clyde

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Posts posted by clyde

  1. Posted

    25 minutes ago, plasticflesh said:
    This, to me, was definitely the appeal of TV shows like Battlestar, Red Dwarf, Firefly, or to a weirder and lesser extent, Lexx. Maybe those are a stretch but they all carried the character based feeling of rag tag crew in space jalopy.

     

     

     

    A big part of Star Wars for me is the aspect that feels like serfs fantasizing about being royalty (with an element of ancestry to it) and that meaning something in the context of religion, morality, and power. I don't get that from something like Space Balls or those series you mentioned.

  2. Posted

    On 1/1/2018 at 11:35 PM, plasticflesh said:

    This is probably a well tread line of thought be here I go.

     

    The strength of Star Wars IV was definitely how it had a strong meme-pool, taking Kurosawa films and WW2 films and mixing them with Flash Gordon films. The films after the original trilogy are suffering recurring generations of memetic inbreeding, the result of which being the contagions of goofy in jokes and stale retellings. Perhaps this is what's going on with mainstream cinema, lots of cultural memetic inbreeding without a diverse meme pool.

     

    How could star wars benefit from a more diverse meme pool? This almost happened with Rogue One and bringing in Donny Yen. There is a dazzling and brilliant world of Chinese and Korean martial arts cinema that make laser sword battles look dim by comparison. But Donny Yen was just one fun cameo and the wuxia themes have not been integrated into Star Wars.

     

    Maybe a less creepy thought is to look at it from Hegelian terms of the dialectic. The interesting thesis and antithesis of the original films was blending of different film genres between eastern feudal period pieces and western . But there's no more dialectic inside the Star Wars movies, it's become only within itself, which has become.

     

     

    A McLuhan-like media analysis perspective is also interest, to examine the way media trends influence Star Wars movies between the 60s 70s and the 2000s. Films used to be in the cinema, and a film goer would be exposed at least to the existence of the many options. With TV and internet, and the huge amounts of media to consume in the world, the selection process has become more specific. So there's less impetus to draw inspiration from outside a genre or market place, of the Hollywood blockbuster Marvel cinematic universe sphere.

     

    So my question is, what are the modern meme pools to pull the new dialectic from? What is the larger ecosystem of other non-Star Wars sci fi that are doing interesting things with genre mashing. The ones that come to mind to me are Her, which couid be a melding of 2000s proto-mumble-core with Wes Anderson style 70s new wave revitalism. Ex Machina, what did something. Black Mirror, that mixes twilight zone with social media. Video game narratives like Tacoma and SOMA or Talos Principle, that use epistolary format to submerge the reader into the the space world.

     

    It might be asking a lot for a big cash cow religiously devoted franchise to reference, pastiche, or rip off something interesting, like A New Hope did that to breath life into the Flash Gordon genre. But the current trajectory, of the franchise referencing literally its own parodies like Hardware Wars, is foreboding.

     

    Edit:

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    This makes me want to look through fan-edits and mashups of the Star Wars films (that hopefully include material from other stuff) until I find something that continues to use the characters, aesthetics, and political fantasies of the series, but doesn't feel like Star Wars anymore. It would be interesting to find the limit in order to see what I think the essence of Star Wars is.

    Lately I've been thinking a lot about Dracula and Nosferatu and examining how that aesthetic was formed and what its purpose has been. After watching The Last Jedi, I'm starting to wonder about how those thoughts can apply to it.

  3. Posted

    Some people tend to treat Twitter as a personal space, but I will follow people generously if I feel like my online social-time is too slow. Then I will reply to their tweets if I have something relevant to say regardless of whether or not they follow me. This pisses some people off and a few of them will act indignant but I just unfollow them and go on to greener pastures. I've ended up having a lot of meaningful interactions with a sizable amount of folks who were interested in communicating over time after I initiated this way. This tends to work much better with accounts that have smaller amounts of followers and they have to be cool too. One promising way to find them is to look at game-credits for itch.io games (Soundcloud would probably be similar).

    My mutual interests tend to be game-jam type stuff so the folks who are more receptive to my methods of initiation tend to actively promote events or smaller groups that they are participating within. There is a lot of small social projects that are starting up with very few members all the time. For instance, I just joined an Experimental Games Reddit group because someone I followed on Twitter retweeted it. That Reddit group then has its own Discord it was advertising so I joined. I end up running into people I've already seen in other Discords or on Twitter and at this level of fame (very low, but still producing creative content) they tend to be appreciative that someone noticed that they exist or that someone found something they made interesting. Some people will be dicks though, I don't mind I just unfollow them; It's just their way of saying they aren't interested. Don't let that stop you from meeting the people who want to be met.

  4. Posted

    So between the excercises, the trackball, using a Xbox Controller more, and paying attention to which hand I use for opening doors; inflamation is much less of an issue. Still I'm interested in more solutions. 

    Has anyone had experience with whether or not the Steam Controller agravates wrist-pain? I'm considering buying one for FPSs

  7. Posted

    I liked Uurnog a lot. It was whimsical, took about 9 hours for me to complete, and the puzzles were so loose that I often felt like I was cheating. I don't tend to enjoy metrodvanias or puzzles, but Uurnog didn't seem like it cared much for them either so it was perfect for me.

  8. Posted

    I took the leap and bought the Zaccaria Pinball Platinum Bundle. If you like pinball tables from the 60's 70's and 80's, and you have and Oculus Rift or Vive, then I would recommend this; it is awesome.

    The pricing structure is not intuitive. Here is what I gathered:
    You can try most of the tables for free (with a score limit and a message across the screen). Downloading the game allows you to play Time Machine without limit. VR support costs $8. The Bronze Bundle doesn't give you any tables.

