Sometimes a bunch of drifting around, talking at length in detail about seemingly unrelated minutiae, and blatantly teasing the reader along can set a mood or an atmosphere. If it is done properly, it can convey more than what the words on the paper are explicitly saying, it just makes an impression.
An example that would maybe work for the HN crowd is this old essay about Earthbound [0], where the writer (Tim Rogers, translator) "reviews" the game by just going on long detours about fishing, being sick in bed, things that happen in other games, etc. As a huge fan of Earthbound, it just captures a lot of it for me.
An absolute master of this kinda thing was the well-known rock record critic Lester Bangs (who, again, may be vaguely known to some; Philip S. Hoffman played him in "Almost Famous"). His rock album reviews are barely recognizable as such by the "8/10 graphics, 6/10 sound" crowd. He just goes on and on about completely esoteric topics, from politics and his life philosophy and little vignettes about his personal life, and occasionally relates it back to the record. I don't know why, but I dig it. I've read "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung", an essay compendium, a couple of times.
I don't know if I'd want something like that if I was writing an essay for university, or trying to decide which laptop to buy, but it can occasionally be a very nice piece of journalism.
Thanks for that description, it helps me appreciate the practice more. The success of that technique entirely depends on the talent of the writer, apparently, because I've come across a few too many "long form" articles after "longform" became an internet buzzword, and where the writing just seems to alternate between the topic and an unrelated topic in almost an algorithmic fashion, before they are weakly tied together.
Sometimes a bunch of drifting around, talking at length in detail about seemingly unrelated minutiae, and blatantly teasing the reader along can set a mood or an atmosphere. If it is done properly, it can convey more than what the words on the paper are explicitly saying, it just makes an impression.
An example that would maybe work for the HN crowd is this old essay about Earthbound [0], where the writer (Tim Rogers, translator) "reviews" the game by just going on long detours about fishing, being sick in bed, things that happen in other games, etc. As a huge fan of Earthbound, it just captures a lot of it for me.
An absolute master of this kinda thing was the well-known rock record critic Lester Bangs (who, again, may be vaguely known to some; Philip S. Hoffman played him in "Almost Famous"). His rock album reviews are barely recognizable as such by the "8/10 graphics, 6/10 sound" crowd. He just goes on and on about completely esoteric topics, from politics and his life philosophy and little vignettes about his personal life, and occasionally relates it back to the record. I don't know why, but I dig it. I've read "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung", an essay compendium, a couple of times.
I don't know if I'd want something like that if I was writing an essay for university, or trying to decide which laptop to buy, but it can occasionally be a very nice piece of journalism.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100102165201/http://www.largep... (ps: it opens up with a really weird line about games being like prostitutes, which I think feels stupid and dated, but it gets better after that)