Two Essays Responding to Stage 3 of Andrew Hess's Everywhere at the End of Time, by Ethan Li and Jade

If you’re like me, by far the most memorable review in the history of the Line Rider Roundup in your mind is Ethan Li’s review of Everywhere at the End of Time Stage 1 by Andrew Hess, which critiqued the piece’s 1950s iconography through an Asian-American lens. Well, recently Ethan submitted an even longer essay about (among other things) the newly-released Stage 3 of Andrew’s project, and then Jade wrote an even longer essay in response. Given that these two essays together are longer than any previously published entire roundup, they’re being published here as a standalone post. Without further ado:

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review of EATEOT Stage 3 / maybe also actually a meta-review?

by Ethan Li

I recently read Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World, which deconstructs how writing is evaluated in MFA-style fiction workshops and then suggests alternative ways to evaluate and provide feedback on drafts. While art criticism in the mission of Line Rider Review (and the Monthly Roundup) - i.e. as criticism for published works - falls outside the scope of Salesses's focus on workshops as feedback for in-progress works, my review here is centered around Craft in the Real World for three reasons:

1. I think its discussion of audience and implied audience (which Salesses defines for authors as “the perfect reader for our work, who would understand everything and would read the book exactly as we intend [...] the reader whose experiences and interpretations the author anticipates”, in contrast to actual living breathing people beyond the writer: readers who bring their own personal, culturally-shaped experiences and interpretations) resonates with, extends, and clarifies - but also might complicate, particularly in the context of questions about audience/viewership for works by minority artists in Line Rider spaces, and also in the context of communities whose members are both creators and audiences - several ideas discussed by Bevibel in their Line Rider in Depth essay on ICRTLWY (e.g. in quotes of Art and Fear about what kind of knowledge or interest “the audience” do or do not have, and what does or does not matter to “all viewers but” the creator).
   
   And the reimagined workshop proposed by Craft in the Real World seems to offer a hand to pull us out of the lonely tarpit which Bevibel’s Line Rider in Depth essay had described of “the process of determining how and why your work succeeded - and didn’t - at what you were trying to do” seeming like an “entirely internal” process (and, in my perhaps-flawed interpretation of that description, therefore a silent process, which makes the process extra lonely). I think Salesses’s toolkit for reimagined writing workshops is all about facilitating a practice of external involvement in supporting an artist to develop their understanding of how and why their draft work might or might not succeed at their goals.
   

2. As far as I’m aware, workshopping isn’t visible as a formally named/structured practice in Line Rider art-making. Yet there are people out here beyond just me who (I suspect) have wanted to hear feedback on their previous releases as a way to inform how they approach their next projects. So when we publish reviews about releases, maybe those are also sometimes implicitly desired/received by the creators of those releases as a kind of extended workshop for their art-making processes, a workshop where in-progress/imagined works are revised/reimagined in place of published works. Indeed, when I attempted to write past reviews oriented towards “constructive criticism”, I was explicitly responding to an assumed desire for workshopping. If such a desire does indeed lurk in the shadows of the reviews published in the Monthly Roundup, then Craft in the Real World might pose some useful questions for responding to that desire more consciously (though Salesses’s questions and suggestions would have to be translated from the art-making cultures of literary fiction into the art-making cultures of Line Rider). And interpreting our art criticism forums through the concept of “workshop” might help us to respond to challenging situations we've encountered, such as critical reviews causing disproportionate emotional reactions (whether voiced or unvoiced) from the creators of the reviewed works. Salesses argues that:
   

   • As one of my MFA professors used to warn, workshop is most helpful to whoever speaks the most, not to the person being workshopped.
     
     Indeed I have found this warning to be overwhelmingly accurate. Workshop’s greatest pedagogical value is in its ability to help writers clarify their own aesthetics (often referred to as “finding their voice”). But this work does not happen in silence. You clarify your aesthetics by talking and writing about how you believe fiction should work and what you believe fiction should do (that is, by actively engaging with the cultural expectations you have learned and are learning).
     

   Forums like the Monthly Roundup are places where we reviewers, in reviewing any works except our own, often have spoken in ways that happen to lead us to new insights about our own aesthetics - or at least that has been my own experience. And these are places in which - like the kinds of workshops Salesses criticizes for failing to give sufficiently relevant/helpful/encouraging feedback on craft - we reviewers evaluate the works we receive without asking the artists for context/guidance about how we might evaluate those works. But this is not necessarily a bad thing: if the goal of the Monthly Roundup is to focus on published products (as a criticism forum) rather than on creators’ ongoing artmaking processes (as a workshop), then it’s probably not very useful to evaluate whether the Monthly Roundup succeeds as a workshop, and many of my reflections here may not be so helpful.
   

3. this review of stage 3 of Andrew Hess's Everywhere At the End of Time series (which is maybe actually secretly a meta-review of the Monthly Roundup? idk) is also an experiment in partially workshopping the series by trying to follow Salesses’s direction towards a reimagined way to workshop. The EATEOT series is an in-progress project being published in installments, so our reviews of each installment might (whether for better or worse or anywhere in between) have effect as a kind of workshopping criticism for an ongoing serialized artwork. And because I have a biased personal investment in Everywhere At the End of Time continuing to do interesting things as an art project, I think it’s worth consciously framing my review of it as a kind of workshop feedback (even if it’s actually unsolicited feedback, which is perhaps Not Always a Best Practice! oopsies 😊).

three memories of art criticism

Actually, I also have a fourth, more personal, reason: reading some anecdotal situations described in Craft in the Real World prompted me to reflect on three past instances of my experiences on both ends (giving and receiving) of criticism practices in Line Rider. And Salesses’s challenge of the “cone of silence” or “gag rule” in traditional creative writing workshops (in which the author being workshopped does not speak about their work and their intentions before/while receiving feedback) made me reflect more deeply on my own various kinds of self-imposed cones-of-silence since 2021, in a way that I now feel a bit of confidence that I might have a positive impact by interrupting one of those silences (the others...still feel like big mountains in my mind, unfortunately). To quote Salesses:

Even the authors [...] were used to workshop taking the work out of their own hands. One student said it made her very uncomfortable to have to answer questions about her own story, rather than sit back and listen. But more than that, I think, they all had gone through many years of school where literature is discussed via interpretation: not by asking questions of the author, but by using the text to answer questions of our own.

In workshopping via only questions, I had meant to interrogate process—the one thing workshop offers us that literary analysis usually does not—I had meant to let the author work out for herself what to do with her story, not give persuasive power to other people’s readings. I wonder whether my students’ attachment to the cone-of-silence model was precisely because it mimics the real-world power situation. In the world, the majority holds power and we are expected to know its norms.

1. Work

My guest review of Work in the September 2021 Monthly Roundup had attempted to workshop that track by rearranging it and comparing the rearrangement to the original work. I attempted to identify some constructive criticism from this analysis, arguing in the end that tracks driven by or synchronized to music should not be “dull and boring or [... chase] away the viewer” if they're trying to appeal to a broad audience. However:

1. I am a viewer, but when a critiquer talks about a work from the perspective of a generalized “the viewer” - as I had done in my guest review - often that’s actually the critiquer positioning themselves as the kind of viewer the artist should be creating for. Salesses elaborates:

   • Typically, when fiction writers employ the term “the reader,” they do so to refer to a generalized reader (not a specific or even an intended one). This means that the term rarely makes a distinction between a male reader or a female reader, a white reader or a Black reader, a cis straight reader or an LGBTQ+ reader—and even acts as a shield sometimes for the person talking. To refer to “the reader” in this way is to flatten audience to a single group of readers who share a single group of cultural expectations. Different readerships are overlooked or othered, the result of which is to make difference an exception. Difference becomes a burden, one that falls upon writers already burdened by their difference in the world.

     
     As craft is a set of expectations, the workshop needs to know which expectations, whose expectations, the author wishes to engage with, if the workshop is to imagine useful possibilities for the story.

     
     [...]

     
     A useful workshop considers who “the reader” is for each particular writer and therefore approaches each particular story on its own terms. Otherwise, intentions are not reflected back to the author but forced on her.

