Eruditorum Press

Our Imposter Syndrome cancels out our Dunning-Kruger

These Shadows Keep On Changing (Castlevania: Dracula X)

8

It’s more than slightly fitting that there should be a haunted Castlevania game. Like most hauntings, of course, Dracula X is ghastly. This was fairly obvious even at the time, when the game got lackluster reviews. Indeed, a new Castlevania game is the sort of thing that could plausibly have gotten me to buy a SNES game in 1995, and certainly could have been good for a rental, except that it appeared in all regards to be a step back from Castlevania IV. No multi-directional whipping, comparatively garish graphics, and in general an approach that looked like it was rejecting all the progress made in the series over the years. And that was beyond stuff like the seemingly pointless and meaningless title. I mean, Mega Man X was one thing, but this was just silly.

And truth be told, it’s a bad game. Most obviously, it’s stupidly difficult, and difficult in fundamentally mean-spirited ways. The most revealing example comes at the start of the second level, which combines a lengthy stretch of crumbling platforms with a chain of Mermen that jump up to attack you, which essentially means that any time you get hit it’s a fatal one. The section’s very early in the level, but the effect is still to make it so that you’re overwhelmingly likely to be down one or more lives when you get to the rest of the level, which isn’t exactly massively forgiving either.

But more than that, there’s just not much to the game. It gives the ugly impression of being shovelware – a Castlevania game rushed out for no reason other than that the Super Nintendo was still the dominant console and there hadn’t been one in a while. Which is almost but not quite what actually happened. In reality Castlevania: Dracula X was nominally a SNES port of Akumajō Dracula X: Chi no Rondo, released on CD for the PC-Engine, the Japanese version of the Turbografx in 1993, and more commonly known in English as Castlevania: Rondo of Blood.

Unlike Dracula X, Rondo of Blood is a good game. For one thing, it’s a sensible follow-up to Castlevania IV. It’s still in a starkly different mould, but instead of feeling like a step backwards it feels like a reasoned and deliberate move in a different direction. Which is perfectly fair – Castlevania IV probably took its approach as far as it was worth taking it. Instead of offering marginal refinement to its predecessor, which at this point simply wasn’t what Castlevania did with its sequels, Rondo of Blood defined its own. Castlevania IV was lushly beautiful and reveled in the possibilities of Mode 7, but was also a relatively slow game. Rondo of Blood, on the other hand, is fast and action-packed – more interested in adrenaline than atmosphere. It also expanded on the handful of secret areas in Castlevania IV and linked them back to Castevania III’s multiple paths structure to create levels with multiple paths and, at times, multiple bosses and exits that lead to different levels.…

Continue Reading

The Eruditorum Press Doctor Who Poll

74

So it snuck up on us, but Eruditorum Press celebrated its first anniversary yesterday. Consider this the standard and deeply sincere post where I thank everybody – our original crew of Jack, Jane, Kevin, and James, the newer gang of Josh, Daniel, and Shana, and our Web Doll Anna. I couldn’t ask for a better team of weirdos to help me forensically diagnose the state of late capitalism via idiosyncratic pop culture thinkpieces. And thanks to the readers and commenters who make this such a fantastic community. It’s been an absolute pleasure running this site for the past year. I couldn’t be prouder of everyone, and I hope my stupid natterings don’t unduly lower the class of the joint.

I’ve got revelries, but first I want to do the obligatory cup-shake. The Eruditorum Press Patreon runneth low. I understand this – A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones was unpopular to say the least. I’ve been bad at some Patron obligations like bonus posts. So I’ve restructured the Patreon a bit. Bonus posts are a thing of the past because apparently I suck at them. So here’s the new reward structure. At $1, you get a preview of Monday’s posts as close to a week early as I can manage. At $2 I’ll send you occasional short reviews of movies, books, and albums I listen to and like. Think 2-3 paragraphs a couple times a month on things that catch my fancy. And at $5 you get writers notes behind the scenes commentaries on major pieces. September’s were on “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate.” There’ll be ones on Last War in Albion Volume 1, and “Theses on Trump” in October, as well as on new Last War in Albion chapters. (Which I have one of ready to go along with Volume 1 when it launches, which will be any week now – I just need to find a 2-3 day stretch to work on it basically.)

