I want to tear it down.
Archive for August, 2008
Gender in Wall-E
Posted in Analyses, Movies, tagged Joseph Campbell, Wall-E on August 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I don’t really have much to say about this, but it struck me when I finally saw Wall-E (which is brilliant and deserves every accolade it can get):
Wall-E, the masculine protagonist, is a robot whose job is to literally clean up the mess left behind by humans. More figuratively, it is a care-taker, protector, preserver, [...]
On Company Time
Posted in Fictions, tagged The Merry Men on August 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Black screen, white text. Four numbers, separated by colons, the farthest right decreasing steadily. It was easy to understand: days, hours, minutes, seconds.
“Where was this?” asked Will.
The countdown had six days left.
David nodded at the screen, his eyes unmoving. “Just an IP address, no domain. But it’s been posted everywhere.”
“Viral. Less is more, the allure [...]
Narrative space
Posted in D&D, Movies, Theory, Video games on August 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I’m a storyteller. I see the world in stories. That’s not saying much, because this is true of everyone. What is a story, after all? It’s an organization of reality, an illusionary order imposed by our brains to make sense of the fundamentally nonsensical universe. So why say I’m a storyteller? Because it means something [...]
D&D 4E Character Sheets
Posted in D&D on August 8, 2008 | 2 Comments »
The standard D&D character sheets, while usable, are always capable of being improved. For 4E I got a particular itch to create anew because the editors seem to assume the use of index cards to keep track of powers (or at least some method separate from the character sheet), and I didn’t see why it [...]
“The tragedy of verisimilitude”
Posted in Analyses, Politic, Television, Theory, tagged Battlestar Galactica, Bush, Generation Kill, The Wire on August 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
This post is something of a sequel to this one.
I’m halfway through season two of The Wire (just finished “All Prologue”) and I’ve got some more thoughts on it and David Simon’s other HBO production, Generation Kill (thoughts which of course apply to television and to some extent narratives in general as well).
What strikes me [...]
The Art of Insult
Posted in Personal, tagged Generation Kill, Monkey Island, Pattern Recognition, Torchwood on August 3, 2008 | 2 Comments »
You fight like a dairy-farmer.
I always used to get into trouble with people because I say a lot of things I don’t mean. Or, rather, I mean them, but other people don’t understand what I mean and think I mean something else, which amounts to the same thing from their frame of reference. It doesn’t [...]
