Claire Hosking

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Posts posted by Claire Hosking

  1. Posted

    This looks like Taylor Swift when she's parodying modern dance in Shake It off.

     

    This just swung by my Twitter desk, RE: MGS5. This isn't plot spoilery necessarily but it's still a scene so I'll tuck it behind a spoiler tag. I promise it's amazing though (it's a parody thing).

     

     

    I really hate the trope of writing competent, powerful female characters then disempowering them either through their story arc or with framing/cinematography/lighting/costuming/animation etc. It's like a smashing-the-sandcastle thing? I don't always mind it when you write a bright star of a character than another character smashes down or undermines, because that is an interesting scenario and something you could write about human tendencies, but when it's actually the viewer or the artist doing it to their own character, it's weird. ie portraying disempowerment is one thing, actually doing the disempowering makes you kinda a villain. 

  3. Posted

    If you want to be healthy tho, it's shown that it's more important to exercise than to be thin. A fat person who regularly exercises (even if they stay fat) is healthier than a thin sedentary person (even if their weight stays steady).

     

    Exercise is also fun, it's good for bone strength and muscle strength, etc.

  5. Posted

    I think motive counts a little. Manslaughter is less grievous than murder, which is less grievous than premeditated murder etc. They're all really wrong, but to slightly different degrees. It's kinda nicer to think Kojima is motivated more by ignorance than greed or malice.

  7. Posted

    Kojima yeah, feels like animé, especially in the way animé doesn't seem to value plot development or resolution anywhere nearly as much as creating kinda pantomime tableaus strung together. So many interesting premises, so few really interesting season arcs. But where animé tends to be more surrealist, Kojima feels like almost dadaist formal experimentation, with a little bit of just stream-of-kojima's-conciousness added. 

  9. Posted

     

    I guess my point is, yeah gross art can reinforce existing societal biases towards gross behavior, but also a stigma towards gross art pre-pathologizes the gross impulses which exist in all of us to one degree or another. I feel like the important thing is mostly to build a consensus on what's gross and why, in which case stuff like the intellectual idolization of R Crumb's work, and not the work itself, is probably the main issue.

     

    edit: I should also mention that I think something like The Binding of Isaac has a lot of value beyond just being weird and transgressive too. It loads so much symbolic imagery around a vague but intentional narrative that, whether by happenstance or intent (I suspect some of each), some genuinely interesting ideas emerge.

     

    This is a really good point. Being conscious of bad messages can help innoculate us against absorbing them unintentionally, for sure, and still allow space all sides of the human condition. I still think an artist has some (not all) responsibility to assess how the audience is likely to understand their work though, whether it's a critical audience that can make the distinction or a hot-headed one that will use it to feed a nasty world-view.

     

    So re: the whole transgressive art thing, I feel like the biggest reason it's important to have stuff like that out there is that if it becomes excessively stigmatized it sends the message that having transgressive feelings is as bad as the actual transgressive act. If the social consequences of admitting that you feel a certain way or have a certain urge are identical to the consequences of acting on that urge, we no longer have any real incentive to avoid acting on those destructive urges. If you tell someone that they're already bad or evil for having certain thoughts, they have no reason to avoid taking action upon those thoughts other than, hopefully, an innate moral compass which supersedes those lessons.

     

    I dunno I'm kinda sleepy at the moment and not sure I'm making sense. I've made a bunch of fucked up art in my day, and the above reasoning is why I still feel that it was (mostly) an ethically sound thing to do. That might just be rationalization though. Never can tell for sure.

     

    I agree with the first line of this, it's really important for people to distinguish between their impulses and reality ("defusion") for all sorts of healthy psychological reasons. For one, being able to distinguish between "my brain keeps say I'm worthless" and "I actually am worthless" is a pretty important life skill. I don't really agree on the incentive thing. I don't think "making dark art" is necessarily taking the place of "doing dark things" for the artists. 

