Tag: media

Reality strikes back.

On By emperorpondersIn English, Uncategorized5 Comments

If you are like most people, you are either isolated at home or forced to share your usually crowded public transport with even more people because some genius thought cutting down travel frequency is a good way to avoid crowds. And if you happen to live in real, non-joke countries like Taiwan, Singapore, or South Korea: You are one lucky bastard.

Some while in my country ice rinks are being repurposed as improvised morgues, let’s dedicate a few minutes to thing about what it all means. Hmmm… *thinking* Recently, I have had a lot of time for that *serious thinking*

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Writing experiment

On By emperorpondersIn English, writingLeave a comment

I’ve been running a little writing experiment these past months. What I found may be especially useful for those with little to no free time.

I don’t know about other people, but I have noticed that one of the most effective ways to stifle one’s creative flow is, quite simply, to go to sleep. I may have spent a couple hours before bedtime all absorbed as I worked on something and then said to myself that I’d continue the next day. Then I wake up the next day and… I forget all about it, as if the person who woke up that morning was a different one or sleeping triggered some sort of memory wipe. I guess the deep-rooted rituals and habits of daily life overwrite whatever thing your excited self from 8 hours ago thought was critical. More than once it took me days to remember that I still had something half-done lingering there in the computer. But by then the excitement had pretty much vanished and I had little to no interest in going back to it.

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Kultural Kontroversy Kommentators, you are still not political.

On By emperorpondersIn EnglishLeave a comment

Of the many things I wrote in my book Dangerous Gaymers Gamers, one that readers (the half-dozen of you) usually point out as surprising is my claim that the Internet kerfuffles and “controversies” surrounding entertainment and, especially, the so-called political bent, bias, or content that has been injected in video games, games, movies, books… (i.e. nerd and popular culture) is not really political. In fact, I even said that political thinking and sociopolitical content has virtually disappeared from popular culture. And I was right, and I’m still right.

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Game of Scoliosis*, manly posture, suits, and other stuff.

On By emperorpondersIn English, fantasy, Philosophy, Uncategorized1 Comment

*Kyphosis, actually, but that doesn’t sound that funny.

I saw this image yesterday, and I chuckled immediately. It was a reflexive laughter, and it took me awhile to understand what exactly had triggered my reaction.

GoT
That’s from the TV show Game of Thrones, in case you have been living under a rock these last years. Image Sauce: NYTimes

As I said, I laughed when I saw this, even before I had consciously processed what I had seen. A few minutes of heavy thunkin’ later, I realized what was wrong: they look ridiculous while trying to look cool, which is the worst kind of ridiculousness that exists.

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The Guardian is really scraping the bottom of the barell here.

On By emperorpondersIn English, videogamesLeave a comment

Among all the humiliating things one has to do to survive in the cutthroat and shameless world of Academia, being a criticaster of popular culture has to be the lowest point.  There are already a hundred theses on the unbearable sexism of Shakespeare or the colonialism of Kipling, so you’ll have to make do with a paper on the border-fascism of Plants vs. Zombies or the sexism of Super Mario. And forget about Elsevier or The Journal of Modern Literature, you’ll have to get published in The Guardian (and you’ll get paid according to how many people you trick into clicking the article):

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Gygax on post-70s fiction.

On By emperorpondersIn Books, English, fantasy, History, RPG, sci-fi5 Comments

There is something missing in the big conversation about the current and future state of sff. Well, I’m sure there are many things, but I will focus on one.

Some of the people I read and follow claim that what is needed is to go back to the more pulpish roots of the genre, with AD&D’ Appendix N (not exactly pulp, but still, close enough) being a great starting point to know more about those now-forgotten or ignored classics. Some even read the editorials and interviews from old magazines to better understand the cultural zeitgeist of that era. Now, Appendix N may very well be a fundamental document of a bygone age, but it’s not like its author (Gary Gygax) died, struck down by a malignant curse in the prime of his life, just after penning his sacred doctrine.

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SocJus Thesaurus: “Reinforcement”, or how A. Sarkeesian misuses psychology.

On By emperorpondersIn English, Uncategorized4 Comments

In the first installment of my Social Justice thesaurus (about the world “problematic”) I said I would follow a certain structure when writing these posts. I don’t remember what I said, so I’ll ignore that and I’ll write this one following whatever order or structure may strike my fancy.

While the overuse and abuse of the word problematic are easy to detect, and it’s almost like a tribal badge for social justice berserkers, I suspect few people have realized that the verb “reinforce” (and, very rarely, the noun “reinforcement”) is a staple of social justice media/entertainment criticism. It is, however, a key concept of Social Justice rhetoric, and many of their arguments would be meaningless without it. If you pay attention, you will see that the word (or a synonym) appears in almost all social justice texts. Why? Because the key trick in any media criticism is to link media “exposure” to a behavioral effect or a change in beliefs, and reinforcement is the magical link. Basically: watch or play this, and it will corrupt you.

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