I’ve also added a goal at $300 per week whereby I’ll review Class episode by episode. 

Right. So now for the fun. We did a big Last War in Albion Twitter Tournament back in March (From Hell won), so as we near election season in America it’s clearly time for a Doctor Who one. So we’re proud to announce the Eruditorum Press Doctor Who Poll – our bid to codify the taste of whatever faction of Doctor Who fandom we represent. (The alt-frocks?) Anyway, here’s how we’re doing it. You’re going to name your personal top twenty Doctor Who stories. One of them you’ll designate your all-time favorite. That one will get five points. Your other nineteen will get one point. I’ll create a ranked list, with ties broken according to my personal preference because it’s my site. You do not have to offer a full list – as many stories as you like, up to twenty. But you do have to pick a favorite.

“Doctor Who Story” is defined however you like. For the sake of settling likely-to-arise issues when counting votes, there are a couple of Official Clarifications at the end of the post.…

Continue Reading

A Citizen Reviews a Misunderstood Classic

18

The following review is a guest post by Eye-Patch, a reviewer and columnist for one of the most respected arts and culture magazines in the Terran Federation.  In addition to his writing, Eye-Patch is a veteran, teacher and citizen.

 

It is now 19 years since the release of the motion picture Starship Troopers, directed by Mr Paul Verhoeven (non-citizen) and based on the book by Mr Robert A. Heinlein (citizen).  It is a film that was controversial upon its initial release and remains controversial to this day.  Upon its release, the film was accused of distorting the original intention of Mr Heinlein’s admirable original story, of representing an example of the film industry’s liberal and unpatriotic bias, of being insidious anti-government and anti-war propaganda, of being covertly pro-Bug, of being out of touch with the opinions of the vast majority of right-thinking people in the Federation.

In this appreciation, I want to argue that much of the controversy about the film stems from the fact that its message has been severely misunderstood, as has the nature of the media in the Federation.  Far from being dangerous and subversive, Starship Troopers is in fact a deeply patriotic film, dedicated to strengthening the Terran Federation, both morally and materially. 

At the time of its release, many critics – on both sides of the political divide that we tolerate perhaps more than we should – interpreted the film as an attack upon our society and war effort.  Whether you thought this was a good or bad thing depended upon your point of view.  But a surprising agreement was reached across ideological lines.  The charges levelled at the film by mainstream critics were that the film might dissuade potential recruits from enlisting for federal service, erode the confidence of the troops already enlisted, erode public confidence in the war at home, and erode public confidence in the government and the Federation’s political system.  What these allegations amounted to was something very serious: treason.  Giving aid and comfort to the enemy.  The only consolation was that the Bugs are too savage and stupid to watch movies! 

It was, and is, an odd idea.  It is not as if the motion picture industry is still run by left-wingers and liberals, the way it used to be in the olden days before the Federation.  We are too wise these days to tolerate a media who are unduly critical of the Earth government and the Federal system generally.  We would not tolerate a media geared towards undermining our war against the Arachnids on the basis of any spurious idea that it was somehow unjust.  It would be impossible, under our rational system of democracy, for such a thing to happen, since the output of the media is supervised by citizens, thus enforcing democratic controls, and the citizens are by definition the ones who have proved their loyalty.

It wasn’t always this way.  Way back in the 20th century, before the failure of the Western democracies, movies were made by what was called a ‘Hollywood’ system.…

Continue Reading

Comics Reviews (September 14th, 2016)

3

Deathstroke #2

Man, you’ve really gotta take the good with the bad when it comes to Priest, don’t you? So much of this is clever – his transitions among sections, his pacing of reveals, a fair amount of his character work… but there’s just a fundamental messiness to the structure – his time jumping too often makes it so the issue lacks a clear structure or sense of what it’s actually about. The stuff about Slade’s son getting kidnapped at the start is the biggest offender – a plot thread that doesn’t visibly connect with anything else in the issue and, worse, has an unclear temporal relationship with it. The frustrations here are rapidly overwhelming the pleasure – not sure if I’m going to keep on with this.

