Full transcript:

In the text file known as Merlin’s Wisdom Project, we find the following: If you have cool stickers, use them. Put them on things. Be carelessly joyful about using your stickers. If you die with a collection of dozens of cool stickers that you never used, you did it wrong.

This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick.

The Steam Deck offers an admittedly limited canvas for decorating with stickers. On mine, there are three, which I have affixed in a left-to-right pattern at the rate of about one per year.

First is the logo of the podcast The Short Game, in the shape of a stylized game controller. It fits smartly above the air intake grille on the left side of the console’s back. The back, I should say, is the only surface of the Deck I’ve considered decorating in this way, as it offers the most contiguous real estate. The sweet fumes ground out from the vents on the top edge of the console, for which is this show is named, could not exist in their fullness with any tampering done to the intake grille, so I leave it wholly uncovered without complaint. Anyway, the podcast’s logo in this position looks a bit like a domino mask that transforms the grille into an accidental toothy rictus grinning out beneath it. I like that.

Moving to the right is a small sticker for Fogknife, my personal blog, on which we needn’t dwell on today, and is the least visually interesting of the set anyway. It’s just the letters of the blog’s title in a typeface whose name I no longer recall, tumbled into a pile and resting below the Valve logo that is carved into the center of the console’s back panel. I definitely feel a resistance to covering that logo, not dissimilar to the reluctance I still have against obscuring the Apple logo on my laptop lids, decades after the first time I slapped a sticker on a chunky white iBook. I don’t have the holy fear for the Valve logo’s untouchable sanctity that I once held for that bitten apple silhouette, it’s more that I’m cautious the doubtful adhesion implied by that unevenly raised surface.

Recently I visited the Pacific Northwest for the first time, and you know I fell it love with it, and I bought… so many stickers, from all of the cities and towns that we stopped at. But it’s a tall, black-on-white representation of a douglas fir, purchased from a Seattle coffee shop, that alone found its way behind my Steam Deck. It stretches from the bottom of the back panel to the top, filling out the whole right third.

For the sake of its majesty, I did allow this tree cover up one other piece of the Deck’s pre-existing decor, the blob of faint gray FCC statements and license numbers and QR codes and such found on the lower right of the back panel. Where the Valve logo seems to demand a modicum of respect, the square of gray ink has no such veneer of core identity. Rather, it commands all the authority of a legally required mattress tag. I did consider other ways to fit the tree onto the surface that would have dodged the question. Arguably, it might have looked better, from a raw page-layout perspective, to lay the tree horizontally along the top edge, above the Valve logo. But its representation of a living thing—a massive living thing, a reminder of the unique and wild-green nature that I got to experience first-hand—called for more respect than that. I pushed past the resistance put up by that smudge of legalese. I let the tree’s roots grasp and bury it, and I knew immediately that I had made the right choice.

I can’t see the tree when I’m playing games on the Deck, but I know it’s there. When I watch my spouse play—we share the Deck, you see—I do get a chance to admire the way I’ve arranged these three smartly monochromatic stickers, offset against the black plastic, and I do especially admire that Doug fir. It’s a strong image. When I hold the Deck in my own hands, I can feel the power of the Cascadian overgrowth entangling the pixels, pushing the images outward at me. The microscopic LEDs vibrate with resonance, remembering the earth from which they were drawn. And that feels so wild and blessed.

This has been: Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show at Venthuffer.com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.