Matthew Arcilla, editorial mercenary

I genuinely love their rivalry, but speaking as someone close to queer shipping folks, I don't think there's enough there nor are they at the right temperature to be paired so easily. It can be done, but there just isn't enough repression or tension between the two to get started with.

Stills I can hear

More like Chips and Shit, amirite

The distinction between "is this person a vocal transphobe?" and "work on a transphobe's project is not a dealbreaker for them" seems awfully thin, especially when these are financially secure people

All I care about is knowing that the fries of freedom is eternal vigilance.

two men are standing next to each other in front of a mountain in a desert . ALT: two men are standing next to each other in front of a mountain in a desert .

TIL there is a place that serves wings in my area called Wing Commander. They also serve fries, which I'm going to assume are for freedom. Please tell me they have a hot sauce named after Melek or Prince Thrakath.

I think the people who are obsessed with the idea of the microwave possibly having feelings about wanting to fuck them are actually just people who really want to fuck a microwave.

That's wild, I just reinstalled CONTROL two days ago and while it's third person and not first person, shooty bang bang times with Jesse Faden have been some of the most fun I've had all week

You have my two pistols

2.1 Lenses, Not Boxes I wondered whether this section was necessary, but games discourse seems to repeatedly find itself adrift in questions of whether _ counts as a _. We have seen the question repeatedly: Do games count as art? Do games without goals count as games? Is The Sims a game? Are hypertexts interactive fiction? Are Twine pieces literature? In fairness to the researchers cited here, all of whom I respect immensely, many of these sources pose or imply the question rhetorically. Still, the necessity of such a framing frustrates me. "Is _ a _?" is, in my opinion, a fruitless question. The question can never be answered to anyone's satisfaction, and it often serves as either a provocation to espouse politics or as a cover to institute gatekeeping. Its agenda is usually opaque to onlookers and bewildering to those trying to advance the field from across disciplines. We should be thinking in lenses, not boxes. It is always more interesting to ask "If we think of _ through the lens of _, what do we learn?" We know it is more interesting to ask "What do we learn by considering Tom Stoppard through the lens of poststructuralism?" than to ask "Is Stoppard's work poststructuralist?" And while some works may be more or less fruitful when examined through different lenses, sometimes the most unlikely pairings of lenses and objects are the most rewarding. Certainly any of the questions above would be much better served by reframing them in this way.

Wow we’re having “games are art” discourse again! Just gonna leave this here.

From my dissertation:

Their home books asked what they would do for the greater good of the world and those who love and support them. Sometimes they broke rules to be a little spicy. But in the 21st century, they started disregarding people's agency and betraying the community. Like a lot. It got cliche. And it sucked.

What happened to these characters -- the great industrialist, the mutant rights ambassador, the undersea monarch, the sorceror supreme, the alien king and the greatest scientific mind -- is that they went from flawed well meaning leaders to bad chess masters, and it utterly damaged their rep.

I mean, maybe I'm an idiot but The Volume / StageCraft feels functionally no different from the repeating projected background they use on old timey movies to put fake city blocks behind actors fake driving cars.

Obligatory

The creation of Volume, or those weird "digital sets" didn't make it any better cause now we have actors standing in front of giant OLEDs, which also creates its own lighting and grading problems.

I know you're being serious and I don't want to take away from that, but my wise-ass likes to say, "General Tso's Chicken and California rolls are Asian when I eat them. Asian for me, not thee, white man/woman."

Seriously, Tale West is like the "Euphegenia Doubtfire" of novelist names

ewoks are just woke wookies

No but Thrawn makes me think of Prawns Thermidor.

A comic book page. First panel: Iron Man is holding a yellow gem, its light illuminating his faceplate. Second panel: Charles Xavier is holding a blue gem, its light also glowing. Third panel: Namor is holding an orange gem, its glow held further from him than others. Fourth panel: Black Bolt holds a purple gem, he is studying it with much intent. Fifth panel: Doctor Strange holds a green gem, but his eyes remain fixed on the speaker. Dialogue across all five panels, from an unseen speaker: "Because I also believe... that given a chance... that we... can accomplish anything. Given the chance." Sixth panel: Its a close up of Reed Richards as he holds a red gem, its menacing glow bathing him in crimson light. "Each one of us will have a gem. And never EVER shall we use them," Reed says. "You will hide them from everything and everyone. WE will be their protectors." He adds, "NONE of us will know where the others have hidden them. It is the only way to keep them safe."

And that to me, doesn't feel like what the comics used to be. I'm not saying this out of misplaced nostalgia for the 20th century comic book runs. But to me the Illuminati, along with the Ultimates and others, is THE shift when the smartest and most powerful heroes started acting like billionaires.

A bald Caucasian man in a business suit. Behind him looming out of focus is an armored suit with menacing appendages and a glowing mask. It's the Yellowjacket suit.

Genuinely feels like every Marvel movie is about power, who gets to have it and in so doing force the world and the audience to accept the nobility of its main characters and their entitlement to power. Any attempt to challenge them is derailed or forestalled, any redistribution of power is stopped

A stylized illustration of the Illuminati. From left to right, a fin-eared man in a coat: Namor of Atlantis. An older man with a mustache and an ornate robe and cloak: Doctor Strange. A man wearing a dark mask and cowl with a jagged necklace: Black Panther. A man in a full metal suit with a glowing chest piece: Iron Man. A man with gray temples and athletic suit with the number 4 on it: Reed Richards, known to others as Mister Fantastic. A man in a half-mask with a small fork-shaped ornament above his forehead: Blackagar Boltagon, the extraterrestrial Inhuman known as Black Bolt. A large man covered in head to toe with fur: Beast, known to his colleagues as Henry McCoy.

I bring up the Illuminati because it genuinely feels like Marvel movies double down on the so-called "world outside your window," but adapt only the most cynical post-9/11 version of that premise. I don't disagree but its a mutation of the genre IMO and not the genre itself.

The Avengers have government clearances and The Fantastic Four live in a metaphorical "ivory tower" above the city. The real tipping point for "supes as a ruling class" within Marvel was in the early 00s when Bendis introduced the Illuminati, snapping the moral backbone of the genre and its members.

The entire mutant / X-Men milieu is not really all that progressive, despite or because it is over 60 years old and is a saga that has been authored by mostly white men and I *still* think these characters are going to be more regressive under The Notorious K-Fed and his boss, The Mouse

People think Reed and Johnny have very little in common, but when left together they bring out the best/worst in each other. You can write a hundred stories about Johnny encouraging Reed to go down the rabbit hole his mind takes him or Reed supporting Johnny's worst ideas in the name of curiosity.

If friends not food then why food-shaped?

At best, publishers will try to shower you with gifts and events and hope that will make your outlet more willing to slant / lean coverage in their favor to maintain the relationship. That's something I actually see, but that is very different from "here's X amount of dollars for every star"

I may have already said this in reply to the last time you had this convo but paying for reviews is a massive waste of PR money. The price would be too high to justify, you'd need multiple outlets to create a lie big enough to have any effect, and the impact reviews have on sales isn't worth it.

I remember this era. Publishers bristled at the notion that anyone might be scraping money from what we comp for the magazine. I sorta understand that they don't want goodwill units being abused for extra bucks, but at that point your pinching copies on a scale you shouldn't have to care about.

Amazing how widespread this assumption is. I sort of understand when gamers hallucinate whatever they believe about the games industry and games media because they're coming from a position of genuine ignorance, but seeing this belief exist among dev/pubs that should know better is wild.