Doom Patrol #1 (Not purchsed by me)

Tricky. It’s doing that big, ostentatiously messy Grant Morrison thing, which is an entirely appropriate thing for a Doom Patrol book to be doing. But it’s sometimes hard enough believing that there’s actually a coherent train of thought knitting everything together when it’s Morrison, and seeing these tricks used by someone else is worrisome in the extreme. That said, this book has a hell of a lot of spark, and while I’m far from confident that it’s going anywhere good (in fact I suspect it’s going to be a bit of a trainwreck), I’m kind of inclined to give it another issue or two. I worry that it’s going to end up being all setup and no payoff, though. Certainly there’s nothing like a clear sign that this isn’t just unfocused weirdness yet. But I’m willing to entertain style over substance for a bit.

Black Panther #6

Many of the same problems as Deathstroke, which is perhaps appropriate for a book so openly indebted to Priest’s work, but Coates is at least sticking in one timeframe. All the same, this isn’t really an issue – it’s a series of short scenes that incrementally advance their own plots without giving any real sense of how they interlock and what the whole is doing. Individual scenes make interesting and often compellingly-written points, but they’re just that – individual scenes that don’t feel like part of a larger issue, little yet like part of a larger story that we’re ostensibly on the sixth part of. 

Cinema Purgatorio #5

Code Pru’s brilliant this month, and Modded’s thoroughly hilarious. Cinema Purgatorio itself’s a bit weak – it tips its hand early in the strip and then doesn’t really go anywhere until the last page, at which point it has some clever again. The remaining two strips continue to suck. All in all, this isn’t actually worth its cover price, but what are you going to do, not buy an anthology with Moore, Ennis, and Gillen in it?

Spider-Man #8

Style is famously the stuff you never stop doing wrong, and so in “classic” Bendis style this is two separate and completely unrelated comics awkwardly bolted together at the middle. The first is an absolutely brilliant scene of Miles talking to Luke Cage and Jessica Jones and is a perfect example of why this is a compelling book.…

Continue Reading

Myriad Universes: Requiem Part 1

, , 2

A young Bajoran girl is lying in bed late one night recording an entry for the journal that she’s keeping for a class assignment. Her mother comes in to check on her, but she’s interrupted by the arrival of two Cardassian soldiers. We cut to her stripped naked and hung from the ceiling as the Cardassians demand information from the woman they call “Trika”.

It’s two years later in a holosuite above Quark’s on Deep Space 9. Commander Sisko is playing baseball with Jake when the programme suddenly crashes and is briefly replaced by something from Quark’s pornography collection before the whole thing shuts down. In Ops, Kira informs Sisko that the station’s primary power reactor has just exploded, tearing a sizable hole in the lower decks and leaving the entire city hanging off of limited reserve power. When that goes, Deep Space 9 will be rendered dead in space, leaving everyone aboard to suffocate or starve. Chief O’Brien points the finger at the slipshod cross-wiring and patching employed by the Cardassian engineers to the point he can’t even tell where everything is, or if it can be repaired. Commander Sisko begins investigating how to get some of the station’s non-functional reactor cores on-line to buy O’Brien time to repair the main one, which is an undertaking that could take months. Major Kira suggests it’d be better to instate a full-scale evacuation of the entire city.

Sisko knows O’Brien can do the job, but he also knows he’ll need help. So he calls up Deep Space 9‘s former chief engineer, one Dulath, who served in that position during the occupation when the station was still known as Terok Nor. This is a move that arouses the skepticism of the entire senior staff, most notably Kira and O’Brien, but, confiding in Jadzia Dax, Sisko exposits he’s seen classified documents that reveal Dulath wasn’t terribly popular with his former bosses: Dulath was concerned the reactor cores were leaking sodium at a rate and volume so dangerous the entire station’s population was in danger. Gul Dukat and his administration had hoped to sweep that under the rug, but mounting public pressure eventually forced their hands and the faulty reactors were shut down. But not before Dulath was mysteriously and swiftly reassigned.