  10. Posted

    Feeling a weird disconnect with people lately. The only person I really talk to about anything I actually care about is my girlfriend. No one else seems to care about anything I have to say, so I just say stuff I don't mean in order to extend conversations about things I don't even want to talk about. I don't know if I'm starting to drift away from my current friends or if I am just completely forgetting how to interact with humans. I am often reminded of this comic:

    ADTWO10.png

    I just want people to realize that I'm an actual person with thoughts about things even if I rarely make it apparent. I feel like I just have this explosion of emotions and fears and everythings that I just want to unleash at someone but I don't know how to let myself. All it seems like anyone wants to hear from me is how excited I am to leave and how awesome and cool everything is. I'm really not a relentlessly positive person but I accidentally made people think I am and it's hard to break that. I still feel like I'm just trying to hide the fact that I feel depressed most of the time because I'm worried people will think I'm taking life for granted. It really sucks that everyone just hides everything from everyone else.

    And I leave for Japan in 3 days. Oh jeez. I know this is a huge cool opportunity but it's also going to be quite difficult. I hope that living in a dorm with people will be better for me than living with my parents 30 minutes away from anyone I know.

    Oh, that sounds really hard and definitely something I struggle with when something bad/sad happens - how do I talk to people about this? I never really know.

    I have patches of anxiety about whether I'm being interesting/charismatic enough all the time, I find the best strategy is just try to be a good listener, go into conversations trying to be interested in other people, until you feel comfortable talking again.

  11. Posted

    Am I allowed to be pedantic just in general here? Because I have a gripe about the way people use envious/jealous as interchangable, when they mean different things. Envy is the desire for something you don't have. Jealousy is fear of losing a thing you have. I know language goes where it goes and people adapt words to fit their needs, I'm just sad two useful concepts are being merged into a less useful "you have something I like and I feel bad" idea.

  12. Posted

    I didn't know there was some beef between Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, but I think it's rather amusing considering one guy has written/produced most of their respective hit singles. They have too much in common to throw crap at each other.

     

    Oh now that you mention it, it's Max Martin who wrote the Perry single I was complaining about. That guy is probably responsible for a huge amount of the regressive messages in pop music atm. It's amazing how much of the last 15 years of pop music he's written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin_production_discography 

    According to the wiki article: "Martin is the songwriter with third most number one singles on the chart, behind only Paul McCartney (32) and John Lennon (26). As a producer he holds the record for second-most number one singles on the chart with 20 behind only George Martin (23)."

     

    That said when Taylor says she writes her music I believe her - she got raised in a song writing tradition, it's not unusual for pop-writers to workshop their stuff with other producers and writers, so I don't wanna seem like I'm writing her off as just being the voice for Martin's music 'cause I don't think that's how she works.

  13. Posted

    *DEEP BREATH*

     

    Here's the thing with ol' Taylor Swift. Sometime over the past six months being ultra-famous in the pop world also started to mean you were friends with Taylor Swift. It means you popped up on her instagram or she invited you on stage for a song. Whatever, that's fine -- the thing that pisses me off is that all of that feels like a cliquey tool to define what's in and what's out, mostly because it began in earnest with the filming of her Bad Blood music video -- a video about a song that is directed at Katy Perry, a public enemy of Taylor Swift. Swift got all of her friends together -- literally a dozen ultra-famous names (Ellie Goulding, Lena Dunham, Cindy Crawford (!!!)) and made a video about a a bunch of badass ladies gearing up with guns to go some unseen war. The video is basically saying "we have bad blood but I have everyone on my side so fuck you." That is pretty much the worst message to send to your fans, most of whom are schoolchildren and have to deal with that shit every day.

     

    Miley Cyrus actually summed it up pretty well: 

     

    “I don’t get the violence revenge thing,” Miley said of Taylor’s “Bad Blood” music video. “That’s supposed to be a good example? And I’m a bad role model because I’m running around with my titties out? I’m not sure how titties are worse than guns.”

     

    I think that's a fair point -- not to clear Miley Cyrus of selling a regressive image of femininity, but I think it's pretty lame for the most famous pop musician on earth to adopt themes of violent revenge with a huge posse because she doesn't like someone. 

     

    Anyway, 31 yo male here reporting in on pop music feuds which are totally meaningless at best and a poison to society at worst. <3 

     

    I think that's a legit criticism, and so is Sarah's. I'll just add that not knowing that this song was about Perry, I was initially impressed that the video seemed to be about women getting together to fight a mutual enemy rather than the more predictable "two women fighting over a man" trope. That's probably a very low bar.

