Reason and Round

Music, videos, tabletop game design, and other things that interest me.

[reasonandround]

To the Moon is an indie Adventure RPG, about two doctors traversing through the memories of a dying man to fulfill his last wish. Get the game! Available on: Steam / GOG / Humble Store Overview Typ...

I just finished this game, and it is one of the most deeply affecting, well plotted games I have played in quite some time. While it has minimal graphics, and a sometimes strange sense of humor, To the Moon has a beautiful story structure, pitch perfect music, and its long slow reveal of a dying man’s memories is elegantly handled.  It is worth the $10, which for someone currently making $150 every two weeks, says a lot.

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Homecoming, or California

I come from a mythic place, with reference scattered across the world to the wonder and the art and the strangeness of LA and it's component parts. Hatred too, but I pay that no mind. My state, as well. California, a final frontier of culture, techne, and the worshipful dreams of a hundred nations, from lands as distant as Kansas and Karnataka. Only by going away have I realized it- being too close I, a cliche, could not see all the traces my home have left on the land, whether it liked it or not. Art show in Chicago; Quiet longing songs heard in Milwaukee; Wistful sighs/condemnation mixed in the flyover. My mythic home wears any face a worshiper needs. Coming home, I am not sure I found it, as it is Changed Strange Lovely Missed And I am not sure I am ready to face it once more. Give me time in the quiet spaces out middle. I'll follow the stories back, like any good worshiper.

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Baltimore ‘looting’ tweets show importance of quick and easy image checks

Eoghan mac Suibhne/@buileshuibhne

Pretty interesting “basic life info for the digital age” info. A quick and easy way to find false info in the copy/paste era.

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AGRIPPA (A Book of the Dead): The Poem Running in Emulation

Agrippa is an old favorite of mine, William Gibson's self-destroying poem from the dawn of the internet age. The DOS age original graphics are just icing.

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Arolo Guthrie – The Pause of Mr. Claus

“The Pause of Mr. Claus” by Arlo Guthrie appears on his 1968 live album, “Arlo”. This song was recorded at “The Bitter End” in Greenwich Villiage. There’s a Christmas song in

Mispelling of Arlo’s name aside, this is an awesome Geniused version of Arlo’s christmas/anti-FBI-creeping song.

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Dark Side of the Internet: Moemon, the Creepiest Pokemon ROM Hack

(Vaguely NSFW)

I was just going for my typical wiki walks and Reddit strolls, and I found something I wish I hadn't. That would be Moemon, where hundreds of sprites from the first 3 generations of Pokemon are changed to resemble little girls (as in the Japanese term/trope/fetish Moe). Essentially, it lays bare the essential weirdness and discomfort of the enslavement themes of Pokemon by humanizing them far too much. You are literally enslaving a team of small girls and using them to battle for you.

What the actual fuck?

Okay... the game is based on a ROM hack of Pokemon FireRed, and was later expanded to Emerald. The mod is mostly a straight substitution of original sprites for the redesigned ones, and a large number of people obviously put a massive amount of effort into the pixel art. In fact, there is even an aborted wiki on the topic, a variety of posters on Tumblr, and, of course, a group on DeviantArt. And apparently there are many more Japanese titles than English translations, which follows as the moe complex is a Japanese one.

I am not going to say that at least some of the creators of these games were attempting to point out the awkwardness of the Pokemon enslavement mechanic and address it in a provocative way. It is just that I can't credit the majority of them with that more high-minded attempt at talking about Pokemon's inherent problems. Instead, I get videos like this (which, if you can avoid the train-wreck-fascination, is something that no one needs exposure to). 

This all ties into a number of other Pokemon weirdness fandoms, from the (relatively) benign rule34 communities around it to the large number of Pokegirls fanfic writers (whose stories often have worse implications than moemon). It is interesting to note how many people got kinked by a game about a derpy kid and his electric attack rat, but I think my foray into the strange side of the Pokemon fandom is over.

TL;DR: Creepy ROM hack called Moemon lays bare the awkward dynamics of Pokemon by turning all Pokemon into sexualized little girls, mostly so its fandom can get their jollies from digital child slave soldiers.

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These are pictures of the amazing old beat em' up game Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. The game is something of a cult classic, but I came across an arcade cabinet of it at the Fun Factory arcade in Redondo Beach, CA. The pics are mostly of the amazing cabinet itself, along with some pictures of the Fun Factory.  Moonwalker is a simple game: as MJ in Smooth Criminal clothes, run around city streets blasting crooks, soldiers, and battle droids with your "aura" and your amazing "dance" maneuver, where every enemy on screen would dance with you, then explode. You have to rescue kids from the dire clutches of Mr. Big, and if you rescue all of them, your chimpanzee Bubbles will turn you into a laser robot (as seen in that last pic). Because reasons. Unfortunately, I couldn't get you more pictures because the game crashed while I was an amazing robot. I may take another trip to the Fun Factory soon to get more shots.

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A friend of a friend (SF based maker Bilal Ghalib) made this as a way of "audio-izing" the worst car bomb attacks since the Iraq war "ended". Pretty interesting audio experiment. The bass notes show the worst attacks, and as the sound shows it is not really getting any better. Check out Ghalib's website for more cool things. The data is from Iraqi Body Count, "the world's largest public database of violent civilian deaths [in Iraq] since the 2003 invasion".

