[A Pleasurable Headache] please move the box every 6-8 seconds, thank you
The last two weeks featured…a story acceptance. This one was a short I had written a year or so ago but it never really clicked. Months pass. I asked myself why it wasn’t working and rewrote the entire thing from scratch.
More info on that when I get it. I don’t think I’ve made reference to it before with a codename or anything. This one deals with toxic relationships, addiction and the age old question ‘How well can you know someone?’
Links
No Time To Die (Review by Walter Chaw)
<https://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2021/11/no-time-to-die.html>
I’m a huge fan of Walter Chaw’s work, so it was cool to see his love for the latest Bond movie. I have my own thoughts about the movie, but they run fairly close to Chaw’s here, especially in his love for Hunt’s OHMSS. Chaw also touches upon Fukunaga’s knack for infusing the action with some great character beats.
“The first thing I love about Fukunaga’s picture is that character development doesn’t stop for the action sequences. A breakneck chase in a tricked-out vintage Aston Martin DB5 pauses midway for Bond to go catatonic as Madeleine pleads with him to snap out of it and ends with Bond forcing Madeleine onto a train, the better to avoid having to unpack exactly what’s happened. This Bond is a conservative golem, a thing of hedonism and violence, misogyny and manifest destiny, and what this film does is break down the grasping puerility of his worldview.”
Chaw also mentions the fantastic forest sequence where sound and mist are used to unnerving effect, making it seem like Bond’s enemies are all around him. As Chaw points out here, this is a point in the film where Bond is perhaps at his most vulnerable.
Craig’s Bond is an odd beast in that he was taken out of the usual fluid continuity Bond films traded in and was instead shackled to a chronology. Whilst this has some disadvantages (hi, Spectre), it also allowed Craig’s bond to have an arc.
Craig’s debut as the character showed us a young, rough around the edges, operative who allows his psychological armour to be stripped of him, only to have his trust betrayed. Craig’s final outing gives us us a Bond haunted by those he has loved and lost, weighed down by them.
Craig’s Bond more than any other has dealt with the idea of mortality, a topic grappled with in Fleming’s latter books as the author saw his own end approaching. Indeed, Chaw’s review rightly illuminates some of the parallels between Fleming’s last full Bond tale (**You Only Live Twice**) and No Time To Die. In Skyfall we saw Bond struggle with obsolescence and the death of a surrogate parent. In the same movie we get a quote from Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, from Judi Dench’s M.
“We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
I always read the quote as a comment on the waning of Britain’s empire and its place in the world, of course mirrored in Bond’s own physical decline. In thinking about NTTD, and how Craig’s films have all been part of a whole I couldn’t help but think of another Tennyson quote, this time from his poem In Memoriam A.H.H:
“I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”
Despite everything, the Bond in Fukunaga’s NTTD, slowly but surely allows his armour once more to be peeled away, leaving him vulnerable and prostrate before his enemies. He has loved and lost, but finally sees no shame in the former.
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I love what you mean to me: On Disco Elysium, Romance and Codependency
A great post on Disco Elysium in the context of codependency and idealisation in relationships.
Spoilers abound for the game, obvs.
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Revolution Without Community
<https://bulletpointsmonthly.com/2021/11/17/revolution_without_community-far-cry-6>
BPM is an all time favourite place on the internet. It’s hard to not just include links to the latest posts over there in edition after edition of this newsletter. That said, this piece by Grace Benfell on the hollowness of Far Cry 6‘s revolutionary politics is especially cutting and great.
“Libertad-occupied checkpoints are constantly clogged up with Yaran army raids, with only a couple of guerrillas to defend the spot. Taking a checkpoint does very little to help the cause along, but does render it more visible, with further opportunities for ambush. The same goes for the multitude of other bases, factories, and hospitals that Libertad can occupy. Yaran tanks will drive past buildings emblazoned with the artwork of their enemies. Libertad is supposed to be an underground guerrilla movement, but it occupies spaces like the very fascists and imperialists it fights.”