2. As Bevibel recognized by analyzing the implied audience of this track (an interpretation which was later confirmed by one of the creators), Work was created as something more like a speech act for building/maintaining friendship (and a public record of friendship, an artifact whose existence says something like “we existed together on the internet. we made something together across 1.5 years. we put a lot of effort into something for each other.”) than as a workshoppable work of art. We might call it a "maybe the real art was the friends we made along the way" approach to making things online (one I have a lot to learn from tbh, especially in my current condition these past two years). So my review was speaking to/from a totally different set of cultural expectations than whatever would've been relevant to the creators, and I was speaking in an opposite direction from the actual story of that release rather than imagining useful possibilities.

I think some of the other advice I had derived in my review is still useful in some ways - but now I can only say with confidence that it was useful for me, as a way to help myself understand/form my own taste in art, and if it was helpful for other people’s art-making then my hope for such helpfulness was only accidentally fulfilled. As Salesses points out:

Let me be clear about the benefits of critiquing someone else’s story: If we in fact critique other people’s writing through our own writing perspective, that critique helps us to understand ourselves. Since the weaknesses we perceive in a manuscript are weaknesses we perceive, our solutions might be most helpful to the problems we face in our own work. But one writer’s treasure is another writer’s trash. In the two years I spent writing myself out of my novel, I wasn’t aware of what I was doing. I could tell I was getting good advice—I couldn’t tell that it was good advice for someone else.

And I'm sorry that I wrote a review which presented feedback in a way which the-me-of-today would react to as discouraging and/or anti-helpful if I were on the receiving end of it - in other words, a review which I can only conclude probably had an at-least-slightly discouraging effect on at least one silent reader back in 2021 because (to quote Salesses again) “the workshop is persuasive and powerful.”

2. a _____ on the _____ of _____ / profile photos (liked by 2 users) / facial recognition training set

I can’t figure out how to do a smooth transition which also simultaneously decouples this new section from my apologetic conclusion for the previous section to the degree I want, so now you get this awkward interruption as the best I can do to begin a separate story!

In retrospect, my experience of reading Bevibel’s review of my a _____ on the _____ of _____ / [rest of title truncated] in the November 2021 Monthly Roundup two months later was a very illuminating and very humbling lesson for my recovering-perfectionist ego-self which prefers to imagine itself as full of anything other than the silly/precious/frustrating/unconditionally-embraced humanity of a 凡夫 bombu, an utterly ordinary foolish being who flails around in misguided passions. Of course, I did not feel this kind of gratitude for Bevibel’s review at the time (and my retrospective recognition of my initial reaction, along with the very meandering path to that recognition, are actually at the core of the illuminating/humbling lesson I received from the review). My ego-self was too fixated on feeling misunderstood (as the real author) by Bevibel’s reading of my work’s implied author - which Salesses defines as “the version of the author that readers imagine from the text (and even occasionally mistake for the real author).” So it’s not until now that I’ve started trying to examine my track in terms of issues of craft - which we might translate from Salesses’s redefinition of craft in writing as being “a set of expectations” about:

how the words on the page [create an image of the implied author]: what expectations the writer engages with imply whom both the implied reader and implied author are and what they should believe in and care about, what they need explained and/or named, where they should focus their attention, what meaning to draw from the text.

In the process of cutting up and degrading the resulting fragments of Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, I was experiencing a perverse self-righteous pleasure at devaluing and decontextualizing this celebrated representation of a crowd of white people having a good time dominating public space in the late 1800s. It was an oppositional act of “ha ha why should I respect this white people art which white people find compelling but which I don’t ‘get’ and which leaves me bored” flailing-about of racial resentment. I could point out now - which means I do point out now, but ambivalently - that the leisurely scene in the painting existed during a period of French overseas colonial expansion including in French Indochina, but 1) I am not Southeast Asian, so that’s not even my history (much less something that would be reasonable for me to appropriate as a weapon for scoring points of smug feeling), and 2) I’m pretty sure this is just my ego-self making an after-the-fact rationalization of its choices, as a flimsy substitute to taking responsibility for my craft (we have responsibility at home). I could also point out that this painting of white people in a public urban space probably held an intensely racially-charged meaning for me in 2021; but if so, that was never a consciously-voiced/recognized thought until just now. Maybe these two retorts might have a kernel of something useful to other people (idk), but I’ve spent too much time freezing myself in the former (and I think I need to process the latter in a totally different context). So now I’d like to turn my attention away from the grudginess of those thoughts in this context, and instead use this situation as a prompt for a more critical examination of my bombu relation to my art.

Of course, it’s Not Fun to recognize myself as the kind of ordinary human being who could be driven to act on such intentions towards other people’s art in such a way as I did (though we might recognize a similarly-shaped shadow of that impulse in my rearrangement of Work), to act out what I now (finally!!) realize were minor feelings - as defined by Cathy Park Hong:

Hong explains that her neologism is indebted to the critical theorist Sianne Ngai, who wrote about “ugly feelings” in 2005. Seemingly trivial affects like irritation, boredom, and anxiety, ugly feelings are often eclipsed by more baroque emotions in the collective consciousness but can in fact provide important insight into social and material inequalities. Like ugly feelings, minor feelings are sustained undesirable emotions. Minor feelings, however, are also explicitly racialized, described by Hong as “emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.”

[...]

Hong writes, “minor feelings are not generated from major change but from lack of change, in particular, structural racial and economic change.”

While making my track, on some level I was trying to disavow its implied author who acts out those minor feelings. In other words, I was trying to avoid vulnerability, which Salesses redefines as “the real author’s stakes in the implied author [...] Vulnerability is more about the investment an author makes in creating a persona that is adequate to the challenges of the text—and its audience.” I did not want to be an artist who might provoke other people through my racial resentment underlying this track. I preferred to be an artist who could express something less untelegenic (initially sadness…though very late in the project I also became conscious of various Thoughts I had about technology, including themes which it’s banky later described in a comment on my track). Thus, I experienced a rude awakening when I saw my initial impulses reflected back at me so starkly as the image of an “Ethan Li” - but reflected with inversion as if distorted by a funhouse mirror into artistic conservatism (or even a reactionary response to Neo-Impressionism) - which Bevibel saw in the author implied by a _____ on the _____ of _____ / [rest of title truncated]. In retrospect, my avoidance of vulnerability (my hesitation at acknowledging and examining the implied author being formed through the filter of my minor feelings, as opposed to other implied authors which my self-deluding ego preferred to identify with instead) seems like a strong explanation for why a _____ on the _____ of _____ / [rest of title truncated] landed for Bevibel like a soggy tissue: out of fear for its implications about myself (real author Ethan Li), I had refused to take seriously one of the implied “Ethan Li” authors that actually existed in the video I was making, and that ended up being the implied author which Bevibel saw. Salesses explains:

We risk something in each creation simply by creating a version of ourselves on the page. That risk is not for sale, but it is on display. If we care to write to a real audience, we should care what our persona implies about us in real life. The writer who claims the freedom to write from any perspective, say, should be aware that it takes an investment in that perspective on the page, and that this investment is open to critique in the real world. If we don’t invest in our implied author, why should anyone else? The worst fiction we can write is fiction that doesn’t even speak for itself.

I doubt any of this lengthy backstory about my track is anything anyone in our Line Rider community could be reasonably expected to have guessed about my work in writing a review of my track, given the conditions of my cone of silence about my process and my work, perhaps compounded by the (self-disavowed) racial undercurrents of my work in the context of the Line Rider community in which I was working. Thus, the structure of our processes for art-making and art-criticism guided me (and maybe also Bevibel? idk) to crash hard into one of the walls of silent workshopping and precluded some potentially interesting questions of craft. Salesses has more to say about the stakes of such collisions for minority writers in workshops, but I haven’t reflected on myself thoroughly enough yet to comment further.

In the meantime, let’s return from “the workshop” to questions of craft and criticism: How do implied viewers read works with multiple implied authors? What does it do to a track when those implied authors end up working at cross-purposes to each other, or are in otherwise complicated relationships (e.g. denial) with the real author(s)? And how might we as critics be helpful (whether to readers/viewers or to authors/trackmakers) in approaching works which don’t consider us among their implied readers, if we do want to be helpful? With this last question, I can say at least that my guest review of Work seems like a less-helpful way of doing criticism. Regardless, I wonder if using the tools gathered by Craft in the Real World, and applying them when we examine Line Rider tracks, might help us (or at least me) to become clearer on how/why we make the kinds of artistic and critiquing choices we see in our community, and how/why/when we might choose differently.