Down in the engineering core, Miles and Dulath are beginning to forge a working relationship, albeit a frosty one, outfitted in special radiation suits that come courtesy of Dax. The Chief isn’t too happy about the working conditions for the Bajoran “laborers” (slaves) that worked in these shafts when Dulath was here, though the Cardassian engineer points out that he and his staff always saw to it that they were cared for and treated well when they came to his division. Miles enters a crawlspace to investigate some antimatter pods and makes an astonishing discovery: Someone has carved out an entire living space deep within the reactor array, complete with a portable generator. And inside, there’s a diary. Back in Ops, Commander Sisko gives the journal to Major Kira to translate, and sends Chief O’Brien and Dulath back down into the bowels to come up with an update on the status of the main reactor.…

Continue Reading

Jerusalem Review

4

It’s easy, with something like this, for the weight of expectations to become crippling. The stakes are such that anything short of it self-evidently joining Watchmen and From Hell on the list of Major Alan Moore Works would seem like something of a failure, and one can almost imagine reviews that sadly say “it’s not one of the top twenty works of the entire history of English literature – merely one of the top fifty.” At this point in Moore’s career the arrival of a would-be major work is as much an occasion for critical knife-sharpening as anything – there’s a grim and awful sense of critics realizing that there aren’t going to be that many more opportunities to declare that the great man has made a real and proper misstep. A preposterously long and ambitious novel named in part for William Blake’s legendarily quasi-coherent last prophetic work really does seem like a prime opportunity for anyone desperate to make the case that Moore’s finally had one spliff too many, and there’s no shortage of those.

I say all of this mainly to stress what it in practice means that Jerusalem has largely gotten positive reviews, including a good writeup in Entertainment Weekly, which endearingly called Moore “an angry old man who writes like an angry young man.” Because not only is Jerusalem self-evidently good, and moreover good in a really calm, untroubled way that’s utterly unconcerned with the question, it’s enjoyable. It demands attention, but it is not a difficult novel. Certainly it is unlike Voice of the Fire, whose deliberately obtuse first chapter went out of its way to winnow the readership down to its most sympathetic core. There is a famously difficult chapter about Lucia Joyce that Moore’s been talking up in interviews, but it’s much of the way through the book and can be skimmed and revisited later in a way that “Hob’s Hog” cannot. It’s in no way an “easy” book, but it’s equally absurd to call it a difficult one. Whatever the book’s literary merit – and I’m about to argue that it’s significant – it’s also just a tremendously well-done piece of writing by one of the great storytellers of our age. I loved reading it. You should clear some time in your schedule and have a go at it.

At the heart of the novel is Northampton. Moore has been deftly mythologizing the place for a while now, but this is clearly the weightiest attempt. Within this mythology, it is the center of the world, which makes sense because its Guildhall has a statue of an angel on it with a sword that actually looks kind of like a snooker cue, and so obviously it’s where the four archangels play their eternal game of snooker that decides the fate of all things within the four-dimensional block universe we inhabit by endlessly cycling through our illusions of consciousness. Plus Alan Moore lives there, or at least Alma Warren, the middle-aged artist producing a career-defining thirty-five work exhibit as an act of magic to try to save the working class neighborhood of the Boroughs and obvious genderswapped authorial insert.…

Continue Reading

Oi! Spaceman: Ghosts of Victorianism

3

Is “Victorianism” a word? I suppose it is now.

Apologies to all of you who were expecting a brilliant post from Phil this morning, but instead you get the latest episode of Oi! Spaceman, in which we return to the Seventh Doctor and Ace and chat about Ghost Light. Since I didn’t trust myself with such an auspicious story, I invited Jack along for the discussion, and he and Shana had a wonderfully brilliant conversation that kind of went in circles from time to time. Steampunk comes up at least twice independently, as does more than the requisite quantity of Moffat-hate. 

