Share Exceptional Articles You Have Read

[sclpls]

This article spans a lot of different things so it is hard to summarize, but it covers a lot about the hegemony of popular movies, music, and how it isn't cool right now to dislike popular things, which is not how things have always been. But mostly I like the article just because it is the most robust piece of criticism I have read in awhile. That is probably more on me, I read too much junk, but this article was a nice reminder for me of how satisfying it is to read a really thorough piece of considered criticism. I don't even know how I feel about the argument, I just like that it got me to think about some ideas about culture from a different perspective.

 

http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/bombast-pop-pop-pop-popular

[clyde]

I don't even know how I feel about the argument, I just like that it got me to think about some ideas about culture from a different perspective.

http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/bombast-pop-pop-pop-popular

This is pretty much how I feel about it. The article seems like an interesting look into the perspective of a professional critic whose self-identity is infomed with a few decades of history, but ultimately the problem that is being addressed feels irrelevant to my own experience. If I was a professional critic I might feel differently.

Consumer culture rewards popular artworks. Popular artworks often do very little of interest to me. Sometimes they do. Why not just write what you have interesting perspectives about. The perceived problem reminds me of that Rockband 4 preview on Polygon. The resulting article wasn't what the context of being a Rockband 4 preview on Polygon suggests to most (myself included), but it was evokative of this type of critic's dilemma. I'm so glad I'm a hobbyist who is in a good enough situation to have health-insurance, a source of income (that does not involve convincing others that my opinion matters) for a mortgage in a rural home, and money for ingredients. I can talk about what actually interest me rather than what seems to interest the greatest amount of people. The hard part is finding others that want to talk about stuff I find interesting.

[sucks2Bme]

I found this article to be one of my favorites in the past year or so. Very well written, long, and made me care about chess, even if just a little bit. 

 

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/09/sinquefield_cup_one_of_the_most_amazing_feats_in_chess_history_just_happened.single.html

[Gormongous]

This is an obvious contribution, but "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" is still one of the most timeless and interesting pieces of journalistic profiling.

[Mangela Lansbury]

This is a really powerful piece about the state of transgender issues today, and a woman named Alena who's being forced to live as Christopher.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/24/alena-bradford-transgender-south-georgia

[namman siggins]

No Coates? He's a must read if you want to read exceptional articles on race issues

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

 

Compass Cultura has a great selection of long-form travel journalism 

http://compasscultura.com

[namman siggins]

http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson-in-perspective/

This Faustian pact has been the undoing of many great artists, many more journeymen and more than a few of my good friends. Add to this volatile mixture the powerful accelerant of emerging digital technology and all hell breaks loose. What I have witnessed happening in the last twenty years is the aesthetic equivalent of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. The wholesale industrialization and mechanistation of the creative process. Our ad agencies, design groups, film and music studios have gone from being cottage industries and guilds of craftsmen and women, essentially unchanged from the middle-ages, to dark sattanic mills of mass production. Ideas themselves have become just another disposable commodity to be supplied to order by the lowest bidder. As soon as they figure out a way of outsourcing thinking to China they won’t think twice. Believe me

[Ben X]

That would explain why most adverts for the past 20 years have been rip-offs of ten-year-old films, other adverts or YouTube videos.

[tberton]

This is the best "Ten Years After Katrina" article I've read so far, about two women who led there respective communities in the aftermath of the storm.

[feelthedarkness]

I love these two articles by David Foster Wallace very much. The first on US Fiction writers, and television as a concept (written ahead of the great rebirth of TV), and the second a profile of David Lynch. One of the two really clarified my feelings on video games as a medium, though I'm forgetting which article (haha, it's been a few years)! I think the TV where he gets into the differences in the act of watching. 

 

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram:+television+and+U.S.+fiction.-a013952319

 

http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhpremiere.html

[namman siggins]

As the game began, we soon got whisked off to the royal hall where we had a meeting with Queen Leia. She and Han were apparently on the outs, so she was currently single. This is only relevant because the gamemaster’s PC and Leia proceed to have a 15-20 minute conversation about how Leia was always secretly in love with him, but how he couldn’t commit to her because he was dedicated to the Jedi ways.

