gregbrown

Nope, but you have sold me on it! My earlier exposure to '60s culture was through Before the Storm and Nixonland, which covered the politics/culture/zeitgeist of the late '50s through to the early '70s.

Loved it. I really glommed onto a lot of the themes Pynchon touched on in the book: how do we see meaning out in the world? To what extent is it taken in, or constructed? Is this all narratives are too? If meaning is out there in the world, yet depends on us, can we really say the two are altogether separate? I certainly didn't enjoy it this much in college, not knowing as much about the '60s as I do today, since a lot of Pynchon's achievement is really capturing the sense of the times—radical groups everywhere trying to change the world as they change themselves. But Pynchon also draws pretty heavily on physics (as many have remarked on), not just the name-dropping like Maxwell's Demon but also deeper concepts like that information is neither lost nor destroyed, merely transmuted beyond recognition (infamously in the case of one significant "paradox"). Granted, Pynchon deploys this more metaphorically than anything, but he carries along the sense of the world being underpinned by systems more universal than we can imagine, just outside of our understanding. But even without those themes, I was still sold from the opening passage where Pynchon describes Mucho Maas's traumatic stint as a car salesman, writing the whole thing as sad and relatable, yet utterly absurd and hilarious. The prose is marvelous throughout, and it's really really hard to pick my favorite part of the novel since it's all so great. Like y'all, I now totally get how he influenced some of the other writers I love. Great pick, and I'm excited to read more of his stuff and listen to the bookcast at the end of the month Bonus liner notes: the Yoyodyne song at one point in the novel was likely mocking IBM's own company songs, which are quite a trip to read. I worked at a winery for a year that produced a Lot 49 Riesling, and only a single visitor during that year admitted to knowing the reference. It was my favorite wine I've ever drank, and has a little Tristero symbol on the label.

Another great cast, one that's making me reconsider my earlier judgment. I'd agree that the symbolism is less omnipresent than it seemed in high school, given that so much of my effort then was dedicated to sifting the symbols out of the book. Like you said, it was an artifact of how they were teaching the novel, but I think it was also because I just wasn't skilled at recognizing symbolism or anything above plot-level elements at that stage, and so had to work at it a lot more. Their more straightforward nature worked against them in my re-read, though you guys brought up some great points about how their depiction-as-symbols within the book is so often complicated by the context. (And if you guys loved the book's self-awareness about symbolism and encoded meaning, you are in for a trip with Lot 49!) You guys mentioned how Fitzgerald did a lot better job with brevity compared to Telegraph Avenue, talking about his pithy sentences, but I think he deserves equal credit for how he plays around with compressing time. With so much of our fiction-consumption informed by television and movies, it's a lot rarer today to see a novelist skilled at elision of events, often sweeping forward in time mid-paragraph. John Williams deployed it wonderfully in his main three novels, and Edward P. Jones takes it to a whole new level in his own writing. Chabon seemed stuck in a cinematic mode, and Fitzgerald rivals Sense of an Ending's first section when it comes to leaping around in recollection. Again, wonderful stuff and great to have all four of y'all in the mix.

Having tried a Kindle, I just find it harder to become engaged in the book itself. Plus this is really dumb, but I love having a bookshelf with all the books I've read and want to read; it really helps with remembering what I've read, and persuading myself to tackle another book. I am also a huge stickler for trade paperbacks, and love the way it feels to read them. My wife is the polar opposite, and loves impulse-buying books on her Kindle—which is really annoying because it totally torpedoes our ability to share books. My fault, but urgh.

The Dota 2 art guidance you guys mentioned during towards the end is really, really great. Cannot recommend it enough if you're interested in how Valve designs their characters and artwork.

Razer's stab at a hybrid mobile/console-replacement seems a lot worse to me than Nvidia's. With Nvidia, it's aiming to be very good at mobile gaming, figuring that it'll be good enough (and cheap enough) in the traditional console role to replace next-gen consoles. And quite frankly, I think it's a good step for strategic reasons around their Tegra systems. Razer, on the other hand, seems to be coming out with a device that isn't particularly good at any one role because it's trying to straddle all three. Plus it's going to start at $999!

That's a good observation, because the shutter speed they used was a compromise between the 1/48th typically used by 24 fps cinema, and the 1/96th you'd expect them to use with 48 fps cinema. They ended up going with 1/72nd which means it's a bit more "fluid" than you'd expect at 48 fps, and a bit choppier than you'd expect when they remove half the frames for 24 fps. I'd be very interested to see what actually using 1/96th at 48 fps looks like, and see if that tempers the complaints somewhat. (I'm personally very skeptical of the tech, but won't get an opportunity to see it for myself for The Hobbit, most likely. )

I'd question how well his films meet that formula, but does anyone seriously watch Tarantino for the plot? For me, the appeal of his last two films have been entirely with how he wrestles with the themes involved and the way he can write a damn good scene.

Whoa, just remembered the Great Gatsby video game that came out a year or two back.

Diablo 3 is especially egregious too.