Overall it’s a fun conversation among friends about Victorian value systems, imperialism, Social Darwinism and eugenics, and racist portrayals. If that sounds a bit dark, know also we chat for some time about Ace/Gwendoline shipping, and queerness as a response to stultifying social restriction. Also, you know, the Great Chain of Being for anyone interested in that sort of thing.

Content Warning: Around thirty minutes in, the issue of rape comes up, partly in reference to the Doctor/Ace professor/student relationship, and partly in reference to 90s cyberpunk. (Yeah, it was an odd conversation.) It’s a bit out of the blue, and I wouldn’t want anyone to be exposed to that who didn’t expect to be, so please take it under advisement. 

 …

Continue Reading

Fenris Wulf: Loki’s Child (2016 edition). A witty political satire using pop music! I bet you’re delighted already.

44

A guest post by David Gerard.

Every field has its standard ways to fuck up. Experienced artists never do these in public, but you’ll see the lesser lights fall for them if you go looking. Someone gets a rush of blood and is struck by aninspiration to do something different, something the big guys aren’t doing, for a new take on things! Not realising that the experienced artists don’t do these things because they don’t work.

Like writing a novel about the pop industry. No, better: a political allegory in the form of a novel about the pop industry. No, better still: a right-wing fever dream political allegory in the form of a novel about the pop industry. Yep, that’ll show ’em all!

Phil Sandifer tweeted a “hey, look what I just stepped in”:

As a connoiseur of the worst of popular culture — and novels about the music industry are definitely the worst of popular culture — I foolishly looked. (Doing a great swan dive naked into the abyss and wallowing while sending back reports probably involves staring at some point.)

The least-unreadable examples of this species of folly, that don’t make you shout “WRONG! WRONG! BULLSHIT!” twice a page, tend to be thin fictionalisations of real events; plenty of fucked-up shit happens in the music industry that makes people go “someone should write a book about this.” Platinum Logic by Tony Parsons fails as an even slightly coherent novel, but every lurid and tawdry incident in that book is a version of something that happened, and spotting the players is the fun part.

There are genuinely good novels that have the music industry as a theme — Pratchett’s Soul Music, Banks’ Espedair Street — but these tend not to be about the music or the industry as such, and avoid going into too much detail even as they slip in the in-jokes. Even The Commitments, which is literally about a band. They resist the urge to be didactic. It’s a trepidatious endeavour, though: get the details even slightly wrong and you look like a fool.

Fenris Wulf gets the details mostly right. The problem is everything else. 

“Hi, I’m Fenris. I’ve considered myself to be a LaVeyan Satanist for about 10 years, and I also embrace a Lokian version of Asatru, as my name indicates.”

Loki’s Child is published by Castalia House, i.e. Vox Day, the abovementioned human dumpster fire, who is now most famous for doing his damnedest to fuck up the Hugo Awards with the Rabid Puppies.

I thought Day was the author of this thing — “Fenris Wolf” was the name of his 1990s video game studio, and he was once in a band with minor hit records so he’s brushed up against the business. But Vox is not known for either patience or attention to detail, and this is a work the author’s been polishing and polishing for years — he put the first version up as Record Producer from Dimension X in 2005, then publicised the rewrite as Loki’s Child in this 2011 post to a fan board for Ayn Rand’s right-wing political philosophy Objectivism:

The novel gets progressively more ingenious, and it exposes the disgusting evil of the nihilist Left in a way that hasn’t been done before.

…

Continue Reading

Shabcast 25 – Phil and Jack talk about High-Rise

5

Hello again, my fellow muggles. 

