Brainjackin: Let’s Play

Didja know, there are yewchoob channels where all the person does is play video games?  Sometimes they do it straight, like, only the sights and sounds you would see if you were playing the game on your own, with their invisible hand on the controller.  Other times they do a voice over, with varying degrees of snark or foolery.  Other times, they have a face on the screen – either their actual mug, or a cartoon avatar of some kind.  Originally these were called “let’s play” videos.  I’m not hip to the current lingo.

I wouldn’t know about these if it wasn’t for my husband and his perpetual search for distractions.  He introduced me and I have enjoyed many hours of diversion as well.

Let’s play videos evolved into the more recent generation, which is people running live video streams on a place called twitch.  They play the game live while the chat runs on the screen yelling nazi memes and throwing fractional bitcoins at the players.  idk, never created an account over there.  But it’s all good.  Time marches on.  And there are still plenty of let’s play videos on yewchoob to choose from.  I favor John Wolfe.  Currently he does most of his gaming content on his second channel, which is something he had to create because yewchoob’s algorithms are crap for the liddle guy and even the middle guy, which is where he finds himself these days.

Before James? Stephanie Sterling came out, and before she?they? became too doomy and repetitive for me to watch (hence my lack of awareness of current pronouns), they occasionally did this kind of content for their own channel.  They were especially focused on playing the shittiest games polluting steam and itch.io.  A fan made collections of the best excerpts from those videos, and I include one below, for your delectation.  The Lenny Kravitz near the beginning is from Neil Cicieraga’s amusing remix.  Enjoy.

edit to add cw:  for the none people who still care, this does have a ton of ableist language.  technically some of these are horror games but the horror content has trouble breaking thru the wall of mangled medium.

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Brainjackin: Silent Hill Good

I’m no kind of gamer.  I usually just watch other people play, and have since long before yewchoob “let’s play” videos were a thing.  When you first get to know somebody in a relationship, you share your interests with each other, and this was one my husband shared with me early on.  Silent Hill 4 had just come out a few years before we got together, and he still had a lot affection for that series of horror video games.  This would quickly sour, to the point that he refuses to look at anything related to the well-received remakes that are starting to happen.

So I’ve played a few.  I played one through three and part of four.  Four reached a point where it was too difficult for me, and I just gave up.  Those who are familiar will know exactly when.  But up until that moment?  It was a great time.  No complaints.  Up until SH, I had only extensively played Super Mario games on snes, Sonic 1-3+Knuckles and Eternal Champions on sega, and Soul Reaver.  Bits and bobs of other things, but nothing to prepare me for playing a video game of atmospheric horror.  (I had watched a homeboy play The Dark Eye on PC once.)

Silent Hill 1 was on ps1, and the graphics would not be acceptable to most gamers now.  Horror gamers are a different matter.  Indie horror has delved deep into retro graphics, some specifically aiming to emulate the graphic restrictions of the old playstation.  It’s a strange kind of impressionism, well deployed by this video game.  There were certainly a few games back then that made better use of the constrained art form than SH1 had, but looks ain’t everything.  Taken as a complete experience, it deserved its legendary status.

I just have affection for the characters.  Maybe that was because of my dude’s fandom rubbing off on me, but the blocky pixelated protagonist Harry was swell.  He wanted to rescue his lost little girl, just being a good dad, but without the macho BS american bros would have put into the performance, or the mucus-dripping tearfest they’d have put on a lady protagonist.  The monsters were unearthly and disturbing in part because the graphics were so lo-fi.

There was a shitty British SH game called Shattered Memories that rewrote the events of SH1 to have Harry be a bad dad.  Fuck that shit a lot, especially because it has become such a played-out trope of “psychological horror” by now.  Harry was the goodest boy.  Like the Evil Dead series of films, where I’m a freak for preferring the first one, I am an outlier in enjoying SH1 the most.

Silent Hill 2 is the game that introduced the iconic Mr. Pyramidheadington of the West Gloucestershire Pyramidheadingtons.  Almost every game after SH4 stood in the shadow of that creation, or some beefed up steroidal version of it.  Nonetheless, he was very cool in that historic moment.  While I prefer SH1, I have to admit the writing approach used on this one was just superior.  The first game leaned into arcane lore and sideplots that meant nothing to the point of the game.  This one focused on one character’s tragic personal experience.  The former approach is a very common weakness of Japanese media, the latter is just a bit of common sense that is often forgotten in the field of video games everywhere.  Big movies about complicated historic events like the World Wars focus on singular characters because it makes more emotionally resonant art.