3. Everywhere at the End of Time Stage 1

The distance between me - a real reader/viewer - and the track’s implied readers/viewers: I think this question is exactly what I was trying to understand by reviewing EATEOT Stage 1 in the November 2022 Monthly Roundup, coincidentally one year after I was confronted with (and before I had language to think about) the distance between a work’s real author/artist and its implied author(s)/artist(s) in [rest of title truncated] / facial recognition training set. Most of my review was about the cultural expectations I saw reflected in EATEOT Stage 1’s content, about the cultural expectations I had as a viewer, and about my attempt to make sense of the collision between those two sets of expectations.

I think my conclusion to the review was (probably not fully consciously) an attempt at imagining myself as an implied viewer of EATEOT Stage 1, and at inviting other viewers from EATEOT’s actual implied viewership to try on my cultural expectations and to see the world (within the text, but also beyond the text) differently. I suspect this review came out of a similar underlying impulse as my review of Work - a desire for my cultural expectations to be responded to - even if my review of EATEOT Stage 1 was delivered (I would hope) more generously to Andrew Hess and more helpfully to viewers. With that awareness, and considering that EATEOT’s source music (The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time series of albums) is structurally split between Stages 1-3 and Stages 4-6, I think the kind of review of Stage 3 that might be helpful to Hess’s craft for the rest of EATEOT will look very different from the review I had written of Stage 1. I don’t know what exactly it should look like (especially because I don’t what kind of feedback - if any - might be helpful for Hess, having not asked him about that despite the lack of any obstacles outside my mind), so in my infinite humility which definitely indicates my worth as a person I’ll just throw something and see where it lands.

on EATEOT Stage 3

I must admit that I feel a bit embarrassed that my first review after such a long period of silence is once again mostly about me as a reader (but also embarrassed about how much I’ve left silent/unsaid here) and once again in large part about various topics tangential-to-varying-levels from Hess’s EATEOT. But apparently that’s the kind of person I am today, and clearly I’m not actually that embarrassed if I’m naming it and moving on without making any changes to my review! Let’s try to put the remainder of this always-already-derailed review back onto however much track still remains after my screws all fell out, as screws tend to do.

To review EATEOT so far, I’ll try to apply Craft in the Real World’s examination of tone, a craft term which Salesses (re)defines as “an orientation toward the world”:

for fiction, it seems to offer a kind of lens through which to understand the attitudes of the characters toward each other and toward the world. [...] our sense of what the tone is helps us figure out how to interpret [characters]. Where does this sense come from? What is it that the author establishes via craft decisions? It is an orientation toward the world, the orientation of the implied author.

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The tone [of a story] depends on how the implied reader [...] is supposed to see things. Is it implied/is the implied reader supposed to feel the same as [the protagonist]? Is the implied reader supposed to feel the opposite [...]? [...] The implication depends not only on how the author depicts the [protagonist], but on how the author depicts the [world], both from within the [protagonist’s] perspective and [...] also outside of it.

Orientation of the implied author toward the world in their track: let’s start by examining the implied author. EATEOT has a real author (Andrew Hess) who uploads tracks to YouTube, an implied author (EATEOT’s Andrew Hess) whom we imagine from watching EATEOT, a “narrator” (maybe also named Andrew Hess, maybe not) which presents to us the subjective experience of EATEOT’s subject (a person dying through dementia), and an on-screen Bosh (maybe the subject, maybe not). What can I claim with reasonable confidence about the implied author from what I’ve seen in Stages 1-3? As the implied author, EATEOT’s Andrew Hess:

• depicts a world filled with nostalgia for the mid-1950s US, along with assorted activities related to romance and leisure, as well as various kinds of landscapes spanning the US.

• is actually depicting the subject’s inner (subjective) world which is initially anchored in that external world of the mid-1950s US.

• is depicting the disintegration of this subjective world by using (especially in Stage 3) various kinds of editing techniques (including allusion to other tracks) and drawn content (including a meandering gray line which I first noticed in Stage 2) to impinge upon the depicted world.

What is EATEOT’s Andrew Hess’s orientation to this disintegrating subjective world? idk yet, maybe examining that world might help me guess an answer to this question. That world is revealed to us through a “narrator” (constructed by EATEOT’s Andrew Hess) which mediates what we see and don’t see of the subject’s experience and the subject’s world; and (at least so far) Bosh is the main consistent visual element which remains in the screen and the subjective world throughout Stages 1 - 3. Ok, so what are the relationships between EATEOT’s “narrator”, EATEOT’s subject, and EATEOT’s Bosh? For example, is the “narrator” presenting to us the story of the Bosh as a subject whose internal experience is expressionistically rendered in the world around that Bosh? Or does the Bosh function more symbolically as just a visual anchor of the subject’s first-person subjectivity as depicted on screen? Are the narrator and the subject identical (first-person perspective) or distinct (third-person perspective)?

I think Stage 1 left those relationships ambiguous. What I remember is a relatively clear and direct representation of the Bosh gliding across the lands of the US and gliding through EATEOT’s subjective world in a relatively frictionless way (especially when compared to a work like Palaces or like some later sections of Stage 3) - which tells me something about Stage 1 Bosh’s subjective experience of the mid-century US. And if I remember accurately, Stage 2 mostly preserved Stage 1’s frictionlessness between the Bosh and the world and Stage 1’s transparency between the Bosh and the screen. By contrast, Stage 3 felt to me like a major change: immediately at the start of the track I am seeing in double-vision with two ghostly Boshes and two ghostly worlds separated-yet-combined by a moderate (and spatially-disorienting) offset in time, and I am also watching the Bosh fall between jagged edges of fragmented memories and fall out of space. Thus, the Bosh’s relationship to the subjective world starts to feel more concretely material (e.g. as the Bosh is occasionally bumped around by a gray thread which had started appearing in Stage 2, and as Bosh collides with the edges of memory fragments). And then the camera/screen becomes visible as a layer interposing between the Bosh and me as a viewer: the screen becomes fuzzy for one section, then it skips back and forth in time for another section. Perhaps these specific choices form meaning by contrasting with some common cultural expectations about the ideal cinematography of Line Rider (immaterial, transparent camera) and about how time should be felt in tracks (fluid, below conscious observation)? I am suddenly reminded of how it’s banky introduced materiality of camera and time in the middle of where a garden once grew to reflect on a perhaps-related set of themes in a potentially-similar/related way. Anyways, the overall effect of EATEOT’s Andrew Hess’s artistic choices is that I find myself drawn to interpret Bosh as a symbolic representation of the subject’s mental state, like the needle of a record player being dragged along an eldritchly-involuting record which is gradually melting back into tar. Bosh (and camera/screen?) as needle, subject (and subjective world?) as record, narrator as record player, implied artist as an Andrew Hess who gives the record player animacy.

But then for the first time in EATEOT so far (at least in my memory today…) I notice the camera doing things independently of Bosh’s motion, zooming out to reveal the repetitive spatial structure of a looping memory, and then zooming back in! Because of this, plus the subsequent reference-by-mimicry to Descenso del Monte Rascaestrellas with a camera filming a screen playing a track, I now see EATEOT’s narrator as exercising its own agency in how it represents the subject’s world to me: there’s actually something behind the camera whose activity I notice in its choiceful interactions with the world of the screen. So now I think there’s some more distance between the subject/world and the narrator, as if I’m seeing the narrator revealing a portion of what the implied author had seen while drawing the track, as if the narrator is looking at the subjective world independently (perhaps outside) of the subject’s perspective of increasing (dis)orientation toward their inner world. As if the narrator might also reveal the implied author’s orientation to the world the narrator is showing us. So now this narrator seems like a promising footprint to follow in searching for an understanding of what tone I might eventually identify in EATEOT.