Admittedly, I have been a fan of some of the Far Cry games (2 is still the best IMO), but my interest waned as they continued to rely on the ‘white saviour’ trope. With Part 5 and the subsequent New Dawn they attempted to move away from this. Part 5 seemed to be an attempt to comment on America’s complicated relationship with religion, grappling with cults and a certain brand of evangelism. It often felt that Part 5 wanted to say something about Trump’s America, but had no idea what it wanted to say or where even to start. The result was a game chock full of the usual Ubisoft tics (throw a load of stuff on a map and let the player have at it) that did or said nothing new.
New Dawn was more the same gameplay wise, but this time seared clean of any real political statement insteady welding the template to a kind of cartoonish post-apocalyptic setting that seemed more at home in a kids cartoon. Part 6 then sounds like a reversion to Part 5’s thinking, trading on buzzwords such as “gritty” and “realistic” but unwilling to engage with anything approaching the reality of the issues it is supposedly engaging with.
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When WhatsApp went down, Brazilian workers’ jobs went with it
<https://www.theverge.com/22734705/facebook-whatsapp-outage-brazil-informal-workers-economy>
Facebook services in Brazil recently had a mass outage. The result was a huge loss of earnings and work for the working class who communicate primarily with others (and clients) via WhatsApp. The incident shows one of many reasons why tech monopolies are a bad thing. An over-reliance on such services is bad for everyone, not least in the implication that WhatsApp merely is the format for communication in Brazil.
Proprietary formats and services will always encourage customer lock in. Why else would they encourage you to go elsewhere?
WhatsApp as a platform uses a customised version of XMPP, an open, interoperable standard that other apps use. Something like an open standard would alleviate some of the problems pointed out in this article. However, this customised version (AFAIK) does not have any ability to function with other applications that use the XMPP protocol. It’s not in their interest to do so. Services like WhatsApp espouse ease of use and convenience whilst profiting off data and lock in. If everyone is using it, how or why would you switch?
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The Games Industry Is Truly Repellent
<https://www.thegamer.com/the-games-industry-is-truly-repellent/>
A scathing editorial by Stacey Henley over at The Gamer on the ongoing shitpile that is Activision Blizzard and the gaming industry as a whole.
> “News broke yesterday that Bobby Kotick… well, where do I even start? He not only allegedly knew about the sexual abuse accusations at Activision Blizzard and allegedly hid them from everyone, he also allegedly wrote the immediate reaction to the scandal that was ostensibly emailed out in Fran Townsend’s name. Oh, and he threatened to have a woman killed. We don’t even need an ‘allegedly’ for that one - a voicemail recording exists and Kotick doesn’t deny it. He threatened to have a member of his staff killed and he still has a job. The games industry is truly fucking repellent.”
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Infiltrating Amazon: What I learned going undercover at the corporate giant
<https://breachmedia.ca/infiltrating-amazon-what-i-learned-going-undercover-at-the-corporate-giant/>
Reader, it’s not great.
> “The expectation of every worker was to hit 300 items per hour for the entirety of the shift. Working with such speed with various items—ranging from books, cat litter, BBQs, and even large ergonomic chairs—created immense pressure. Of course, we were told constantly to move things safely, that our health was a priority, never to run, never to lift items too heavy. But these recommendations began to feel like a joke, because the bottom line was that our rates were everything. If we became too slow, boxes would pile up rapidly and cause a nightmare at the end of the line. According to my calculations, keeping on top of it meant moving a box about every six to eight seconds.”
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Why Is Gen Z Acting Like Boomers Right Now?
<https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/gen-z-acting-like-boomers>
Because no one knows what’s real any more?
Gen Z reviving the chain email for a new age.
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I’m off to tell Storm Arwen to quit it, because some of us are trying to sleep. See you in two!