It was a great game, although some parts dragged for me, and I did feel invested in the family story that was left behind to focus on the new protagonist, famous James.  It was more elegant and powerful than the first game, but less evocative and slightly less fun for me, personally.

Silent Hill 3 is the most empowering game in the franchise.  Empowerment is the antithesis of horror, so it could come off less scary, but it also perfected use of the PS2’s graphic abilities.  Animated textures impressed, and overall there was more chiaroscuro and a rich juicy look to the horror – without getting tacky.  All of the games bore some influence of the art of Francis Bacon, but this one used that influence the best.

SH3 had the missing daughter from the first game as a cool teenage girl, ably swingin’ various weapons at shimmering monsters, and having amusingly awkward conversations with members of her deceased original mom’s cult.  Was the game actually easier, or did it just feel like it?

Silent Hill 4 is so different it has been suggested (confirmed?) to be a different product altogether, randomly given a Silent Hill makeover two-thirds of the way through the production cycle.  Weirdly, that was a very good thing.  The Silent Hill paint made the art cooler, this game’s lore made the Silent Hill setting richer, and this game’s play made the franchise fresher.  I enjoyed the part I was capable of playing well enough that I don’t rate it too poorly for being unfinishable.  The main monsters of this game are ghosts.  Fucking awesome ghosts, I tell you whut.

Some long years of insulting abuse of the brand happened – terrible games made by far-flung third party companies, fucking slot machines…  My husband’s hope for any possibility of good coming from the franchise is now long gone, but just before it was gone completely, we went to see the Silent Hill movie directed by Christophe Gans.  At one particular violent moment, a guy in the audience said “oh hell naw!,” which amused.

There were good people working on that movie doing good things, but the bad kept grating on my dude until he decided he hated it.  C’est la vie.  The worst person involved had to be the screenwriter, who co-wrote the legendary screenplay for Pulp Fiction, but at this point was just a few years shy of drunk-ass vehicular manslaughtering a guy, and lifted the cheesiest line in The Crow.  (No way in fuck the bum got it from where The Crow got it, Vanity Fair.)  I agree; that shit sucked.

I wouldn’t have experienced any of that if it wasn’t for my husband.  When we met, I was more unplugged from video games than ever.  I was spending much more of my time on art and TTRPG bullshit.  I appreciate the introduction.  Silent Hill good.

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Platonic Inversion

My husband and I were discussing some issue he has relating to other people intellectually and he arrived at an idea that is not necessarily original, but was new(ish?) to us at the moment.  Hence this is something of a “brainjackin’” post, but I’m mainly using some of my go-to Philo 81 vocabulary to explain it.  My dude had initially spoken of it in terms of semiotics, which is a field I’ve been petulant about learning, because I have the same prejudices as the bitch that “citation need”ed the shit out of the semiotics wikipedia page.

My man said that it seems the most foolish people are often thinking in the most abstract ways, which is an inversion of what you’d imagine foolishness to be.  You would think foolery derived from simplicity in thought, but that it often comes from an advanced human ability to categorize.  For example, how would a deer feel about a bear?  It would recognize that as a dangerous animal and run away.  How does a human feel about a bear?  We immediately think of cultural images, which could well supercede our animal sense, and endanger our lives.  A bear will eat you regardless of how you perceive it, and I’m not saying every person eaten by a bear thought they were pallin’ around with Yogi or Gentle Ben, but some certainly have.  Even those who didn’t see the bear as friendly were still seeing it as a symbol rather than as a flesh and blood creature that will kill you on a lark.

When tapped for jury duty recently I had to watch a video giving a cursory review of unconscious bias, so I was in mind of it.  Unconscious bias is how we categorize people and other things we experience as a shorthand for judging everything and everyone we encounter on an individual basis – an ability that is literally prejudice but does have some practical utility in preventing us from feeling overwhelmed by the world.  Cultural icons and received wisdom can be direct sources of our biases.

What those videos don’t get into, because it’s unnecessary for their purpose, is that we can have biases about almost everything we do or experience.  Routines that save us the effort of thinking can get to the point where they replace practical thought completely.  If you know exactly what to say or do with every experience you encounter, sunrise to sunset, how prepared are you going to be for something outside your experience and understanding?