Stage 3 ends with the culmination of Bosh’s disconnection from land: Bosh starts floating into the air over and over (perhaps like in the subjectivity of a certain person who aims to colonize Mars), then drifts gravityless through an outdoor wedding memory as if floating through an empty space riddled with a tiny gopher tunnel system of invisible wormholes, and finally cycles through a place stretched both across subjective time (which I notice in the alternation between trees and stumps and forest-absences, and in various states of existence of the house) and across different levels of abstraction. With the cultural expectations I bring as a reader, I see this ending as potent clay for sculpting possible orientations to the world - i.e. possible tones - in EATEOT. That makes me very intrigued to see where Andrew Hess and EATEOT’s Andrew Hess will take EATEOT next (and with much more excitement than after I had watched Stage 2, because of my personal taste for the kinds of creative choices I’ve described here about Stage 3), and to see more clearly the shape of EATEOT’s implied viewership.

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review of EATEOT Stage 3 review / maybe also actually a review of my desire for Ethan to review my review of their review of EATEOT Stage 1?

by Jade

When I think of the 6-hour currently-in-progress Line Rider track Everywhere at the End of Time by Andrew Hess, I do not think of Andrew Hess, or even the musical artist the Caretaker. I think of Ethan Li, as my immediate association with the project is Ethan’s review of EATEOT Stage 1.

bosh is old: the finale

I watched Everywhere at the End of Time Stage 3 for the first time on a group voice call in the Line Rider Artists Collective, which Andrew and his partner Liese were present for. When it ended, I glanced at the video description and noticed the communally-obligatory Inspirations List™, which included many tracks I recognized the names of from five-ish years ago, but had not heard in a long time since they’ve stylistically aged a bit and aren’t well-remembered among newer community members. In the call, Andrew specifically mentioned gaoyubao’s 40-second 2018 release Bailey as one of the most significant inspirations to the project, specifically in the way gaoyubao communicates a narrative between characters through only the track’s environment (though, it is interesting to rewatch Bailey and notice tiny silhouettes of people in the windows of the house and the movie theatre… or maybe those are supposed to be movie posters, which Andrew conceptually borrowed in Stage 1, along with the picnics and wedding arches, which all come attached with implied backstories of past relationships). The sole statement of Bailey’s description, “Bosh is all grown up :(”, will remind many Line Rider enjoyers of banky’s iconic opening of the forest under the earth’s description, “Bosh is old.” Why were former-manuquirk-doers like gaoyubao and banky so drawn to this idea of Bosh aging – of Bosh becoming a withered corpse guy, rather than the young agile sledder kid we all initially view them as?

I think there’s a meta-commentary here about Line Rider itself aging – both the concept of Line Rider and its community. 2016 was a notably sparse year for Line Rider as the community had died down to only a handful of people making impenetrable quirk tracks and feeling upset that no one was paying attention to them, and as Line Rider became a lonelier pursuit for its remaining participants, the idea of Line Rider’s eventual “death” weighed heavy, naturally prompting creators to reflect on their past and to introspect on their own aging, and how that ties into feelings around still playing this flash game when you’re supposedly “all grown up”. Bevibel’s 10-Year Line Rider Anniversary: A Retrospective is the perfect video for capturing this feeling of Line Rider aging alongside you – there’s a crushing existentialism around still wanting to create Line Rider after all this time, which Bevibel deliberately speaks about very slowly and in brief sentences, like a dried-out husk of an animal on the brink of perishing from thirst. It is both a “thank you” and a “sorry” to Line Rider, and as the pit of contemplation becomes more agonizing towards the video’s end, Bevibel pairs their final spoken desires to create alongside clips of relatively recent flatsled tracks, which play calmly after a slew of dense scenery and manuquirk. For whatever reason, flatsled embodied an underlying association with old age, even back in 2010 with ACwazHere’s Old People (an all-flatsled track approaching flatsled with a trick-oriented mindset of “how smoothly can I make Bosh land on a line?”), and in the cultural context of 2016, using flatsled demonstrated frailness, a limited capacity for complexity, a tiredness, a stillness that was existentially crushing and beautiful. It represented thinking back to simpler times – nostalgia. Anemoia, perchance.

To state that “Bosh is old” is to directly place your feelings around aging and the changes of your social and artistic environment into the body of the work, using the statement’s natural contradictions around Bosh’s canonical child-ness to invite introspection about how Line Rider has changed into a supposedly bygone relic of early internet culture that died long ago, and by extension, how YOU might be a bygone relic of early internet culture yourself (AKA nerd). Of course, Line Rider did not actually die – the following year, two groundbreaking viral tracks (This Will Destroy You and Mountain King) set the stage for a new generation of Line Rider enjoyers finding and trying out the medium for the first time, including myself and Andrew Hess in 2018. But if Andrew Hess is technically part of a relatively newer generation of trackmakers and discovered Line Rider much later than gaoyubao or banky, does Everywhere at the End of Time, a project where “Bosh is old” and gets dementia, contain the same underlying feelings toward the aging of Line Rider as Bailey and the forest under the earth?

A few other listed inspirations that caught my eye (because I was there when they were new and relevant) included Anton’s Picnic and Turner Wise’s Handlebars (both in the Top 10 of 2019), Rosen Grove by pocke (an imagined preview to what colour in linerider.com could look like in the not-so-distant future), my own 2020 release A Burning Hill (my favourite track I had made for a while), and El Loco’s Invisible’s Descenso del Monte de Rascaestrellas (the original “screenual” and a generation-defining moment in terms of experimental presentation in Line Rider.)

Oh yeah, and most importantly, Yahoo by Chuggers. Who can forget?

Well, the community can. And to be clear, I don’t say that begrudgingly at all, or in a way that implies any idealized nostalgia for how things were before in Line Rider. Do you still think I would want to be making tracks in only black and white? Of course not, lol. Respectfully, that shit is ass, but it’s an important ass, and it’s one that Andrew Hess is still pooping out of, even after everything changed in Line Rider at the end of 2021 and throughout 2022 when coloured tracks in .com became the norm and Bevibel released their I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You In-Depth video essay, which invited all Line Rider creators who watched it to reflect deeply on who it is who receives their tracks, what is an art community, and why is any of this even worth doing? After this, I became much closer friends with a lot of Line Rider artists and enthusiasts including September, who in her debut year of releasing tracks, elaborated on vsbl’s interpretation of the Line Rider canvas as an endless notebook and, with tracks like My Boy and My Pal Foot Foot, fundamentally changed the visual and narrative style of how many of us approach making Line Rider art, resulting in a boom of creators reevaluating their artistic processes and embarking on personal self-discovery projects in 2022. Instantflare began the Ray project. Tulips made 14 Images, a zine which September printed out for me into a booklet that now hangs from my curtain batten. September herself figured out how to turn her complicated feelings around DeafTab’s departure from Line Rider into ALL THE THINGS I COULDN’T SAY TO YOU. Autumn worked through a public crisis of Morman faith that culminated in Nude and Give 'em hell. / DEVIL (I found myself when...). UTD made Unfold Reimagined, pocke made Revisitation, and Ethan made The Name Engraved in My Heart. There’s a common thread here – all of these tracks are about processing trauma.

Like these creators, Andrew also reevaluated what his tracks meant to him and how to proceed artistically from here, but he somehow (?!) came to the conclusion that making a six-hour track (?!) that would take most of the following decade to finish (?!) was the next logical step in life (?!?!?!). He decided to give his own Line Rider trackography dementia, perhaps without realizing the inevitable meta-commentary that would arise as everyone else’s trackmaking styles drastically changed around him while his stayed relatively consistent. Andrew’s art is trapped in a previous era of Line Rider that we’ve all been slowly, collectively forgetting about — he’s really the only person left who still makes scenic, solely black-and-white Bosh-focussed visualisers that were almost ubiquitous from 2017-2021, and I don’t know if Andrew actively keeps up with current Line Rider track releases, seeing as the EATEOT Stage 3 inspirations list only contained one track from 2022 or after (pocke’s walk/rain). Just like the 1930s ballroom style of music sampled in the Caretaker project, the style of trackmaking that Andrew remixes in EATEOT is distinctly a style of the past, but the difference is that the style is aging significantly in real time, literally growing more distant the longer Andrew works on the project. Having experienced this time period of Line Rider, I have distant memories attached to this style of trackmaking — memories of people, and what it was like to share space with friends who are no longer around in our life.

