eerie, the obvious difference being, in Palaces, Bosh never reaches the top — when the grade intensifies too much, she slips, dismounts, and flails herself up until she is left motionless underneath a flag and the looming of another peak that stretches way beyond where she currently resides. We’re left with a confession in the lyrics:
I thought beyond the exit
There would be palacesInitially, this seems disappointing — I thought there would be a reward for my struggle; a light at the end of the tunnel — but upon reexamination, I can’t help but wonder, why would we want there to be palaces? Palaces are giant homes where people who are at the “top” of society reside, ruling over everyone else. In today’s capitalism-driven society, ideologies of hard work and relentless struggle are viewed as necessary steps to achieve success, and to be rewarded for that success with bountiful amounts of wealth so you can have a stable financial situation and have a home to live. The more successful and powerful you are, the bigger a house you can afford, and the bigger the house, the more it resembles a palace and acts as a status symbol. Ray’s work has attempted to dismantle these ideologies before in I wish I could, and I think it’s happening again here, at least subconsciously. The spoken confession is admitting that the idea of there being a monetary reward for working yourself to the bone is bullshit.
This is why the ending of Palaces reads to me more as a healthy quitting than a complete failure or disappointment. The choice to stop or cut something off is an empowering one, even if it’s painful in the moment, and even if there will always be a peak higher to climb. Not every mountain top needs to be conquered, and realizing and articulating this is one of the most considerate things someone can do for their own health and wellbeing.
I think the fact that Palaces is so effortlessly captivating, despite its apparent simplicity, comes down to the evocative power of two things: purposely subtle movement, and forcing the viewer to sit with discomfort. In concrete terms, almost nothing happens in Palaces - the sledder slowly climbs up a slope - but the way they climb is so well-executed that it creates a palpable sense of struggle, almost as if they have to push their sled forward to make any progress. It takes effort to climb this mountain, which is a big part of what makes the ending feel so bleak. The other part, of course, is that Ray understands our desire for there to be some kind of resolution, or the future possibility for one, at the top of this mountain, and purposely withholds this from us. Not only is the sole thing on this desolate peak a tattered old flag, but this isn’t even the top. This resistance to giving the viewer some sort of relief within the work itself is uncomfortable, and it’s up to the viewer to resolve that, not Ray. The ending of Palaces may be one of total hopelessness, but the way it shows us this pushes us to carve out our own meaning in life, and that’s anything but.
👍
sometimes - gavinroo538
[cw: dissociation]
This video makes my brain fuzzy. Usually when I watch a Line Rider video, I am constantly scanning, trying to absorb every detail that I can, in a manner so habitual that I rarely realize I am doing it. sometimes, however, seems specifically designed to make this impossible. A number of effects are employed to match the shoegaze music of My Bloody Valentine - the background and track lines are entirely limited to two shades of red, scribbles of decreasing thickness create a diffusion effect, much of the piece is recorded at a very close zoom, Bosh frequently hovers around the edge of a vertically-locked camera, and finally, the entire video has been blurred and a vignette filter applied. It all combines to create a heavily dissociative work that is all but impossible to analyze or describe in specifics, only in terms of vibe. While watching sometimes, my eyes glazed over, I completely zoned out, and my thoughts got all blurred together. It was great.
👍
Crystal River - pocke
For about the first twelve years of Line Rider’s existence, track lines could only ever be black lines on a white canvas, and it was impossible to make them invisible. They could be obscured by or incorporated into scenery, but any scenery was required to take into account not just the movement of the rider, but also the track lines themselves, which could not be altered or hidden. I remember watching Urban Run as a kid and being frustrated that Bosh couldn’t ride down the middle of a road, or path, or skatepark ramp, unless there was a big ol’ line drawn right through where the rider would actually travel. This was one of the biggest limitations of Beta 2, but after years of figuring out how to deal with it, we all learned to accept it as if it were a law of nature. It makes sense, then, that even after invisible lines became possible, with layers being added to Linerider.com in 2018 and made publicly available in 2019, it would take years - and the minds of creators who had never touched Beta 2 - to begin to realize the creative possibilities of putting the track lines on these invisible layers, with releases like Unkillable, The Fall Of Mr. Fifths, Don’t Worry, and Surreal!st Movement, Pt. 1.
