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Comics Reviews (March 9th, 2016)

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Guardians of the Galaxy #6

The good part of this thin and uninspiring week is that even the lowest ranked book is pretty good, especially for this largely disappointing All-New All-Different relaunch. A nice two-hander that focuses on the relationship between Peter Quill and Kitty Pryde, it provides Bendis the space for the sort of hyper-talky character work he excels at. It’s artful, but often heavy-handed, not least with Kitty’s tear-stained shout of “it’s a concentration camp.” Although “chag sameach, mother-#$@#$@!” almost makes up for it. Still seriously minded to drop this, but at least I can see why someone else would enjoy this issue.

Ms. Marvel #5

A very silly premise is allowed to get a bit out of hand here, and while numerous parts of it are thoroughly delightful, perhaps most obviously the stunning line “what, Tyesha gets to be a Muslim but my anarch-atheism is a phase?” the whole feels like markedly less than the sum of its parts, and like this story is more an opportunity for everyone to be silly and let their hair down than anything else. I suppose after an apocalyptic Secret Wars arc and a big reintroduction that’s deserved, but equally… meh.

Radioactive Spider-Gwen #6

A strong issue long on good character beats, with genuinely fantastic exchanges between Gwen and her father, Gwen and Captain America, and Gwen and Harry Osborne. The last of these is probably the most interesting, providing one of the book’s characteristically clever reworkings of the standard Spider-Man relationships and offering an insight into some of the ways in which Gwen is better at this than Peter. Not exactly thrilled that we’re headed into a crossover next month, but I’ve been curious about Spider-Woman and am at lest game for it. …

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“I Can’t Drive Warp 5”: Force of Nature

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Now this one is interesting to me because it’s an episode that’s always been very memorable to me, but also one that’s sort of bad, however, it’s not memorable to me because it’s bad.

For some reason, the Warp 5 speed limit is a concept that really stuck with me. I have no idea why, it’s no less outlandish then some of the other artificially out-there concepts this franchise plays with on occasion, but for some reason this one connected with me. When rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s earlier years back in the day I would *always* self-correct whenever Captain Picard had the Enterprise go somewhere at over Warp 5: “Well, they didn’t know any better at the time”, I kept telling myself. For some reason. Because, famously, this is a plot thread that is pretty swiftly abandoned and the speed limit is a rule that has more exceptions and gets broken more frequently than the Prime Directive. I would always let this one through in my personal headcanon, even though I didn’t particularly enjoy watching it, because to me it introduced a critical piece of worldbuilding: A “Datalore” for the latter years.

Except it’s not critical. At all. The warp speed limit is only mentioned I think like three other times, so I have absolutely no idea why this struck me as such an important piece of Star Trek universe worldbuilding. I can tell you why I think it’s important to talk about today though: “Force of Nature” is attempting, albeit clunkily and embarrassingly, to address environmentalist issues, which don’t get considered anywhere remotely near as much as they should. Environmentalism is a fundamental part of my political philosophy because I believe in a holistic utopianism that would reunite all forms of life energy in the universe. Connection to our land is an extension of empathy, of course, and perhaps the highest form of it because at that stage you’ve finally shed all the artificial boundaries you have erected between the self and the perceived other. A great deal of my most formative intellectual background is actually in the fields of zoology, ethology and natural history (my interest in genre fiction media studies is honestly a kind of aberration, albeit a big one) and I’m a big supporter of Donna Haraway’s conception of ecofeminism and multispecies ethnography, although that’s best saved for a look in a specific essay down the road a bit.

(Apart from the weird warp speed limit thing, as I looked at “Force of Nature” this time some of the effects shots with the space rift and scenes with Data and Geordi in the Jeffries tubes felt familiar to me: This may have been an episode I saw way back when, or it’s at least a part of the same landscape of visual memory.)

