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Comics Reviews (August 31st, 2016)

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In a smidge of a hurry today, so I haven’t had time to look at what’s out next week yet.

Ms. Marvel #10

The bits that work are typically brilliant – the “nine years earlier” intro in particular is charming. But Wilson can tend towards a somewhat subtlety-free didacticism on its own, which works fine when she’s picking interesting topics like gentrification, but is a rough mix with the already crass didacticism of Civil War II. Add in yet another “Captain Marvel shows up to be blatantly and transparently wrong” scene and a desperately unsubtle bit with Becky and you get an issue that’s just not very good. Also, opening with four pages of Adrian Alphona art serves to make the rest look lackluster, which is terribly unfair to the quite talented Takeshi Miyazawa, whose only flaw is to not be flattered by the comparison. 

Avatarex #2

One strongly suspects Grant Morrison is writing the scripts for these in an afternoon and then collecting the paycheck. I’m sure it’s a very nice paycheck, and I don’t begrudge him this one bit, but it’s still Grant Morrison at his most “here are the standard issue Grant Morrison tropes put in an equally standard issue order.” If it were the mid-90s this would be refreshing. Instead it’s just got some pretty art in places.

Spider-Man #7

A solid issue. The Bombshell conversation in the middle is grotesquely contrived in that way that talking about the plot of Civil War II almost has to be, but the narrow focus on Miles and Miles trying to figure out what being a hero means to him along with the basic satisfaction of the Jessica Jones plot keeps this one in the “Bendis showing why he’s actually good” category instead of the “for fuck’s sake Bendis I know they say style is the stuff you keep doing wrong, but could you have a little less of it” category. 

Lazarus #24

An above-average issue that maintains a simmering tension throughout. There’s a lot to wonder what’s going to happen about, which is always a good place for a book like this to be. There’s still an entire plotline I couldn’t tell you what the hell was going on in, which is a frustration (the recap page for this book never comes close to doing enough). But it’s good, compelling sci-fi espionage, which is what i look for out of this book, and the “Forever finally learns the truth but from Johanna of all people” twist is a smart one.

4 Kids Walk Into a Bank #1-2

Couple weeks old, but came recommended. If Stranger Things were a heist film, basically. There’s a sort of willful sloppiness in places, which is kind of a thing with Black Mask, I find, but the entire premise of “four kids get themselves involved in a bank robbery” is sufficiently ludicrous that the moments of “what are you actually trying to do here” seem more like charming embellishments than carelessness. I’m not as in love with it as some are – I think there’s a real failure to develop a lot of the main cast adequately – but it’s smart and funny and trying interesting things, and I’m probably in for the back three issues of it to see if it pays off cleverly. …

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Myraid Universes: Divided Light Part 3: Bodies of Evidence

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As with all issues of this kind, we begin with a couple of pages of recap from Captain Picard. The Enterprise then sends down three teams to assist the three gestalts in retrieving the missing bodies as per Deanna Troi’s request, each containing a doctor and an engineer (needed to disable the shield generators surrounding the holy sites). While on the ship, Captain Picard asks Reg Barclay to try and track down the base where the crewmembers were captured initially, just in case Deanna’s plan runs into trouble.

Each team has to navigate some kind of harsh environment to reach the holy sites in question. Needless to say, they all make it and everyone gets their body back in one piece. The first team, led by Deanna (in Alexander’s body) also includes Commander Riker and Robin Lefler. As they hop across a series of ice floes in an arctic environment, Will regales his team with tales of an old friend who fell through the ice and couldn’t look at ice cream sundaes for months right before Deanna promptly does that. She’s fine (as is Alexander) though, and no sooner do they fish her out then they come across what they were looking for. Deanna comments on a very literal out-of-body experience.

Doctor Selar’s team (comprised of her, Alyssa Ogawa and Jenna D’Sora), has to navigate through a desert in the middle of a howling sandstorm. Thankfully Selar has figured out how to use Geordi’s VISOR and can lead everyone through the sand no problem, except for Alyssa who stupidly wanders off and gets lost. Thanks to the VISOR though, it’s no time at all before she’s found again. And just as before, the team finds the missing person, the engineer disables shit (while Jenna stands guard) and they beam out. And finally, Ro Laren leads Lwaxana Troi and Doctor Crusher through a dense thicket of tropical jungle. The three most kickass ladies in the crew use their phasers as machetes and fry their way through the undergrowth to reach the temple where Worf is being held (to which Laren kicks the door in to get inside, because you’d better fucking believe she does). On each team, someone comments on how strange it is that none of these places seem to be guarded.