Li’s 5th Serving of Line Rider

Stage 3 in the Caretaker’s album is infamous for being a significant step up in terms of intensity in audio distortion compared to the relatively nostalgic serenity and musical coherency of the first 2 stages. It’s like the Uncanny Valley of the album, where “some singular memories get more disturbed, isolated, broken, and distant”, treading a fine line between comprehensible melodies and garbled noise. Naturally, this means this stage of music is much more experimental in technical production; whereas in Stages 1 & 2 Leyland Kirby is mostly just picking sections of old recordings and letting them play on repeat with a touch of record scratch, in Stage 3 he makes a lot more creative choices around the intricacies of the musical entanglements, often stretching out tempos, splicing up melodies, rearranging and overlapping notes, adding heavy distortion and reverb after-effects — gradually destroying the music in a very deliberate way. So when I found out Andrew was embarking on making a track for the whole album, I was particularly curious as to how he would go about representing this stage technically, especially for a generally by-the-books artist when it comes to approaching production and musical visualization.

Well, I can easily report that EATEOT Stage 3 is Andrew’s most experimental release yet, with each segment presenting its own subversion of the previous stage’s settings, leaning into the natural existentialisms of the Line Rider canvas in ways that reminded me of Ethan Li’s early work. Ethan’s debut track A Fleeting Life came out a few days after the Top 10 Line Rider Tracks of 2020 video released, and looking back on it, A Fleeting Life feels like a natural invitation to apply the growing artistic maturity of Line Rider into a new style of presentation, one that uses camerawork and video-editing to destroy the fundamentals of Line Rider and reinvent the medium, asking: What if Line Rider had no lines, and the Bosh’s weren’t riders? What if the camera wasn’t locked to Bosh all the time like it has been for the last fifteen years? Who is Bosh? Who controls the camera? Who is it who makes these choices?

As a result, it personally feels off to see no Ethan tracks listed in EATEOT Stage 3’s Inspirations List™ – in fact, Andrew did actually confirm in the watch party that Ethan’s second track A Shiver Sequence was an inspiration for the execution of F7 - Libet delay, but he forgot to write it down. It’s since been added in, but regardless, I felt somehow that A Shiver Sequence wasn’t the only Ethan track that held strong resemblance to ideas and themes I was seeing in EATEOT Stage 3, but I couldn’t place it. This was until I read Ethan’s above review where they mention that a _____ on the _____ of _____ was made as “an oppositional act of ‘ha ha why should I respect this white people art which white people find compelling but which I don’t ‘get’ and which leaves me bored’ flailing-about of racial resentment”, and I thought to myself, holy shit – Beethoven’s 5th Serving of Lasagna is also like that!

You may not be aware of this track (or, that Ethan made this track) since it’s posted to NoodleChaos, a collaborative Line Rider channel that parodies DoodleChaos’ Western European classical music-synced tracks, and makes it pasta-themed for some reason? Seems like a pretty inexplicable theme for a Line Rider channel with little potential for artistic staying power, but Ethan saw it as a golden opportunity to destroy even more highly-celebrated white people art: Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, the track Beethoven’s 5th by Mark Robbins, and… the critically-acclaimed culinary art piece of “lasagna”. To this day, it’s still Ethan’s most recent track, being released a couple days after The Name Engraved in My Heart, and about a month after their review of EATEOT Stage 1, and looking back, Beethoven’s 5th Serving of Lasagna predates ideas and themes that would surface in EATEOT Stage 3, particularly in E6 - Sublime beyond loss where an old once-familiar Western song is spliced up, destroying the once “logical” organization of the composition as the video frantically jumps between sections of track that correspond with those musical fragments. In Beethoven’s 5th Serving of Lasagna, Ethan has orchestrated the distortion themselves, picking and choosing musical sections with repeated motifs in different keys to overlap in a dissonance that is both humorous and slightly horrifying. The horror is amplified by the intimidating, almost threatening expanse of that lasagna – it’s so huge and culturally European and carefully, logically layered and orchestrated, much like the music itself! You may think I’m silly for analyzing the lasagna (and it’s true, I’m rather silly) but Asian culture is very food-based, and let’s be real, if the background was replaced by footage of chow mein being tossed in a wok, this track would make no tonal or cultural sense. Notice how race haunts EATEOT, notice how race haunts Beethoven’s 5th Serving of Lasagna, and notice the unique parallels in technical experimentation and music-based storytelling between these two works.

Considering that in EATEOT Stage 3, Andrew, whether knowingly or subconsciously, accessed and leaned into these artistic choices that Ethan practically predicted after EATEOT Stage 1’s release, it shouldn’t be a surprise (though, it is still a surprise) to see Ethan come out of the woodwork for Stage 3’s release specifically, to leave one of the first comments on the video saying they loved the artistic choices in this stage, and to submit a 5,000+ word review of the track a few days later.

good bears

I’m currently writing this in the first few hours of 2025, pacing back and forth alone in the downstairs of my parents’ house. My sibling got sick and couldn’t attend any parties tonight, so they invited me over to spend New Year’s together in their bedroom, watching the real-time countdown in the plaza of their Animal Crossing: New Leaf village. Our parents said goodnight to us before midnight, and all of a sudden, I remember where I was exactly three years ago – in my bedroom, making my first Line Rider track with colour:

When I was younger my sibling and my parents would always stand together at midnight on New Year’s to watch the distant Downtown fireworks blow up from the wide upstairs office window, but I distinctly remember that not happening this year. I don’t remember if there was a specific reason why – I think there had been some rising tension between us in the previous months as I frantically navigated an identity crisis while struggling to apply for post-secondary programs, a process that they made very stressful for me. Or maybe I was just too focused on making this track I had started right after Bevibel left a call where I watched and failed to understand their new track ASDFGHJKL. I remember her struggling to explain the track’s emotional landscape, and she eventually concluded I was likely just too young to get it, which was probably true – huge layer-automated scribbles flashing “I DON’T KNOW HOW I’M GONNA PAY RENT” meant nothing to me at the time (it definitely does now, and I’m currently procrastinating on e-transfering my landlord), but my headmate Cabaret really wanted to make something that would resonate with Bevibel’s headmate Isabel in an unspeakable way, with the underlying message being that I may not comprehend these adult-specific struggles, but I can create this very childlike art about reassuring you that things will be okay with the sincerity of a stuffed animal (💙).

I sat quietly in an LRAC voice call with Ethan when the year changed to 2022. We noticed the clock, said happy new year to each other, and continued with our activities. A year later during the top 10 judging process of 2022, Ethan said this about Don’t Worry in their review document:

Really comforting. Watching this is like hugging my stuffed bears.

to which I thought, wow, what a simple and succinct thing to say about your second-favourite track of the year. I could never write something so short about a piece of art I love that much. Those must be some good fucking bears.

A week ago, I started a trivia game show where I display zoomed-in images of Line Rider videos, and contestants have to guess which track it’s from. Spoiler – the first image of the first episode was of a stuffed bear that peers from the side of the screen in a sea of childhood imagery in The Name Engraved in My Heart. When the answer was revealed, UTD said “now every time I watch The Name Engraved in My Heart I’ll appreciate that bear. I’ll be like, wow, that’s the bear”, and I’m like, yes, this is how I feel: that’s the bear we hug when we can’t sleep at night, the bear that understands us better than our family or the people at school, the bear that affirms the hope of children when their worlds are cruel to them.

