OSV Field Notes #45

Welcome to OSV Field Notes , a weekly, high-signal curation of things worth your time.

This week: What endures, and what keeps it going? A game creator's freedom to be strange, a century-old tavern that keeps finding a way, a Marine memoir that changes how we judge human endurance, the surprisingly familiar panic over teddy bears, and Cormac McCarthy on the ancient mind behind our newest ideas.

Death Stranding drops you into an America that has come apart. Rain ages whatever it touches. Spectral figures drift over the landscape. You play as Sam Porter Bridges (mo-capped by Norman Reedus), a courier tasked with moving packages across the fractured landscape. The game world is littered with strange things: babies in jars which connect to the ghostly plane, eccentric characters with insane style.

And yet, for all its weirdness, it's a game about belonging and rebuilding.

Most big-budget games are built by committee to minimize risk. Death Stranding feels different. It's barely a game (some people have called it 'a walking simulator'). But the cutscenes are marvelously done, and the world feels rich. Maybe it's a relic of a different time, when games could be AAA in scope, and be philosophical.

And I couldn't help but wonder about the game's creator Hideo Kojima, who has spent his career trying to make bold games like these. How many creators get the freedom to make something this strange?

Death Stranding came out in 2019. Just four years earlier, Kojima had been kicked out of his longtime company Konami, where he had turned the Metal Gear game series into a world-class IP. The times were changing. As The New Yorker reports, free-to-play games had remade the Japanese market, and Konami was turning toward these cheap, high-margin mobile games. Kojima disagreed. "If you're only focussed on the profits immediately in front of you," Kojima said, "the times will leave you behind."

So he established a new independent studio, also called Kojima Productions. And he found a willing patron in Sony, to back his next game which became Death Stranding .

Kojima's story is a microcosm of what's been happening in entertainment. Capital is betting on the tried and true, while bold swings are pushed aside. As one of Kojima's colleagues said: "Why risk producing pricey and sophisticated games in an age that favors indulgence in shallow, convenient entertainment?"

This is a question consistently on my mind. And while I ponder on it, I'll continue to be immersed in Kojima's brilliant world. [ Rohan ]

I couldn't afford World Series tickets. So last week, I ventured half a mile from the stadium and watched Game 1 from the beer garden of a 102-year-old family business where the walls are covered in hand-painted murals of monkeys holding steins, a black cat arching its back - a German symbol for a hangover - and the phrase Trink' dein glas heute ohne sorgen : drink your glass today without worry.

They installed a giant screen for the packed beer garden. Free Jäger shots were handed out for every Brewers run. It was the biggest party Kegel's Inn has thrown, probably since the repeal of Prohibition. And it was, improbably, still standing to throw it.

In 1924, an Austrian immigrant named John Kegel opened a soda pop parlor in West Allis. That was the cover. Inside, it was a speakeasy complete with beer brewed in the basement. John's wife Anna worked the room with flasks tucked in her jacket, slipping homemade whiskey into customers' "sodas." On May 1, 1927, state agents raided the place and busted Anna with "several ounces of intoxicating liquor." An expensive lawyer, a little luck - and in 1929, Wisconsin repealed its state Prohibition enforcement law. Kegel's was spared.

Shortly before repeal went federal, John unveiled his real vision: a full restaurant with five apartments upstairs, billed as the largest tavern built since the return of beer. It opened August 26, 1933. German-born artist Peter Gries started the murals that same year. They took more than seven years to finish. Nearly everything inside - the hand-carved woodwork, the stained glass, the mahogany bar - is still original. In 2010, it earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.

Four generations carried it forward. The current steward, Julian Kegel, had no plan to come back at all - he left Wisconsin in 2006 to guide in the Alaska wilderness and figured he'd only return for holidays. He took over in 2016. His philosophy on carrying a century-old family business: "Don't screw this up." Kegel's survived Prohibition, wars, downturns, and COVID. The chances of a business reaching 100 years are less than one percent. Even fewer stay in the family the entire time. Julian infused innovative ideas to get them through the pandemic, including a drive-thru fish fry. This year, the World Series watch parties infused five nights of revenue into one of the region's oldest German haunts.

