Euxinus
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Gillian Anderson Boards Starz's "American Gods"
GOG Connect Lets You Import Some Steam Games to GOG
The newest feature on GOG.com lets you import some Steam games to your GOG account for free.
Preacher Is Finally Here and It's Absolutely Been Worth the Wait
When the first things you see on a TV show about a preacher in Texas are the words “Outer Space,” you know you’re in for something special. And special is exactly what the first episode of AMC’s Preacher is. The long-awaited live-action adaptation of the 1995 comic series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon done with respect for the comic, but plenty of entry points for new viewers.
Stephen King Has Some Major Hints About the Dark Tower Movie
It’s DC/CW blowout as Marc Guggenheim teases the future of Legends of Tomorrow, Grant Gustin discusses Barry Allen’s journey on The Flash, and there’s new pictures from Arrow’s season finale. Jennifer Lawrence talks about her future with the X-Men franchise. Plus, a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 clip. Behold, spoilers!
Watch the Shocking First Four Minutes of Preacher, Right Here
The first episode of Preacher airs on Sunday but AMC has just put the first four and a half minutes of it online. That may not sound like a lot, but directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg pack the intro with tons of foreshadowing.
Musician performs every Metallica song in 4 minutes
Rob Scallon
AMC's "Preacher" Was Almost a Direct Adaptation of the Comics
Preacher Goes Behind the Scenes, Where There's a Table Just for Severed Limbs
Everything we’ve seen so far from Preacher looks amazing, and now AMC’s released a trio of videos that do nothing but whet our appetite.
ABC Has Canceled Marvel's Agent Carter
After two seasons of fighting crime, Agent Carter has been given her walking papers. The ABC show, based on a character from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has been canceled.
The People Making Cyberpunk 2077 Would Like To Correct A Misconception About Game Development
Violent "Preacher" Promo Introduces Show's New Characters
Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" to Recast Mad Sweeney
WATCH: Jesse Custer & Tulip Have a Little Fun in New "Preacher" Promo
The Punisher TV Series Officially Coming To Netflix
Praise God, It's a Righteous Flood of New Preacher Photos
We’re less than a month away from AMC bringing the legendary Garth Ennis/Steve Dillon comic Preacher to the small screen. It’s gonna be a slightly different take than you remember, but this giant collection of new photos should make every fan say a prayer of thanks.
We Finally Have a Trailer for Bruce Timm's The Killing Joke Movie
The definitive Batman voice actors have returned for an animated adaptation of one of the most famous stories in comics history, and everything about it looks fantastic.
American Gods Continues to Have the Best Casting Ever
American Gods has added Cloris Leachman and Peter Stormare to its cast and is now, officially, our most anticipated new series. (Like it wasn’t before.)
Neil Gaiman to Write "Good Omens" TV Miniseries
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Is Ten Years Old
A reader in the comments yesterday pointed out that it was Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion‘s birthday. Bethesda’s RPG is now ten years old. It’s the less celebrated of the series’ modern iterations – less weird than Morrowind, more awkward than Skyrim – but its my favourite in the series.
Happy birthday, potato men!
The First Episode of Preacher Gets The Important Stuff Right
A filmed adaptation of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s classic Preacher comic book series has been an on-again, off-again project for more than ten years. Yesterday, the first episode of the upcoming AMC TV series finally saw the light of day. Judging by what I saw, Preacher’s going to be bringing the word of God and the Devil with it.
Neil Gaiman Comments on Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Departure from "Sandman" Film
Earth Squared and Halved and Shrunken and Invisible and Doubled and Miniaturized
JF Ptak Science Books Post 1936 (expanded)
This post is a part of overlapping categories, including:
- Duplicate Earths (including Mondo Bizarro, Science Afflictions and the Dubious Mind—Bad Science, Part 1. NYC in Space (?!) here and Extra-Earth Humano-Alien Souls From Outer Space Repopulate Earth-Hell!!(??) here)
- Strange Things in the Sky, and New York City Attacked (including such posts as New York City: Attacked by Tentacled Flying Saucers, Giant Flying Snakes, Glaciers, and Mining Missile Space Aliens, 1929-1941)
- And before we get to Mystery in Space I wanted to make an uncommon addition to the "Duplicate Earth" category--I really don't find "Extra Earths" too often and so I feel a certain obligation in reporting them. And so, the Extra Earth of Fletcher Hanks' cover for his very uncommon superhero creation, Stardust:
I don't know if this is an actual Extra Earth that makes an appearance in a Stardust episode, or if it is just a repeated element of design--from what I have seen from Hanks, it could easily be either.
