Now, I could get all political here, and talk about how people secretly long for what they hate, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on. While hating this media is part of the experience, I don’t think that we enjoy this experience because it’s what we hate — at least, not usually, — I think we do so in spite of the fact that it’s what we hate.
Read MoreI’m taking a short break from talking about politics to discuss a video game I completed recently, Paradise Killer by Kaizen Game Works. To an extent, this dovetails with my recent writing on mutant epistemologies. I say this because detective fiction, after its heyday in the earliest twentieth century, does one of two things: it either simply recapitulates the tropes of hard-boiled fiction as an imitation, or it delves deeper into questions of knowledge and how we know what we know.
Read MoreMore than anything else – as several reviews I’ve written over the years indicate – I’m interested in tabletop role playing games. These games are fascinating for several reasons, but the one I want to focus on is an intuition that I’ve been working with for a while: Tabletop role-playing games – which don’t, in any but the most loose sense work anything like other games – are toy models of political economy, and I suspect that they could be used as models for alternative political-economic systems.
Read MoreThere is a concept out there that all of society is predicated upon a socio-sexual hierarchy, and that we all have a place in it. This is a cancerous outgrowth of work done on captive gray wolves. This was first done by Rudolph Schenkel, a researcher at the University of Basel, and was picked up later by L. David Mech, who has tragically had to spend the rest of his career trying to debunk it, in his 1970 book The Wolf.
Read MoreThe solid and the ethereal, though, have traded traits, and the result is something new and unfamiliar. We no longer have the “spiritual” and the “material” – I would argue that what we have is the “informational” and the “totemic”.
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