[A Pleasurable Headache] Rebooting Cyberpunk; the small web; Gatwick drone; Tenet; the mighty giraffe
We're pretty link heavy for this years first edition. Have at it!
Cyberpunk Needs a Reboot by Ryan Zickgraf
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/cyberpunk-2077-aesthetics-elon-musk-anti-capitalist-fiction
"For all of its thrills and clever Jean Baudrillard references, the Matrix trilogy is a superhero movie disguised as cyberpunk. Love conquers all in Pixar’s cutesy dystopia WALL-E. Ready Player One, an empty-headed YA cyberpunk novel for aging Gen Xers, takes place in an inhospitable future but manages to reify the techno-utopian ideals of Silicon Valley. All a broken world needs is a highly competent CEO, an Elon Musk type, the book essentially concludes.
Ready Player One can’t even do that quite right. Its hero — teen Wade Watts — is no visionary, just an obsessive gamer with an encyclopedic knowledge of ’80s pop culture who conquers a VR version of the internet called OASIS. Its newly released sequel, Ready Player Two, doubles as an accidental indictment of the liberal social justice warrior movement. What if our authoritarian white male ruler got woke and — you know — centered marginalized voices and stuff?
It’s cyberpunk as window dressing, another nostalgic reference to Stuff Nerds Like in a book full of them."
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Writers Don't Need Social Media
https://litreactor.com/columns/writers-dont-need-social-media
Just in case you need even more of a reason to quit the hellsite in this year of our lord, 2021.
" The comparison of social media to a slot machine is used a lot to make the point that sites like Twitter reinforce user behavior, like doomscrolling, but less common is the comparison for someone trying to market their shit. Social media marketing and social media "just for funsies" work the same way.
Lots of you probably have 100k tweets under your belt. And yeah, you pull that slot machine’s arm 100,000 times? You’ll have some wins.
It’s a lottery. Some will make HUGE gains, but almost everyone will expend resources for no gain whatsoever. There's very little meritocracy on social media, very little work in, product out. It's as good as random."
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What is the Small Web? by Aral Balkan
https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/
"Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you. On the Small Web, we do not have the concept of “users”. When we refer to people, we call them people.
Another fundamental difference between the Big Web and Small Web is that on the Big Web we trust servers and distrust clients whereas on the Small Web, we distrust servers and trust clients. We treat servers as dumb delivery mechanisms. The client – under the control of the person who owns the site or app – is the only trusted environment."
Yes, please.
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The mystery of the Gatwick drone
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/01/the-mystery-of-the-gatwick-drone
Simpler times.
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A Beat-by-Beat Explanation of What Happens in Tenet
https://www.vulture.com/2020/09/tenet-explained-whats-going-on-in-the-plot-of-this-movie.html
I may not be the only one who needed this.
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Consider the Giraffe by Katherine Rundell
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n22/katherine-rundell/consider-the-giraffe
"Giraffes are born with no aid from the camel or hyena, but even so their birth is a wonder: they gestate for 15 months, then drop into existence a distance of five feet from the womb to the earth. It looks as brisk and simple as emptying out a handbag. Within minutes, they can stand on their trembling, catwalk-model legs and suckle at their mother’s four teats, biting off the little wax caps that have formed in the preceding days to keep the milk from leaking out. Soon they are ready to run, but still liable to trip over their own hind legs, a hazard they never learn entirely to avoid."
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Disc Diving: Medal of Honor Frontline
https://colewriteswords.medium.com/disc-diving-medal-of-honor-frontline-97b57c92209d
"Original Xbox and PlayStation 2 games have aged wonderfully from a visual standpoint, and in many ways, they still look better (or more compelling) than games do today. Medal of Honor Frontline is a perfect example as to why. The constraints of the system’s power meant that instead of creating a facsimile of reality (or realism), developers instead created an impression of realism. The latter is far more interesting than the former. These impressions of reality are heightened and thus they are far more expressive. Ruined cities feel grander, bleaker, and even more otherworldly than they already are. Darkness feels richer and more textured than any normal nightfall, and interior lighting is more deliberate than natural. Red alarm lights blanket a hallway in a deep sheet of harsh red light while muzzles flash and people scream and fight through cramped hallways. To call this game simple in its visual palette or that the graphics are bad/have not aged well shows that one has missed the point entirely."
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Promising Young Woman Is a Devastating Portrait of Survivor’s Remorse
Spoilers abound for the film's climax and other aspects of the plot.
CW: Sexual assault, rape, violence towards women.
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The Workplace, Wet or Dry by Joe Lansdale
https://www.mulhollandbooks.com/books/the-workplace-wet-or-dry/
An ode to writing wherever you need to, written by one of the all time greats.
"My office became a combination of window platform and a board from a ruined bookshelf, which I propped under the computer as a place for my keyboard. Even now, below me, hammers slam and saws buzz, and there are all manner of compressors and snapping sounds I can’t actually associate with anything I recognize outside of a movie like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Here, on this board, I have written a tremendous amount of work in the past two months, and it occurred to me that, though a nice place to work — an office, a library — is good and maybe even inspiring, any place that allows a writer to practice his craft is pretty damn good as well. I don’t feel any different with my keyboard on this bookcase board when I’m writing than I did when I was writing on my huge desk in my bottom-floor office or, for that matter, when I was a kid with a composition notebook and a ballpoint pen. I’m lost in the world I’m creating; I’m meditating in my own way."
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I'm off to watch my country fall into the sea as the QAnon movement manifests into local dingbats filming in hospitals whilst they criticise the NHS. See you in two!