Crystal River feels to me like the newest development in this exciting creative frontier. Like Unkillable and The Fall Of Mr. Fifths, the track lines have been made entirely invisible, but this time they have been largely replaced with colorful scribbly approximations. This means that collisions with lines still feel real, but pocke can choose how much of it is smoke and mirrors, play with how precisely the scribbles match the movement, and embrace the playful expressiveness of scribbling away. It’s a simple but effective idea that anyone could have come up with in the past three years, which is why it’s so impressive that pocke is the first to do it.
This idea is enough to carry the track and keep it entertaining throughout, especially with the use of distinct color palettes for different sections of the song, but the rest of Crystal River I would describe as a little uneven. There are various little things that feel out of place - a color palette about a third of the way through feels off, a somewhat random cluster of crystals is never revisited, and there’s a sudden zoom-out that doesn’t quite land as the dramatic payoff it seems like it’s meant to be. But there are moments of brilliance, like neon-blue streams of light that sync with pitch-bent synth notes, a killer visual music-sync when the song drops out and then comes back, a section that looks like futuristic buildings, and an offsled section that matches the shift in the song quite well. There’s not much in the way of narrative, and it’s probably not going to make you feel anything beyond “Whoa, that looks super cool!” But hey, it’s true. It does look super cool.
👍
4 - VV_insane
Guest review by Ava Hofmann:
4 is a solid but unmemorable work by a new trackmaker that would generally go unremarked-upon in these reviews. But there was one thing that I found interesting enough to give a few thoughts on:
Namely, I was surprised that 4 used color layers. Generally, newer players of Line Rider do not use color layers. Why is this the case? Because color layers are a hidden feature within a hidden feature. For LineRider.com, the default url does not allow users to access the layer features at all. Instead, the player must enter a hidden url: linerider.com/?layers. Then, to use color layers, you must rename a layer to a color hex code. From there, a color-picker UI appears and lets you pick whatever color you want. As a result, the main people who can use color layers in Line Rider are those who have access to the Line Rider community and who can tell you about these hidden features, as none of these things are communicated on the Line Rider website.
I don’t really understand the reasoning for hiding the layers feature behind a special url, nor do I understand why layers by default don’t always display the color picker UI. Perhaps there are some issues with the technical implementation for the color picker UI, but surely layers should be a feature in the default .com url?
And these sorts of problems are deeply familiar for the Line Rider community: LineRider.com has a plethora of extremely powerful tools which are almost entirely hidden. Some of this is understandable: LineRider.com is developed part-time by one person, and Conundrumer does not have the time or resources to polish them to perfection. But the result is that the experience of making things in Line Rider is one of using hacks piled on top of hacks piled on top of hacks, and I think it severely limits the number of people who are able to use Line Rider effectively, and thereby limits the diversity of voices and creative approaches Line Rider could contain.
Interestingly, at the same time, there has been renewed interest in developing Line Rider. Scripts can now be saved into track files, and we are in the midst of a bit of a mod revolution for Line Rider, including the ability to import fonts/svgs, adjust line multipliers fractionally, and generate polygons/spirals/etc. Furthermore, much of the quirk/LRA side community seems ready to adopt .com, if not for a few features present in Line Rider Advanced missing in .com. This is very understandable, considering that LRA no longer works on Mac, and even projects like Line Rider Advanced: Community Edition are no longer being extensively developed. Increasingly, I wonder about the possibility of uniting the tools that Line Rider creators use, closing informational and feature gaps, and ending a developmental divide that has characterized the Line Rider community for over half a decade. It seems possible to me at this point, although not easy by any means. At the very least, I have hope for such a future.
NOT A REVIEW OUT OF 10.
Grid - Csquare2
Grid seeks to be, according to the creator, a track that “the inner-circle of the community will like.” Judging by the content of the track - a surface-level attempt at copying moments from tracks like Brain Power and Selee - this “inner circle” is creators like myself, Conundrumer, and Andrew Hess. It’s for this reason I hesitate to review this track - it makes me pretty uncomfortable to discuss my feelings about a work when I know the creator will be doing a close read of every word I say, and might potentially get very upset if I have negative things to say. So I’ll skip over all that, and jump to why I think Grid falls flat, which has more to do with the approach than the execution.