spoons: A Line Rider Diaspora

Out of anyone I’ve known in recent years, wless has had one of the most fascinating creative journeys involving Line Rider… at least for me. Yeah, I’m pretty biased as an active Geometry Dash creator myself who often takes inspiration from wless, and I know he’s only released one track: Come In, a track that went under the radar in 2019, but in hindsight was ridiculously ahead of its time in terms of its scribbly visual style, its rejection of specific movement tricks or techniques, and its angsty music choice. With Come In, wless gave way for several of his Geometry Dash buddies to “come in” to Line Rider and play major roles in sculpting the shape of Line Rider art to come, most notably vsbl, pocke and DeafTab. But as much as I desperately wish wless had continued with Line Rider, I understand that sticking to the medium wasn’t really his intention when he made Come In — instead, it was to perform field research into Line Rider and its creating culture, and consider how its alternative approach could deepen their already experimental style of Geometry Dash creating. It worked extremely well, almost too well, as the levels that followed Come In are, to this day, some of the most divisive, argued-about and hated-on levels that I’ve ever witnessed the releases of, because of the way they intentionally challenged Geometry Dash’s bombastic creating standards in favour of the relatively quiet and static humanness of Line Rider tracks. You can notice a huge difference in the fundamental artistic approach between 2019’s chaos game and 2020’s in the radiator — the former is a pretty level-y level that uses in-game assets with many different textures and effects, switching between visual ideas every few seconds, whereas the latter is an auto level where your square-icon quietly twitches in an endless dark void for 4 minutes, with emphasis on the player’s micro-movements that sync to crackling static… it’s very Line Rider, and all of wless’s following levels (with the exception of twist the knife, a side-project for dumping more Geometry Dash-y ideas) have a concept-based approach, with a careful attention to textural consistency that is rare to see in the stimulation-seeking ethos of Geometry Dash. There’s i’m god, which features a uniform structure design that wouldn’t look out of place in Widows in Paradise, vacation bible school, which uses well-defined lines of consistent thickness to create a striking and static design that compliments the electroclash of Ayesha Erotica, what you see is what you get, a level that uses the common Line Rider technique of “making the viewer sit and wait” in a way that would be unthinkable for most GD players, and most recently line level, which… I shouldn’t need to explain its connection to Line Rider.

However, I bring up wless because there’s one particularly fascinating level that no one really talks about, and that Line Rider artists seem to be unaware of — spoons, which if you look at it, it’s literally just Line Rider. Nothing but black lines on a white background, with a climax that recreates the scribbly architecture of Come In into Geometry Dash. The thing that gets me about spoons though, is that it’s set to “Your Best American Girl” by Mitski, which has a chorus that goes,

your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me
but i do, i finally do

and I can’t help but wonder… why? Why, out of all songs, would wless choose a Mitski song about cultural identity and belonging for a level that is themed specifically around his unique relationship to Line Rider?

When I posted Pink in the Night in early 2021, wless commented on it, “line rider and mitski are the perfect combination”, which I didn’t think much of at first, but I later pinned the comment after I saw spoons for the first time. Did he think the two just felt nice together, or did Mitski and Line Rider share interpersonal characteristics that were specific to wless?

If you look at the comments on the music video for “Your Best American Girl” there are thousands of people saying things like “as a black woman living in the US…”, “as a Pakistani man…”, “as a Muslim girl living in Germany…” followed by a very specific and personal reason for connecting to Mitski’s song, sharing an experience of being hurt, dismissed, and alienated in a predominantly white society, even if it’s over something that seems petty and small, like not being seen as attractive enough for a high school relationship, or maybe… your Geometry Dash level sucking ass because it isn’t flashy or complicated enough. Seriously though, wless is one of the most harassed artists I know because of the way they make art — art that’s directly inspired by Line Rider, which I feel is something worth caring about! He bridged the gap between two art forms and used Line Rider’s philosophies of music-synced video art to make tasteful levels with a wholly original identity, and for what? Their levels were beloved by his close friends and fans, but were otherwise largely slandered for being “lazy”, “boring”, “broken” and “not good enough for a rate” by jealous GD people on Twitter, and because he’s technically only made one track, he’s also not particularly celebrated by Line Rider artists either… so he ends up not really fitting into either community – either artistic culture. And since the way you make art is culturally defined, could the underlying narrative of spoons be that wless considers Line Rider to be a mother in terms of artistic upbringing – a “my mother” that “your mother” (Geometry Dash creating standards) doesn’t approve of, but that he has to ultimately accept is forever a fundamental part of them and their art?

The most liked comment on the “Your Best American Girl” music video says:

The thing is Mitski is mixed, so she looks Asian to Americans but when she goes to Japan she looks white to them. Makes you feel like you don't belong anywhere.

I went to a high school in East Vancouver where 90% of the students were Asian, most of which were Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean or Japanese, so I looked pretty white compared to the general student body. I remember in Grade 8 my friend told someone I spoke some Japanese and they instinctually responded by calling me weeb. More recently, I ate dinner at one of my queer Chinese friend’s places, and when we sat down, their parents asked me if I knew how to use chopsticks. In these examples, I tell them I’m half-Japanese, then they reassess my face. They see it, and we laugh. But then I’d return home from high school and join a Discord call of nearly all white Line Rider artists, and I look and feel Asian to them. My race changed during the 5-minute walk home.

Another recent interaction I had with one of my other queer Chinese friends was when we were walking to the bus stop chatting about my white ethnomusicologist teacher who almost exclusively plays with Carnatic and West African musicians, and they shared with me this personal take: “sometimes I feel like white people secretly want to be people of colour.” Though I nodded and agreed with where they were coming from, I was also set aback in that moment, because of what that implied for me personally. I knew they said that with the implication that I’m not white – that they don’t perceive me that way – but really, I feel I am a white person who everyday wishes she was more in touch with her person of colour-ness. I wish that my Japanese school wasn’t so repetitious and underlyingly cultish so that I could have stuck with it through high school. I wish my mother had lived in Japan a little longer, so that she didn’t (according to herself) sound like an 8-year-old when she spoke Japanese. I wish I was still doing aikido with my sibling, and sometimes I want to go back to see Tama Sensei, because I know she loved us and would mention taking my sibling to study with her in Japan, but now my appearance and gender and name have changed and it would be too weird to introduce myself with my deadname, but I would also be lying if I pretended to be a newcomer, because even though my identity has changed, my relationship to this dojo has not – these are still my same roots from when I was young, and I still practice her wrist exercises.

So yes, experientially, I feel like I’m “a white person who wants to be a person of colour”, but not in the way you’d instinctually think. Western discourse on racial issues generally lacks the nuance to recognize non-whiteness and whiteness as a squishy Venn diagram instead of a binary, but that’s because race isn’t about genetics or ethnicity, it’s just a meaning that is attributed wherever appetite bestows a thing, and when that friend travelled to Ghana a few weeks later, they were called white by locals, and so they are. Still, I feel like I’ve cheated somehow, like I’ve tricked my friend into thinking I’m a certain race, when I fall progressively more out of touch with this language and culture I was surrounded by as a small child growing up in my grandparents’ house, where the most complex interaction you could have was to request for a refill of your bowl of sliced watermelon cubes (motto suika kudasai). I still sometimes think in these child’s Japanese thoughts, chopped up like a too-spicy garnish in the mostly bland soup of my English understandings.

My grandparents’ house is the coziest and most cluttered place I’ve ever been in. Reader’s Digest magazines. Sudoku books. Niche inexplicable electronic devices. Endless baskets of Japanese DVD cases that I would sift through trying to find where obaachan placed the Wii games. Sewing machines and fabrics. So many tiny bedrooms and bathrooms with toilets that warm your butt. Paintings. Entire walls of paintings depicting people, intersections and corridors in Gastown and Chinatown, and fanart of the Nutcracker, painted and framed by ojiichan. I visited for shogatsu to have mochi and sashimi and when I used the washroom, one of the showers was just… full? Canned goods. The basement is designed like a war bunker, and now everyone in this family lineage has a similar hoarding problem.

When we were 4 years old and living there, my ojiichan enthusiastically tried to show my sibling and I the Ghibli film Hotaru no Haka (Grave of the Fireflies), which if you don’t know, is literally about two Japanese orphans in WWII eating rocks as candy and starving to death. “Look kids, this is my childhood!” My mother was not pleased, and opted for Tonari no Totoro instead.

I also recall this one day when I was 7 or 8, I really didn’t feel like going to school. I wasn’t sick or anything, I just didn’t want to go, and my grandparents still made me. I yelled at my ojiichan the whole drive there, and he eventually asked me why I was yelling at him. I said it was because he was old, and he asked me “does that mean when you are old, I can yell at you?”, to which I replied, “you’re already dead!”

Both of us are older now; I’m twenty and he is ninety-two. I try to cherish the little time I get to share space with him. When he visits, he sometimes shares his new special interest, which always has something to do with practicing memorization. At one point he had over 900 digits of pi memorized, but it might be 2,000 now. Another time when he came over, he handed out printed and laminated poster papers with a drawing of a room containing distinct objects along with big 13x4 grids to my whole family. I think the exercise was something like associating the drawn objects with the 52 cards in a deck, so we could recall the objects when playing a random card, but I don’t think any of our family fully understood what was going on. He says he practices these things because he’s afraid of getting dementia.