You meet somebody at a party that can easily talk with anybody about babies and relationships and work, but whose eyes glaze over when you mention music or art or filing for unemployment or how gender is a thing they are currently experiencing, or that you could go look in the corner of your bathroom right now and see a spider if you were so inclined, I dunno.  If you’re even slightly unconventional in any way, and you go among the banal, you will find out the limits of their ability to think real fast.

My dude tried to run a book club once, and all anyone had to say about any given story put in front of them was the same shit.  They sought the parts of the stories that matched certain expectations and hammered that button.  One person, after reading Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? said “It’s a modern retelling of the Persephone myth” like prose is all about simple answers, and didn’t bother contributing much after that.  The less people attended, the more pointless the book club felt, but the more people attended, the more superficial the treatment of the reading.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave proposed that what we observe directly before us was less than real, that it was all debased shadows of the perfect concepts of what is and what can be.  That bear is a shadow of the ur-bear, the ideal bear who embodies bearness most perfectly.  One could take that as an early striving toward scientific understanding, that he was really saying we experience only a fraction of bearness and that one could understand much more deeply by using science not yet available to him – dissect the bear, measure its bones, compare them to the bones of relatives living and extinct, overlay the results from osteology with a tree derived from genetic characters, place that bear in its evolutionary context, run cognitive tests on it, compare its gut flora to those of coyotes and deer, etc etc.

I think it would be more accurate to say he was getting at a mystic view of the world, where abstract concepts were more significant and important than the reality that is in front of you – reasoning more important than empiricism.  But humans have a remarkable ability to devise cognitive shorthands that give us license to walk through life in zombie mode.  Those cognitive shorthands are abstractions of observed or communicated reality, ignorant of the specifics of what is actually there and even superficially apparent.

It might be that Plato was, in a thinky way, reaching for the simplicity of walking through life freed from thought.  If you have determined the ideals of how things are and should be, shadows can be dismissed as unimportant.  Now, thousands of years later, we’ve perfected that art of abstraction.  It turns out there is no truth to be found in ideals.  The realities that abstraction helps people ignore are the exact places where the world is burning; the abstractions are where the memedog sits saying “This is fine.”

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Brainjackin: Kiyoshi Kurosawa Good

Hey remember J-horror?  Japanese horror movies?  Who cares at this point, right?  There was a long-haired lady ghost, maybe a well, a video tape, a tiny boy in his tighty whities?  I dunno.  On the back of viral success of a few imported movies, Hollywood decided to milk the genre for a few bucks.  Attempt one was pretty successful, followed by nothing but suck.  Probably the coffin nail was the last iteration of hollywood’s the grudge.  Ill.

When this was going on, I became aware of the genre, but knew about the same as anyone in amurrica.  However, very early in my relationship with my husband, we shared our favorite movies with each other, and I discovered more.  There was a standout among Japanese horror directors that does not get much love in the USA, save from the extremely hip.  That’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Did I say Akira Kurosawa?  Is that what you read?  Go back and reread that name.  It’s worth remembering.  Kurosawa means something like Blackmarsh, and is a fairly common name.  It ain’t like the highlander; there can be more than one.  Kiyoshi thinks of himself primarily as a horror genre director, but his work has so much virtue that he keeps getting tapped to direct arthouse movies, like Bright Future.  That film is fine, but lets allow the boy to do what he wants.

My husband’s favorite film by him is Cure, but a few others hold special places in his esteem as well.  Retribution is the first and unfortunately only one we saw in the theater.  Pulse is excellent and had a shit hollywood adaptation filmed in like, a community college in sarajevo after it closed for the night.

The guy is a feminist.  I don’t know how common that is in Japan, but the themes of certain other famous j-horrors are sometimes low key misogynist, so it stands out.  He doesn’t use the word, but in movies that are otherwise full of subtlety, he will sometimes stop the proceedings to underscore that women are full-on human beings whose lives do not depend on men, and whose lives matter.  Retribution features a scene of dark humor at the expense of a traditional-minded male character, Guard From Hell ends with the male and female leads shaking hands and parting ways.  He drives away in his car, she walks to the bus.  He was once tasked with making a titty film called The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girls and made it without titties, getting into trouble with the studio, blacklisted for years.

That’s just one example of the ways he stands out from the crowd.  How do I describe what the movies are actually like?  He’s just one of the best movie directors in the world.  Sometimes his subject matter will keep you away.  Sometimes budget or other constraints have caused weakness in a project, like on Charisma, so I can’t say he’s perfect.  But when it’s all working right?  Easily as excellent a director as Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Danny Boyle, John Carpenter on his best days.

