Because Blood Is Drama: Considering Carnage in Video Games and Other Media

Defender of sex, violence, and provocation.

Because the world has gotten too damned boring.

Because Blood Is Drama: Considering Carnage in Video Games and Other Media

A brief bit of advice to my video game playing friends

Fuck the world. Save the girl.

The Moving Pixels Podcast Concludes Our Discussion of Life Is Strange

We've been chattering our way through Life Is Strange for almost a year. Kind of sad that our discussion ends today.

The Moving Pixels Podcast Concludes Our Discussion of Life Is Strange

Dissecting roses

Been thinking about literary criticism a bit. Largely, I've been thinking about how I have always resisted connecting myself to a particular critical approach. I'm not a feminist, a Marxist, or one who takes a particularly psychological approach to literature (or really any media that I analyze, film, games, music, whatever). I'm not necessarily opposed to any approaches people want to use (unless they get lost in the ideology of the approach, rather than in showing me something about the work itself). Use whatever approach when it's useful, I say. Discard it when it is not.

I'm not interested in politics, sociology, psychology, or much of anything else when it comes to literature. I'm just fascinated with aesthetics and semiotics. In a nutshell, I'm fascinated with beauty.

I just like dissecting roses.

Cruel, I guess.

Moving Pixels Podcast: Life Gets Stranger

I accidentally titled this podcast the same thing that I titled our podcast for episode 2. This sort of thing bugs me. I am dumb.

Moving Pixels Podcast: Life Gets Stranger

The Beginner's Guide, a New Prison from the Developer of The Stanley Parable

Less immediately engaging than The Stanley Parable, but still intellectually interesting.

The Beginner's Guide, a New Prison from the Developer of The Stanley Parable

The government does not concern me much, and I shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. It is not many moments that I live under a government, even in this world. If a man is thought-free, fancy-free, imagination-free, that which is not never for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.

I know that most men think differently from myself; but those whose lives are by profession devoted to the study of these or kindred subjects content me as little as any. Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society, but have no resting-place without it. They may be men of a certain experience and discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful systems, for which we sincerely thank them; but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very wide limits. They are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency.

--Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"

fuck all that

Smut hunting and salvation

By focusing on sex, smut-hunters help eroticize a society by establishing boundaries to be transgressed. Censors share with pornographers an exaggerated sense of the importance of sex; in their different ways, both endorse Woody Allen's often-quoted witticism: "Sex is not dirty [pause] unless it's done right." Neither group will grant moral or intellectual motivation to the other side. Pornographers and censors can be sincerely indignant (the one about guilt and repression, the other about excessive freedom and license), can be driven by obsessions, can feel the need to bear witness to deeply held beliefs; both can feel that they are saving others.

--John W. Slade, Pornography in America

The Binding of Isaac Afterbirth: Our Ongoing Love Affair with the Twisted Mind of Edmund McMillen

Gross. Grosser. Grossest.

The Binding of Isaac Afterbirth: Our Ongoing Love Affair with the Twisted Mind of Edmund McMillen

What Happens When a Point-and-Click Adventure and a Roguelike Have a Baby?

Skyhill.

What Happens When a Point-and-Click Adventure and a Roguelike Have a Baby?

We met through a shared view

She loved me, and I did too.

Have I mentioned that the lead singer of The Streets looks nearly identical to my cousin Michael? It's uncanny.

The thing I love best about this track is Mike Skinner's horrific attempt to sing the choruses. The effort is so purely beautiful in its undeniable ugliness, so utterly compelling.

One pill makes you larger

A dozen or more make you much, much, much larger.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks. The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.