Now that I've actually re-read the book for the first time since HS, you know who would have made a really good film version? David Lynch. The book uses so much dream-logic—narrative contrivances, strangely disjointed coversations, implicit violence under the surface—that he would be a great fit. Granted, Luhrmann's operatic approach may solve many of the same issues, but in doing so strip them of their strangeness that's a distinctive mark of the book. What a weird novel. I wasn't particularly entranced by the content or themes, though. It's funny that all the metaphors that I was bewildered by years ago are now painfully clear and explicit in the novel itself, to the point of coming off as ham-handed more often than not. I'm old enough now to appreciate the pain in learning it's impossible to resurrect the past, but Fitzgerald's embodiment of that theme didn't add much outside of linking it to the American drive to ascend to higher social classes and throw aside the circumstances of your birth too. I can understand why everyone reads it in high school—it's Important, Clear, and Short—but it's waaaay out of what I'd consider if we want to start picking Great American Novels. ( Warlock by Oakley Hall is my current favorite candidate.)

I'm almost finished with Chris Ware's Building Stories, and WOW. I was a big fan of Ware's earlier book Jimmy Corrigan, but this latest one seems like a leap beyond. It plays a lot more notes than Corrigan's meditation on lonely behaviors, and the playfulness is put to a lot better use. The term "book" is a little loose in this case, since Stories comes as a giant box loaded with everything from small pamphlets to a giant board that folds out as if you were going to play a board game. These are weird and bad comparisons to use, but the whole thing feels like my favorite part of Infinite Jest: the middle-third where you get 20-30 page jags of some of the best writing you've ever seen, going on for hundreds of pages, seemingly (and pleasurably) without end. Of course, IJ has to come to an ending of sorts, but because Stories is in a dozen different pieces in no particular order, there's this very real feeling that it truly is endless, that you could loop back around to read them in a different order and forever stay in that zone. The other comparison I would make is to Edward P. Jones' The Known World, which has these wild leaps in time, even in the middle of a sentence. You get the feeling that Jones has imagined his character's entire lives into the future, and that's a similar impression to what Ware brings. Pieces are set as early as the '40s and as late as the modern day, covering different spans of memory and time. One memorable piece—and probably the best to orient yourself by—covers 24 hours and is patterned after the Little Golden Books of my childhood, with the gold spine and hard cover. Best unwrapping experience ever.

Yeah, as far as that goes, I'm not turned off at all when they dwell on a single game for a while, and I'd love it if they revisited the game in two weeks now that they've released the less-hud patch and the bizarre writer interviews have appeared.

Thanks for writing in! For me, those kinds of linked systems are brilliant when I'm enjoying all parts that are going on, but are incredibly frustrating when I don't. Something like Deus Ex (or more recently, Dishonored) takes the opposite approach and lets you not just progress your character but also differentiate it in a way that allows you to play in a more enjoyable style. Granted, you do want a game to push you outside of your comfort zone occasionally—such as a botched stealth approach that forces you to fight your way out of it. But from their description of Far Cry 3, it sounds like the game really does want you do everything, all the time, by ping-ponging you from mechanic to mechanic to mechanic. I think there are ways to accomplish what they set out to do and encourage the player to explore unfamiliar styles of play, but it requires a bit less forcefulness. They tried to be helpful but instead it comes off as Clippy.

GTA IV mods are .

Yeah, I haven't picked up GG yet to re-read for this month's club, but I'm kinda entranced that Luhrmann is doing something interesting with it rather than playing it straight. It's really hard to capture the sense of opulence—riding the line between post-war optimism and foreboding decadence—that we think of in the gilded age, and going balls out like that seems like a promising way of getting that across. Maybe that'll change once I re-read the book and get more into the nuances that could be easily drowned out in that kind of treatment, but I'm hopeful!

Such a weird interview that it would be funny if the writer wasn't 100% serious. I grimaced every time the guy mentioned "curation" or described video games as "curated experiences". Ugh.

That's the special passed-out-drunk-sharpie-treatment shader.

My guess is that it'll meaningfully tie into the "Infinite" title, which I think everyone has disregarded as noise so far.

You can download it in friendly format on the Humble Bundle page where you downloaded the games. In Spacebase's case it's necessary due to the dynamic layering of the music, but the other games may include the data in mp3 format in the games themselves.

Great for friends or family alike.

https://twitter.com/vanaman/status/277216452161970176/photo/1

? I remember the controversy, but Rooney Mara & Rashida Jones are two of the only characters who called their bullshit out. Both minor roles, sure, but there were only a handful of people in the film overall.

A. O. Scott (my favorite along with his partner in crime Manohla Dargis) had a really great passage on this feeling in his Hobbit review. It's a style that really came into its own in the first Pirates of the Caribbean film with big central set-pieces that the action navigates around and through, but has often devolved into a linear CGI thrill-ride.

I had a similar reaction—I think it speaks more to how the expectations of video games have broken our mind when we're upset that we can't act like a sociopathic killer in every scenario. That said, like Sean said they could have done a better job of ensuring that potential interaction wasn't even possible. On a related note to the Spaceteam discussion, Artemis—a more serious bridge-simulator—also just released an iOS version that networks with nearby devices. Throwing the main screen up via Airplay and then everyone manning their own devices sounds so cool.