     

    Both Swift and Perry annoy me how fun their songs are but often have a splash of really terrible values. Perry's lyric "You change your mind like a girl changes clothes. / Yeah, you PMS like a bitch, I would know" is just the worst. I have such mixed feelings about Perry's song Birthday because I love how its video clip's aesthetics imply sex as something upbeat and fun like party decorations (actually kinda rare in our culture), but at the same time it's not about her desire (unlike, say, Beyonce's songs) but rather giving yourself to someone as a gift. 

     

    I note though in this thread Swift is getting a lot more policing of her self-expression than R Crumb is.

  14. Posted

    See, I have a problem with this too. Yes, it does allow the status quo to be perpetuated, but I do believe people need an artistic outlet to let out all the nasty shit that's in their head. I'm a fan of R. Crumb and though I find his misogynistic, sexist and racist terrible, I'm glad that it exists and that it's out there.

    I am of two hearts in this topic: the first is where you're coming from and as I've gotten older the path I've moved more too and agree. But, there's also a small part of me--from my experience with very transgressive, controversial art--that stops me from fully embracing that mindframe.

    I can't say I'm "glad" that it exists, I'd prefer it didn't, but I can tolerate it for the sake that it's probably a very minor bad for individual creators to make one questionable work.

    If I had evidence it was harmless I might feel that way, but I find it hard to believe that the culture around us - the movie, tv, books, ads, artworks, poems, letters, tweets - doesn't affect our mindsets or the way people treat each other. I don't think individual works contribute very much - only a tiny tiny bit - but they're each one drop of water in the tsunami of oppressive ideas everybody gets hit with. Tact is the normal name we give the skill of being able to express yourself in ways that don't unnecessarily harm others and I think it's important in art too.

  15. Posted

    With the ed mcmillian thing, it feels like you’re tiptoeing around why it feels different, more excuseable, when an individual creator does something problematic than when a big studio does. When a big studio does, it seems to be for craven reasons like that the producers/publishers/marketers want to target a toxic audience, but when a small creator makes something straight out of their consciousness it seems different. Maybe because they’re expressing their selves, not degrading the world just for money. Maybe it’s because we (rightfully) feel that big studios and big games have a larger cultural impact and therefore a larger responsibility to cultivate a pro-social games culture.

    I struggle with it – I think there needs to be room for people’s dark sides but also we have a responsibility to the bigger culture. I don’t really like r crumb, I think his excuses are a little bit thin to base a whole career on. Sure, it’s stuff straight out of his brain, unfiltered, not deliberately twisted. But that’s exactly how the status quo is perpetuated – people let problematic stuff into their brains then regurgitate it unquestioningly and I find it vapid.

  16. Posted

    Thank you Nick for echoing my feelings on EG winning the International completely.  I only pulled up the video after hearing they had won and the extent of my Dota 2 knowledge comes from the Free to Play documentary but wow that was depressing and awkward.  I can understand some level of catharsis for some of those guys but it just felt like they were lining up for awkward school pictures.  I don't think it will keep anyone from watching in the future but if the competitors aren't showing excitement after winning the biggest tournament for the game then why should I?

     

    DOTA matches at The International are relatively long though - how long were the last four games put together? A few hours at least, much more than just an 80 minute football match. And wasn't EG playing the semi-finals immediately beforehand? How long was their day? No wonder they're exhausted. 

  18. Posted

    I just wanted to make a quick note about Jake's reference to Team Secret, the team that wore the golden sunglasses going into the match versus EHOME, who proceeded to knock Secret into the lower bracket. I think it is widely presumed by a lot of people that this was a super arrogant move on Team Secret's part. I suppose there was maybe some arrogance in the move, but I also know from going to the International something about that that everyone at home missed because of the camera shot. Everyone on Team Secret took off their sunglasses as they shook the hands of the opposing team. But when it came to Puppey, he took off his sunglasses to reveal a second pair of sunglasses. But when I watched the twitch replay of that the camera switched to a bird's eye shot of the two teams shaking hands, so basically nearly everyone missed the punchline.

    oh man so good

  22. Posted

    The name Eve is one of the biggest indications that it's meant to be multiple personalities - "The Three Faces of Eve" was one of the breakthrough movies about multiple personalities that put the concept into public consciousness. I think it's a deliberate red-herring though. Which annoys me - everything comes across as a red-herring. I think every theory is deliberately undermined by at least one piece of information and I think that's cheap.