His movies don’t invade your space, hammer you with what they’re about.  They are quiet and reward paying full attention to the screen.  They make it hard to look away from the screen, drawing you in with something more than just suspense or drama.  It’s hard to characterize the art of making film out of sight and sound, out of medium and edit, of coordinating the work of others to create a single coherent story that transcends its subject matter to get right into your head.

My personal favorite was Retribution.  I hope someday a lot more of his older stuff becomes available in the west.  It’s hard enough to make the time to give a two minute song your full attention these days, and I’m asking you to watch two hour movies, so…  Make of this all what you will.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa good.

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Brainjackin: Kafka Good

There are things I wouldn’t know if it wasn’t for my husband.  I was broadly aware of Franz Kafka and his works, aware of what people meant by “kafkaesque,” but that awareness meant I wasn’t actually reading it.  I’m just sunshine and lollipops over here.  Unfortunately I am also horney on goffs, so I ended up married to one, and ended up reading some Kafka for myself.  Now I know – Kafka deserved the fame.  It’s absurd to say he’s really good actually, but he’s really fucking good, actually.

On my husband’s thirtieth birthday, he got the dying words of Franz Kafka character Josef K tattooed on his arm – “Wie ein Hund,” in the handwriting of Kafka himself.  My dude must be more goth than anybody in alles die deutschsprachige welt, because google image search for that quote comes back with nothing but cutesy inspirational dog pictures.  Yes, we know that means “like a dog,” but c’mon.  Sort yourself out, Deutschland.

One time I mentioned Kafka to a German lady and she had no idea who I was talking about.  Yeah, he was Jewish and lived in Prague, but he’s the most famous writer of the German language in much of the world for a reason.  Sorry, Goethe is cheesy.  Mann is lovely but I never heard of him until I was cohabiting with a goth.  The disregard for our boy feels antisemitic.  Do you like your own language or not?

So.  What’s good about Franz Kafka?  He owns your ass.  As an author, you want to communicate a feeling to somebody, make them experience it, and if it’s a feeling that cannot easily be expressed in words?  All the more impressive.  People will talk about the absurdity and futility in his stories, but they don’t mention the humor and the pathos.  It’s dark humor, the emotions are sad as hell, and when you’re experiencing both of these things and more, all at the same time, you are spellbound.

Unless you’re immune to art, which is a trait we can add to DickDawk‘s laundry list of character defects.  At least he has the courage to never delete his history of incredibly embarrassing tweets.

So far I’ve read The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and The Hunger Artist.  I know, I haven’t even read The Trial.  Fake Kafka fan.  Despite my high praise for him, I would not call myself a fan.  What he did as an artist was basically perfect.  Sometimes I can think of a quibble with even some of the greatest literature of all time, and I have no such criticism for Kafka.  However, did I mention my sunshine and lollipops?  When it comes to dark art, I am a tourist.  It isn’t for me, for who I am.  But it’s absolutely worth reading, regardless of who you are.  Just once.  Check him out.

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Brainjackin: Renaissance Cuties

We’ve all heard the names of various renaissance artists before, right?  Not being Italian, it’s easy to miss that some of those guys are known by nicknames.  Davinci, Caravaggio, Raphael, Tintoretto, Botticelli, and Bronzino sound similar enough to anglophones, but that list is the equivalent of Anglos being named Stratford, Carmichael, James, Spunky, Reginald, and Prettyboy.

In particular, Tintoretto’s nickname meant something like “little painter boy” and Bronzino’s “tan boy.”  There was a military dude from back then, who is best known now from being the subject of art – a sculpture bearing his nickname, the Gattamelata.  That shit means “honey cat.”

I suppose history will remember Cherilyn Sarkisian as Cher and Louise Ciccone as Madonna, so maybe we’re still at it.  But regarding those renaissance cuties, I didn’t know about it until my husband told me this information he had picked up in Art History.  Thanks, man.  I’m turning this tidbit into blog content.  The essence of brainjackin’.

What other historical figures are known by a nickname?

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Like a More Edgy Star Trek or Something

My husband had a dream he was watching a TV show (or was it a youtube let’s play of a Deus Ex -era video game?) in a future setting, where these people were preparing to go out for a trek, if you will, among the stars.  The narrator / main character had a bad Sean Connery accent.  R&R came first, and in lieu of sex, people got into virtual reality machines that let them live out their ultimate fetishes, which were weird.  One spacefleet lady was riding a motorcycle with little man heads on the handlebars, and when she cranked them, the man heads vomited.