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Happy belated New Year's y'all! I hope this year goes well, so here is the singer-songwriter Steve Goodman's song "The 20th Century is Almost Over". It was written decades ago but is still a fun romp of a song. It also continues my fascination with the Guthrie clan & their associates,

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This is an absolutely brilliant short video by all-around awesome entertainer Tom Scott (who does everything from sci-fi shorts to bizarre facts to strange game shows to running for parliament as a pirate- you get the picture). Watching this, though, the biggest question I have is what are the aliens like who made this video. They would be maximally cooperative, physically weak, likely silicoid creatures who somehow still have interstellar space travel. Just something to think about, and I may do a write-up of what kind of critter it would be with a friend soon. 

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Teenage clicks: how gifs became the rebellious adolescent of the art world

A baby flying into space, psychedelic glitch rainbows, and snippets of selfie porn films from swinger websites ... a new exhibition shows the world of gifs in a whole new light – but you can't even see it without a smartphone or iPad

Wish I was in London to see it. 

[reasonandround]

Old and New: Don't Think Twice It's All Right

The song I am throwing out today is the song "Don't Think Twice It's All Right" covered by Ramblin' Jack Elliot, the temperamental and talented companion to Woody Guthrie (and with him and Steve Goodman a few days ago, I am having a Guthrie-associate week). "Don't Think Twice" is one of his better known covers.

Another excellent version is one I found while going through some of the New Basement Tapes songs from a few weeks ago. Marcus Mumford (of Mumford and Sons) and Justin Hayward-Young (of the Vaccines) do a fantastic cover.

Do you have any favorite covers of the song?

[reasonandround]

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. It’s true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

That was from Carl Jung's "Memories, Dream, Reflections". It reminds me to keep the eternal resilience of life and societies in mind when handling big disasters or other events in the worlds that I create, and how that affects the people of that world. When Rome was sacked and the empire fell to the Goths and Vandals, their advances were not truly lost, even if a number of them faded into irrelevance for the time. In fact, many of them were transformed- Roman civil law was injected with a dose of Germanic freedoms, the shared society of the Latin world not only persisted to today but was reinvigorated, and the works of engineering and science persisted due to archivists and the Eastern Empire through the Middle Ages and beyond. Of course, Rome and its people suffered in the fall as the integrated trading and protection systems broke down, but not all fell. Just something to keep in mind when worldbuilding- something always lingers in the deep currents.

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"Po" is one of the best videos I ever found for the Qyou, this amazing animated music video is from the cool Irish band O Emperor and the production company Plastic Zoo.  is weirdly calming, despite the broken fairy tale aesthetics. 

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Lore Revisited 2: The Character

Yesterday, I talked about how I went back into the lore of Skyrim and how I have enjoyed the game much more as a result. One way that manifests is what my character is, and how it interacts with the world. 

Character Background My character is named Arjeeti, a Khajit who came to Skyrim as a way to get away from the indifference of Cyrodil. She came from a line of Imperial functionaries in Elesweyr who were forced to flee when the Empire failed to stop the Aldmeri Dominion from conquering that land. She grew up in Cyrodil, where her family had lived for a few generations, in the bitter aftermath of the Great War. Her family encouraged her to learn magic, and to do so quickly, as it was the great strength of the Thalmor. 

Actions Taken So what does all this mean? Arjeeti happily hunts down all the Thalmor she finds, going out of her way to do so. She also believes that the Empire is the only force capable of regaining her ancestral homeland, and if Skyrim seceded it would be the end of that hope. So she joined the Imperial Legion. She also aims to purge corrupt institutions in society, so she killed both the Silver-Bloods and the Forsworn King in Markarth, as well as eradicated the Thieves Guild and especially the Dark Brotherhood. 

The Result                                                                                                   What this changes for me is how I play the game. I just couldn't get into one of the largest parts of the game due to how the background was presented. This is, incidentally, what turns me off Destiny so much. There is a lot less soul without the history of the world, the context your character lives with. After doing the research myself, I came to a much better relationship to the game, and this is a common problem.

In fact, I will be finishing this discussion in a future post covering the broader parts of that very problem, namely, the lack of context and history in games. 

[reasonandround]

A bit of a change of pace. While I was preparing for a Changeling: The Lost campaign I got into a strange "evil sounding classical music jag", and this was one of the weirder results. This is Penderecki's "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima", and one of modern classical music's more haunting works. It's great for strange operas and the music played in an old eccentric's macabre parties, or for just scaring the crap out of your players. Enjoy! 

[reasonandround]

Revisiting Lore 1: Skyrim

I recently started playing back through Skyrim, and I have been enjoying delving deeper into the Elder Scrolls lore to give my characters meaning. A major part of the game centers upon the struggle between a distant colonial power, the Mede Empire, and nationalist (and racist) rebels, the Stormcloaks. When I first played the game several years ago I was dismayed at the lack of depth given to either side, or any real redeeming features for either side. 

Although I have played and loved the Elder Scrolls series since Morrowind, I never had a more systematic view of the lore. In fact, as I came into my own as a worldbuilder, I was disappointed in how little the wider world seemed to intrude and guide the game. This time, I took the liberty of trying to understand the background lore a bit more before I played again, and was pleasantly surprised at its previously unsuspected depth. I learned more of the Great War, of the changes in the Empire, and the dangers of the Thalmor. Given my wiki-vorous tendencies, it was great fun.

Now, I am better able to enjoy the whole process. Tomorrow, I am going into how that lore informs my new character, and what my reservations are about role-playing games.