     

    I don't wanna sound too critical because I loved this game and I hope it seeds a genre. The 5 clips thing is like this game's equivalent of an invisible wall to stop you wandering off the map. It would be possible to get the 5 clips limit without the in-world fiction if you wrote a story that only mentions each significant word less than 10 times. Tricky, but tricky like putting rocks around to stop a player wandering off the map instead of just using invisible walls.

     

    If you've played and enjoyed this I really really recommend playing Barlow's other game Aisle: http://www.ifiction.org/games/playz.php?cat=&game=232&mode=html

    I think it embraces the "conflicting storylines" in a much better way, which is that it's upfront that these aren't part of the same story or intended to be ambiguous - they're separate narrative possibilities for the same starting character. It interests me more to think about the different ways lives can turn out than the frustration of not knowing how a particular character's life went. 

     

    p.s. Here was my letter to thumbs in case anyone was wondering:

    I saw you were gonna talk about Her Story this week so I thought I'd send you some thoughts because I felt pretty strongly about it. 
     
    Like many people I thought this mechanic was amazing, and the sense of discovery was fantastic. However I was less impressed with the story you discover. The gothic plot of baby-stealing midwives and hidden twins seems propelled by high cliche and conveniences, not character, circumstance, place and culture. It seemed like there were three possible explanations for the story: That there is one woman who has multiple personality disorder; That there is one woman who is faking multiple personality disorder to escape the murder charge; or that there are twins pretending to be one person. I didn't find any of them very satisfying.
     
    I don't like the "she genuinely has multiple personality disorder" explanation b/c while it explains away the weirdness of her story, there's no nuanced portrayal of mental illness here. I have a friend who sometimes has psychosis, so sometimes believes very strange things and sometimes doesn't. I think trying to uncover the truth of an event from someone like that would be a a fascinating story, but in this game it seems more like it's used to cover for the writer's flights of fancy. Also I don't like to see it reinforcing the idea that mental illness makes people dangerous. 
     
    The idea of a clever woman faking multiple personality disorder is a little more interesting, but it erases the story and motive, and means we don't know anything about this character in the end. Without more characterisation, it's kinda a simple and boring "oh she's an evil eve type". There are lots of devious, inexplicably criminal women in fiction already, I want more than that. 


    The twins explanation is the one I find most interesting because it's even more pulpy and therefore harder to write well. This is where most of the plot seems to point, and if you’re going to have a twist, to me this one says the most interesting things about sibling relationships, about identity and obsession. The portrait painted of how two girls can relate through play and secrets and codes, who grow up in tune and then find their relationship becoming fractured is human and promising but it’s barely sketched. Who are these people? Where are they from, specifically? What is that house like beyond having the spatial necessities of lounge, kitchen, cellar and attic? I don’t get any sense of what kind of parents they have, who make 17 y/os marry. Without characterisation, this detail’s only purpose seems to be an easy plot fix. All the details feel overly broad. Simon is... nice? Shy? The only time I get a real sense of that is the dorky pick-up-line he uses on Eve, and the innocence of chips on the beach. 1994 doesn’t seem to exist beyond a CRT shader and some blazers. No reference suggests why this particular time and place might have informed ‘Her’ behaviour. Nothing elevates it beyond tropes into a specific portrayal of a particular sisterhood, a teenage pregnancy, a marriage etc. I kinda wish Julian Barnes had written this game.

     
    While I think the snippeting mechanic probably favours a super plotty story, there was still a lot more room for characterisation. So I loved this mechanic even though I found the story shallow, like enjoying a jigsaw puzzle but not the image that’s on it. I hope influences many other games including ones that focus on drawing a full persona as well as being a good thriller. 

     

    I wrote an extended version for unwinnable:

    http://www.unwinnable.com/2015/07/07/a-tale-of-two-women

     

     

    Anyway! I'm so excited this finally got done :)