I would describe the approach like so: Csquare2 saw some Line Rider works that they really liked, so they attempted to copy moments and elements of those works to create their own work. This is an extraordinarily common approach, dating all the way back to people copying TechDawg’s scenery styles in 2007, but it rarely results in anything that isn’t completely overshadowed by the work it’s copying. The reason it rarely works is because this approach fails to take into account that what they enjoyed was not itself created by copying others, but through the creator finding paths to creating art they enjoyed making and that resonated with others. Everyone takes inspiration from others, of course, but it’s important to recognize that we’re all better off trying to find what we are uniquely equipped to create and how we can spend our energy moving towards charting our own path as an artist, rather than following in the footsteps of those we idolize.
👎
Either - Ava Hofmann
Guest review by Fern:
Before diving into the elements of this utterly inscrutable, modern-day “omnitrack” (a term used in earlier Line Rider times to describe tracks showcasing a full array of every trick a quirker knew how to do), I feel a bit of context about the background music, “Judges” by Colin Stetson, will be important to discussing my relationship with this track:
“Judges” is a song with a bassline, drumbeat, and melody, all being performed on one bass saxophone simultaneously. In this interview Stetson demonstrates each musical component of the song, using unhinged techniques such as circular breathing, attaching tiny microphones to the inside the horn to amplify the percussion of keypads being pressed, and vaguely screaming into the horn to create hellish overtones by intensely tightening his throat. As a saxophonist myself, I find myself enamoured by how intimately Stetson has grown to understand such obscure and inventive techniques around the saxophone physics engine, if you will, and even more in love with how these techniques form such an unorthodox and textually rich sonic landscape together.
Alt-quirk and jazz were recently discovered to be a harmonious combination in banky’s recent releases such as BRING DOWN THE HOUSE and fruit punch. For me, part of why this combination works so well is because both jazz and quirk are languages of expression rooted in diverging from the norm and exploring styles and ideas that would almost feel wrong in more classical contexts. They also share an emphasis on advanced technical ability, though this aspect has only previously been leaned into in HOLD YOUR BREATH (the title of which is a reference to clarinetist Doreen Ketchens’ impeccable breath control) but Either shows a self-awareness towards the stylistic overlap of Colin Stetson’s performance and omnitracks being both relentlessly impressive and bizarre.
I feel that the context behind how the song was created matching the mindset towards the track’s conceptualization (or at least, what initially made quirk compelling at all) makes it a far stronger piece than most older quirk tracks. There’s also an intentional emphasis on using “jokes” and “flow-killers” to explore territory of motion that would be devalued for being too rough or amateurish a decade ago, which also aligns with the uprising of jazz as well as Stetson’s musical approach. However, while Ava attempts to use “disgusting/uncomfortable movement” as a direct revolt towards long-held assumptions about quirk, the track is nowhere near as subversive as the majority of Ava’s Line Rider catalogue; on the surface, the track still feels homogeneous with what so much of past Line Rider creators chose to focus on.
In terms of Ava continuing her multi-track homage to a bygone era of early quirk-doers, the comedy and silliness in Either isn’t delivered as effectively as in Surreal!st Movement, Pt. 1, and Anemoia 2 is more effective in getting us to emotionally care about the quirk pioneers. Nonetheless, Either is still an important piece in Ava’s historical re-assessment of quirk, as it shows a more faithful interpretation of older work while still being critical and developing Ava’s personal values as a quirker. I’m very happy it exists.
I feel like I’m losing my mind. Ava Hofmann, creator of Line Rider works with incredible storytelling along powerful themes, such as I Want To Be Well and My Boy, has released a track that, if it didn’t have remounting and was more allergic to slow flatsled, would be virtually indistinguishable from Beta-2-era quirk. It’s got manuals, it’s got gravity wells, it’s got black lines on a white background, it’s got granuals, it’s got space recycling, it’s got actual recycling that’s slow and janky, it’s got tiny XY sections for no reason, it’s got vague sync to shifts in the music, it’s even got a gigantic evolving foot fling.
