June 2023 - Reflective Surfaces, Micro-Consoles, and Feeling Bad In Your Local Nature Preserve
I hope folks could stay safe and healthy when so much of the US was shrouded in smoke or blistering hot this month. We still have to take care of each other, in spite of everything.
Work In June
In the latest The Angel Looking Backwards, I discussed Kara Stone's The Earth Is A Better Person Than Me. This one's a bit sprawling, but that's because this game really made me feel things and encouraged me to dig into the roots of those feelings.
For GameSpot, I wrote up something on the Ouya's tenth anniversary. The Ouya was a micro-console, based on Android, which retailed at $99 and was propelled by a massively successful Kickstarter campaign. It was a serious, but ill-advised, attempt to disrupt the industry that mostly resulted in a set of *weird* objects rather than any tangible disruption.
For Paste, I wrote about playing Diablo instead of its recent four-quel and finding something refreshingly unadorned and unpretentious, despite the game's own stated ambitions.
As for podcasts, we covered the miserable Dino Crisis 3 on The Safe Room. Fortunately, we were asked a number of fun and engaging questions by our wonderful listeners!
On the Patreon side, we covered Silent Hill Revelation, the truly abysmal SH3 film adaptation. For Shitposting, Em and Jackson from Abnormal Mapping joined us to bullshit about Fall Out Boy, Square RPGs, and plenty else.
Our Fatal Frame episode technically landed in July, but we recorded it in June, so I'm counting it here. Fatal Frame is an extremely cool game!
Bits and Bobs
Two fascinating science fiction podcasts hit my radar this month. The first is Starboard Vineyard Tours, which explores science fiction studies and plain science fiction. The second is Shelved By Genre, which is a genre fiction book club and is starting up with reading Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, a genre-bendy science fantasy epic. These podcasts are, imo, the best kind of nerdy shit. Enthusiastic people talking with verve and clarity about the weird things that matter to them.
I also read the novel New To Liberty by DeMisty D. Bellinger this month. It's about three women's scant, or long lasting, encounters with the titular town. The novel works backward in time, starting in the mid-60s and concluding during the dust bowl. I'm a sucker for this kind of play with the order of history, Cloud Atlas is an all time favorite of mine, and New To Liberty works in both novel and predictable ways with a deft hand. The town itself, as implied by the name, is a way where secret victories, new alliances, unlikely loves and friendships are all possible. But it's also a place with hard, violent, limits. New To Liberty is about the tragedy and the glory of those possibilities and the worlds they suggest, that still may yet come true.
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