Ojiichan’s nephew (my mom’s cousin) is Tetsuro Shigematsu, a Vancouver playwright and former writer of the CBC show This Hour Has 22 Minutes who, according to his website and Wikipedia, was the first person of colour to ever host a daily radio program in Canada. As children, my sibling and I got to see a few of his plays with my family, like One Hour Photo which retold his father Akira’s experience of post-war Japanese internment, or Empire of the Son, a play about Akira’s death, their estranged father-son relationship, and ultimately, learning to cry. My grandparents never came, though. Ojiichan hated these plays so much, and he thought Tetsuro was disgusting for turning his dead brother’s trauma into critically-acclaimed art pieces for financial gain. He also felt disgust and personal shame when confronted with anything that expressed Japanese nationalism and pride. He believed that the Japanese probably deserved to be put in internment camps, because everyone in Japan is raised to believe in the divine wisdom of the emperor, who is also the head of the government and military.

Ethan’s EATEOT Stage 1 review “asks you to notice how race haunts this track”, but for me that act of noticing extended far beyond the edges of this track.

With all these childhood memories and family history brewing in the back of my mind, on Christmas of 2022, I decided to make a silly Line Rider track that accessed my broken, half-learned Japanese child voice, with the hope of tapping into the various things I was feeling around culture, childhood, and language. I chose the song “There Are People” by Dylan Kanner, because the whole song is built on one English sentence, “in [place], there are people”, the grammatical backwardsness of which resembled Japanese sentence structure compared to the more conventional-sounding “there are people in [place]”. Since every lyric is the same, just with different places, making a translation felt a lot like doing one of the repetitive practice sheets our Japanese school made us do as kids, focused on one kind of sentence, filled with phrases you’d never hear in everyday conversation, and of course, my doodled child-representations of each sentence in the margins of the page.

At some point while I was making the track, Ethan joined the call, so I showed it to them. They really enjoyed it, which made me curious about their feelings and encouraged me to keep using Line Rider as an outlet for cultural exploration. I thought it would be really funny to make a track that sampled and repopulated the scenery of EATEOT Stage 1, doodling over it with silly little guys as a response to Ethan’s Stage 1 review which emphasized the implied absence and erasure of people in these post-war American landscape memories. Our depictions of creatures – multicoloured, disproportionate, laughing – clashed with EATEOT’s ominous tone and the strictness of its monochrome style in a way that feels a bit like taking a shit all over the perceived white-person art, but Andrew was planning to tear apart this “beautiful daydream” anyways with the later stages, so we’re all together in this wild cultivation of historical catharsis. But unlike Andrew slowly squeezing out his neverending nightmare project, my poopage was more tender and joyful, stepping back into an imagined personal Stage 0 as I took a house from EATEOT and drew my Line Rider friends around it, peering out the windows, sitting on the roof. At the end of the track, I drew a figure that vaguely resembles Ethan’s old Discord profile pic, with the words 我希望有一天我們能再見面 (i hope to meet with you again one day) floating next to their head. Additionally, in the same week I made a little tribute track to Lore’s 14 images, a Line Rider-inspired zine about processing trauma and allowing art into your life that made me feel very proud of them, proud to be in their life, and most of all, a desire to get to know their system better.

Somehow, these three tracks – one about translating an English song into fragmented-child Japanese, one about graffitiing the people-less landscape of EATEOT, and one about wanting to connect with Tulips – all felt very connected in some huge way. I figured it had something to do with “family”. I spent the next year figuring out how to connect it all together. I initially thought I’d just have to make a couple more tracks, and the final product would be about 20 minutes. You know, I also thought this review would be like, two thousand words tops. Maybe one day I’ll learn.

A lot changed in Line Rider after I started Hito ga imasu (There Are People) – some incidents that involved me, some that didn’t, and some that shouldn’t have – meant that our designedly tight-knit community scattered apart as many of us figured out ways we wanted or needed space from one another, and when I finished Hito ga imasu the following December, the initial audience I had intended at the start felt like it was missing a few people. Lore disappeared from Tulips’ system, and Hito ga imasu became a celebration of life, a commemoration of this community-cultivated short-lived existence. Unlike Mount Eerie’s release which was met with a seemingly endless whirl of excitement, Hito ga imasu, despite its comparable scope and critical acclaim, was met with relative hesitation and sadness by the few who did receive this track in my company. I don’t mean to point out Bevibel in particular, but juxtaposing the closing remark of her Mount Eerie review:

MUCH LOVE TO THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE!!!

with her review of Hito ga imasu:

It imbued upon me a vague, persistent, utterly overwhelming sense of sadness and despair, the sources of which I seem to be entirely unable to pinpoint or understand.

makes me feel… this hole. What is that hole?

It’s a similar feeling to the one I got when The Name Engraved in My Heart released, and all these emotions came to me when I watched it privately, but then I came back to find all my white Line Rider friends in a voice call struggling to understand and describe what they had watched. I’d left a comment with my immediate thoughts on the video, and Bevibel asked to publish that comment for the roundup, and no one else wrote anything about the track, nor did anyone else sign up to review it in the Top 10 video that year. To be clear, I’m not placing any kind of value judgement on this experience, and it’s probably healthy to prioritize listening to others first in that scenario, but I’ve found it is, let me say, instinctually surprising to me – “How can The Name Engraved in My Heart not resonate with everyone I know?” I think to myself, naively – and it’s weird how that track and Hito ga imasu feel like such lonely pieces of art in the context of the Line Rider community, even though both tracks are ultimately about reaching out to our real family and to ourselves.

I also felt this hole when I finished reading Ethan’s review of EATEOT Stage 3. As I finished reading their essay on queer-Asian diaspora, cultural loneliness and non-belonging in Line Rider, and what it means to share personal thoughts and your own burning memories on someone’s else’s work, I was left with this same, deep unplaceable sadness, like squinting into the fog – maybe you felt something similar, but for me, there’s this feeling of unreachability, this hole of “how thankful and sorry I am”, this place that is away from home, and maybe that’s just my personal experience of diaspora, an unfillable cultural void in my life. But I think this feeling I felt also has something to do with how while I was working on Hito ga Imasu, I was maybe actually really looking forward to what Ethan would have to say about the track when I released it?

I generally don’t make tracks to seek validation. That’s kind of a weird, terrifying concept to me – not to say that you shouldn’t, as long as you do it healthily and don’t become reliant on others’ compliments – but pretty much everything I’ve shared in Line Rider, I’ve made without the knowledge or care of if anyone will like it when I post it, because someone’s surface enjoyment of my art has no effect on my life. I think with Hito ga Imasu though, I was seeking a different kind of validation – I think I wanted to be like Mitski, a half-Japanese woman who could make art like “Your Best American Girl” that brought together people of colour from so many backgrounds in their interwoven diasporas grappling at their historical contexts and sharing their complicated intimacies with white people and culture. I think deep down, as I made Hito ga imasu, I wanted someone to tell me, “as an Asian-American, I felt this, and I see you.” But Line Rider is mostly a white community, and at that time, no one in Line Rider could have given that kind of validation to me.

However, I did end up receiving this acknowledgement from two people I wasn’t expecting: Ojiichan and obaachan.

My parents watched Hito ga imasu, and had pretty boring comments like “wow Jade, that sure must have taken you a long time!” with the vaguely implied subtext of “what are you doing with your life”, but when we visited my grandparents last shogatsu, they both gave very interesting reviews. My obaachan loved it, and had watched it three or four times, pausing the track to try and understand all the English. At the same time, Tulips and September were attempting the impossible task of collecting all the Japanese in the film into a Google Doc and making an original translation (they only got through the first 5 minutes), so to hear that someone was having a similar experience from the other direction felt indescribably special and right. I asked my ojiichan if he had any thoughts on the track, and he said this:

I think… I need to rethink my life now. I think I want to make art again. All these paintings… I’m tired of them. It’s time for new paintings.