    I doubt I would have bought this if not for the VR support and I was nervous that I wouldn't like it in VR, but I like it a lot. I love these older styles of tables and since I live in the U.S. I haven't seen these tables before.

     

  11. Posted

    I've only played this for a bout an hour, but I'm so excited about it. Please side on caution with spoiler-tags in this thread since little things and details of intrigue feel especially weighty in this game. Perhaps label the spoiler with the chapter and character or room like so:

    [Early Chapter 2: Gustav] or [Late Chapter 2:Dining Room]

     

    The game is basically a murder-mystery that takes place in a Victorian Mansion and you as the player chose where to be at any given time as the suspects move about, take actions, and talk with one another. You can pause, rewind, and fast-forward time as you teleport around the mansion examining clues and just generally being nosy.

    So far, I think it is great. I love the characters and the performances. The animations aren't astounding, but they get the job done. Everyone is so friggin suspicious!

     

  12. Posted

    @Siromatic  I started playing a VR game called The Invisible Hours and it is pretty much a Sleep No More kinda thing. There is no interactivity beyond choosing where to be and picking up objects for examination (they settle back into place automatically). I've only played for about an hour, but it is awesome. The performances are better than I would expect, the characters are wonderful, and everyone is a suspect. I'm not only intrigued by the mUUrder, but by the history of the characters themselves and the alliances that are forming in one side of the house while I'm watching an interrogation in another. It's awesome.

  14. Posted

    14 minutes ago, elmuerte said:

    well, obvious classic scoring as that balances the playing field

     

    But if we level the playing field, the ball will never drain. It'll just stay up in one of the orbits. :getmecoat

  15. Posted

    I enjoy maxing out the challenges on the tables. It's helping me get into tables I've never liked and giving me reasons to play old favorites again (though briefly).

    I like the 1-ball challenge the most, but part of my process is to unlock the absurdly over-powered rewind-time upgrade by getting 5 stars in the 3rd challenge type. 

    I think it's cool that the latter challenge types allow folks to see what completing a mode is like since they have always-on ball-saves. 

    The scoring system that includes upgrades does bloat scores, but I like that the default mode accounts for time spent on a particular table. I also like that is essentially makes the table easier over time. A lot of Zen's tables have become too easy for me which results in a single game lasting +30minutes in a lot of cases, but for beginners I can see this potentially incentivizing them to keep learning a table until they come across the wizard-mode. For the tables that take too long to lose on, I'll just stick to classic after I max-out the challenges.

     

     

    Also, the table-guides are much better than they used to be.

     

    I'll join a tournament if one of you starts one. My only preference would be that the scoring be classic.

  16. Posted

    I'm installing it now. I read the Tom Chick review and I want to examine the purist-sentiment I feel welling up in me. The leveling-up sounds like sacriledge (though I imagine it could get more folks into pinball abd he says that classic leaderboards are still available so why not). I want to find out if I enjoy the experience-points idea or if it'll feel like added bloat to something elegant.

  17. Posted

    Since I'm doing multiple things to take care of this, I'm not sure which things are helping more than others.

    But I wanted to share this video because I've been casually doing these exercises and I think they are helping.

     

     

  19. Posted

    I ended up getting a thumb trackball. It arrived yesterday and I've been trying to use it since then. I didn't think it was solving the problem because my wrist was still sore. I pulled out the mouse three matches into Overwatch (it's a difficult thing to accept the loss of half your dexterous capability in a game you play frequently). As soon as I started using the mouse my wrist-pain was apparent af. So I wound its cord around it and shelved it for a while. 

    Eventually Competitive Play will match me with the other trackball players.

  21. Posted

    I'm going to paste what I wrote over on Waypoint about this film. 

     

    The more I think about this movie the less I like it. The most positive thing I can say about its rhetoric is how it evokes a powerful emotion on the political effects of fertility.
    I appreciated the scale and colors and such, but I think it is worth asking oneself what this movie looks like to an ethnonationalist or fascist or misogynist. Everything (including the visuals) is about monetary, patriarchal, technological and violent power. I’m not well schooled on Futurism, but I think it might be a movie a Futurist would make in 2017.
    There was only one character who was anything more than her societal role and she was in the movie briefly. All the other characters appear as pawns of the actual hero of the film, the cruel distopia itself. Some of the minor characters (including K) have the shallowest idea of faith and hope, but ultimately they are just vehicles to show how the distopia exerts its power. I can see an argument that the point of the movie is to show how this technology nightmare rips everyone out of their sense of interconnect humanity and uses them all as individual tools, but the resulting lack of acceptance of human dependencies on one another takes what I find interesting about narratives Out Of The Narrative. It’s a tech-demo of cool ideas and premises with no actual humans living in it (with the exception of Stelline). This is the dehumanization that bothers me in the film and even though it is made to look unpleasant, I think the overall rhetoric is a glorification of the rhetoric that makes it possible; people are no more than their professions and political affiliations and human agency is no more than a reaction to where one is placed in an institution of power. I think there is some truth to that but when it is presentedso absolutely and cooly, I don’t like it. With the exception of the visual aesthetics, the only things I find interesting about this film is my reactions against it.

  24. Posted

    41 minutes ago, dium said:

    Uh, so, it's good and I liked it. I mean, it's hard to throw unreserved enthusiasm behind

     

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    an American movie about slavery and a slave uprising in which all the principle actors are white

     

    ...but I agree that it is remarkable for all the reasons people have listed here. I might like it just about as much as I like the original – which is to say, a lot, but with some big caveats. Although I suspect I might come down a bit on it later, after I come down from the audio-visual high.

     I thought about this a little bit. I describe it to myself as a 2017 white fantasy of uncovering your own ancestral victimhood.

    Spoiler

    First time I noticed this was Ghost In The Shell (2017).