It also comes with a long manifesto in the description, that describes Either in ways that are strikingly similar to how Kramwood described Resurgence in 2020, or how Hedgehogs4Me described The River in 2010. It’s all here - Either is about subverting quirk tropes and trick categories, it’s about prioritizing things the creator enjoys about various classic quirk tracks, it’s about rejecting the omnitrack philosophy that it’s best to organize different styles into clear and distinct sections, and it’s described as a work of critical analysis and re-imagination of quirk from a philosophical perspective. There’s even a whole paragraph devoted to a new stable quirk state discovered by the creator, made possible by the 2020 remount feature, which she calls a “hofmanual” - ostensibly sarcastically, but while using “georgual” and “kramual” elsewhere in the statement without comment. As if that wasn’t enough, there is a promise that a scened version of Either will be released in the future, which genuinely gave me a brief trauma flashback. Given that I have read, railed against, critically dissected, and made art to deal with my anger around each and every one of these things an exhausting number of times in the past, and ultimately - thankfully - finally! - have not had to think about any of this in years, Either feels like some elaborate way to troll me specifically. If I weren’t personally friends with Ava and know (and trust) this not to be the case, it’s very possible I would have assumed this to be obvious bait, decided that any review I could write about Either would be falling for it, and refused to write a word.
I suppose I could drag out all my tired old arguments for why Either near-universally fails at the goals it sets out in its manifesto, as innumerable quirks have before it. I could sit down and give a lengthy history lesson on how very smart people talked themselves into very silly beliefs, like the idea that doing two flings on top of each other would fundamentally revolutionize Line Rider. I could write a video-essay length review here, I can feel it burning at me - and if I’m honest with myself, I think part of me would really enjoy it - but what would that accomplish? When I ask myself where that impulse is coming from, it’s not pretty. This desire that lives in me, to eviscerate the philosophy responsible for all my hardships in the Line Rider community in the 2010s - to burn any trace of it to the ground and salt the earth so nothing can ever grow there again - it’s a punitive urge, born of a destructive desire to hurt that which harmed me. Not only is Ava innocent here, but the forces I once struggled against are no longer the inescapable ideology of the Line Rider community. The idea that anyone, in 2022, would watch tracks like Either and then decide to craft their entire body of Line Rider creative work in conversation with it is laughable. Hell, just this month Ava herself released on a day like this one (reviewed above), a track that’s better at making all of my old arguments than anything I could possibly write here. Quirk has, once again, become a harmless source of fun and creative experimentation. I can, and should, relax. So, while I personally find Either both utterly boring and borderline-retraumatizing, it’s very clearly not a danger to me or society. I’m glad Ava is exploring and discovering quirk for herself, on her own terms, and I shouldn’t want to stand in the way of that process.
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lkdsfjlsdfjlsdjfklsdfl hi - Ava Hofmann
Guest review by Fern:
If movement in Line Rider is a form of 2-dimensional dance, lkdsfjlsdfjsldjfklsdfl hi is the memory of our 12-year-old confused boy-body being dragged to a Baptist Church dance party with our sibling’s friends and being mystified on how people could find genuine expression through oscillating and wobbling their flesh sack prisons. This track is what we saw in that moment of stimming in a corner next to a piano: teenagers ba-going-ing— <UH.> <UH.> <UGH.> <UGh.>, back and forth to superficial sounds that had a straight beat alongside many other things, but nothing substantial. When listening to mainstream pop-dance music, our brain often fixates on one instrument because it doesn’t blend with the other parts, and it’s awful because these parts clearly aren’t produced by a living creature, or at least not one who cares about being interesting or creative or expressive. Often this instrument is the bass. It rumbles. It oscillates. It changes like once. And yet it is the primary fuel for the romp.
Since then I have been involved in enjoyable and empowering dance classes and have become completely accepting of my body as a part of myself, and thus, a medium of expression for the self. And this expression through human body movement is what many movement-based tracks dig into wonderfully. But in our dissociative viewing from afar, I couldn’t see genuine interactions between souls even when someone pulled me up and got me to try dancing, and lkdsfjlsdfjsldjfklsdfl hi gives me access to this memory due to its elusively stripped-down sonic textures and socially inscrutable group rider choreography, with each Bosh eventually leaving to their secluded little corners. Unironically relatable.
I want to say something about this one because it’s the first released track with dynamic gravity - every half-second, gravity flips upside down. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot that’s interesting about it besides that. Five riders float about erratically on a large, sparse line structure without much direction or intention until each one crashes and gets shoved into a little box to stop them from continuing to float away. It’s a cool new feature, but a disappointing showcase, compared to, say, My Boy’s incredible showcase of the color layers feature. There’s so much potential for dynamic gravity - the one that jumps immediately to mind is Bosh orbiting a planet - but you’re not going to find much creative use of it here.
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