Atlantic

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Posts posted by Atlantic

  9. Posted

    What I'm Doing: Music and ambience. I have a lot of experience writing music but I'm eager to practice my production skills.

    Contact Info: Here on the forums or by email at [email protected]


    Time Zone: GMT
    Portfolio: I can make all sorts of music but here's some stuff that might be suitable for games:

     

     

  12. Posted

    They call their advertisement section "The Money Zone." I think self-indulgence is a major part of their whole enterprise. The first time I gave up listening to MBMBaM was after Griffin shouted about Pokemon for what felt like 25 minutes. I only recently started listening again and I put it on 1.5x speed.

  13. Posted

    @itsamoose There is definitely something to the idea between "scientific" biological sex and cultural gender. It's something I tried to get at in my earlier post, but there's always more to say. A science education and a liberal arts/humanities education in my experience have very little overlap. For instance, I have read a handful of books and articles on gender performativity, but couldn't tell you what a chromosome actually *is,* while there are definitely people who are the reverse of me. And that's where some of the tensions about biological sex and gender come from in "debates" across forums/twitter/youtube, in that we are separated by a common language. We both say "males and females" or "men and women" but have different definitions for each of those terms, but are talking, arguing, shouting past one another with those same terms.

     

    But then again, you say that these terms are used to keep some sort of objectivity in experimentation. I was taught to effectively throw objectivity out the window and instead to critically think on subjectivity, or subjectivities (plural!). This also reminds me that masculinity is not singular, and that there are masculinities (plural!) further complicating everything. The point is that a scientific argument seeks to continuously clarify, and a liberal arts/humanities argument seeks to continuously question and be happy in ambiguity, and ambiguity is a much more difficult thing to leave sitting in the back of your mind (which I suppose is part of the reason that I got burned out on academia).

     

    Obviously I used evidence in my essays for different things, but I wonder now if there shouldn't be more science in the humanities, and humanities in the sciences. WHO KNOWS.

     

    I'm glad you brought the difference up, because like how defining terms at the beginning of a paper, maybe a rule-of-thumb for an internet discussion is to clarify your own viewpoint... ?

     

    Incidentally, a youtuber that I like called ContraPoints recently did a video titled "What is Gender?" that seems appropriate to link right here right now, pls watch:

     

     

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    @clyde Maybe gender is a religion. Maybe that statement was intended to be flippant and silly, but I think you have a point. Religion is something that is ingrained in children often before the development of language. I was baptised as a Roman Catholic before I developed the ability to form memories, or even before I knew my own name, and only in my teens and early twenties did I question these things. Same goes for gender. I was told that boys wear blue and girls wear pink and that's that.

     

    As for me, I'm biologically male and I started wearing nail polish just a few months ago. Am I a man? Am I tentatively gender non-conforming? What I actually think is that I am a nebulous, moving point on some loosely defined gender spectrum, with some parts masculine, some parts feminine, and that all of this is likely to change with time. What this means for the song that Clyde linked in the OP is that you read it as having a masculine traits, which I don't hear. Doesn't mean it's not there, it just means that we have different feelings/understandings/interpretations. Maybe it held some sort of masculinity in 2005 when it was originally released (I googled it), but for me in 2017 that masculinity is much vaguer and more obscured through my admittedly unsure lens, but I've made that point a few times now.

     

    I just want to note how civil this thread has been thus far and I am extremely thankful of that. This community is Very Good. :tup:

  14. Posted

    Thanks @Gwardinen and @itsamoose for a a few clarifications. I don't have much of a background in science and definitely come from a cultural studies angle instead, which has to do with things like ideas about how gender is performed rather than hard statistical data. I'm going to read some of my old notes and see if I can't contribute something more substantial.

  15. Posted

    I'm a little bit concerned about this version of Prey. I have really liked Arkane's games since Dark Messiah. The Prey demo seems to have a couple of issues that I hope they solve.

     

    Like @marginalgloss mentioned, some of the audio is messed up, in that it jumps in when there's one enemy around, hangs around for way too long after you've killed the mimic, and then ends really abruptly leaving an awkward silence. The music has been of a good quality, but it isn't being used very well. Also, I'm not sure for long the mimics will be an interesting enemy. I played through the demo slowly, and kind of figured out how to spot them before they jump (I won't write it for fear of spoilers and I'm not 100% sure on it either). The controls feel a bit clumsy too.

     

    I think it'll get more tactically interesting when you get powers (which aren't in the demo), but I'll be curious as to how they control and interact with everything else going on.

  17. Posted

    We spent some time thinking on talking about masculinity while I was studying for my master's degree (in music, so it's a bit more relevant). I'm trying to recall ideas from years ago, so I may get some things wrong or be outdated by now but I'll offer it up anyway. I'm also far from an expert and am probably going to make a bigger mess!

     

    It's a relatively common thought now, but the first thing to note is that there is a difference between biological sex and gender. People are born with male or female (or intersex). That's biological or anatomical or purely physical. Gender, on the other hand, is a social construct. What this mostly means is that there are social norms that people are expected to follow that conforms with their biology. For instance, boys generally have short hair and girls have long hair. But these things are flexible and can change over time and across different cultures. In the 19th century, baby boys were clothed in pink and girls in blue. Sometime in the early 20th century, it flipped.

