In Defense of Hooting
I like a lot of Matt Taibbi’s work, but I really wish we'd stop talking about riots and looting as if they're discrete processes anyone has direct control over.
Read MoreCyberpunk With Zoomer Characteristics
Does “post-cyberpunk” even exist as anything except a placeholder marketing category for publishers to sling newer edgier variations of cyberpunk fiction? I didn’t think so until a couple years ago when I became aware of a new aesthetic beginning to trickle into sight.
The source of the trickle was videogames, mostly the cellphone gacha games Girls Frontline and then Arknights, but to a lesser degree other sci-fi games like Nier Automata, Death Stranding, Apex Legends, and Valorant. There are similar visual motifs to those established by cyberpunk designers like Syd Mead and Masamune Shirow: dense urban landscapes, digital and/or holographic screens everywhere, neon lights, exotic greeble-laden vehicles. But whereas the traditional cyberpunk seems to always have one foot planted in the pop culture aesthetic of the 80s-90s era that birthed it, this new post-cyberpunk style uses aforementioned motifs as a jumping off point for an overall aesthetic that pulls way more from the present than from pop cultures past.
Read MoreSmash the four olds, cultivate the gijinka
A lot people playing Girls Frontline know that MICA Team -- a mainland Chinese game studio -- censored many of the character models for the domestic release, models which were left uncensored in the later launches of the Korea and Japan servers (for some reason the English server left the domestic CN censorship in, much to players’ chagrin. My pet theory is that it’s because EN is the “global” server, including several markets in Southeast Asia who, though gacha game-crazy, happen to exist under religious majoritarian or straight-up authoritarian governments)
What’s less obvious is the cultural framing of the T-Dolls.
Read MoreLels interlinked within lels interlinked
Blade Runner 2049 was a nice way to end the story. My hope at first was that they would carve out a new story out of whole cloth within the same universe, but that was dashed early on when I saw promo photos featuring Harrison Ford standing around in a grease-stained t-shirt and holding a rectangular bottle of Johnnie Walker Black.
It’s 2049.
Rick Deckard has let himself go.
Read MoreDarth Vader wo horobosu zo – Star Wars: The Force Awakens
There’s not much to say about Star Wars: The Force Awakens on its own without referring to it within the context of the six other films that came before it. As a standalone work it’s a solid sci-fi adventure movie, a longish but otherwise punchy, smart aleck-y experience that stands in contrast to the pseudo-intellectual bent of recent SF films like Interstellar and Ex Machina. It feels like Star Wars.
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