On the Enterprise, Captain Picard is about to contact the Sakerionites to let them know the missing crewmembers have been retrieved safely and to take them up on their offer to put everyone’s consciousnesses back where they belong. But before he does, Reg comes in and tells him he might not want to do that until he hears what he discovered. What follows is one of the worst dumps of exposition in the history of mankind: For the duration of an entire two-page spread, a bunch of Sakerion randos explain in extremely loud and exacting detail about how it was in fact they who orchestrated the whole body-swapping fiasco and framed the Ergeans in order to sabotage their application for Federation membership and cover up the fact the Sakerionites have been exploiting Ergeus’ natural resources and have been effectively using its inhabitants as slave labourers.…

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like this (poem)

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times like this
hotel alone
panic attack
soon to be crone
new rhythm, new daring
time to make another
can’t find the word, something like life

should be happy
all put away
food in the fridge
dogs are at bay
but this, this, other thing lurking
a freshly calved iceberg about to
can’t find the word, might be like sluice

just keep running?
find it so hard to
can’t find the word, like being together
left behind
this is my way
follow your bliss, follow my this
always calls out
just turn away
keeps me at bay

stumbling slow like
running through sand
the palm of that hand
too late to go back
no, must find a sanctum
desktop, café, cave, bedroom
holds treasure so dear
like a word
just beyond this grasp

steal it
catch the wind
sail away to my garden
feed, water, dress it so fine
in plain sight
inch word
this

introduce to new friends
in hope of communion
vain hope

for i have no roots …

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I Think It Would Be a Good Idea (Civilization)

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In case you missed it, “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate,” a longform piece on topics closely related to The Super Nintendo Project, went up on Saturday.

At last, the false dichotomy between playing video games and saving western civilization stands revealed. But when we choose to do both at the same time, what exactly is the civilization that we are saving, and how might that shape our understanding of certain larger conceptual wars?

In bluntly materialist terms, which are after all the best way to approach civilization, it is another instance of a PC game getting a fundamentally middling SNES port, in the same vein as Populous and SimCity. There are no doubt those for whom this is “their” Civilization – the version of a monumental piece of video game history. This is the game that inspired Iain Banks to the phrase “outside context problem,” for fuck’s sake. Or, at least, it’s the crummy console version of the predecessor to that game. Certainly that’s where my history here intersects – somewhere past 1996 with a lot of Civ2, in a phase of video gaming otherwise defined by Diablo and Quake. High school, notably, where the Super Nintendo was late elementary school/early middle school.

The games are largely similar – Civilization II refines the original, as opposed to reworking it from the ground up. It’s more balanced and more elegant. This is doubly so when compared to the SNES port – the gap from this to 1996 is in many regards far more shocking than the gap from Donkey Kong Country 2 to Super Mario 64. But the basic thrill of the mechanism and its dizzying central metaphor persists. I compared it to Populous and SimCity earlier, and it really does manage to be a fusion of the two, combining the granular deep systems of SimCity with the cosmological scale of Populous to great effect. You may have had godlike powers in SimCity, but the scale of it was always small – one’s cities fundamentally never felt vast. Civilization feels vast easily, especially in the early stages of the game, which is as it should be. The effect of your initial tiny and contextless patch of land on which you build your capital slowly opening outwards until you encounter the Other, then borders, and finally a coherent world is genuinely effective, making the scope of what you can do feel real and substantive.

But we must be careful here. This sense of progressively illuminating an exterior world is certainly the form of western civilization as depicted here, but it is not the content. We’ve identified the story Civilization likes to tell, but not how it tells it. The answer to that question is inherited from the Avalon Hill board game Civilization is unofficially based upon: a tech tree. This is perhaps Civilization’s most significant not-quite innovation – a sublimely smooth implementation of an interlocking ladder of game upgrades that also serves to create a technologically deterministic narrative of human history from road-building to space colonies.…

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The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate

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An excerpt from my book Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

One measures a circle starting anywhere, so let’s pick up where we left off. Vox Day, who got in on the ground floor, back when it was still called the Quinnspiracy, begins his description like this, in the first of two chapter fives:

In 2012, a fat and unattractive woman with blue hair and numerous piercings decided to play at being a ‘game designer’. She plugged forty thousand words into the Twine engine, a hypertext tool that allows people without any knowledge of programing to create interactive fiction games similar to Zork and other text adventures circa 1977, combined it with a ten-second piano loop, and called it a game.

It is ironic that the book should be called SJWs Always Lie, because he lies right there. He lies when he uses the same disaffected tone of factual declaration for “a hypertext tool that allows people without any knowledge of programming to create interactive fiction games similar to Zork and other text adventures circa 1977” and “a fat and unattractive woman with blue hair and numerous piercings,” as though these are both straightforward truths in the same way. He lies when he shifts the definition of game throughout; one moment she is a faux “game designer,” the next the not-games she not-designs are defined straightforwardly in terms of an iconic piece of gaming history. (And he gets it wrong for good measure; Zork was a parser game, not a hypertext.)

