the project of civilization

Firstly! The Talos Principle is an amazing puzzle/exploration game and is only $10 right now on Steam.

To expand:

I am a weird gamer, in that I’m not one and kind of wish I were. For console games, I peaked at SNES and have barely so much as looked at a console since. (Nothing will ever beat Chrono Trigger.) I have loved certain computer games in my time, but nothing from, say, this century.

But I do look at games now and then, and want to play them. Beautiful visuals, interesting stories, great work being done. But. Then there’s fighting, or whatever. I get frustrated when you have to manage quick keystrokes during high tension (like getting hacked at by a monster), or you just have to get killed a lot, or get good at physical mechanics of the controller through rote repetition. Also, I don’t have a controller, and playing on a keyboard and mouse isn’t the best.

Anyway, this is all to say that I finally bought The Talos Principle when I had a snow day and, boy, friends, do I love it.

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First of all, look at the pretty! It’s so pretty! Ruins and varied skies and plants and shiny portal things and a few laser guards that kill you, and all of it is gorgeously executed.

Secondly, it’s puzzles and exploration. This appealed to me so much about Portal, but Portal became too quickly about maneuvering and dodging and all the dangerous substances. This, though it has some of that, is moving slowly into it. It’s not the point of the game.

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THE TOWER (ominous music)

The world is the point. The philosophy. The story. The choices you make, I think, and what it makes you think about.

There is a voice booming from everywhere. There is a prohibition on a certain Tower. There are notes left by other unseen people. There are time capsules telling a slow story. There are questions of personhood, of civilization, of purpose, of intelligence.

And also there are puzzles!

I’m only a little ways into it and I’ve been playing almost 4 hours, so I’m excited about the amount of gameplay I have ahead of me. At the rate I go, this’ll probably do me for, oh, all of 2016.

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Art: The Sky is Calling

Happy Monday! I decided to resurrect my #artmonday posts from Tumblr over here. I like art posts.

Art by Teetering Bulb (Zelda Devon and Kurt Huggins). Zelda Devon also once made #spacewitch art as a speed painting that I found on twitter, so I will always adore her. It helps that she’s amaaaazing.

You’ll quickly find that I love lush illustration that drips with story. Something is happening. You’ve caught the characters in the middle of something wonderful, terrible, magical, dangerous. Something beautiful and strange.

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Pomegranate
Claws_and_Cauldron
Claws and Cauldron
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The Sky is Calling

 

eat it up with a spoon (TWIR)

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penelope bunce by siminiblocker on tumblr

This week I finished Carry On, may have Thoughts someday. I say that a lot. I’ll try to follow up this time. Maybe I’ll set it up like a FAQ, since a lot of my thoughts are centered around questions/expectations.

A friend passed me a copy of City of Blades last week and I started it and oh my gosh it’s so good and so fascinating and mysterious and Mulaghesh is great. I want to dig into this with a spoon and eat it up, or maybe dissect it and study its parts, or maybe both.

Short things

Okay, not much in the way of short things this week. I did read a bunch of things, just not much of note, I guess? And stuff I immediately lost track of.

Who Pays Writers? | Dissent Magazine - Money and the arts, and the NEA, and grants, and how things were getting better for a shining moment mid-century, and then plummeted again. Because capitalism and our weird hatred for the arts. Writers need money and material security in order to be daring in their art — most writers, at least. I’m sure there are some willing to risk starvation and poverty in order to be experimental and radical, but mostly people want to having a roof and steady food, so they write what is safe to sell, what is a known quantity, what’s been done before. Giving security to those whose voices are different allows them to speak up. It gives them room to breathe while they create, rather than burning out and disappearing. At least, that’s what I think. Anyway. Art: it requires support.