Their tagline says it best: "History doesn't pour itself." [ Taylor ]

I've read a lot of wartime memoirs. Some really stand out, and this one stands out among those.

E. B. Sledge had a naturalist's eye. He loved watching birds as a boy and became a biology professor after the war. His memoir, With the Old Breed , covers his service as a Marine in the war against Japan, on Peleliu and Okinawa .

That scientific background shows up in the prose. Sledge said he learned his writing style from composing scientific papers, where precision mattered. Not that the writing is dry. He's a great witness of the incredible situations he finds himself in, and of the men around him. We live it through him. On Peleliu, he describes the thirst and the difficulty of digging into hard coral as artillery fire is raining down around him and rotting bodies lie unburied in the tropical heat. The physical conditions become part of your understanding of every decision these men make.

He's particularly good at conveying the accumulation. Shelling is terrifying, but it happens to someone who is already exhausted, sick with dysentery, whose skin is covered in sores, who has spent another night barely sleeping. Even between attacks, there's little opportunity to recover. You begin to understand how a person's world can shrink to finding somewhere to lie down and getting through the next few hours.

His affection for the Marines he served with runs through the book, along with his understanding of their limits. When men finally break under the strain, he doesn't regard them as weak. And after you read what they've been through, you won't either. [ Liberty ]

With the latest technological panic upon us, it's a good time to revisit the moments when some new device or creation burst onto the scene and our fear got the better of us. Thankfully, you're spared the digging by a site called the Panic Patrol Show .

They've created hilarious "case files" on the panics over teddy bears, bicycles, the Walkman, and artificial ice. Yes, even ice had its moment of outrage. In 1907, a Michigan minister warned that replacing dolls with teddy bears could lead to falling birthrates.

The creators use AI to produce convincing portrayals of the news segments that might have been: fake interviews with partisans on either side of a given debate over the gramophone or the teddy bear.

In their thesis statement, the Panic Patrol says this: "The fears featured in Panic Patrol often made sense to someone at the time. New technologies disrupt habits. Social changes threaten established norms. People worry about unintended consequences. Sometimes those fears prove justified. Sometimes they look ridiculous in hindsight." This team has simply decided to amplify the absurdity, and in making us laugh, maybe make us think, too.

I found this a useful, funny antidote to the recent panic, and a reminder that the people who feared the bicycle and the teddy bear were not fools. They were just like us, just a century earlier. [ Jimmy ]

" The Kekulé Problem " is one of my favourite essays. Cormac McCarthy published it in Nautilus a few years before he died, and it beautifully put into words something I had long believed: the real work of creativity happens in a place that language can't go.

The title comes from the chemist August Kekulé. In 1865, stuck on the structure of benzene, he dozed off by the fire and dreamed of a snake seizing its own tail. He woke up understanding that the molecule was a ring. This story - the substance and symbolism of it - struck a deep chord within McCarthy. If the unconscious understood the problem well enough to solve it, then it clearly understands language. So why not just tell him? Why does the unconscious speak in images and symbols? In other words, why the snake?

His answer is that the unconscious has been running the animal for around two million years, and language only turned up about a hundred thousand years ago. The old system never learned to trust the newcomer. So it still speaks to us the way it always has, in pictures and dreams.

This hypothesis sounds like new-age, woo-adjacent nonsense until you investigate the history of not just artistic but scientific discovery. Mendeleev dreamed the periodic table. Otto Loewi dreamed the experiment that won him a Nobel Prize. Banting came up with insulin half asleep. Einstein, Tesla, Darwin, and Poincaré all described ideas arriving as visions or sudden flashes. McCarthy found his answer to the Kekulé problem while emptying a wastebasket.

The same year he published that essay, McCarthy sat down with David Krakauer in the library at the Santa Fe Institute, and in that conversation you can watch him wrestle with these ideas in real time.

There's no shortage of books and advice on creativity. But given the heights he reached, perhaps Cormac McCarthy is a man whose answers, however speculative, we shouldn't dismiss lightly. [ Dylan ]

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