SNAFU City
Well, after a technical SNAFU this end wiped what I’d written for this week I’m afraid it’s a link heavy edition (in emergency break glass, propagate links).
Links
First up, Moira Hicks has a piece over at Fanbyte about the Metal Gear Solid series used elements of magical realism to convey the horrors of war:
“This is a series where an antagonist is named “Vamp” not because he drinks blood (which he does), but because he is bisexual. It’s a series where a deadly female sniper has to wear a bikini at all times because otherwise she will suffocate. Metal Gear plays fast and loose with technologies and science, but is utterly honest to the horror of the military industrial complex. By contrast, Call of Duty is disturbingly faithful to the technologies and sciences with which we create war, but it presents this faith with no critique of soldiering.”
///
HiLoBrow is currently in the middle of a series called Convoy Your Enthusiasm a series of guest posts on action movies from the period 1974-1983. Here‘s Madeline Ashby’s excellent piece on Blade Runner:
“Unlike most action films, Blade Runner relies on Deckard’s physical and emotional vulnerability to create tension. He’s not a badass. He’s not a martial arts master. He’s weaker on every level than the creatures he’s hunting, and he knows it. As such, it makes sense that Deckard’s one act of rebellion at the end of the film is to lean into his tenderness. Like the Replicants, he chooses to love. And that is the one choice the powers that be cannot abide. There are many science fiction films about terrible fathers — it’s baked in, from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s DNA. But there are far fewer about rising above that trauma and choosing something different.”
///
Author Myke Cole over at The New Republic has written a piece on the Sparta fetish and its celebration in right wing circles.
///
Comicbook.com on the best comics of 2019 so far.
///
FAIR on the media’s current trend of presenting horrifying stories that show the realities of late stage capitalism as ‘uplifting perserverance porn’.
///
Walking as a super power.
///
To End All Wars collaborator Jonathan Clode over at HorrorNews has taken a loving, but humorous, look at the Friday the 13th movies.
///
I still have reams of notes on the non-fic piece I wrote on the Hitman reboot. The excellent YouTube NoClip has saved me a heap of research though with this video on the construction and design of the levels in the game.
The notion of public and private space, layers of security, etc. are all elements that are integral.
///
Bustle has a list of 46 horror movies that pass the Bechdel test.
///
George Monbiot on buffoons and clowns in the modern political system:
“Today’s billionaires are the real citizens of nowhere. They fantasise, like the plutocrats in Ayn Rand’s terrible novel Atlas Shrugged, about further escape. Look at the “seasteading” venture funded by Paypal’s founder Peter Thiel, that sought to build artificial islands in the middle of the ocean, whose citizens could enact a libertarian fantasy of escape from the state, its laws, regulations and taxes, and from organised labour. Scarcely a month goes by without a billionaire raising the prospect of leaving the Earth altogether, and colonising space pods or other planets.”
///
Finally, Standard eBooks is a cool project whereby a team of volunteers have taken (free) texts from Project Gutenberg (works that are in the public domain, including some classics) and tidied them up and presented them in modern, nice looking eBooks. All for free. There’s a few PKD short stories on there including the usual Gutenberg classics (Moby Dick, Turn of the Screw, etc.)
///
I’m off to find the remnants of my work down the sides of the electronic sofa.
See you in two!