Day tears into the game at length –  a critical savaging. “It’s even less fun than it sounds”; “soul-drainingly boring and more than three decades technologically out-of-date”; “I have never played a less entertaining computer game.” He brings a gun to a knife-fight, eviscerating the game with a level of contempt that raises the question of why he even gives a shit about it if it’s so self-evidently unworthy of attention. Of particular note; his citation of its 1.8 score on Metacritic, based on 308 ratings.

Eventually he reaches his point, saying that the game was a complete irrelevancy until “August 2014, when an upset young man who had finally broken it off with his cheating girlfriend created a WordPress blog called The Zoe Post that documented, in excruciating detail, his experience of having loved and lost.” Apparently the designer of this game cheated on a guy with some people who wrote for some websites that had mentioned the game in articles at some point. From this he casually spins out a conspiracy theory; “Given the very poor quality of Depression Quest, it seemed readily apparent to casual observers that the unusual amount of media attention garnered by the game must have been the result of the developer’s liberal distribution of her sexual favors.”

At this point, three pages into the chapter, entitled “Counterattack,” Vox Day makes a stunning reversal, admitting that “this does not appear to have exactly been the case.” And no wonder.…

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Consider the Ray Gun: Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land

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Because apparently it’s podcast week here at Eruditorum Press, and creating new podcast threads is more fun for me than watching Firefly again, today I’m going to introduce yet another new podcast as part of the Oi! Spaceman family. This one is called Consider the Ray Gun, and it’s ostensibly going to be about reading old science fiction books, but since it’s an Eruditorum Press thing it’ll likely go wildly off topic in an episode or two. 

For the inaugural episode, I’m joined by Pex Lives’ own James Murphy to chat about Stranger in a Strange Land, a book that I grew up with and meant a lot to my teenage years, but which James had never encountered. We chat about the counterculture, period sexism and racism, Hugh Hefner wannabees, Heinlein’s political evolution, and whether American science fiction authors live more colorful lives than British fantasy authors. Among many other topics. It’s a fun listen, I think, although of course I’m biased. …

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Shabcast 24, Part 1 of the JFK / Nixon Conversation

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It’s Shabcast listenin’ time again. 

This time I was joined by James and Daniel again, and – for the first time – by Kit Power.  We talked for as long as you’d expect about Oliver Stone’s insane, brilliant ’90s political movies JFK and Nixon, thus helping to remedy the desperate online shortage of white guys talking about movies about white guys made by white guys. 

This week you can listen to the first half of our conversation, here. 

 

 …

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Comics Reviews (August 24th, 2016)

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Chew #57

Three to go.

Deathstroke #1

Good, competent stuff. I’m still not sure the non-chronological storytelling has a point as opposed to just being a thing Priest likes to do, but it’s at least a better way to introduce an important “old friend” character than many approaches in comics. Unless Wintergreen’s a longstanding supporting character; it’s not like I know Deathstroke’s supporting cast well. But still, Priest is working to introduce him, and the non-chronological story helps with that, even as it leaves the actual status quo of this book a bit muddy. This hasn’t grabbed me yet as such, but I’ll persist for an arc or so.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #10

A frustratingly unfocused issue that sutures two half-issues together without much in the way of payoff or connection. Still good, as this book always is, but an obviously lesser issue that ends up feeling like it’s wasting a Ms. Marvel guest-slot, which, as I think about it, is probably the thing that’s most knocking this down towards the bottom of the list this week. 

Snotgirl #2

Has the typical second issue problems of a modern comic, which is to say that it’s mainly tasked with fixing the problems that crafting a coherent and catchy first issue has created for the overall arc, which typically means going “right, so instead of paying off that cliffhanger we’re going to take a step back and fill in details.” And complaints that the book is mean-spirited about fashion blogging have a few more teeth after this one than they did after the first, although I still have a good amount of faith in O’Malley such that I’m willing to assume loving satire. Still, this is good, interesting stuff that I’m going to at least read a full arc of. 

New Avengers #15

Al Ewing in his finest form, paying off scads of earlier stuff in inventive and unexpected ways while remaining funny and full of good character moments in the present. This is the sort of book that makes sure if it’s going to randomly bring in Warlock for a guest spot then Warlock is going to get to appear in a heartbreaking scene and also get to do a Warlockified “do you feel lucky punk” at the book’s opener. This is not a book invested in offering particularly deep pleasures, but it remains the book that most feels like my idea of what reading Marvel comics is meant to feel like, and that’s always welcome.

Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat #9

There’s a delightful slowness to the structure of this book – a willingness to spend time on the human moments just being goofy before getting to the nominal plot. So much of this consists of the characters converging at a karaoke night, and it’s scintillating. Eventually the plot shows up and is also good, in part because Leth is focused enough to make sure that the long setup actually feeds into the plot and keeps all her plates spinning, avoiding a Bendis-esque “and now for the one panel in which the thing we put on the cover shows up” bit of bullshit.…

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Failure is Always an Option

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So I’ve been playing a lot of Sonic Generations lately. This is partly because it’s Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th Anniversary in 2016 and while SEGA has announced two special games to commemorate this event, neither will see release until 2017 because SEGA. So I figured I might as well mark the occasion by revisiting the last milestone anniversary Sonic game. Also, I just recently got a somewhat hefty new gaming laptop to replace my aging workhorse with the cracked monitor and failed hard drive I used to write to you all on that was as old as Sonic Generations, and I’ve been putting it through its paces with a collection of PC games I’ve had saved in my Steam library but have been unable to, you know, actually play until now.
 
For a five year old game, Sonic Generations has held up *exceptionally* well. Even just in terms of sheer visual appeal, this is a gorgeous, gorgeous game, especially if you download and install the optional shader effects to unlock the full lighting range of the Hedgehog Engine. For those of you who might not know, the Hedgehog Engine is a proprietary game engine SEGA’s Sonic Team built for the 2008 game Sonic Unleashed and was used again in Sonic Generations. I’ve been a huge fan and defender of the Hedgehog Engine since I first saw it in action and I always find new ways to be impressed with it. It’s the lighting that really sells it: The art style in Sonic games doesn’t try to be hyper-realistic like a most other games, but is instead bright, colourful, stylized and vivid, and the lush sunshine and cool shadows allowed by the Hedgehog Engine really bring Sonic’s world to life here.
 
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the same age as Sonic Generations and was once a visual tour de force, but, on my new gaming rig, its age is finally beginning to show itself and Skyrim is starting to look a bit plasticky and rough around the edges. Yet another reason we desperately need that Special Edition re-release. Not so with Sonic Generations, which, barring the odd mesh here or there, looks like it could have come out yesterday. It’s not always a good long-term investment to chase the dragon of graphical photorealism.
 
But it’s the gameplay where Sonic Generations shines the brightest. What made this particular entry special is that there was a genuine attempt made to sum up, hone and refine years of gameplay evolution in the Sonic series. Now believe it or not I’m not talking about the “Classic Sonic” sections: To be honest with you, I’ve always found them the weakest parts of the game, chock-full of tedious platforming and unfair death-traps that demand countless amounts of trial-and-error. In spite of their conceit, they don’t succeed in recreating the feel of the original SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis games, but we shouldn’t ever have expected them to because that’s functionally impossible in the Hedgehog Engine.
…

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Of Spaghetti, Myths, and Donuts

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No, I’m not going down the rabbit hole writing an essay on spaghetti, myths, and donuts.  It’s just a clever title to cover up the fact that I haven’t had time to write in a while as I’ve been whipping The Last War in Albion: Book One into shape, and it’s finally given up and submitted to my ministrations.  It looks like it’s clocking in at 237,000 words and 210 pretty pictures, covering 760+ pages.  Whew.  So that should be coming out pretty damn soon. 

In the meantime, though, I was able to squeeze in some rather lovely conversations with some rather lovely people.  A few weeks ago I sat down with James and Kevin of Pex Lives to discuss some Westerns and some Doctor Who.  We’ve got three Sergio Leone flicks on tap — A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.  This “Man With No Name” trilogy (which, by the way, totally applies to LOST) is juxtaposed with the fan-favorite Tom Baker classic, Underworld, which I chose especial for this chat. “What on earth,” you might be wondering, “is this woman going on about? Underworld?!?  Compared to Sergio Leone?!?!?” Well, if you want to find out, you’ll need to listen to the podcast, which you can get here. Because the quest is the quest.

In even more exciting news, I am happy to announce what should be a new regular(ish) podcast series called Giant Woman, as the amazing Shana Wolstein of Oi Spaceman! and I both have a deep abiding passion for Steven Universe and we can talk about a few minutes of material for hours on end! (Yes, I’m exaggerating, but only kind of.)  In our pilot episode, we talk about the first episode, “Gem Glow,” and compare it with the unaired pilot episode that got Steven Universe greenlit into a regular series on the Cartoon Network.  We would be very happy if you would catch that episode here and listened to it with your undivided (undivided, that means “a fusion,” get it? Get it?) attention, and then come back (comeback!) to let us know in the comments what you think.  (Sorry about the sound quality on this one, as we had a small technical snafu, which should totally be fixed when) we cover “Laser Light Cannon,” “Cheeseburger Backpack,” and “Together Breakfast” in our next podcast, which will hopefully come out next week.

And hopefully I’ll get back to writing more about LOST and Doctor Who in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned!…

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