It’s important that Star Trek: The Next Generation adopt ecology and environmentalism as part of itself, but sadly, the way “Force of Nature” goes about doing it is fairly terrible.…

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Time and The Island

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So I recently finished the last couple of Jonathan Blow video games, so curious was I about this developer’s work given the interest in it by people I respect. As Phil predicted, The Witness was a bit more up my alley than it was his. Phil is often right.

Not that I didn’t like Braid. Indeed, the basic mechanic itself in that game is both fascinating and relevant to the game’s overall points about regret and nostalgia, which are entwined with the impetus to “save the princess.” The actual puzzles I found very entertaining. Indeed, stripped down to just its mechanics, Braid has a wonderful, enchanting structure. Each section is basically an exploration of what happens when the mechanic of going back is contradicted or expanded in some novel way. Even more so, the way the various levels unfold remind me of certain musical compositions.

Take, for example, the rather well-known Canon in D Major, by Johann Pachelbel, or Ravel’s Bolero. Certain passages repeat, over and over, but with different tones and expressions as they are played by different instruments and with slight variations. This is the sense I get of Braid’s structure, from the repetition of The Pit as the first level in a new world (to explore a newly introduced mechanic) to Tim’s constant failure to find the princess at the end of each sequence.

Likewise, I found the art of Braid to be terribly enchanting. The palette of colors, the impressionistic brush strokes, coupled with the background music, it’s a game that’s pleasurable just to get immersed in. There is an element of pleasure for the sake of pleasure that I find very appealing, though obviously that’s not all that’s going on with Braid.

Which brings me to what really didn’t work for me, which is the story. Some of this displeasure is undoubtedly rooted in having just played Undertale. In Undertale, the avatar for the player is decidedly ambiguous – a figure who could be any sex, and who could come from all kinds of different cultural backgrounds. Which makes it very easy to project one’s self into the story. But Undertale goes further, in that there’s an element of co-creation to the story, for indeed the point of Undertale is explore what sort of role you want to play in a game in the first place. You don’t have to kill monsters, you can make friends. Or you can be a terribly fearsome fighter. The outcome of the story is a reflection of your choices.

The actual mechanics of Undertale, in the meantime, are relatively trivial. You wander around various environments, solve some puzzles, and occasionally play mini-video games that are mostly about dodging or capturing certain sprites. But, as I said, the point of Undertale isn’t the mechanics, it’s the story, which unfolds through the exploration of the world and interacting with its characters. If anything, then, the central mechanic is choosing what you’re going to say next.…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 3.07: The Bear and the Maiden Fair

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It was a hairy bear. It was a scary bear. Brienne and Jaime beat a hasty retreat from its lair, and described it with adjectives.

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, the Hand of the King Tywin Lannister

Lions of Harrenhal: Jaime Lannister

Dragons of Yunkai: Daenerys Targaryen

Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow

Direwolves of Riverrun: Robb Stark, Catelyn Stark

Bears of Yunkai: Jorah Mormont

Roses of King’s Landing: Margaery Tyrell

Burning Hearts of King’s Landing: Melisandre

The Direwolf, Bran Stark

The Direwolf, Arya Stark

Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark

The Kraken, Theon Greyjoy

Tigers of Riverrun: Talisa Stark

Stags of King’s Landing: King Joffrey Baratheon, Gendry

Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae

Bows of the Wall: Ygritte

Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn

The Dogs, Sandor Clegane

The episode is in twelve parts. The first part runs two minutes and is set on the far side of the Wall. The first image is of the open sky.

The second runs four minutes and is set in the Stark camp between Riverrun and the Twins. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Robb Stark.

The third runs two minutes and is set in the woods beneath the Wall. The transition is by family, from Robb Stark to Jon Snow.

The fourth runs eight minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Sansa Stark.

The fifth runs seven minutes and is set outside Yunkai. The transition is by dialogue, from Joffrey and Tywin talking about Daenerys to her.