In Hito ga imasu, I addressed ojiichan’s internalized detest towards Japanese pride, by quoting and expanding on pocke’s 2022 track Revisitation:

I can’t go back and tell you it’s okay not to hide or lie, but I can tell you this now. i can’t change the past, but i can change our future.

Revisitation is a track about addressing the ways your cultural upbringing has ended up hurting and traumatizing you and, somehow, accepting that you “wouldn’t have it any other way”, which felt personally relevant when it came to addressing ojiichan’s feelings; however, the track is also specifically about addressing the way the Geometry Dash community harms artists whose artistic cultures don’t adhere to creating standards. Hopefully that helps illustrate my point about wless’ level spoons drawing parallels between cultural and artistic upbringings, and the ways that cultural discrimination and artistic disapproval go hand in hand.

it’s just a burning (...)

This review is taking me a while, so it’s now the end of January. I just saw a show at Red Gate showcasing a variety of local trans performances including comedy, music, and theatre. There was a play by a trans Métis woman where she speaks to her dead ancestors about her struggles to make her transness understood by her Catholic family, grapples with her experience of “being too red for the white folks and too white for the red folks”, and eventually finds beauty in the non-understanding and our messy interconnections. She smudged me and other people during intermission, burning sacred medicines in a dish so we could wash our hands in the smoke and draw it over our ears, mouth, and mind, so that we will hear good things, say good words, think good thoughts. Then Lady, AKA Goats and Lasers (who’s actually subscribed to this Line Rider newsletter, so hi if you’ve somehow made it through this 10,000-word thicket!) played a set of improvised music, at the beginning of which she put out a tissue box with the word “burn” on it. As a stimmy synth loop cycled through subwoofers, she offered us paper and told us to write one thing we wanted to let go of, something we want to free ourselves from. We didn’t have to tell anyone what and she wouldn’t read what people wrote or drew, she just promised to burn the box with whatever was put inside.

I decided I was done. On a torn piece of paper I wrote, “I don’t count as a person of colour.” I folded it up, held back my tears, and placed it in the burn box. I decided I was done trying to disassociate from this truth, half-convincing myself this experience somehow isn’t real because I happen to have more prominent eyelids than my sibling or whatever, because all of this isn’t a binary no matter how people around me frame it. It’s about acknowledging this hole, this burning memory of a home far away – this “desire for [our] cultural expectations to be responded to”, and always being vaguely reminded of that connection to somewhere, wherever you go, whatever track you watch.

—

李Yí達,

I want you to hear me and understand me.
I made this for you.
I am grateful for this moment of your attention.
I won’t waste it by hiding.

At the end of the voicemail sequence in The Name Engraved in My Heart, your father sends a voicemail that concludes with “We love you, we miss you, bye”, which always stands out to me since it’s the only message where your parents don’t specifically request a response from you, like they finally start to let go of constantly trying to get a hold of you. But since you distanced yourself from Line Rider and stopped responding to Discord messages, I felt a twisted guilt for wanting to hear from you, and for relating to sentiments being said by your parents, because we do miss you, and we do love you — but… hmm, this clearly isn’t goodbye, since unlike your parents, you are actually still okay with speaking to us!— it’s just that it has to be done through a five-thousand word text wall that has the audacity (/s) to call itself a “review” of an Andrew Hess track when it’s really just a reason to dump a bunch of underlying personal feelings about Line Rider and your complex relationship to its community of artists! But if that’s a form of communication that you feel comfortable and safe with, I accept and welcome it with open arms, and I will happily respond in the exact same format.

I broke down when I finished reading your review. I’m crying now too, because we miss you and your words so much, and our gratitude towards you is communal and immeasurable. You’ve taught me so much about being Asian in ways that me and my Asian-Canadian peers probably would not have considered towards ourselves otherwise. Your resilience matters. Articulating your truth matters. I know things have been hard for you in the Line Rider community, but the way you’ve reached out in your art and provided insight in your reviews and discussion has been one-of-a-kind in my life. It’s inspired me to reflect on my heritage and family history in the context of a community where that previously didn’t even seem possible, and this has helped me better understand and nurture my culturally-complicated relationships to others and the world as I became an adult. Even if we didn’t talk too much, I cherish the interactions we’ve had, and I hope people know how crucial you have been to Line Rider, especially since you prefered to do most of your community work behind the scenes. I don’t know if you were expecting or hoping for a response from someone with your review, so I hope sharing all of this is okay. I want to be clear that there is no pressure to respond or to acknowledge my review or to come back to Line Rider at all, though if you ever choose to do any of those, we’ll be here for you. I’m mostly just grateful to hear from you again, and to have this opportunity to reach out. I hope you are doing okay, and that you’re safe, wherever you are.

我希望有一天我們能再見面

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revisited, reimagined, reclaimed

If you’ve read this far, I appreciate you. I want to thank you for sharing this moment of growth and recognition with me. We’re at the home stretch now. Let’s bring this review full circle – that’s right, this will actually be a review that starts and ends by talking about the track it claims to be reviewing – revolutionary concept!!

In Ethan Li’s review of EATEOT Stage 3, they mark F2 - Drifting time replaced as a subtle yet enormous turning point in the creative presentation of EATEOT, when the camera begins making choices independently of Bosh’s motion, zooming out to reveal the feeble smallness of the subject’s looped perception of space. Up until this point, we as viewers have felt that something is wrong and the narrator has given hints in the not-immediately-obvious details that change between looping tracks, but in this unprecedented moment of dramatic irony, this zoom-out confirms our suspicions without any trickery, recognizing the subject is too far gone for this to be their story anymore, and the narrator join us in the audience – all we can do is watch the decay now, and as we zoom back in, the song finishes, and for the first time ever in EATEOT, the pops of static become the main voice that EATEOT’s Andrew Hess chooses to sync Bosh’s movement to.

There’s a similar shift in narration that happens in the presentation of the EATEOT albums. The author of the music is Leyland Kirby, but the implied author is someone called the Caretaker, a persona that Leyland Kirby started releasing music as in 1999 to explore nostalgia and deterioration, and the Everywhere at the End of Time series meant to serve as the conclusion to this multi-decade project, where Kirby would give the Caretaker character dementia, killing them, their music, and their memories. Like the release pattern of the Line Rider installments we’ve seen thus far, the six albums were incrementally released once a year to give listeners the sense of revisiting a nursing home every now and then to check in on a relative’s deterioration. However, in the post-awareness stages, a significant change happens not just in soundscape, but in presentation. The individual songs go from 3-minute tunes to 20+ minute audio tracks with no structure, no beginning or end, and most importantly, no titles. In Stage 4, three tracks are simply titled “Post Awareness Confusions” and one is titled “Temporary Bliss State”, implying that it’s no longer the Caretaker publishing or titling their music, but maybe it’s someone who works at their nursing home, given the clinical organization.

Whose art even is it that we are making and releasing and sharing? In Western artistic culture, the author is a strict singular entity and so is the art, which is weird considering all of this is a shared soup without bounds, stirring through time and cultural influences, and to me, Ethan Li has become the most important narrator of EATEOT in the same way that September is the narrator for DeafTab’s Unspoken. Unspoken is a cool track and whatever, but it doesn’t do much for me alone – I mostly care about it because of September’s unique relationship to it, one that she explores in All the Things I Couldn’t Say to You with beautiful storytelling that connects the track to her personal cultural experiences. September makes me care about Unspoken in a way I otherwise wouldn’t, and that’s exactly how I feel about Ethan with EATEOT; however, a note-worthy difference is that EATEOT is a work-in-progress being released incrementally over the course of many years, and whenever a new installment releases, the project naturally reaches a hand out to receive feelings from its audience – to be workshopped in a way that has an effect on the next passage of this narrative. For Ethan, I think being able to plant a seed by workshopping and asking questions through reviews, then seeing it sprout just a little in the next stage is empowering, both as an action that results in your cultural experiences being acknowledged and responded to in an important piece of art, and as an act of reclaiming the harmful idealized post-war landscape by participating in the shattering of Stage 1’s “beautiful daydream”. This unique relationship Ethan has to EATEOT is special to Line Rider and deeply important to my life, and that is what my review intends to highlight.

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Jade’s YouTube
Ethan Li’s YouTube