nonstopintrospection

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Posts posted by nonstopintrospection

  4. Posted

    The anime breakdown was pretty good, to expand a little on the cyberpunk reading front:

    Here’s a quick reading list of some stuff that was formative for me, I break down some of the authors and titles below the list, this is mostly early stuff, I’m sure there’s interesting cyberpunk that was made a little more recently (Altered Carbon was pretty decent):

    William Gibson, the Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive)
    William Gibson, Burning Chrome (short story collection)
    William Gibson, the Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties)
    Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
    Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
    Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
    Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net

    As always Gibson is the starting point, and a good mixture of aesthetic and theme.

    Considering Blade Runner is considered THE movie canon, you can't talk about cyberpunk without Philip K Dick.  His stuff is often a little further down the rabbit hole than the depictions of cyberpunk that we're used to.  I remember reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? expecting something more like Blade Runner, and got a world that it took me half the book to wrap my head around.  I think reading Dick was important for me to understand the way 60's drug culture and altered reality played into a lot of the hopes of technology some of these people had.  I think that theme is much more important to early cyberpunk than what we are left with now.

     

    Neal Stephenson is another author that was a progenitor of cyberpunk.  Snow Crash is pretty renowned, but I feel like it hews more to the aesthetic than the ideas and cultural descriptions of Gibson, I heard it was supposed to be a comic book originally, and to me it shows.  The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a better cyberpunk story in my perspective.  Cryptonomicon has some ideas about technology that relate to cyberpunk but is basically void of the aesthetic entirely.  (One of my favorite novels for the ‘punk’ of cyberpunk is a novel of his called Zodiac about eco-terrorism, but I wouldn't call it cyberpunk at all)


    Bruce Sterling also has some great stuff, if you're only going to read one book, read Islands in the Net.  I also enjoyed Zeitgeist, but it’s more along the lines of Cryptonomicon, a future looking tech thriller, rather than cyberpunk.

  5. Posted

    As odd and funny as it is to talk about lines of code, some points of reference, in school for CS we got an assignment to program tetris.  Myself and a few friends compared our (relatively) working assignments.

    My program: ~2000 lines of code

    Classmate 1: under 1000 lines of code

     

    Classmate 2: 10,000+ lines of code

  7. Posted

    I'm a dancer and have been teaching and dancing but not choreographing for a couple years, and I didn't think I could make anything I felt good about anymore. With some hand-wringing and pressure from friends over the holiday weekend I put something together. 

    I actually feel pretty good about it, and I'll get a chance to perform it soon.  It all came together really fast and surprised me super pleasantly.

  8. Posted

    As an aside to the Baldur's Gate note, I feel like jRPGs do a fair amount of poking at the player as main character tropes.  Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross both have pretty milk toast main characters, but over the course of the story really subvert the player as main character thing.  Final Fantasy 6 is another example of a game that never truly gives you a main character, and has one of the most stellar ensemble casts, maybe partially because of that.

    And MGS2 is a pretty famous example of a video game being aware of and breaking the player as main character understanding.  I recently read Driving Off the Map after hearing Austin Walker and Heather Alexandra talk about it.  Remembering my experience with that game while reading the article was a fun and revealing exercise.

  9. Posted

    Maybe I'm oversimplifying or misunderstanding something, but I always felt a lot of cyberpunk (sort of driven by the "punk" part) was the opposite of competence porn.  Broken or near broken people stumbling their way to maybe a temporary victory in a system that was way more powerful than them. 

     

    Gibson, in particular, is very stingy with true success and more often it seems like characters almost completely fail, and then the system tears itself apart from their disruptive influence more so than their competence. 

     

    The success is just the punk ideal that absolute corporate power will be broken down by sort of haphazard disruption more than protagonists actually accomplishing specific goals/tasks.  That comment about neon and noir sclpls made resonates with this reading for me.

    Maybe that's just the type of cyberpunk I like, and so those themes stand out a little more to me.

  11. Posted

    Yeah, I take a little umbrage with the "could have been a short story, radio play, novel" idea.  I really dislike the idea that strong, physical causation is the only significant choice we have in games, and that somehow makes framing choices totally non significant.

    The ability to influence the tone of a relationship and a character's reactions to a series of events felt as strong or stronger an experience than uncovering the story in Gone Home by tinkering around.  Despite some jarring in certain transitions, I really did feel like I was influencing and creating a relationship between these two characters in a way that very, very few games ever give me the capacity to do. 

    And for me it reflects how often relationships are like that in life.  I am probably never going to choose to skip out on work, bail on my responsibilities, not do the thing that I "should", but I frame how my life relates to those actions, and how I respond to others and let them in or close them out from my life.  That is an entirely different experience from observing an author's singular version of a series of events, i.e. a novel or play.