The seventh runs four minutes and is in sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys stroking Drogon to Shae looking at her golden chains. The second section is one minute long; the transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion saying he would take care of his bastards to Gendry.

The eighth part runs two minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by dialogue, from Mellisandre to Arya talking about her with Thoros and Berric.

The ninth runs three minutes and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by region, remaining in the Riverlands.

The tenth runs five minutes and is set in the Dreadfort. The transition is by family, from Roose Bolton to Ramsey Snow.

The eleventh runs eight minutes and is set in the North along the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Theon about to have his cock cut off to Jon and Ygritte. The second section is 44:30; the transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Bran Stark.

The twelfth runs eight minutes and is set in the Riverlands south of Harrenhal. The transition is by hard cut, from Osha to horses standing on a hill. The final shot is of Jaime and Brienne walking out of Harrenhal having prevented a bear from completing a Full Web.

Analysis

The phenomenon of Martin writing for Game of Thrones is reliably interesting.…

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“Everyone talking about hard rain”: Necessary Evil

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“Necessary Evil” exists in two distinct places within my memory, and they map alongside the two phases of my experience with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The first time I was exposed to this story was in 1993 or 1994, naturally, as part of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine. Like “Rules of Acquisition” before it and “Second Sight” after it, this is a story I vividly remember from the episode synopsis printed in issue 7. At the time, I immediately recognised it as a modern classic in the making; a wonderfully dramatic noir mystery that fleshes out the backstory of Odo and Kira during the occupation and adds a touching nuance to their relationship in the present day.

It was not, however, an episode I watched on television at the time (or if I did I don’t consciously remember it…The imagery certainly feels familiar). The first time I actually got to see the finished product itself must have been somewhere around 1999 or 2000. I’m not sure if Enterprise had been announced or the TNN Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns had started up yet, but either way the winds must have been starting to change: I was over at the house of some friends, two brothers who shared my love of all (or at least most) things Star Trek. One of them made the offhand comment that they had actually taped an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine live at the time as part of a larger collection of programming that also included one or more episodes of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (for younger readers, you have to understand that in those days VHS tapes were capable of holding several hours of video at a time, so it wasn’t uncommon to have single tapes that had entire days worth of material archived away. The catch was, of course, that the transfer quality was garbage). Knowing how passionate I was about the series and how eager I was to fill in the gaps in my understanding of this period in my life, the two suggested we give it a watch that afternoon.

The episode they had recorded (of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, not The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh) was “Necessary Evil”. I immediately recognised it from the teaser and the name drop of Vaatrik, and I got very excited because I knew this was a good one. Then the credits ran, and I proceeded to be completely bowled over. This was the first time I had actually seen the intro credits to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in something like seven years, and it was the first time I remember consciously registering what I was seeing. I was utterly taken aback because I didn’t remember what they were like and didn’t really know what to expect: I guess I was assuming that the theme song would echo the motifs of the Star Trek: The Next Generation theme song in some way instead of being something completely different.…

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City of the Dead 8: The Psychopath

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Eruditorum Press is thrilled to announce the return of Holy Boson and the City of the Dead podcast to our… whatever you call airwaves for a podcast. Anyway, this is the famed “lost film” of the Amicus set, with a story that I know Holly related to me once, but that I’ve completely forgotten the details of. I’m sure she explains it in the podcast. Anyway, with a script by legendary horror writer Robert Bloch, one assumes this is potentially a hidden gem. Or possibly a legendary trainwreck. Find out right here.…

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A Witness To Its Own Myopia

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One of the most fascinating figures in William Blake’s mythology is Ahania, the Emanation of Urizen. Like all of the Emanations, she provides the feminine aspect of a concept, in this case reason and the intellect. Where Urizen is a tyrannical figure of single vision and Newtons sleep, deriving absolute and universal law from precise and mathematical measurements and using it to ensnare the world in the net of religion, Ahania represents pleasure and curiosity – the carnal urge to discover and understand. Her separation from Urizen is what dooms him to his fall; her eventual reunion with him his redemption and a fundamental part of Eternal salvation.

