This is all the otherwise hard-to-categorize stuff. A couple books, Pan’s Labyrinth, some general theory that’s not specific to any particular text – oh, and the video game manifestos, they’re worth a read.
Media Hierarchies and the Horus Heresy
You’re familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, right? Back in the 80s, there was an arm of the Dungeons and Dragons franchise responsible for creating and selling little fantasy miniatures, so that as you’re playing you can see your characters on the table. It makes it easier to manage things like distance and position during combat,…
The Horus Heresy: On Agency
I mentioned back in April that I’ve been enjoying the Warhammer 40K novels. I’ve been reading the Horus Heresy – it’s a series with over 50 titles, exploring how Horus Lupercal, favoured son of the Emperor of Mankind, turned against his father and started an intergalactic civil war. You’ve got the loyalist Space Marines, who…
On Change in Video Game Criticism
I’ve been on a bit of a board game bender this year. I touched on this implicitly back in March, when we were talking about Magic: The Gathering (Constructing the Player in MtG), but – for a few years now I’ve been playing MTG Arena, which is a digital version of Magic, and then I…
Plug & Play: On Juxtaposition
This past week I’ve been reading Richard McGuire’s Here. It’s a 2014 comic about all the different events that happen in this one specific room throughout history. And it kinda intersperses different scenes, such that a moment from 1912 might have an overlay from 1970, taking these events from across time and putting them next…
Why Star Trek is Bad
This is a hate piece about J.J. Abrams’ 2009 film Star Trek. It isn’t strictly necessary – there are much more recent things to complain about in Abrams’ oeuvre, and we’ve already played the drinking games where you take a shot every time there’s a lens flare. And yet in watching it again recently, I…
Into the Spider-verse: Family and Loss
The 2018 animated film Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse is a film about loss, and how we deal with it. Loss is obviously a major component of just about any text – there are always setbacks and failures as part of the broader arc towards a given goal – and it’s even arguably part of the…
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Death is a Whale 