More links than Golf
A short one this week. In the midst of sending another story out and battling with a back garden that is slowly losing a war against weeds.
Some weeks there are announcements and victories, other weeks there are not. That's just the way of things.
Links
I've said it before in this newsletter, but it's even more apt in the light of the recent Mueller report, but Matt Taibbi is doing the lord's work and his newsletter is definitely worth the sub fee. He's essentially using the platform Substack to write his next book (titled Hate Inc.) and delivering each chapter as he publishes it to his subscribers.
There's some more 'Russiagate' commentary here (this time from Matt Bivens) on the absolute wretched conduct of the mainstream media during the whole affair. Bivens also touches on the recent New York Times videos I referenced (and tore apart) in the last newsletter.
Additionally, The Grayzone have compiled a helpful list of all the sinister things Putin has been accused of. Clearly, he's a busy man.
= = =
Talking of disinformation. The Atlantic has a piece about the ever changing war on disinfo has now spread to Instagram. This is mostly in the form of memes and the usual Q-Anon flavoured conspiracy theories.
= = =
Polygon has an excellent interview with Fraction and Kelly Sue that covers working together, their different approaches to work and process, etc. It's a superb read.
"I start with cuts. I start with juxtapositioning. Sometimes it might just be one angle; one shot, one image. But more often than not, there will be something connected to that that comes next. Or I’ll have something before, or I’ll have something like, Oh, I knew the dog was going to show up with the arrow in his mouth. So I make a joke about how the boomerang arrow comes back to you in the end. And it’s the arrow the dog has in his mouth 20 issues later. So there’s 20 issues between these cuts, but I knew when I wrote “It comes back to you in the end,” I knew where that was going to pay off."
The above quote (from Fraction) is from a section where both creators discuss their approaches to the conceptual stage of an issue/comic.
The article made me think about my own approach. The initial thoughts on a project, for me, are usually similar to the quote above - images. These are images central to the theme or a particular scene or sequence.
It's then a matter of arranging them into some kind of coherent order. Or, more often than not, it's about how those images combine with another set of images or thoughts from long ago. A large majority of ideas only really 'click' when they combine with a strong central image looking for a home.
= = =
Slate have an article on how prime-douche, Joe Rogan's podcast is a gateway into the IDW (no, not the comic publisher).
= = =
I'm not sure I agree with all of the points about The Last Jedi in this article, but its discussion on the flawed (but still great) KOTOR 2: The Sith Lords is what makes the post worth reading.
===
This caught my eye on Twitter recently. It's an X-COM inspired Afro-futurist strategy game where you take control of a group looking to ensure nature and the creatures within all co-exist.
"We Are The Caretakers is a real-time afrofuturist squad and society management game inspired by XCOM, Darkest Dungeon, Ogre Battle, and Northgard. Players will make difficult, permanent decisions to unite cultures on a post-postapocalyptic planet after the barrier that separates the Caretakers from the rest of the world mysteriously falls
Only together can you protect the Raun -- massive, energy-charged, endangered animals -- that may be the key to saving the world."
Hell yes.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it plays nice with Steam's Linux compatibility doo-hickey.
= = =
Paul Jarvis on why newsletters beat social media. You'll hear no arguments from me.
"Email and newsletters also feel like they’re instant but slow enough. Emails don’t go away if you don’t check your inbox for a few hours. Group chats require constant paying attention, to ensure we don’t miss anything. Social media tricks our brains into all sorts of things to keep us coming back. But email is simple: replying quickly, in most cases, doesn’t make your reply any better. It can be quick, but doesn’t have to be. It shows up in a place where most people spend a great deal of time—their inbox—and doesn’t require adding or installing yet another thing to constantly check in on."
= = =
Andrea Long Chu rips Bret Easton Ellis a new on reviwing his new book, White, for Bookforum. Reader, it is glorious. Here's an excerpt from the first paragraph:
"Following several increasingly metafictional novels and a few bad screenplays, White is Ellis’s first foray into nonfiction, and the result is less a series of glorified, padded-out blog posts than a series of regular, normal-size blog posts. Mostly, Ellis hates social media and wishes millennials would stop whining and “pull on their big boy pants”—an actual quote from this deeply needless book, whose existence one assumes we could have all been spared if Ellis’s millennial boyfriend had simply shown the famous man how to use the mute feature on Twitter."
= = =
Bright Wall/Dark Room on the fantastic spectacle that is Magic Mike XXL.
"It is very easy to argue that Magic Mike XXL is a dumb movie, (Many movies are dumb!), but there are ideas, Big Ideas, presented in Magic Mike XXL that are not dumb. In fact, it’s one of the most progressive movies to come out this year. This isn’t a movie that panders to women; it’s a movie that worships women. Women aren’t talked down to. Women are respected. Hell, everyone is respected! It’s a movie about objectification that is also about respect and kindness. Imagine a movie where everyone actually really likes each other and wants each other to do well. Imagine a movie where a character literally says “it’s bad that no one listens to women.” Magic Mike XXL is a movie that believes women want and deserve good things, and in this universe, those good things are basically hot, nice, dumb men."
= = =
Polygon have done a fantastically detailed oral history of Morrowind to celebrate its recent anniversary.
This was probably the first game I was obsessed with, delving into every nook and cranny of the world and its lore. My PC was never good enough to run these kind of open world RPGs. So it was a huge thing when Morrowind came out for the Xbox.
= = =
Other Worlds is a YouTube channel celebrating the worlds and environments depicted in video games. They've also recently started doing videos presenting ambient sounds from various games.
The above video on the sound design of the tense and atmospheric Alien: Isolation is a testament to how well the developers portrayed the world created in the movies.
Speaking of...
To coincide with the 40th anniversary of the new movie, 20th Century Fox commissioned a bunch of film makers to make several short movies set in the same universe. The first two are already up. Despite the low budgets they're quite effective and suitably anxiety inducing.
= = =
I'm off to bring order to the chaotic wasteland of my back yard. See you in two!