MrHoatzin

I've had this kind of thing in the back of my consciousness forever—it recently resurfaced when a friend described Sal and myself to a third party as the foreign couple. When if ever will it be kosher for me to include myself and my work in the American canon? At this point, I've lived in the US longer than I've lived in Serbia. I am a citizen. A lot of my artistic development happened in San Antonio, I am very much a part and an evangelist of the art scene here. I feel a certain kinship with the cowboy artist archetype. Hobo Lobo is all about America... But people will interpret my work as a product of some radical ornery Eastern European no matter what. Yet I am totally not speaking to any Serbian audience. I haven't the slightest what I would say to them. I don't really fit in either place—perhaps not as drastically as Nabokov who couldn't go back to Soviet Russia—but pretty definitely all the same. And while I don't have a foreign accent when I speak Serbian, my vocabulary and grammar are utter shit and for any kind of complicated conversation I have to either segue into English or take a gamble with sloppily transmuting Latin-rooted words into Serbian... I don't think my work should be deemed any less American because I haven't been born American, just as it shouldn't be grouped into the Serbian canon because it doesn't fit there. Ultimately this kind of bird's-eye-view taxonomy has no direct bearing on my work. But it does affect the interpretation of it in ways that I can't quite grasp or anticipate. People are too eager to interpret shit through what they imagine I've been through. I don't know how to really feel about that.

I think Nabokov is fair game. He wrote everything after The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in English, in the US, about the US, and those are his best works. Of all the ones that they put on the list, Pnin is the most wacky and curious choice. Pale Fire, Lolita and Ada are all amazing books that I wholly recommend. I should really give Ada another go; I don't think I ever finished it.

The breathless thing and the rest of the heart-attacky symptoms like the numb limbs could be panic attack related. Have you had any reasons to be flipping out lately?

A mockumentary?

boo

It is actually one of these dudes:

Not only is that a framed picture of my back, it also UPDATES IN REAL TIME!! Pretty epic technology. No moving parts! Uses no energy to run! I had to flip the phone really fast while it was taking the picture to get the flipside of the phone in the shot.

The new spoiler tag makes me not read spoilers ever, even when I kinda would want to. Is this just some random temporary wackiness or the new order of things? The olden redacted stripes were more satisfying to unredact somehow.

My avatar looks like I am livid or at the very least disapproving, but I am not:

Also: you may just make me try Civ again. I always get overwhelmed by trying to second-guess the systems and get destroyed by some belligerent AI in relatively uninteresting scenarios; I never considered it an option to just play the game as a casual simulation.

I just now got to actually listening to the last few podcasts. You dudes mentioned at some point how US is pro-active in its spreading of culture. I recently learned that the Marshal Plan contained a clause stipulating that countries receiving support must open their film markets to a certain percentage of US movies. And here I was thinking that we all spoke English because it was a simple language and stuff.

It is not our fault that we like to support wacky games that don't support us.

Mac version would be super nice.

I just need to know there is a police blimp. Is there a police blimp? With, like, a swat team on board.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy#History

It's hard to miss that a lot of what they're doing is hypemongering—but I'm choosing to assume (because I am a starry-eyed optimist) the true audience for the hype are VC firms that they would go to with all this nice press and buzz and pitch the project for the REAL money that they're looking for.

Well, ok! But isn't this how open source projects are done? Put out a v1 and then iterate and improve upon it with user/community feedback? And speaking of it being a pirate's wet dream, I think their goal of building an effective curated marketplace should be enough of a deterrent against the kinds of piracy that actually hurt bottom lines. I dunno guys! I still think this is not as horrible an idea as some people demand it be. From where I'm sitting it can go either way. And all it takes at this point for it to succeed is good branding and outreach. If they fail on the followthrough, they failed, sucks to be everyone who believed in this thing. People need to be making things for standardized open platforms, and I hope these guys are not out to fleece everyone as that would retard grass-roots open gaming by many years.

But they are asking for so little money—unless everyone in that demo vid was a hired actor/stock footage—the work that has already gone into this probably eclipses the kickstarter many times over. I could see how the Kickstarter could be their attempt to gauge the public's interest or a way to get out the word about their product. The game they're playing is so big that I doubt it is the money that they're really after here. The Kickstarter campaign is just free press with a cherry on top. If however they disappear tomorrow and the console never sees the light of day, then we'll know what exactly their game was.

I somehow doubt he would throw money at something that was crazy pie in the sky untenable.

Where did I read that Ed Fries is also somehow behind this?

That Gamasutra article is filled with conventional wisdom and truisms. Let's wait and see how it all plays out.

Fun times!

I need an incentive to go on. I've played the first couple of levels and so far there is a lot of hacking and slashing, some strategy and tactics, and a lot of super sacharine art. I don't have problem with any asset individually or the style in general—stuff is super gorgeous, no argument—it is when they're all put in a pile together that it gets busy and kindof focusless. Does the art get more coherent as one goes on? Also I take it there is a story that is worth hanging out for? Hmmmm.

It blows my mind that after all that was said, you still insist on equating being bullied for being a white dude for being bullied for not being a white dude.