📡 – 03.03.2020
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. Feel free to discuss in the comments below.
-- 👂
GUARDIAN, Lorn
Little Clearing / The Well, Will Stratton (fd: Will is a friend)
You Want it Real, Lié
Workaround, Beatrice Dillon
Face Time, Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger, James Rushford
-- 📖
Reality Has Endorsed Bernie Sanders – Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, New Yorker
The Art of the Meta-Scam – Francis Tseng, Rhizome
Our Fascination With Canon Is Killing the Way We Value Stories – James Whitbrook, io9
Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety – Hua Hsu, New Yorker
‘Essential’ Laundromats Under Strain as City’s Wash Culture Shifts – Ese Olumhense and Rachel Holliday Smith, The City
Google Data Centers’ Secret Cost: Billions of Gallons of Water – Nikitha Sattiraju, Bloomberg
The necropolitics of COVID-19 – Christopher J. Lee, Africa is a Country
A Complete History of Pandemics – Vaclav Smil, The Reader
That one time Felix Guattari tried to sell a script in Hollywood – Mike Huguenor, The Outline (RIP)
Policing and the English Language – Patrick Blanchfield, New Republic
America needs N95 masks. These people are trying to get them to health care workers. – Ingrid Burrington, Vox
Tired of Netflix? Stream Experimental Films and Video Art – Dessane Lopez Cassell, Hyperallergic
“Chinese Virus,” World Market – Andrew Liu, Nplusone
The Coronavirus Called America’s Bluff – Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic
Why Are There so Many Lesbians Cops Onscreen? – Rachel Charlene Lewis, Bitch Media
To Fight Covid-19, Curb the Spread of Germs—and Rumors – Whitney Phillips, WIRED (fd: Whitney is a friend)
How much of UK dance music history is real? – Matt Anniss, DJ Mag
American Bottom – Walter Johnson, Boston Review
What Endures of the Romance of American Communism – Vivian Gornick, NY Review of Books
Pod-Products for Pod-People – Mitch Therieau, The Baffler
Effects of spatial elements and sound sources on sound field in Main Hall of Chinese Buddhist temple – Zhang, et al, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Two systems for thinking about others’ thoughts in the developing brain – Wiesmann et al, PNAS
A World More Full of Life – Simone Haysom, Popula
Celebrities Need to Read the Room Right Now – Eve Peyser, Medium
-- 🎥
As mentioned in the April Update, I was sick for a few weeks. And during that time I watched almost exclusively GDQ speedruns. I can recommend the following:
-- 🕹
I finished Disco Elysium. Or. Rather, a first playthrough of Disco Elysium. It is not like, say, Nier: Automata, in that it really requires multiple playthroughs to get the full experience. But in DE you choose a "build" – sorta more like... an affect? – and, combined with your early dialogue choices, you enter a set of pretty well defined lanes. I can't imagine the game isn't quite different with a different build, and different early dialogue choices.
But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Without giving too much away, in Disco Elysium you play an alcoholic police inspector in a fictional former-bloc-ish country. You come-to after an evening bender, not remembering who you are, and you must solve a murder. Also, there are voices in your head. A lot of them. And much of the game is spent conversing with – fighting with, pleading with – the lot of them.
It is absolutely brilliant. I've said this a lot lately (about Death Stranding, about KY0) but DE is probably in my top 10 games of all time. It is brilliantly written, and the story is compelling. Though, to be fair, a politically oriented murder mystery with psychological and [REDACTED] elements is basically aimed directly at me. All it's really missing is vaguely explained semi-futuristic technology that doesn't alter the landscape too severely from our own, non-fictional world and that everyone takes for granted so it sorta blends into the background.
Anyway. It's a dense story. A lot happens. I don't want to write too much more for fear that learning anything might make someone feel they've been spoiled, and then they wont play it. It's on PC rn, but apparently a Switch version is coming this year. It's extremely good. Please play it.
-- 🤓
Released some new music on bandcamp at the end of last month.
New Fun City episode out this morning.
-- ❤️
Hope everyone is safe, healthy, indoors and has a great weekend <3