    This didn't feel particularly spoiler-y to me, but if someone feels it is, I'll move it to the other thread, it seemed like there was more talk of the Tom Chick review happening here.

  12. Posted

    Just finished first playthrough, and that emotional journey was rough, but beautiful.  There were a couple of elements of the mystery that lost me a little bit, but the script and acting blew me away.  I was also convinced of bee significance for a while.

    The first day that the ring is on the table literally made my heart lurch.  The picture of Julia and the ring were so obvious, and yet so effectively did what they were supposed to for me.

    My Henry didn't put Jules in a home, partly because I remember those discussions with my parents and grandmother regarding my grandfather, and how hard they worked to maintain that horrible experience, so that they could have those moments of lucidity.  It left me with a deep fear of early onset Alzheimer's for years, but if my parents end up in the same situation, I think I'd still have to wait a long time before putting them in a home, as heart crushing as that is.  I am so very glad that they kept the intro details out of media, because seeing that beforehand would have put me in a very different state coming to the game.

     

    As far as ending goes, I asked her to come to Boulder, and was glad it didn't commit their relationship into something.  I was never romantic with Delilah in my playthrough, but there were certainly the roots of a deep friendship there and I didn't want her to think that I wanted to walk away.  I was glad that option kept the relationship trajectory pretty open.

    I have a weird comment/question, did anyone else somehow hear Chris's voice in Henry sometimes?  Something about the vocabulary or delivery occasionally very much reminded me of Chris.

  13. Posted

    It was great to hear the podcast!  It was fun to hear Chris and Sarah's takes on the book.  I find it revealing and a little disconcerting that a lot of Sarah's points were totally new ideas and even a little alien to me, and I resonated a lot with Chris's experience of the book.  It makes me really appreciate having Sarah's viewpoint on the podcast, and I hope it continues to make me reflect on these books in new ways.


    The point Sarah made about the book juxtaposing standard masculine and feminine stories with its two leads was something I noticed but didn't really reflect on until she mentioned it.

    I guess if I think about the book as a critique of writing and the roles of men and women in a marriage, as well as characters in the literary canon it makes it both more thought-provoking, and recontextualizes my distaste for the characters and the structure of the ending.  I still feel really conflicted about the book for a lot of the things people mentioned throughout this thread, reference almost for its own sake, the chorus, a cartoonishness to the characters that make them insufferable.

    I also bounced hard off the soaring success of Lotto in the middle, I remember reading the transition from Mathild telling him he'll be great while he hesitates and starts to encourage himself (a piece of writing I really enjoyed, his hesitancy, the idea of giving up one dream for another, etc) to him being a great playwright.

    At that point, I dropped some expletives in frustration, stopped the audiobook, and had to go run off my frustration.  As someone who has done a transition to creative work at a similar age, a soaring creative success as deus ex machina is completely infuriating.  Not that significant to the book as a whole, but I appreciated the frustration with that narrative device.

    Did anyone have strong feelings about making Gwinny a viewpoint character right at the end?  The whole period post investigation felt a little terse and not as fully realized to me.  In a book where only a few characters take the POV, it felt strange to give Gwinny that sequence, and then it was compelling writing, but didn't feel like it did anything particularly powerful.  For a book that makes choices that seem very intentional to build something structural, it felt like a strange choice.  I'm probably missing something, but I was curious if other people reacted to that.



    I've been meaning to read Kazuo Ishiguro for years, so I'm glad for the motivation.  Love the podcast, so glad it's back!

  14. Posted

    If someone was going to attempt to read Dickens for the first time, where would one best start?

    It's not particularly short, but A Tale of Two Cities was the book that really made me fall in love with Dickens, and it was a very comfortable and engaging read for me.  I never truly connected with Oliver Twist or A Christmas Carol in the same way. 

    It's been a long time so it's hard to trust my memory, but I think the density of adaptations on the latter books made it hard to appreciate them as much, and I didn't have that problem with Two Cities.

  15. Posted

    I actually saw the Best of Enemies documentary a few weeks ago, and none of my friends are much into serious discussion, so it was awesome to hear people talk about that.  It was an incredibly compelling piece of history and filmmaking, while being an incredibly depressing look at where pundit politics started and thinking about where we are now.

    This is quickly becoming my favorite Idle Thumbs show.

  16. Posted

    I'll be sure to check out some of the ones you recommended, and the article with Sloane Leong talks about a lot of the elements I was curious about.  I'll definitely be following Maps to the Suns now.  The article in particular is a great read, thank you!

  17. Posted

    Hey, I know this is a bit off-topic, but I'm curious.  Does anyone have any sports stories in American or European comics that are standout?  In particular something more relational, rather than just a testosterone fueled rise to the top (although those are fun too sometimes).