And now on the the rest:
In the eight years or so of collecting information and stories for the odd-bits section of this blog I have never encountered so many choice visual examples in one place for strange/weirdly-imagined/impossible/high-SciFi of the Earth than with the comic book, Mystery in Space. The very dedicated keepers of Coverbrowse.com website have reproduced thousands (?) of covers of pulpily-published science fiction and exotic-thinking comics books, including the home base in which all sixteen-plus years of Mystery in Space live.
I've just found another Earth-halved image, this from the comic Strange:
Written from 1951-1966, Mystery in Space very freely uses words like "astounding" and "astonishing" and "amazing" and "strange" to describe itself--on its cover (!)--and then lives up to it in so many astounding/astonishing/amazing/strange ways. Keeping simply to odd representations of the Earth, we find it halved, duplicated,cubed, miniaturized, dragged, tugged, targeted, canaled, and bullseyed; it is also the background to a WWI biplane attacking a spaceship in space, a flying skyscraper, and an alien craft lifting the United States from its geological moorings--in short, a very high and filling feast. And this, again, is just judging this book by its cover, which might actually be the best thing to do as the covers tell enough of the story to let your imagination tell the rest of the adventure. The covers tell fabulous stories of such highly unexpected ideas that they may be the only part of the book that we need to bother with, the cover doing away with the need for the printed narrative; and it may be the case that it saves the reader from the interior eye-splitting out-of-time writing.
The artwork and promise of the story are almost always (issue-after-issue) compelling, and there are a number of superb examples of simple jaw-dropping, belief- suspending, flabbergasting and mostly bad but very unexpected science fiction. But this is so potentially high-bad that the "bad" looks good, a tried-and-true badness the content of which is so surprising that its high degree of creativity and difference transcends everything else. And since we're just looking at pictures/cover art, there is no time-sink involved wading through turgid/florid/bad-bad prose for hours to only discover that the story is only getting simpler and lost and the writing even worse (worser). So Mystery in Space is a great visual luxury, a bookmark for ideas rendered in artwork that is obviously deadline-dependent, swirling in bad color and modest skill seemingly steeped in smoke and alcohol, and which delivers joyful incredulous surprises time after time.
This Doctor Who/Force Awakens Trailer Mash-Up Is Way Too Perfect
The Chickening
EuxinusEl millor que m'ha donat internet des de "Too many Cooks"
The Chickening is the first of its kind in remixed, augmented cinema. It is a theatrical trailer for a fictional film in which Stanley Kubrick’s classic film The Shining has been artfully transformed into a new, poultry-infused comedy adventure by digitally altering the film to create a new narrative. This new style of filmmaking is a hilarious collision of classic films with modern day visual effects; “Cinegraffiti”—the ultimate neo-nostalgic visual feast for this digital age.
The Chickening
Steven Moffat Leaving Doctor Who After Season 10, Broadchurch Creator Steps In
Neil Patrick Harris Is About To Get Really Unfortunate On Netflix
What's Going On With Firefly Online?
We may never get another live-action Firefly movie or TV show. So every bit of Firefly media that we do get is precious—and that explains why Browncoats became so excited about Firefly Online, the online role-playing game. But what’s become of this project?
The Toy Story Shorts Are Awesome, And You Should Watch Them
The Toy Story movies have been very good. But it’s Pixar’s five short films in the series—many of which have never been seen by the main trilogy’s adult fans—where some of the real magic lies.
