Death to Realism! 016
Death to Realism! 016
It's cold here now! I saw a seagull standing on a part of the duck pond that froze over today. I hope you are staying warm and/or experiencing southern hemisphere summer. 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?
The CFP for a special issue I'm co-editing on Local Digital Game Production is out now. If there are any games academia or even just general media studies academia individuals among us, and you're doing work on Local Game Production (in the broadest sense, but we're especially interested in non-industry, grey-legal, online and Global South angles, I think) send it along! I'm really excited to read it though my relationship to academia as someone who got their degree but is not in an academic job is kind of tenuous and long-term uncertain; basically I'm putting my skills out there for stuff I think is interesting and important in its own right.
I kind of pretty much finished a draft of my NaNoWriMo project yesterday? At least, it reached an important stage for me in long-form narrative writing which is like, Everything Happens. As candle would say, everything else is surgery on a grape now, by which I mean, there's the problem of going back through and beefing up the parts I know are kind of rushed, making sure characters and theme are coherent, etc, but also the problem of what exactly to do with a ~65k word novel draft once I've reached a level of satisfaction with that. So most of the work is left, it seems. I'm taking a mental day off before jumping into revising but did write a paragraph about a creuset after that walk to the duck pond today.
Last call if you would like a holiday card from me!! I will probably commit to the number of blanks I'll order and start working on the linocut design (don't get too excited) around Tuesday.
Coming Soon
Well it's getting close to December, and in my last message I basically advertised my intent to Start No New Projects for a month beyond the holiday fun I already have planned. I have two more short stories in progress that I outlined or wrote bits of during NaNo, and it'll be nice to tinker with them if free time comes up... As for the new year, I have some CD interviews lined up, may also see about revitalizing Plaintext Distro as a round of zine fairs come up, but nothing solid yet.
The Rec Room
For Keywords in Play, I did an interview with Felan Parker, who does some great work on cultural mediation and games. What he had to say was pretty interesting IMO so check it out...
I also enjoyed this short twine game-poem about communing with the souls of dead tamogotchi
I am such a sucker for densely-textured poetic single screen bitsy games and this is a good one.
Festive Bakes are back in Greggs! I just love the weird spiced gloop flavor, I could have a scoop of stuffing with every meal. The vegan ones are really good, because seriously, the meat is really not carrying most Greggs products to begin with. They also have vegan minced pies, which are really nice. I reccomend these
I've Been Reading
I've started Dave Beech's Art and Postcapitalism which was an impulse buy during the most recent Pluto Books sale. I get really bummed out by overly prescriptive or functionalist readings of art in relation to capitalist production, positive or negative, and so far this one seems to be making some interesting arguments for it as an important possibility space. I'm previously familiar with Dave Beech as an editor of The Philistine Controversy, which is another book of critical essays I go back to a lot, and it has Noel Burch's essay on Sadeian Aesthetics that really impacted my thinking on art in general.
Some interesting articles from the past two weeks: Biome Collective did an interesting write-up on their small grant process that took place last year and hopefully will be open for another round soon! I helped with developing the process and selecting the grantees after my blog post critiquing how a lot of gaming/digital arts funds are based on huge applications for large pots of funding, while the Biome Grant is still pretty small, it's hopefully a much more open process and will reach people not served by those organizations.
I also really liked this essay, which is focused on re-centering the human labor that goes into supposed "AI" and "automation." My recent blog post dealt with this a bit as well. I think it's a good way of tracing where the work actually ends up, in both technological pipelines as things we experience as external to ourselves but also within our own lives, without getting too excited or too afraid about the ability of these things to "automate."
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