That’s how you’ll know that you are ridden, virtual motorcycle space man heads.  You’ll feel the burn in your throat.

Personally I used to have Star Trek: The Next Generation dreams all the time, where I could have been any given cast member, or just third person observing their adventures.  I think because of Reading Rainbow, Levar Burton’s character hit different for children, and became more memorable.  Also felt some type of way about Data and Counselor Troi and Cap’m Picard.  If I was a polyficcer that would be the four I’d put together.  Maybe Dr. Crusher could watch and … that’s just disrespectful.  They all did a very good job; I’ll leave it at that.

Maybe my husband and I were the space man heads, and Dr. Crusher was on the bike.  It’s what I deserve, tho surely my husband is an innocent man in all of this.  Clemency!

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Brainjackin: The Normal

There are some things in life I only know about because of my husband’s evil influence.  Once upon a time he got on a jag of listening to a musician known as Fad Gadget, aka Frank Tovey.  Good lookin’ guy, passed too young due to a congenital heart defect, made wacky art-influenced electronic music.  While he was digging that guy, he told me all sorts of other adjacent things.

It starts with a guy named Daniel Miller in 1978 releasing an indie electronic track called “Warm Leatherette,” for his solo project The Normal.  That song did well for the indies, inspiring Grace Jones to do a more successful cover of it in 1980.  “Warm Leatherette” is very basic, even crude, and has lyrics that are just basic bitch fanboying about J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash.  You know, the one that was portrayed in cinema some years later, with James Spader and Holly Hunter getting their rocks off by experiencing car crashes.

Meanwhile, Miller established the soon to be ultra-successful Mute Records.  One of his other projects there was a silly little album of classic rock and roll covers as The Silicon Teens.  According to wikipedia Miller provided the vocals, but they do sound rather like his friend Frank Tovey, who posed as the band’s singer.  Who actually sang?  Dunno.  But Mute Records had all sorts of interesting artists.

Of primary interest to my man, Frank Tovey’s Fad Gadget, who had several cool songs, most famously “Ricky’s Hand,” “Collapsing New People,” and “Lady Shave.”  Did Collapsing New People make you think of Einstürzende Neubaten, whose name means Collapsing New Buildings?  No coincidence, that band was also on Mute, and the song was about them.

That’s not what made Mute a gazillion dollars.  That would be Depeche Mode.  I love those guys.  Once upon a time they were young men, and there’s a picture of lil’ Dave wearing a Fad Gadget T-shirt.  At least, I remember seeing that somewhere.  Might be misremembering it.  Anyway, the world wouldn’t have all that great Depeche Mode music if it wasn’t for these weirdos, and if it wasn’t for The Normal, and if it wasn’t for Warm Leatherette.

Join… the car crash set.

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Brainjackin: Abbott Handerson Thayer

Another type of post to add to the rotay, so I don’t run out of birdposts and dreamposts and discposts: Thunks I Stole from My Husband, aka Brainjackin’.  These won’t necessarily all be original thoughts or observations of his, run thru the filter of my misunderstanding.  Sometimes it will just be Things I Wouldn’t Know About if It Weren’t for Him.  Like this post, about Abbott Handerson Thayer’s hot idea.

OK, this idea might have crossed my horizon before, but it didn’t take root in my memory until my husband mentioned it to me one random evening.  Early 20th century painter Abbott Handerson Thayer was very successful in his own time, a man of letters as well as visual art.  Seems like everybody had to have big opinions about everything, and he put forth an idea on the topic of zoology, which may have been a good example of people talking outside their expertise.  According to Thayer, even boldly colored animals were actually adapted for camouflage.  After all, predator or prey, you have good reasons to wish to remain unseen.

In support of this idea, he used his exceptional painting skills to illustrate a book.  Very beautiful pictures of not-at-all cryptic (camouflaged) animals, in just the right circumstance that they could fade into a background.  Por ejemplo,

I think this guy was more famous for paintings of pretty girls, but this stuff is a lil more memorable in the scheme of things.  At least, to me.  Were peacocks adapted to blend in with bushes and trees?  Probably not, but the idea was at least good for producing some very cool art.  Thank you, Hander Thaybotson Randers.  Aw shit, I’m losing it already…

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