Off the Clock: Space Opera Millennials and Their Grand Narratives
Welcome to Off the Clock, my weekly column about the stuff I've been doing while out of the office. Among other things I did over my holiday break, I spent some of my free time watching and thinking about…
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens
(Heads up, I’m going to talk frankly and openly about elements of The Force Awakens.)
After my first viewing of The Force Awakens, on my way out of the theater, I rushed to tweet a joke I’d been holding back throughout nearly the whole film: “Star Wars: Episode VII: The Millennials Will Be Okay.” I say “joke,” but like a lot of jokes based in observation, I kind of meant exactly what I said. It seemed like an obvious reading. The major members of the new “generation” of Star Wars characters--Rey, Finn, and Kylo Ren--all stood in the shadow of a past in different ways. Or said differently, each is a sort of “fan” of the same Star Wars stories that we know and love, and they all find themselves struggling with the canon.
Towards the start of the movie, Rey’s fandom is on full display in the form of a vintage X-Wing helmet and a doll of a rebel pilot--probably Luke, whose sandy footsteps Rey seems to be following in. Finn, a First Order stormtrooper gone AWOL, struggles to distance himself from the group he was born into--a group that (despite a fairly complex history) likely conjures for the viewer only the image of faceless totalitarianism. Kylo Ren dwells on the good ol’ days of Darth Vader, frustrated like a 20-something who thinks that Baby Boomers are right about the rest of his lazy generation.
Like most of us in our own lives, each of these characters has a limited understanding of the universe, and especially of the past. What do other worlds look like? What was “the Galactic Empire” really? Is the Force real, and if so how does it work? Nowhere is this difference in understanding illustrated better than in how these characters view Han Solo: For Ren, he’s an uncaring father, for Finn, he’s a brilliant war hero, and for Rey he’s a legendary smuggler. Each finds their understanding challenged by a more complicated truth: Han was an absent dad because he cared so much; the great Rebellion war hero is a scoundrel without a plan; even seemingly invincible legends die.
In confronting the fact that the world might not quite be what they thought it was, these characters are unmoored from their senses of self. In some moments, Finn can’t seem to tell if he’s really just trying to escape the First Order or if he has nobler motives. Rey and Ren both struggle with their connection to the Force--the former wanting nothing to do with it despite aptitude, the latter wanting the control he thinks is his birthright. These dilemmas are pretty classic space opera, but look past the laser swords and they're not so different than the struggles of real people (millennial or otherwise). "Who am I and what the hell is my place in this world?" is the sort of question people have been asking themselves for as long as there have been people.
And this is where it gets interesting.
Beyond "The Hero's Journey"
While (depending on your feelings on metaphysics) the real world leaves us to try to find some subjective meaning for our lives, the world of Star Wars defines the roles of its inhabitants actively--or at least, it's supposed to. It's a universe that seems to present fundamental, inescapable truths. There is a Force that ties us all together. There is a moral Light side and a selfish, immoral Dark side.
The world of Star Wars is (or at least has been) filled with capital T "Truths." This is what made me turn on the series back in my late teens/early 20s. Despite growing up with the franchise, I stopped calling myself “a Star Wars fan” during the prequels. That was partly due to the quality of the those films, yeah, but also because the moralism of the series had begun to grate on me. I was moving into a period of my life where I became more interested in complex understandings of ethics and politics, and I was bored of reading again and again about how the Hero’s Journey was the One Way to Tell Stories, and I was especially frustrated by stories that wielded Good and Evil like hammers.
I stand by those developments in my thinking, but what I don’t stand by is the brash, Dawkins-esque elitism that they were accompanied by. That elitism led me to dismiss things I didn’t like instead of thinking about them. What a huge mistake. It was facile to dismiss that Star Wars morality as being “too black and white.” Yeah, of course it is--that's what they're going for. That shouldn't have been a stopping point for thought, it should've been a first step. Not only should I have asked “Why don’t I like this as much as I used to?” but also “What is it doing with this sense of morality and how does it do it?” Not just "Ugh, stop talking about the hero's journey," but "What is the academic heritage of Campbell's famous "monomyth," how does Star Wars utilize those things in a cinematic context? And to what end?"