Jonathan Blow’s second game, the would-be masterpiece The Witness, attempts to be an extended hymn to Ahania. Its purpose, as Blow stresses in interview after interview, is to explore the experience of learning and discovery. His mechanism for this – indeed the defining mechanism of the game – is a maze puzzle. The basic form is simple: trace a line from a starting node (a big circle) along a path to an ending node (a small rounded nub at the end of a line). The variations are numerous, with the game ultimately having several hundred iterations of this puzzle type of varying difficulties, arranged on panels across a sizeable island to explore.

There is genuine elegance to how this unfolds. Observe the progress of the opening area. You begin at the dark end of a tunnel, an illuminated door ahead and above you. You walk up to it, and find the literal simplest form of the game’s puzzle, and the game gives you one of its handful of actual instructions as it suggests pushing X to attempt the puzzle.

You trace the line, the door opens, and you get a second door.

Which opens into this courtyard.

And when you go to investigate that panel up ahead, it’s a souped up version of the first two doors (shown here at the moment of solution).

Solving it causes the wire coming out of it to ostentatiously illuminate, and you can trace it to a couple other panels of growing complexity, and finally to gate with this panel to the right of it.

A bit of poking at it reveals that you can’t complete the maze through the black bars (what a surprise), but if you trace the other wires you can find panels that will lift the bars, allowing you to complete that maze and open the gate.

Obviously the game gets harder. Indeed, it will in the very next area, which we’ll look at in a moment. But it’s worth explicitly highlighting the step-by-step education given here. Indeed, of particular note is the second puzzle – the little L-shaped path that comes between “trace a line” and “here’s a maze with dead ends.” The truth is that essentially no player actually requires both it and the initial straight line puzzle as preparation for the mazes. As an education in how the game works – which is obviously what this is, being an initial area of a game and all – it’s going ostentatiously slowly.…

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“Unloved”: Attached

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Could it ever have worked?

That’s a question failed romances and failed engineering projects seem to get asked all the time. There’s an allure to the counterfactual, the idea that had just a few things happened a bit differently, than all our lives would have ended up immeasurably better as a result. When confronted with a failure, or a perceived failure, it’s perhaps only natural that we would pick through the rubble and self-reflect after the fact. Sometimes we say things like “it was doomed from the start”. Hindsight, of course, is always 20/20.

In reality, no endeavour is ever “doomed from the start”. At the outset, each project has just as much potential for success, or for failure, as any other. Technology must always start as a fiction, and every fiction is equally real. What governs the success or failure of a technology is whether its constituent human and nonhuman actors can work together to keep it alive throughout the process of reification. It requires a sustained loyalty and commitment from all given players, and this is what we mean when we talk of love. Because that kind of unyielding resolve only comes about through a kind of love, because we can only ever be that committed to things we love very deeply. Actors need to adapt and evolve as time goes on, and they have to care enough about their project to have the willingness to adapt alongside it. From an engineering perspective, the moment where something is post-facto declared a success or failure only comes about when the actors resonate together in such a way that the project becomes what can be considered a material, tangible reality.

But this is not necessarily a healthy approach to take when examining romantic relationships between human (or perhaps humanoid) actors. There’s no bigger or better sign of an aimless, self-absorbed and self-indulgent man who’s completely lost his way in life (and let’s be honest, this is almost always a man) then the guy who randomly calls up his ex to ask if things could ever have worked out between them and if they ever had a chance at “really going the distance”. In real life, romantic relationships typically end for a good reason, usually that the people involved have either grown apart from each other (which happens way more than people are willing to admit) or they’ve slowly realised that they probably weren’t a great match for each other to begin with.

