gregbrown

I went to a Chabon reading earlier this month where he read from the scene after the home birth, and his voices were also pretty over-the-top. It's more to do with how he wrote the characters' dialogue than anything.

Sorry, I think that point got a little garbled by how I wrote it. I'm talking about how the expectations of a genre can be harmful to the success of that genre's works, similarly to how the expectation that combat must be in every video-game ends up distracting and detracting from some games' strengths. I'm not worried about one genre getting another genre's cooties.

Agreed, especially when it's actually transposed and not just re-enacted for the film. The Prestige was great to see in both book and film form, for example.

I agree with everything you wrote here, and it's why I have misgivings about declarations that we're post-genre or that criticizing genres is bad. While there are excellent works in every genre I can think of, some of the habituated expectations of genre-reader communities can still be harmful to storytelling and harmful to what I, Chris, and others would consider some of the Big Goals of successful literature. It's probably easiest to discuss them in the sense of what sells, since discussions about the norms and values of a genre community can quickly turn into No True Scotsman tail-chasing, while industry discussions at least have sales data to fall back on. I consider this genre stuff a very tricky subject to discuss because once you start listing examples and specifics, you can very easily become engaged with the trees and completely ignore the forest. That said, it's a very interesting subject to discuss given the right time and place, since you can start to delve into why genres are constructed the way they are, and what sort of purposes they might solve and wider social divisions they may parallel.

I feel like the discussion of how "genres" function in modern literature as a community and as an industry could easily colonize the entire hour of discussion about Telegraph Avenue. It is a very complicated subject that has the potential to white-wash over a bunch of careful distinctions, piss people off, and occasionally accomplish both in one fell stroke.

You didn't miss anything with Revolutions and V for Vendetta, but Speed Racer is a visual treat!

Oh wow. I saw this quote from Mitchell, but had no idea he went that far. When asked about the occasional recurrence of his characters from one book to another, Mitchell described a sort of waiting room, where every character he's ever written hangs out, and if he has a place for them in a story, they get a new part. The only similar writer I know of is Edward P. Jones, whose style of writing is really wild: he composes all books orally in his head, and then writes them down when he's done composing. His novel The Known World is absolutely amazing, and I really really really hope we book club it.

I'm only ~100 pages in so far, but I'm really disliking Chabon's choice of flowery prose covered in pop-culture references. There are some character viewpoints that aren't so bad about it, but man. (The last paragraph of the jacket copy is wince-inducing, but I can't blame that on Chabon at all.) Also having this reaction to the book's project as a whole, though it's fading as I read more and forget about it:

Which blog posts are you looking for? The link you gave is to the main podcast, whereas here's the one for the Book Club: http://feeds.idlethu...et/idlebookclub You can also just use the View Feed XML on that page if that URL doesn't work in your RSS reeder to subscribe. It'll look like this: http://feeds.idlethu...club?format=xml Edit: On a related note, it looks like Feedburner is dying a slow death, so you guys might want to move off that.

The eXile and alumni—most famously Matt Taibbi—all ape his style pretty strongly. It looks like they have a still-active online spinoff. I am not a fan of Taibbi, but I do enjoy seeing him periodically eviscerate Thomas Friedman's awful writing and opinions. Vice Magazine is a less-spiteful example, and their video work is guided by Spike Jonze and does some really great ongoing features, like The Vice Guide to Travel (as well as some simpler ones like going to the Westminster Dog Show on acid. Outside of that, the gonzo style has largely been digested by its parent, New Journalism. You'll see elements of it pop up, but rarely balls-out in the way Hunter S. Thompson used to do it.

Not a fan of that crossbow, as it's game-breaking. There are some missions early on that assume you don't have explosive weaponry yet, and become a piece of cake if you do.

The Oregon Trail and educational games discussion—both during this episode and in last week's thread—was superb. This is actually sort of a hot topic in the ed-tech community, along with a wider understanding of how to best teach subjects. (This post turned into a barfing-out of vaguely-related thoughts, oops!) I'm mostly familiar with it from the math angle, where the Khan Academy's approach has been both successful and polarizing: while it is allowing kids to proceed at their own pace and democratizing math learning in a way, it also apes textbooks and ignores a lot of the latest pedagogical research. An alternative approach championed by Dan Meyer tries to get students to become well-versed in stepping up and down the "ladder of abstraction", figuring out what questions to ask, how to ask them, and what's relevant in the facts of the situation. Parallel to this discussion has been the discussion of how to teach programming. Again, the Khan Academy's approach has been kinda pioneering: to give kids an outright compiler for creating Processing programs. But again, there is well-founded criticism (in this case by Bret Victor) that they don't go far enough. Math and programming have the advantage of clearly being outright systems of thought with their own language and internal logic, but Social Studies is rarely treated the same way, whether in textbooks or in an edutainment sense. And so we often turn to fiction, whether it's a systemic game or a non-systemic game or even the written word. There is some non-fiction that can capture an era's way of thinking, but it's so rare as to be remarkable: Solnit's River of Shadows, the opening to Caro's LBJ bio The Path to Power, Perlstein's Nixonland. Oregon Trail is particularly fascinating as a game because of its stakes are so small, yet they're everything: bring your own family full of no one special to Oregon, and try to survive along the way. We're not dealing with the fates of nations like in Civilization, or leading a special squad of soldiers in World War II. The anonymity is what makes it special, and what makes multiple playthroughs so appealing.

Now I can't stop thinking about J. Allard's Zunebase, where he lurks to this day.