That heritage is (among other things) a school of 20th century thought called Structuralism. Building on the work of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, structuralists identify and analyze what they see as common, foundational elements inside of any given set of human activity. While others in the field of linguistics were studying how a given language changed over time, Saussure was trying to figure out what was core to the way all languages must work. Levi-Strauss expanded on Saussure’s work, looking not only at human language but also at the structure of human stories and mythology. For both Saussure and Levi-Strauss, answering these questions about human activity was key to figuring out universal and intrinsic truths about humans.
Over the decades that followed, structuralist work expanded into analysis of economic, cultural, and political realms. It was often incredibly productive, since it gave people the tools to look not only at individual instances but also broader trends and practices. But structuralism eventually found pushback from folks who doubted that so much was truly "universal." Structuralist thought sometimes minimized real differences between different phenomena, and it often led to grand claims that prioritized the world views of the powerful and established. Some "post-structuralists" kept the toolset of structuralist analysis, but emphasized that the "structures" they were studying were ever-changing, not eternal: "Yes, we can analyze the structure of myths, but that changes as economic, social, technological, and emotional contexts do."
When I finally brought all of this to bear on Star Wars, I realized that it didn't only lean heavily on supposedly "universal" elements of myth-making, but also featured a fictional setting that itself presumes structuralism to be accurate. There is a fundamental organization and underlying structure to all sapient activity in Star Wars: The Force. And as Han says, "It's real, all of it." It's a claim that ancient alien bar-owner Maz Kanata supports, too: In a long enough timeline, "the same eyes appear in different people"--and whether she means that Star Wars characters are literally reincarnated or just that we're looking at a world of endless, thematic recurrence, the point is clear: There will always be a Luke and a Leia and a Darth Vader, even when they're a Rey and a Finn and a Kylo Ren.
Star Wars communicates its structuralism not only narratively, but also with a fierce cinematic cudgel. It hits you with black masks, with bright blue and red lasers, with orchestral swells, and with the sort of panoramic wide shots that seem to reach out and say “Yes, there is a transcendent, capital T Truth out there.” The lonely, desert sunsets of Tatooine and Jakku; the surge of heroism as an X-Wing squadron drifts in-formation over the waters and forests of Takodana; the Evil of General Hux's gathered mass of potential violence, his stormtroopers, his red banners, his technological supremacy, his eagerness to destroy populations we've barely met. At its highest points, Star Wars is crafted with such mastery that it is easy to convince oneself that it touches something fundamental to all humans, something eternal and real.
"A Man, Nothing More"
The Force Awakens does something surprising, though: It pairs all of this with techniques that destabilize and historicize. The film features endless panoramas, but also a jittery camera inside of a stormtrooper transport. Supreme Leader Snoke is a massive, growling personification of cruelty and ambition, but as his hologram diffuses so does our confidence that he is actually so threatening: Is he just another Wizard of Oz, someone who pulls all the right levers to convince us of his stature? And when General Hux delivers his speech, he isn't channeling some platonic form of Evil. He's channeling what we, the viewers, know and recognize from 20th Century fascism. His face carries the same combination of self-delusion and self-doubt that many ideologues wear--and Kylo Ren's does the same.
It was a surprise to see Ren's human face, and the reveal has been divisive. For many, it transformed a hateful, masked figure into an angsty little boy. Given the rest of the film's focus on destabilizing the mythic, I suspect that was the point. There is a similar scene towards the end of Knights of the Old Republic II: In the right circumstances, Darth Nihilius--a wordless being who devours the lifeforce of whole planets--can be unmasked to reveal what one of your companions describes as "a man, nothing more." The same could be said for Kylo Ren, or, in a way, even the mega-weapon that the First Order wields to devastating ends. Starkiller Base is not the mechanical, pseudo-moon monstrosity that the Death Star was. It is a planet converted into a weapon in the same way that Kylo Ren is a man converted into a killer The Force Awakens reminds us that evil doesn't need to look like any of the strange alien beings of the Star Wars galaxy. Sometimes it looks just like us.