... uh...

We tried to interrupt this marathon of uncomfortable awkwardness as the gamemaster had a romantic conversation with himself, but each time we were shushed aside so the “dialogue” could continue

http://io9.com/your-most-heinous-stories-of-role-playing-games-gone-wr-1728049438?

[Gormongous]

http://io9.com/your-most-heinous-stories-of-role-playing-games-gone-wr-1728049438?

 

God, the one about rape has me livid. Also, I'm only a third of the way through the article, so if there's more than one about rape, then it's the first one, and also, fuck the world.

[Zeusthecat]

http://io9.com/your-most-heinous-stories-of-role-playing-games-gone-wr-1728049438?

 

Wow.

 

Okay, so I have almost no knowledge or exposure to D&D or other tabletop style games so this article is super confusing. Do people just like make up their own rules and stories or is there some kind of framework they are supposed to follow? It all sounds so random and arbitrary and like a big game of pretend. That being said, it sounds totally super awesome and fun if you had a good group of people. It's kind of sad knowing that I probably completely missed out on having some of these kinds of experiences. At 30, chances are pretty low that I would find even a single person I know that would be down.

[Ninety-Three]

Okay, so I have almost no knowledge or exposure to D&D or other tabletop style games so this article is super confusing. Do people just like make up their own rules and stories or is there some kind of framework they are supposed to follow? It all sounds so random and arbitrary and like a big game of pretend. That being said, it sounds totally super awesome and fun if you had a good group of people. It's kind of sad knowing that I probably completely missed out on having some of these kinds of experiences. At 30, chances are pretty low that I would find even a single person I know that would be down.

 

The stories are completely made up, but the players have their characters interact with those stories according to rules that define what they can do. Some game systems have more rules than others, wherever the territory defined by the rules ends, people tend to go to making stuff up. Additionally, across the board people will often let the rules slip and end up playing more of a game of pretend. At its best, that turns things into a beautiful exercise in collaborative storytelling, and at worst it turns things into a bunch of self-indulgent players and gamemasters all grabbing at the reins.

[Gormongous]

Wow.

 

Okay, so I have almost no knowledge or exposure to D&D or other tabletop style games so this article is super confusing. Do people just like make up their own rules and stories or is there some kind of framework they are supposed to follow? It all sounds so random and arbitrary and like a big game of pretend. That being said, it sounds totally super awesome and fun if you had a good group of people. It's kind of sad knowing that I probably completely missed out on having some of these kinds of experiences. At 30, chances are pretty low that I would find even a single person I know that would be down.

 

Yeah, like Ninety-Three said, it's basically cooperative storytelling with preexisting rules that exist to help the players know what is possible for their characters to do and to help gamemasters decide on consequences for what those characters do. Truly great campaigns feel like living out one of the greatest novels you've ever read, but truly terrible campaigns (like almost every story in that link) feel like being trapped in the fantasy world of a sadistic asshole, so... Yeah, I've got a group with whom I run semi-regularly, but it's a labor of love that most people aren't really up to doing in their thirties...

[Zeusthecat]

Man, that does sound like my cup of tea. But oh well. Probably never gonna happen.

[clyde]

On the popularity of media, creative output, audience, and self-awareness:

http://50shortreviews.tumblr.com/post/128194510808/criticism-roundup-2013

[feelthedarkness]

Maybe it's because i'm sort of close to boston punx peripheral to the story, but the story of these hardcore kids' Yankees Suck t-shirt empire that turned into a ridiculous gang war with edge dudes beating the snot out of all fenway sausage vendors is kind of blowing me away:

 

http://grantland.com/features/yankees-suck-t-shirts-boston-red-sox/

[namman siggins]

Fucking Boston edge kids.

 

I thought the edge kids in Cinny were rowdy, but some of the horror stories--plus that dumb FSU documentary--coming from the Boston HC scene. Great bands though. 