    I have a deep abiding love for Mitsuru Adachi's work, which are light hearted coming of age romance stories surrounding sports.  I've never heard of or seen any interesting sports stories in western comics, and I'm curious if there's something I'm missing, or it's a genre pretty unique to manga.

  18. Posted

    Just finished up Fates & Furies (contracting mono is real crappy, but it does give you plenty of time to read.  I might finish a few more this month as well...)

    I am super excited for the Idle Book Club to return!  It was possibly my favorite podcast when it was going.  The selections and following the books section of the forums transformed my reading choices in general, and I'm looking forward to the upcoming episodes and where they'll lead me.

    I have some thoughts about the book, and I want to get them out before my impression fades, but I have lots of thoughts and not a great idea of how to order them.

    I loved her prose at times, even sometimes moments that when I process them for a while seem a little cheesy struck me emotionally in flow. I felt most engaged and most impressed by the writing surrounding the couple living their life, and her description of the marriage.  It just resonated with me in a way that most of my favorite writing does.  That said, I think I walked away from the book with a bad taste in my mouth.


    I felt often almost a shift in tone and prose when the plot kicks in, and it made it hard to care about the characters.  As the schemes develop and the betrayals come in the writing becomes stale to me.  I see the way it could be comical or cartoonish, but it really fell flat in my experience.

    I understand that a lot is going on structurally, some I saw, some I think went over my head, but sometimes when I read a book the structure seems to flow with the narrative and enhance it, and in this it seemed to hold back the power of the story and the characters when I noticed it.

    Not caring much for the plot or the more bombastic nature of the book made the second half sting, especially for having been extremely excited to hear from Mathild's POV when I realized that was happening.  I think with Lotto I reveled in the moment to moment experience of the writing, the experience of their marriage, of his career, and I wanted to take a journey with Mathild in the same way.  Her experience of grief had some potent moments, but it felt overshadowed by the unraveling of the plot.  The ending bits of oedipal plot in particular felt rushed and unsatisfying, like a slideshow at the end of a movie.  The Gwinny viewpoint was interesting, but felt like a strange choice, short and out of place.

    I wanted more of Mathild's experience of the marriage when Lotto was alive.  I thought in the second half there would be more of her experience of some of those moments of the first half, but it hewed more to the before and after.

    I've recently been reading Pynchon and Farrante, and it was interesting to me to try and frame this book on a scale between the dark, relationship-driven grounded writing in Farrante, and the sort of manic, ostentatious characters and situations of Pynchon, and think about how this book has elements of both.  I think for me it actually detracts from the experience. Farrante makes me feel that world and characters in a way that this book seems to shy away from, and everything is so cartoonish and manic in Pynchon that I don't feel like I'm losing that grounding, and can totally focus on prose and structure and reference in a way I just found disappointing in Fates and Furies.


    Trying to write about the book made me realize how disorganized my thoughts are about this book.  I am certainly glad I read it, and I enjoyed the experience of reading it, but I don't think I like this book.  I am really interested to hear what others think, and the podcast episode.

  19. Posted

    I'm a sucker for playing and replaying single player rpg's.  It was KOTOR 1 and 2 for a while, then Fallout 3 and NV for the last few years.  Now, after only mildly liking it on release, I went back to Dragon Age: Inquisition and it's the only game I've played in months, up to a few hundred hours.  I tried to get into old crpg's, Arcanum, Baldur's Gate, etc. but the clunkiness of the combat ui is beyond my patience.


    I'm poor after a couple years of privilege, so I have a big backlog to explore, but honestly, I'll probably spend the next five years on Skyrim mods.

  20. Posted

    How apocalyptic does it have to be to qualify?  Some of my favorites that I personally put in this genre:

     

    The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi

    Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang - Kate Wilhelm

    The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe

     

    But all of them veer pretty far from standard post-apocalypse.  In particular Bacigalupi's stuff, including his YA novels and short stories I find really interesting, both as character writing and for the ideas and settings.

     

    I've heard a lot of great things about Oryx and Crake, but the writing didn't really click for me.

  21. Posted

    Sorry for the topic shift, but I was actually taking a break from Blueprint for Armageddon when I listened to the Thumbs cast this week, and I was really excited for the Hardcore History plug.  I love the way Carlin breaks down war history, focusing on the human tragedy enough to keep me grounded in the horror of it, but leaving me feeling like it's important and significant to think about the events and ideas that created those tragedies. 

     

    Talking of Twilight Struggle reminded me a little of the old talk of Neptune's Pride, I would love to see a game take on an earth-based, history driven strategy game that incorporated secrecy, speed of communication, and diplomacy the way that game does.

  23. Posted

    Hi!

    Been listening to the podcast for a few months now, and figured I'd join the forums to get some of the ideas that spawn from listening these podcasts out of my head and somewhere other people can reflect on them. After lurking for a while, I'm pretty impressed by the community on these forums. Hope to have some good talks!