February 28, 2020

📡 – 02.28.2020

A small collection of things I ~consumed~ recently.

Not all of this is new. Inclusion does not imply endorsement. All of it gave me something to think about. 

-- 👂

I've had to do some music direction over the last couple weeks, so I've amassed a small bounty of fun stuff to listen to (thanks in no small part to bandcamp daily and their AMAZING editorial team). 

This is all really good, but I'll put a recommended next to the ones I've listened to the most.

• Phoenix,  quest?onmarc – dance-y

• U-Udios 2, Geo Rip *recommended* – electronics, but jazz-y

• Planet of Death, ishi vu – dance-y

• doG, IVVVO – electro-y; also content warning for 90s nu-metal flashbacks

• loader mither, by vester koza *recommended* –electronics

• Local Guide, North Sea Dialect–noise-y

• Heavy Tongue, by Parlor Walls– goth-y post-punk

• Debiasing, by Barker *recommended* – electronics, dance-y

• Amarração, Odete *recommended* – pop music eating itself

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• 1,700 3D Models of Cultural Heritage Objects Now Available in Public Domain – Monica Castillo, Hyperallergic

• My Dictator: Growing up in Ceausescu’s Romania – Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, Popula 

• A Renegade in Atlantic City – Dave Simpson, Popula

• This Self-Described “Chinese Peasant” Has Become the Twitter God of Drinking – Ryan Swen, Hyperallergic

• The Labor Beat – Robin James, Real Life

• This Brand is Late Capitalism – Rachel Connelly

• Max Horkheimer, a Teacher Without a Class – Ingar Solty, Jacobin

• Fuck the Poolice – Nathan Robinson, Current Affairs

• You Are Here Intro: Mapping Network Pollution – Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner (fd, Whitney and Ryan are friends), MIT Press

• “Let’s talk about genre”: Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation – New Statesman

• Why do so many Egyptian statues have broken noses? – Julia Wolkoff, CNN

• The Alexander Technique and the Museum Walk – Mark Josefsberg, Centered  Walking
  
  I also read enough papers they're worth their own mini section, just in case this is something that doesn't interest you, you can skip it:
  

• After the social crisis: the transformation of employment relations at France Télécom – Doellgast et al, Socio-Economic Review

• Effects of Winning Cues and Relative Payout on Choice between Simulated Slot Machines – Spetch et al, Addiction

• Cultural studies and actually existing culture – Woo, International Journal of Cultural Studies

• Digital visibility and the role of mutual interaction expectations: Reframing the journalist–audience relationship through the lens of interpersonal communication – Wilhelm et al, New Media & Society
  
  pair with
  

• Sustained journalist–audience reciprocity in a meso news-space: The case of a journalistic WhatsApp group – Kligler-Vilenchik and Tenenboim, New Media and Society

• Gastro-emotivism: How MasterChef Israel produces therapeutic collective belongings – Grosglik and Lerner, European Journal of Cultural Studies

-- 🎥

Brace yourselves. (content warning: firearms but zero violence, except to the hegemonic concept of "genre")

-- 🕹

I hated Outer Worlds so much that I got up, mid-conversation – with four dialogue options at the ready, the game waiting for me to select one – and turned my PS4 off. My wife asked why I had given up so suddenly, and I effectively told her 

Except replace Earth with a fictional planet called "Monarch".

I think what I actually said was "I'm tired of helping these idiots with their stupid, self-made problems." Outer Worlds goes about 10 steps down the pathway towards looking critically at a hypercommercialized, corporate controlled future and then ... stops, with the wilderness of  agency and political thought ahead and a well manicured privately-owned-public-garden just a few steps behind. Then it sets up camp, and serves fancy tea to whomstever might all pass and remarks  "Wow, pretty nuts out here - huh?"

I believe the premise of the situation where I gave up was that some boss of a Company Town decided he needed to prove to the Corporate Board that their outpost was worth investment, because they had grown tired of independence. Freedom is nice and all, his refrain went, unless you want nice things. And when it comes to getting nice things, a collective of citizens working together isn't gonna cut it.  You gotta lick some boots. So in order to prove the worthiness of the Board's investment, I would have to collect a large gun thus proving his quality as a leader. All this, so I could macguffin some macguffin that would macguffin my macguffin, which was needed to macguffin further macguffins in need of macguffining. 

I'm told there is a way to go about this mission where you don't have to "commit war crimes" (YIKES very happy I didn't get that far) but there is no path forward where the speech options don't amount to agreeing – perhaps temporarily – yeah actually ... worker solidarity is pretty dumb if you want an improvement in your working and living conditions. Probably better to court capital. 

No thanks. I almost put the game disc in the garbage where it belongs. Call me a tankie or whatever for being mad that a game isn't left leaning enough, but I think I'm reacting to how exceptionally lazy and noncommittal the writing in this game is. It should be called Centrist Worlds YUKYUKYUK GOT EM 

The sky textures on alien planets were nice, though. And the sound design was pretty on point.

I've moved on to Disco Elysium. You may be shocked to learn one of the first thoughts I internalized was "Mazovian Socio-Economics." I am the Big Communism Builder and I'm having a grand time. I have a few thoughts brewing about speech options having played KYO, OW and now DE one after the other.

-- 🤓

• Posted some thoughts on Speech Acts and Kentucky Route Zero.

• Trying to release one ~20m piece of music a month for 2020. The February track just came out this morning. You can find it on bandcamp here. This is a track that Patrons will be familiar with, but I'm gonna follow this with some download codes for $3+ patrons on Patreon in case you want it via BC.

• We're taking an episode release cycle off over at Fun City, so this week we made public our normally Patrons only chat show Fun Chatty.

• I might be back on social media by the end of the day? Maybe on Monday. We'll see.

-- ❤️

Hope everyone has a great weekend <3