[namman siggins]

But the story of the downfall of Otto Pérez Molina is one that has many protagonists and that has been pursued and fought for much longer than the length of the La Linea investigation. The question that may long haunt Guatemalans, and which will certainly be studied and analyzed, is how such a man, about whom so much was already known, ever became President in the first place. Pérez Molina himself is a central and emblematic figure in that fight, which, at its most basic, has been a battle to strengthen the rule of law in Guatemala, thus protecting a functioning democracy, against the all-corroding forces of corruption and impunity. It has specifically been a struggle waged against the consolidation of government as a kind of criminal syndicate, one maintained by entrenched criminal powers inside and outside government, regardless of who is elected President. CICIG itself, an international commission of judges, prosecutors, and investigators established in 2007,was conceived by Guatemalans who were concerned that the country’s justice system not only needed strengthening but also outside help. Since the end to the country’s long war, the Guatemalan Army’s all-powerful military intelligence agencies from the war years were seeking to preserve their power and privileges by transitioning into organized crime.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-president-to-prison-otto-perez-molina-and-a-day-for-hope-in-guatemala

 

But this brings us to yet another problem for the comics snob: The cartooning style barrier I refer to is eroding.  You would have to be a very blind man indeed not to notice how the range of acceptable styles in mainstream comics has expanded in the 21st century. It wasn’t that long ago that the style of a Paul Pope would have been considered entirely outlaw, but now is accepted into mainstream commercial comics as nothing out of the ordinary. Though a walk through a comics shop suggests that the kind of comic art I complain about still occupies the center ring, the tent is much bigger. 

 

It’s humor that makes superhero comics enjoyable to at least this comics snob. I’ve recently come to the realization that we make a mistake when we look at comics like Jack Cole’s Plastic Man or C.C. Beck and Otto Binder’s Captain Marvel as send-ups. Rather, they saw the humor inherent in the superhero concept and exploited it. Humor is challenging for the adult reader of superhero comics. Much of the joy of reading superhero comics when you’re a kid comes from your ability to take them seriously. When you’re resolved to continue this pleasure into adulthood you must maintain an extreme degree of suspension of disbelief. Superhero comics face this challenge by keeping a very straight face indeed. A horse laugh in the wrong place undermines it. In an interview the comics writer Mark Waid recalled the dread he felt when reviewers started referring to a series of his as “fun”: “‘Fun’ is a death word in this market.”

http://www.tcj.com/a-problem-for-the-comics-snob/

[namman siggins]

The story of how arcade games made it to the USSR is a circuitous one. Though it has never been substantiated by historians, the anecdote goes that on a trip to the United States, Khrushchev was so smitten with the arcade games he saw that, upon his return, he invited all the game makers to come to Russia and showcase their best games. Then, he bought all of them, and sent them to Russian military factories with orders to figure out what made them work. Afterward, he took bids for new game ideas.

http://io9.com/the-alternative-universe-of-soviet-arcade-games-1729012559?

[Coods]

I really enjoy this piece about the stigma around poetry by Jenny Zhang. 

 

I don't know a lot of poetry but I love her idea about how alluring emotion is when it's deeply ingrained in creative work.

[Zeusthecat]

As I've mentioned before on these forums at one point, I just don't and will probably never understand all the hype around Apple's yearly announcements of the exact same overpriced shit that they unveil every single year (although I guess they did release a watch this year that I've heard exactly zero people talk about since it's release so there's one new overpriced thing). So I was very happy to stumble across this article that was written specifically to cater to my opinion: Link

 

I've just come to accept the fact that I'm an Apple hater. No disrespect to any Apple lovers out there, this brand just never clicked with me and that means I must hate it irrationally because it's Apple and you have to pick a side.

 

Edit: Dammit, can't get the link to work. I don't understand the internet sometimes. You would think just copying and pasting a link from the address bar would go to that thing and not some stupid separate comment section thing.     

 

GOT IT!!

[Ninety-Three]

Working link of Zeus's article.

[Zeusthecat]

Please tell me what you did! It's the same freaking link I used!

 

Edit: Okay, got it now. Just had to explicitly declare it as a link instead of just pasting it into the post. It's because I said bad things about Apple. I just know it.