     

    I remember I wrote an essay about Chopin and Georges Sand, their relationship, and how their sex and genders were considered in 19th century Paris. Chopin was biologically male, but was sickly and considered to have feminine qualities. In contemporaneous accounts, he was considered an androgyne and this was a positive aspect. The term was "angelic." Georges Sand was a woman, a proto-feminist that wore trousers around mostly-liberal Paris (and therefore having masculine qualities). She was considered in the accounts as a hermaphrodite, and this was a bad thing. But that's a big digression.

     

    We were taught that masculinity and femininity are terms for referring to aspects of the male and female bodies respectively. The obvious examples are male and female genitals. We might also say that a man's deeper-pitched voice is masculine, and a woman's voice feminine. Or that men generally grow a little bit taller than women, or that women have wider hips. But you might know tall women/short men, or men with high voices and women with deep voices, and that's where it all becomes socially constructed or socially mediated. Likewise with personality traits, like men being aggressive and labelling that as a masculine quality; there is no reference to male bodies in it. It is totally socially constructed and reinforced through culture and cultural artefacts. BUT! Just because it is socially constructed and and without any real tangible biological evidence for does not make it less real. Masculinity and femininity are as real as language! It's easy to dismiss gender issues in any regard as being without grounding but millennia of human culture is that grounding.

     

    PS. The example we were given of masculinity in women is in PJ Harvey's "Man-Size." But gender performativity is a whole other kettle of fish!

     

     

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    So clyde, that song you linked. I'm not sure if your definition of masculinity lines up with mine, but here's my thoughts on it. You wrote that the emotion expressed in the song is somehow a masculine jealousy. I'm not 100% on what that means. For me, there's very little in the text of the song that supports that reading. The only part is in the performance of the song, using a man's voice (or I should say a masculine voice), but I don't think that the emotion is especially masculine. But then again, we (probably) live in different countries, come from different cultures, have different understandings of those cultures, and masculinity could be considered differently.

     

    (I'm very tired rn so if none of this makes sense, let me know and I will try to clarify)

     

    (PS gender is confusing and nebulous and I am still learning a lot about it)

  21. Posted

    @marginalgloss Thanks for the links! I've skimmed through the blog and the comments and frankly I'm even more conflicted about PSS now. Something to think about. Hmm.

     

    @Beasteh TC&TC is my favourite of Miéville's, with Embassytown close behind. He really hit his stride with those two, in that the worlds are interesting but they're also concise.

  22. Posted

    I have recently read Perdido Street Station and The Scar by China Miéville, poster child of the New Weird. I have read a few of his other books. I really enjoyed The City and The City and Embassytown, and I liked King Rat decently enough. Now I'm two thirds through his Bas-Lag trilogy, and I have some Assorted Thoughts:

     

    Perdido Street Station is absolutely crammed with interesting ideas, from severe body horror to friendly hell-dwellers to a rejection of Tolkien-esque fantasy tropes. Sometimes, this is to its detriment. I don't particularly care for elves and orcs and dwarves and such, and PSS avoids all of this in favour of a bunch of much stranger creatures, like the man-bird Garruda and the extremely sexually dimorphic Khepri. These all have different cultures and ways of living, but they're all overlapping in the city of New Crobuzon. All of these details are interesting, but the story focusses on the invasion of some monsters into the city and the efforts of "rogue academic" Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin. There are a bunch of subplots that weave through this, but some of the story is lost in all of the world details, which is the same problem as the Lord of the Rings just in a different skin. There are a few revelations that happen towards the end that made me feel manipulated, and not in a fun way. I found this book to be mostly a slog, but I spite-read my way through it because I have enjoyed some of the other things that Miéville has written.

     

    The Scar is much better! It's the story of Bellis Coldwine and the pirate city of Armada, a conglomerate of stolen ships and scraps. Again, there are a bunch of New Weird fantasy races all living side-by-side. Despite the fact that PSS and The Scar are pretty log (~800 pages each), the latter was a much easier read. There is a smaller cast of characters and they are all contained on this ship-city, and they are much more developed. All of the world details didn't feel like fluff this time, but rather relevant information that also fleshes things out. Some of the twists and turns are obvious to see from miles away, but there are still a few surprises. I really enjoyed The Scar, way more than Perdido! The problem is that I don't know if anything in the setting would make a lot of sense if you just jumped in here, but maybe... ?

     

    Anyway, I am interested now in the last of the trilogy, Iron Council.

  24. Posted

    On 27/03/2017 at 4:01 PM, Badfinger said:

    I finally listened to the episode of The Flophouse, and it's absolutely hilarious. I was put off of the show by the ads on other Max Fun shows, but it turns out that their voices are less annoying and there are far fewer songs than I was led to believe. The fact that I basically never watch movies turned out to be a non-factor after all!

     

    The Flop House is good! All of the Max Fun ads are terrible and do a poor job of capturing the enticing parts of each of the shows. The best episodes are the ones where they watch a film that ends up as "good-bad" in their final judgements, especially the ones that are completely crazy. They all have a deep appreciation of movies, but they have wildly different tastes. Someone has been keeping track of their recommendations, and once you know that Dan watches whatever, Elliott likes old movies, and Stu likes schlock you might find something you like.

     

    You will in time come to love Elliott's letters songs!