gregbrown

I know some friends—well acquaintances, really—that can hook you up with some uncut Klout smuggled through the border. PM for details.

Mac version is out now on Steam, so I finally got to play through it and... Wow, this is one of the more vibrant games I've ever played. It reminded me a lot of Psychonauts, both for the aesthetics at points and also that both play around with compression of time and a sort of dreamscape in the same way. With Psychonauts it's literal, but with this one it's deployed for raw storytelling ends. Really amazing work, and really pithy in a great way (and out of necessity, judging from the commentary stuff). Only downside was that the jump cuts and color choices kinda gave me a headache after playing through it twice in a row, but I'm willing to just stack that up to my weird head issues.

Wanna use that word all the time now.

I'm not as sure about the second part (partially because I can't find a good definition on Google, lol), but I would totally agree that a lot of games that use violence aren't so much about the violence. As they've talked about on the podcast a few times, "shoot something to make it go away" is a really simple and time-proven mechanic to build a game on top of, so we'll get thoughtful games stacked on top of a shooter. That's the disjunction that's really bothersome: the violence is central to the game, yet not where the passion and creativity is. It feels poorly-weighted. I think The Walking Dead succeeds because it makes the violence peripheral, with the central aim of feeling other people out and trying to discern what they're thinking. As you noted, other games like Hotline Miami and Far Cry 2 choose the second route of addressing the violence head-on and actually being about it.

Fun non-flaming alien-with-human-skull-inside story: the head on the original Alien had a human skull suspended in clear material. It never really showed up on screen due to Ridley Scott & Derek Vanlint's beautiful cinematography, so they dropped the transparency when they made the cheaper and more agile suits for the sequel.

Sweet discussion of Diretide on the cast, especially for someone who's never played a LoMa before. Sean's evocation of the game as an ecosystem of lords was really cool, with Papa Roach as an invasive species.

It got pushed back one week, I think because Jake and Sean are in crunch for the last Walking Dead episode of the season.

The simple-but-expressive controls you mentioned for Tennes and other games are also a highlight of the best iOS games. Generally, games that bring over the complexity of console controllers fail, while the ones that go with a really simple control or just a physical metaphor succeed.

Koyaanisqatsi! It's coming out on blu-ray this December, with a gorgeous new Criterion edition of the three -Qatsi films. http://www.criterion.com/films/28034-koyaanisqatsi

If you so desire, you can even read the actual novelization of Ghost Dad.

Yeah, going in the direction of making a literal reinterpretation of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man that drew heavily from blaxploitation cinema was a bold choice by Chabon, and I've got to say I was surprised when Titus got introduced and it turned out to be also be a Ghost Dad remake.

It's seriously a thing he brings up with the first question as a strawman to be batted down, and is dealt with in 60-90 seconds. Silverblatt isn't interested in tough interview questions at all.

Chabon's Bookworm episode is a really good interview with the author, for anyone hankering for an early dose before the bookcast.

Surprised that the class isn't reading Pynchon, who's a centerpiece of the "information overload -> apophenia" trend. Umberto Eco is another good one too, with at least two books that deal with serially misreading the information available. Still, sounds like a thoroughly kickass class to read.

This is amazing, though it went on way longer than I expected for a flash game and had to quit early to go back to work.

Cannot wait for the further ongoing adventures of Bobby Kotick and his Golden Parachute. How will he fare on the fifteenth of the month when the world's greatest part-time assassin goes after his head? Was the hit commissioned by J Allard or foes unknown? And who is this mysterious Phaedrus: yet another schemer?

Carl Wilson's excellent book on Let's Talk about Love advances a very cool teleological argument at one point, arguing that we should look at the purpose of a given work in ascertaining its quality. (This is actually my favorite unified theory of criticism and I use it all the time.) His example is Celine Dion's music, which we can evaluate as serving a cathartic function very successfully for certain subcultures. "Bad" books and movies should be looked at the same way, and I have no end of bad movies that I find utterly endearing despite being nowhere near good. That said, bad-but-interesting is one of my favorite classes of movies, and bad-but-boring is the worst. Most bad books fall into that latter category, just by virtue of the increased effort and time investment books demand. (Everyone should read that Carl Wilson book because it owns and is short and awesome.)