I wish I could have played FTL as a kid, because I'm sure I would have done the same thing of renaming the crew after me and my two brothers and then setting rations to minimum and pace to grueling for a nihilist march towards certain death exploring the galaxy and shooting anything that moved. It would be cool if the game did more to memorialize crew deaths, like taking a screenshot of the scenario so you could see what was happening when they died. It's hard to beat "died of dysentery" tombstones, though.

As sclpls noted, Biden's lovability started out from The Onion's articles about his wilder side, but didn't really take off until these last few months when Biden hit the campaign trail and it turned out that The Onion Biden is only a slightly-exaggerated version of Real Biden. All the sweet Biden links you'll ever need, both real and not: http://pinboard.in/u...gbrown/t:Biden/ Also, I'd pull out this specific speech for an example of how Biden's one of the most genuine people in politics today, and how quickly that can pivot from being a goofy guy to addressing serious topics straightforwardly, and with a sense of willing vulnerability:

Only partially through, but I have to say that I fucking love these anecdotes and the music and the paced way Sean says them. It's like you dropped a bizarro chunk of The Memory Palace into Idle Thumbs and it WORKS.

You can listen to that Cloud Atlas episode to get a sense of what he goes over and how shallowly he dips his toes into spoiler territory. Silverblatt is a lot more interested in the themes of each story and his reading experience than going over specific plot-points, and his show is great for discovering what books to read. You'll get more out of it if you've read the book, of course, but Silverblatt is such an incredibly good interviewer that the episodes are fantastic even if you haven't.

Michael Silverblatt's Bookworm episode about Cloud Atlas is typically excellent, and I'd highly recommend it! The way he describes the way your perceptions are altered by what you're reading—or in his example, right after you visit an art museum—is incredible. Fuck, I need to listen to more Bookworm, even if it means putting up with the grimace-inducing theme music they adopted a year or two back.

Goon Squad was a pretty miserable reading experience because I sort of went in primed by all the praise, and found a book that came off to me as MFA-pastiche. The linking element didn't even figure in what I thought of it, because I felt that most of the stories were very generic and trite in what they covered—the result of a writer who is so good at the mechanics of writing that she doesn't really stretch to cover anything particularly adventurous. And the final straw for me was her awful, awful attempt at futurism towards the end, which is the same worry that's keeping me away from Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story: it's a way of heightening the most superficial qualities of today without making a substantive critique, or just making a really shitty and easily debunkable critique that also has the side-effect of cheapening how the characters move through the world as a result. Cloud Atlas was removed enough that I didn't take it as him really trying to say how the future would be—or rather, that he was creating this pocket universe specifically designed so he could tell the story that he wanted to tell, like Ted Chang's best short stories (or Borges, for that matter).

Also just got to stage 3 of the final boss before dying. Still haven't beat it, and I always play on easy. The cumulative nature of those bouts are also tiring; I couldn't repair between stages, and was down to 25% hull by the third level.

A ton of great discussion here, and glad I snuck in before finishing the book to read it all! I've reached the back-half of the novel, and have enjoyed each of the stories so far. Like Squid Division, I'd be very interested in what the Thumbs have to say about it as game designers/writers. I think one of the most successful tacks to take against Ebert and others that claim that games aren't art due to player choice—not to dredge that argument up again—is to point out that films and novels also encompass a multiplicity of experiences. One measure of a work's quality, in my opinion, is how many different perspectives it can encompass. My favorite films affect me differently each time, coming along with me as I change as a person. Knowing the complex formal structure of Cloud Atlas coming in, I was worried it would be too clever in pointing towards a singular interpretation—or at least, not rich enough to harbor side-stories compelling on their own. It has completely dispelled those worries, an incredible feat given the constraints he's working with and the tendency of pastiche to become sardonic or mocking. Very, very impressed. A similar book that disappointed me along those lines was A Visit from the Goon Squad, a novel built out of interlinking short stories that ended up being a pretty damning pastiche of MFA tendencies. (I really, really, REALLY didn't like it at all.)

Good. Kickstarter has been edging dangerously close to becoming indie QVC, with QVC expectations. There are some Kickstarter projects that inevitably aren't going to succeed, and greater transparency throughout is the only way to ensure that people aren't surprised. Felix Salmon, as always, is great on the subject. (That LED Wi-Fi lightbulb project is going to disappoint so hard.)

I think most people shrug off that series' storytelling because it's transparently so they can come up with a bunch of different scenarios and shoehorn them together into a plot, with no concerns for character continuity because you're always switching. That said, it's weird when it comes to games but—as noted in the cast—not that weird compared to everything else which is why no one really gives it too much scrutiny. A fuller answer may be that games have figured out how to sneak non-linear storytelling within the wider envelope of a linear plot: see the audio diaries in Bioshock, or even the mind levels in Psychonauts embodying that character's formative experiences.

I'd argue that games don't typically go for non-linear storytelling because of the way a player's character will become stronger and more competent through the length of the story—and jumping around in time typically muddles that arc. (A common exception to this rule is the abilitease,)

Reading the book right now myself, having already seen the film when it was in theaters. One of the things I'm really enjoying about the book that couldn't make it into the movie is each of the characters' histories. The novel has much more time to gesture at operations past, and generally soil everyone with the dirty work of maintaining England's decaying empire—more of information and alliances than of the old colonial rule—in the face of the Soviets. It still works in the movie because one of the core values of the story is in rendering everyone else an unreadable enigma who could break either way. In the film, this bleeds over even more into the main characters, since we can't be assured by their past exploits. Also this is really making me pine to watch the film again, but it's no longer available in iTunes for rent—probably a premium channel exclusivity deal—so I'll have to pick up the DVD instead!