So the question has to be asked. Could it ever have worked out for Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher? And the answer, quite simply, as far as I’m concerned, is no. Firstly, I still maintain there’s too much of an age difference between Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden, and thus their characters-Ten years is simply far too large a gap. That puts them, quite literally, in two different generations. And as much as Captain Picard may symbolically be linked to his younger crew instead of other people his age or older, there’s still an unpleasant cultural precedent involved in pairings like this I feel Star Trek: The Next Generation should not be perpetuating.…

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Shabcast 16 – Do White Saviours Dream of Electric Sheeple?

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I’m planning to make up for the lack of any Shabcasts in February by providing loads in March, and here‘s the first. 

This time I’m joined by the amazing Mayor Kevin Burns – my favourite US politician, and one half of the Pex Lives team – to talk about the Matrix movies.  For some reason.

I wanted to hear him indulge his hate, you see.  I went in intending to sortakindamaybe half-play the role of ‘good cop’ (at least with regards the first film) but that didn’t last long.

Please enjoy our show, in which we analyse (i.e. pillory) the three films, review the old ‘do movies cause violence?’ debate, complain about the Hollywood CGI singularity, ponder the unfortunate obsessions and attitudes of the late 90s-early 2000s, and look back with sadness and shame on our wasted youths.

Download here. 

Next time I’ll be joined by the wonderful Shana of the Oi! Spaceman podcast, to talk about some good films, the 80s Jim Henson fantasy masterpieces The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

 …

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Comics Reviews (March 2, 2016)

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And so begins the last month of the long and terrible WicDiv hiatus.

The Discipline #1

I wanted to like this. I mean, that’s implicit in the fact that I picked up the first issue. Peter Milligan is famously hit and miss, but when he’s on he’s good enough that I have second thoughts about not making him a main character in Last War in Albion. And then there are things like this. 2016 is the right time for a weird fiction erotic thriller comic with a female lead. It’s an on-point, interesting idea for a book. The problem is that Milligan’s lead, while short of a cliche, is visibly taped together from stock characters and stereotypes, seeming to wander around buffeted more by the needs o the plot than by any sort of coherent internal psyche. Right book, wrong writer. Oh well.

Batgirl #49

An artist’s jam of an issue that holds together better than those usually do. There’s a sense in which this feels like it’s building to an end, which would be a pity, as this really is a solid take on the character. All of which said, I’m just not managing to invest in the Fugue as a villain, and this somewhat by-numbers “psychic rescue” issue doesn’t really change that. 

Darth Vader #17

This book’s monumental commitment to the slow burn continues, although at least there’s some actual heat being generated at this point. Gillen is managing to foreground Vader’s interiority without actually going inside it, which is compelling; this is the first time in possibly all the Star Wars I’ve ever consumed where I’ve felt like the angry and impulsive character of the prequel trilogy and the majestic villain of the main trilogy were actually the same person, which is quite a feat. I’m sure once the heat on this arc gets intense enough it’ll move up nicely in the weekly rankings. For now, a solid effort. 

Digital code: FCM5RNYY1KB4

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor Adventures Year Two #6

Snagged on a whim because “River Song and Abslom Daak” was too tempting a combo to reject. Not entirely sure why John Hurt is on the cover, but other than that this was a charmingly overstuffed banquet of continuity culminating in a reveal I saw coming a few pages off and thought “no, they can’t possibly actually be going to do something this gloriously wanky.” They did. I punched the air. Might well go back to this; certainly will be getting Part Two. Still a pity about the art. 

Invincible Iron Man #7

Bendis’s typical style of decompression pays off nicely in an issue that’s mostly a funny and character-heavy dialogue between Tony and Mary Jane. Deodato’s art ends up providing a strange and perverse contrast, as he’s stuck trying to make preposterously talky pages fit his style. The results are the best pages I’ve seen him do in recent memory. The book loses focus on the back half as the need to do plot takes over, but this is still probably the best issue of this eternally frustrating book to date.…

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