Finished the book tonight. At a certain point later in the novel, Chabon seems to realize that he has no clue how to end this and suddenly elevates one of the sub-plots to drive events forward to a wacky climax, most of the effects of which are negated in the epilogue. Even worse, the epilogue is a jump ahead and he clumsily shoves exposition describing the interim into dialogue, as if he were writing for a bad movie. Even after finishing the book, I still don't really feel an emotional connection to any of the characters, which is unusual for me when reading a novel. None of them seemed particularly real or cogent, and while the pop-culture references we talked about earlier really hurt by making them feel like author-mouthpieces, the other character stuff also didn't click. I still have no clue why Archy found it so hard to make good decisions, and it seems like Chabon hand-waved each of the characters into making bad choices by saying ~they were mad~ or ~they were drunk~ or ~they were inscrutable~ (in Titus' case). No idea of their inner life outside of their interests and other facebook profile page pieces. He's a great writer but a terrible author, at least for this book. As far as Tarantino goes, it seems like Chabon is falling into the worries some had about Tarantino before he excelled in Inglorious Basterds—fear that the substance of his films was merely reference, and that there wasn't anything else there (kind of like A Certain Other Indie Filmmaker From 1994 Familiar With Comic Books). As Chris points out though, Tarantino has plenty of other authorial trademarks that often get ignored like non-linear storytelling and punctuating violence. Chabon may be aping Tarantino, but doing a really shitty job at it. Other fun facts from the Chabon reading I went to earlier: Chabon's original impetus for writing this (I guess on the TV pilot level) was because he was surprised at the happy reaction to OJ Simpson's not guilty verdict in the black community, and felt like he had gotten out of touch with that community. Yep, what you're feeling was my reaction too. I should mention that this surprised him because... He grew up in Columbia, Maryland, a utopian planned community that planned to eliminate segregation on all levels by offering housing for all classes to members of all races, anchored by interfaith centers. His family moved him there when he was young, and he has really fond memories of his time there.

Good fiction isn't just about living through the fictional experiences in books, but also bringing my own experiences to bear in the process. Without subtlety, as Chris said, fiction simply doesn't match up. It also guards against prematurely collapsing the set of potential responses, and ensures that if I go back and read it a second time, I may get something different out of it as I've changed. I'll continue to maintain that the choice of how we direct our attention—and what we think about as we read or watch literature or film—is as crucial in shaping the artistic experience as any player choice in games. Mainly, though, subtlety is a very good heuristic for whether something is well-written, or shoddily constructed to lead to a predetermined conclusion. There's deliberately making facets obscure (or simply withholding) and it doesn't always track with good writing, but I've rarely come across a piece of good literature that isn't subtle in some crucial way.

O_o

I seem to remember the enemies not respecting the time-lapse, so you'd see them move as if they were in slow-motion as the day spins around them. (Also, I really enjoyed the shooting but you definitely have to respect the weapons and distances involved.)

There's one essay that is D'Agata-level bullshit, and I don't want to spoil which one because I want you to be as disappointed as I was. The rest? At his best he can be wonderful at empathizing with his subjects while still stepping occasionally into little DFW-esque interpolations and mini-arguments for a specific point. But he can also be kind of meandering in a way that doesn't really go anywhere. Probably one of the better general essayists coming up through the system on a prose-level, but I'm not sure if he'll be able to get to the next level. He's not there yet for most of his essays. I squawked about it for about an hour with my wife once (with spoilers we call out), back before she got sucked into Grad School and my free time went down the toilet.

Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near would be a good way to get transhumanism as explained by its most popular adherent. Critiques are easy enough that no one's really done it book-length, outside of persistent treatment in sci-fi. (Really, you can just think about the poor while reading Kurzweil and that'll do it.) There are also some great treatments of specific post-human futures in sci-fi, and my personal fave is the Dune series. (AVOID BRIAN HERBERT'S PREQUELS AND SEQUELS.)

Yeah, once I found that out, the "You're Fucked" conversation really stood out as being written for the screen. (Chabon also did some screenwriting for John Carter, so maybe that's bleeding over too?) The really frustrating thing about the book—as I round the corner into the final quarter—is how pointless and meaningless most of the pop-culture references and metaphors are. They're fun to read out loud, but inert on the page and make no sense if you stop for a few seconds to think about them. Not to mention that the language is way too invariant between the characters: deservedly more for Julie & Titus, but inexplicably also layered onto Archy and Gwen's sections. The book as a whole feels a lot more performative than written, with Chabon more interested in stringing together delicious sounds than in composing coherent thoughts. I really really wish I'd read other Chabon before this to have a good baseline, but it strikes me as the occasional late-career malady of selling well enough to ignore your editor.

HOW AM I GAMING? (VID) EOG-AMES that's (843) 364-2637