Death to Realism! 015
Death to Realism! 015
As I'm writing this, it's 4 PM and already getting dark here in Glasgow, but I hope you are enjoying whatever snatches of fall sights and sounds the amount of daylight allows you to enjoy! If you need a refresher on the origin & nature of these bi-weekly updates, check out the first issue before reading on.
What's New?
Domino Club is back with a whole new round of games!! Check out the twitter thread for all the new titles that have dropped, and, be aware that, based on both the anonymous nature of the jam and the three secret prompts we got to choose from, a lot of the entries are about sex, violence, and the indifferent void of space. Videogames!
Thank you to candle for organizing an amazing judging panel and awards ceremony to wrap things up. I can, at this point, reveal that I won the Mettaton Award for my entry: 10,000 SEX ARSES STUCK AT CALAIS. It was my first time using RPGMaker, and it was a blast to see it go over so well with everyone. Give it a try if you like!
I also made up my annual form to fill in if you would like a holiday card from me, and typically order card blanks around the end of the month, try to do it before then!
Coming Soon
I'm keeping on with my NaNoWriMo project, keeping at just above quota every day and thinking about the characters basically constantly, so I guess that's good! I wrote an update post on my personal blog that goes into my plans for it a bit more, as well as some process info on my Domino Club project. In general, through to the end of the year, I'm trying desperately to not take on any additional work or projects once I wrap up this novel draft, besides, of course, cooking a bunch of holiday food and making the linocut design for the cards.
The Rec Room
THE GOBLIN EGG/VIRTUAL BABY is a cool and highly constrained "double sided" bitsy project.
The new Ty Segall album (after an uncharacteristic two year break) has been my work soundtrack of choice this week
I don't have time to do it, but the second Bipsi jam is still open for submissions. It's a fun and flexible tool to work with that can do some interesting stuff.
idk. I'm just obsessed with this. I think I'll become a prog guy.
I've Been Reading
I have been catching up a bit on my infinite To-Read pile... I'm in the middle of a book called Wayward Nuns in Medieval Literature, which is both pretty fun and informative, comparing and contrasting both bawdy and romantic depictions of nuns who leave their convent with historical documents of this phenomenon at the time. It offers an interesting view on what monastic life was like as well as the role it played as a social institution, as depicted by this variety of historical evidence. I'm looking into this stuff more because A) I'm really excited for more Misericorde but also B) I feel like I need to beef up the portions of a story I'm working on that take place in/near some monastic ruins.
I also finished a short collection of incomplete Adorno and Horkheimer notes (recorded by Gretel Adorno, naturally), which I expected to be mostly theory inside baseball, but they ended up making some pretty incisive and applicable statements about productivity, value and mass culture.
Here's Adorno:
"To be useless will then no longer be shameful. Conformity will lose its meaning. Productivity in its genuine, undisfigured sense will, for the first time, have a real effect on need: not by assuaging unsatisfied need with useless things, but rather because satisfied need will make it possible to relate to the world without knocking it into shape through universal usefulness."
and the Horkheimer quote I most enjoyed:
"We criticize mass culture not because it provides us with too much or because it makes our lives too secure—we can leave that to Lutheran theology. Rather, we criticize mass culture because it contributes to a situation in which we receive too little and in which what we receive is too bad; because broad swathes of society live in terrible misery, both inwardly and outwardly; and because people end up resigning themselves to injustice."
There were a lot of really good gaming history articles over the last two weeks. Chaoyang Trap remains one of the best email-senders to grace my inbox, with a longread on Chinese flash games and iQue consoles this week. This retrospective of VN dev Christine Love's early work is also great, and finally, if you're still hurting for some sexy content after playing all the Domino Club games, I also enjoyed this history of strip mahjong. If you don't want to read about games at all, well, this review of a history of women's role in alcohol production that goes on to ask deeper questions about the stories we tell about and social position of alcohol, is really interesting.
I think that's all I have this bi-week! For new subscribers who have signed on since the last newsletter, you can check out the archive of past issues at any time!
Thank you again for your support,
Emilie