Like, isn't it just the way that nature works?
Updates
Go Home will be re-released via ComiXology Submit next week on Wednesday November 20th. As many know the previous publisher had some questionable ethics so I made the decision to pull it. Now it has a shiny new home at Mallet Productions (those behind Mansion of Madness). The comic will be available here upon its release (the link won’t work until then). For those who didn’t pick it up first time around this is another chance to grab it.
There should also be word soon of Disconnect‘s release via the same avenue. Stay tuned!
The last two weeks I’ve begun work on another prose short. Again, for this one I have a very specific submission target in place. Lets call it Project Albion for now.
Definitely a folk horror aspect to it, which is all the rage now the country devolves into enclaves of madness and tribalism.
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Links
Sometimes you come across an article that unearths a memory you’d long forgotten, such as this excellent blog post by Kimimi on the tonal third act swerve in the original Tomb Raider game. Here, instead of the ancient, grandiose temples of Atlantis we’re treated to a vision of the lost kingdom that’s half Barker, half Lovercraft in its construction and execution.
“But if you do take the time to look… the mummy on Qualopec’s right watches Lara as she moves around the room, and if you shoot it enough times it will eventually give out an unearthly groan before falling over dead. There’s no need for any of that to happen as far as completing the level’s concerned, but it’s a little seed of wrongness in a game that until that point had been straightforwardly Indiana Jones-y and a small taste (or warning, depending on your point of view) of things to come. The obvious move after this minor reveal would be to pepper the game with similarly unsettling things to make sure everyone knew something wasn’t quite right with Lara’s globe-trotting quest, but Core Design bravely went the opposite way entirely and the next few levels have no Atlanteans (living, dead, or mummified) in them at all, leaving players to wonder if that first creature was just a weird one-off a bored level designer put in for a bit of fun, or in the days before always-on internet and countless walkthrough videos, if they ever really saw anything at all…”
The post is well worth a look, if only for the pictures/reminders of the inhuman horrors of ambling flesh, bone and sinew you’d heretofore suppressed.
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Sticking with video games, Heather Alexandra’s review of Death Stranding on Kotaku is a masterful piece of writing. I may never play the game (Xbox One here) but it sounds like another zeitgest-centric piece of gaming art by Kojima (Sons of Liberty may have been flawed but boy does it look prescient now):
“I don’t have answers to this. Death Stranding didn’t provide them. Instead, it insisted on a simple idea: that we are made strong by the grace and, more beautifully, the chance of others. That we travel on the roads of those who went before us, leaving our own marks that ultimately affect the path those behind us take. We walk alone more often than we walk together, losing ineffable things along the way like so much fumbled luggage. And yet, we sometimes see signs of care. In life, they’re small. A random text message from an old friend, a free drink at the neighborhood bar, an enthusiastic conversation with a co-worker about nothing important, the sound of your roommate playing his guitar. In Death Stranding, these things are literal. A generator powering our car in the middle of nowhere, a glowing thumbs up emblem at the city gates, a ladder crossing a flowing stream, a structure protecting us from the acid rain.”
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This post by Mike Caulfield is a few years old now, but it’s still pertinent, touching on how we consume and repurpose the information (if at all) we come across on the internet.
“I am going to make the argument that the predominant form of the social web — that amalgam of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research and that our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of “the web as conversation” and on to something more timeless, integrative, iterative, something less personal and less self-assertive, something more solitary yet more connected.”
The post has made me think more about how I structure my approach to this newsletter as well as how I catalogue and link elements of research for writing projects.
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Jenny Slate is great. Jenny Slate writing at The Paris Review on the patriarchal ‘Code of Hammurabi’ and its subsequent impact on the rest of history is ::chef’s kiss::
“Does it not seem unnatural that the basis of the interactions between genders in our species is something that was created by a psycho who took too much from an already generous river, thousands of years ago? Does it make you sick to know that the same men benefiting from this code are also the duds who are adjusting their popped collars, fixing their necklaces, wearing a ton of deodorant, and confidently saying, Okay, babe, but … to play the devil’s advocate … like … think about hunter-gatherer stuff. Like, isn’t it just the way that nature works?
Nature does not work that way. Nature does not give a shit about low thinking like that. Nature invited us to be more than apes, more than cave people. Nature pushed us to change. Instinct is real but so are the facts that we lived communally and that human remains have been found buried with tools, both genders buried with tools, buried with babies from the other humans who dwelled next door. We lived in groups, we acted in a friendly way toward each other. We partied together. That is what we were inclined to do.”
A.Fucking.Men.
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If you write any longform non-fic on Medium, it might be an idea to put it somewhere else, somewhere you own. As mentioned before, I’m a huge proponent of the IndieWeb movement and this piece from March 2019 over at Nieman Lab highlights just how precarious it is to host your writing in a space that you do not own or control.
The article soon segues into a potted timeline of Medium‘s various pivots and developments since its inception. My favourite are these gems from April 2015:
“April 14th: Williams tells Wired why Medium doesn’t do video. “Video is incredibly powerful and influential, but not for the average person.”
Then, a week later, on the 21st:
“Esquire launches a content partnership with Medium in which it will “present audio recordings of interviews with celebrities like George Clooney and Clint Eastwood as animated videos.”
Emphasis, definitely my own. Yeesh.
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Not only are we nearing year’s end but the end of the 2010’s. As such there will be many lists shooting into your eyeballs in the next month or so. Here is AV Club‘s list of the 100 best TV shows of the 2010s. No real surprises here, but the real meat is towards the lower end of the list where the hidden gems lie. I’ll be over here, as always, pouring one out for Terriers.
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Between 1946-58 the U.S detonated over 60 nuclear warheads around the Marhsall Island chain. Contaminated soil and other debris, as well as the detritus from later biological tests were dumped into a huge dome-shaped concrete coffin. Now with the ever looming threat of climate change and rising tides the ‘tomb’ is at risk of collapse. Officials from the islands have asked, naturally, for U.S help with the matter. The U.S response is, unfortunately, not even remotely surprising:
“Officials in the Marshall Islands have lobbied the U.S. government for help, but American officials have declined, saying the dome is on Marshallese land and therefore the responsibility of the Marshallese government.”
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A new Call of Duty game is out which means its questionable attitudes to combat are also back. This time around the game seeks to link a real life U.S war crime with Russia:
“We’re told in a cutscene that, during its invasion of this fictional country, Russia bombed the highway killing people trying to escape. Just like that, in a piece of popular fiction, American atrocities become Russian atrocities. It’s the kind of distance players need to separate themselves from history, to watch the road uncritically through a scope, and place bullets downrange so that their enemies head’s satisfyingly explode. It’s a fun mission.”
Also interesting is this piece on the idea of cyclical violence and conflict within the Gears of War franchise. Then there’s class war in Fallout 76 and the huge impact of Halo 2 on the gaming industry.
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The developers behind the productivity app Freedom interviewed Kelly Sue Deconnick recently about process, productivity and procrastination (the holy trinity):
“Fear is the biggest: fear of failure, fear of not finding the story or the story being lackluster, fear of being a fraud. When you see yourself as ambitious, there’s the fear of not living up to that drive. And it hurts when you do crash. Even when you know that failing is critical and that if you never fail, you never grow.”
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Following on from last week here’s some more Parvati worship. Play Outer Worlds if you haven’t done so already.
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Finally, please don’t vote for the Liberal Democrats in the upcoming election and remember:
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I’m off to try and get “Boris Johnson” into the Urban Dictionary as a term for ‘inert piece of lard bordering on sentience’.
See you in two!