First, apologies: I wanted to provide you with some written material this week, but I was unable to get the next bits of either Psychic Landscape or Are You Sitting Comfortably? ready in time, so you’re getting yet another Shabcast instead.  It’s a good one though.  I’m joined by Phil again, and we chat about High-Rise, both the Ballard novel and the Wheatley/Jump movie.  In the process we veer wildly off topic at times (I can hear your gasps of surprise), touching on subjects such as Phil’s upcoming Build High For Happiness project, ‘Paradise Towers’ (of course), The VVitch, some other movies, Stranger Things, and whether or not Robert Holmes read J. G. Ballard.

Download or listen here.  (Beware Triggers and Spoilers.)

ADDITION: I forgot to link to a couple of relevant documentaries.  I posted this one – a dated but still-excellent account of some of the hidden history of Modernism – at my own YouTube channel recently.  (I’m slowly working my way through a huge stack of old home-recorded VHS tapes.  When I encounter a good documentary that I can’t find anywhere else online, I post it at my channel.)  This one is about Pruitt Igoe and that whole thing, who is mentioned by Phil during the Shabcast.  It takes a political, myth-busting look at the issue.

In other news, it’s apparently Star Trek‘s 50th anniversary today, and so ATB Publishing are now taking pre-orders for their forthcoming collection Outside In Boldly Goes.  Every episode of original Star Trek written about by a different writer.  As you may recall, I was in the first Outside In, the one about classic Who, with a little essay about ‘Snakedance’ that was initially written for the fanzine Panic Moon.  This time I’m in Outside In Boldly Goes with an entirely new and original piece about the TOS series 3 episode ‘Requiem for Methuselah’. 

 …

Continue Reading

Comics Reviews (September 7th, 2016)

3

Glitterbomb #1

Kieron Gillen was on Twitter yesterday making a very good point about a standard first issue structure where you open by showing the interesting thing then cut back and recap how you got there, which is that it’s a weak structure. I pointed out, in particular, that it’s a TV structure based on fear that someone will change the channel at the first commercial break, as opposed to a comics structure where the concern is that they won’t come back next month. Gillen wasn’t talking about Glitterbomb, as it only came out today, but it’s a case in point – on page 2 I was 100% in for what the book was doing. By the issue’s end, I was bored and wishing we could get back to that bit where it was interesting. It wouldn’t quite be as simple as not doing the flash forward structure – if you did the issue in chronological order Farrah’s first kill would defang the end. But still, it’s a lackluster approach that puts the moment of big emphasis in the wrong part of the issue. 

Eclipse #1

Competent but unexceptional sci-fi mystery. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing that immediately announces itself as transcendently brilliant and must-read either. Some good images, but could probably have used to do a little more character work and a little less worldbuilding. 

Mercury Heat #11

Good stuff – this arc slowed down rather a lot in the middle, but it gets off to a proper roar again here, and you start to see how it’s possible that we could be leading to a semi-satisfying book ending with the next issue. (Although I wish it had gotten one more arc – this is good stuff and I trust Gillen that it’ll come to a conclusion, but it’s also clearly not the plot he’d have picked to go out on.) The first ten issues of this are available as part of the currently running Uber Kickstarter, and if you like 2000 AD-flavored hard SF, it’s definitely one you wish you’d checked out.

Kill or Be Killed #1-2

Not sure how I missed the first one of this. The Brubaker/Phillips noir stuff has historically left me a bit cold, but this has a wicked sense of humor and a really compelling narrative voice that makes it feel vigorous and fun and daring in exactly the way previous Brubaker/Phillips things have not. It’s notable that this has much of the same premise as that ghastly Demonic comic that came out a few weeks ago – reading them side by side would be an excellent demonstration of good vs trite and mediocre writing. Also interesting to compare is Scarlet – there’s a similar case of “let’s take vigilante justice as a morally serious concept.” I hope it doesn’t end up going too blandly noir as a result – I don’t demand that our protagonist “get away with it” by any stretch of the imagination, and the book’s discussion of that notion pretty firmly mitigates against the idea that it could end that way, but straightforward “no murder really is wrong” will be tremendously unsatisfying.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 102 103 104 105 ›»