Category Archives: links

The Gist: Capital Crimes:

Government ministers had theatrical fits of the vapours at a piece of art depicting the police attending an historical eviction. They needn’t have worried. The image was clearly too subtle.

No artist would be so crude as to simply show the police force of the state standing guard at Bank Machines, protecting money against the people who own it.

And now, no one needs to.

I usually try to avoid anything too political over here, but this whole situation is just too bonkers to ignore, and Simon McGarr’s take is spot on.

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Double Fine PsychOdyssey – YouTube

Wait, shit, speaking about Tim Schafer, I just realised that I never linked to Double Fine’s PsychOdyssey when it was released earlier this year! It’s an epic warts-and-all, 6 year long behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Psychonauts 2. The BTS stuff we usually get is part of the promotion of the game, they’d never allow anything bad to be shown. PsychOdyssey shows a company at its best and at its worst and it’s absolutely insane to me that a company would allow itself to be so candid. By the end, I was sobbing. Sobbing.

Honestly, even if you’re not into gamedev, this is worth your time, just because I don’t think we’ll ever see anything like it again.

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Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge—The Commentary Tracks

Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer recorded a commentary for the special edition of Monkey Island 2 and now you can listen without having to play through the game. A great rambling conversation with three old friends about the process of making a classic game.

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Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny – Blood Knife:

When revisiting a beloved Eighties or Nineties film, Millennial and Gen X viewers are often startled to encounter long-forgotten sexual content content: John Connor’s conception in Terminator, Jamie Lee Curtis’s toplessness in Trading Places, the spectral blowjob in Ghostbusters. These scenes didn’t shock us when we first saw them. Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always?

The answer, of course, is not anymore—at least not when it comes to modern blockbusters

Pretty insane that Oppenheimer, of all films, would be the exception that proves the rule.

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Polygon announce a “Making of Spycraft” documentary

Oh wow! Spycraft was one of my favourite games of the 90s but it’s been pretty well forgotten by most people, despite the fact it did some really interesting things both narratively and gameplay-wise. And it had Charles Fuckin Napier!

So fair play to Polygon for going back and revisiting it now for a making-of documentary that sounds like it’s been in the works for a while. The documentary is coming in 2023 but you can watch the trailer now. And if you want to play the game, it’s available from Steam and GOG and it runs pretty well in Dosbox, even on a Mac.

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A year of new avenues

I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet. At last, in 2023, I want to tell the tech CEOs and venture capitalists: pipe down. Buzz off. Go fave each other’s tweets.

With the implosion of Twitter and the move towards Mastodon and the federated web, the internet of late 2022 is feeling more and more like the internet of 2002: Ours.

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Just Read the Book Already

Laura Miller reviews Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home, a book about rediscovering the power to actually read — I mean deep read — in the digital world of 2018.

There’s a lot of things that stood out to me in this review, but I’ll highlight this one because it’s so obvious and also so right

One of the reasons that digital readers skim is not because of some quality inherent in screens, as Wolf seems to think, but because so much of what we find online is not worth our full attention.

Ordered.

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Unfollowing Everybody

Anil Dash recently took the step of unfollowing everyone he was following on Twitter. This line in particular stood out to me:

… when something terrible happens in the news, I don’t see an endless, repetitive stream of dozens of people reacting to it in succession. It turns out, I don’t mind knowing about current events, but it hurts to see lots of people I care about going through anguish or pain when bad news happens. I want to optimize for being aware, but not emotionally overwhelmed.

That’s entirely it. I’ve got a private list of maybe 20 people I follow because they’re the ones that are the least outraged about The Thing That People Are Outraged About Today, and it’s recently become my main view for Twitter because I’m too exhausted (emotionally, spiritually) for the main timeline.

See also Matt Haughey’s recent announcement I’m done with Twitter.

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