This is a key thing to remember when considering the anxious response some have had about The Force Awakens' diversity and the heroic competence of Rey, the protagonist who some call a "Mary Sue" (and sometimes do such with the same temper-tantrum tones of an unmasked Kylo Ren). The film recognizes that the heroes of Hollywood--and thus the heroes of modern western mythology--have had wide appeal, but offer shallow representation. To twist Orwell: The stories of Luke, Leia, and Han are universal, but they're more universal for some than others. As much as Star Wars has spoken to a wide audience, it hasn't always spoken for that audience. To address this, the heroes of The Force Awakens are just as adept as the protagonists of the past, but now they're played by a much more diverse crew.
Between Hux's fascism and Ren's anger at Rey's natural prowess, The Force Awakens anticipated some of its most ardent critics well enough to personify them in the film. Ren's frustration is particularly ironic. He believes in a twisted meritocracy: Those who practice drawing upon anger and hate will one day learn utilize the force's full potential. When he is met with a person who--with no training--is able to outperform him, his worldview is so threatened that he takes drastic steps to try to reinforce it. But there are those in the world of Star Wars who are seemingly born with advantages others don't have, and this is as infuriating to Ren as it is to Rey's real life critics. Of course, this has been an uncomfortable fact about the world of Star Wars for as long as there have been Jedi, but before Rey, it went unchallenged. Suddenly, given the form of Daisy Ridley, old fans find an old truth undesirable.
Hux and Ren--and, I think, those angry fans--look backwards towards an elusive (and fictional) past where things were simpler, but The Force Awakens wants us to look forward instead, even though that might be challenging. The world is unfair, it says, and unstable. The things we thought were structural and eternal are in fact man-made and mutable. They're just very, very convincing. Addressing the challenges of the future will require not only people who are preternaturally skilled, like Rey, but also people like Finn, who will do what is needed when others refuse. I am thrilled that The Force Awakens is embracing this unsure future.
It is telling that the despite the heroic successes of its protagonists, the final moments of the film are not rendered in one of the series' bold, enveloping wide shots. Instead, we see Rey and Luke--his face intimating a well of history and thought and just a little confusion.
They stand on a hill on an island on a planet of oceans, the camera spinning around them in a wide, almost dizzy crane shot. The camera shakes, just slightly, hit by wind and a whispered doubt about what's to come.
I also spent some time over the break...
- Listening to: The Revenant: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alva Noto, & Bryce Dessner - If you like this, definitely go back and check out Sakamoto & Noto's previous work, too. I'm a big fan of Summvs.
- (Re)Reading: "The Anxious Defenders of Liberalism" by L. Rhodes - Rhodes is a deft writer and thinker who I find myself turning to again and again to help me think through contemporary politics. In this piece, he unpacks the long and complicated "political correctness" debate. The historical context is incredibly valuable.
- Playing: MechWarrior Online - I think I'm enjoying this? Or rather, I am definitely enjoying it, but the the real-money mech prices make me feel uncomfortable. That said, I haven't felt the need to put any cash into the game so far, and I think I'll be able to keep that streak going.
And A Question For You
Above, I wrote that Star Wars is able to use certain cinematic techniques to convey common feelings in a really evocative way. Can you think of any games that do this, whether with gameplay mechanics, controls, aesthetic design, or something else? If so, how do they do it? My favorite example of this is probably the way that Cart Life requires the player to purchase a watch in order to learn to make accurate predictions about travel times--without one, everything is unpredictable and incredibly stressful.
If I have time to, I'm also going to continue to collect and highlight my favorite comments at the end of the week. If you'd prefer your comment not be included in that post, let me know and I'll respect that.
The Milkman Cometh: Psychonauts 2 Has Been Funded
An odd feeling – this thing we prayed for for years, and which seemed such an impossibility, is now happening. And not just happening: it felt like a foregone conclusion from the second it was announced. With $3.35 million pledged by crowdfunders and investors, it looks like Psychonauts 2, Double Fine’s sequel to their acclaimed 2005 adventure-platformer, will become a reality at last.