Just a heads up! This will look better on my website.

I’m still recovering from two weeks across the continent, where a minor bout of congestion partly killed my voice, and now this weekend is a music festival, after which I will probably sleep about 12 hours. So this will be a grab bag of random thoughts I wrote down at various points, with little elaboration.

I occasionally complain that video games aren’t taken seriously as an artistic medium, but as a counterpoint, consider this issue of Peter Raleigh’s (excellent, strongly recommended) Long Library, where he compares the recent Backrooms unfavourably to Silent Hill 2. It’s a fantastic example because he just casually assumes knowledge of Silent Hill 2¹, in a way that I think will become much more common in the near future. On the other hand, compare for instance W. David Marx’s slightly snippy comment that Elon Musk “expresses his contra-liberal tastes through a love of video games”, which feels rather dismissive of the whole medium. I think the former approach to criticism will ultimately triumph over the latter.

A few weeks ago, I was listening to a Vergecast episode² revolving around health tracking and one of the hosts pointed out that, to paraphrase, all this health tracking doesn’t really matter because you could always get hit by a truck tomorrow.

And, while the point is taken — you can’t really control everything, health-wise, no matter how hard you try — it’s also quite sad that a truck is the metaphor we use, isn’t it? Because, as a society, we don’t have to accept traffic deaths. And yet, somehow, it’s so completely normalized that we just do.

Which makes me wonder if, in a hundred years, if traffic deaths went to zero, would people still use “getting hit by a truck” as a metaphor, detached from their personal experience? In much the same way people refer to “spinning a yarn” without understanding how that plays into textile productions at all.

So The Handmaiden is a film that I kind of love, even though I think it’s pretty weak in some ways (certainly not as strong or important as No Other Choice). One common (correct) criticism is that, for a movie about lesbians, it’s incredibly male-gazey.

But on thought there... obviously, there’s a whole complicated set of issues about power (and who has it) and gender (and which has it) and how The Handmaiden is an adaptation of a novel by a woman and how sexuality is portrayed on film and the history of male gaze. But. But! The thought is: The Handmaiden (which is, ultimately, a feel-good romance about a pair of lesbians provided for male viewers) is not that far from the widely-beloved genre of feel-good romances about gay men provided for female viewers, a la Heated Rivalry. Like, yes, again, obviously, very different situations in many ways. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody point out the structural similarities — how they’re almost dual to each other.