Sunday is for writing your first Sunday papers. Although your excitement, like mine, may subside a little when you realize that you've been reading almost everything but gaming articles this week. So, I'll lean pretty heavily on “(mostly)” in the column's mission of collecting “great articles about (mostly) video games.”
I hope you can have as much fun writing about bacteria, lighthouses, and life after nuclear war as I do.
I have one gaming item that I can recommend. I write for 404 Media, Jules Roscoe talks about immigrant rights organizers using Fortnite to teach people how to stand up to ICE agents. Video games have often been used as virtual meeting spaces to discuss topics other than gaming, but in this case, activists are using Fortnite's features to make their lessons interactive.
At the foot of the courthouse steps, two government agents emerge from a purple golf cart. They approach the door. They carry weapons.
– Hey, is anyone inside? says one of them. “Are there any vulnerable people here? We have a warrant. We have a warrant for any vulnerable people in this area.”
One civilian opens the door, sees the agents and immediately slams it shut. After more calls for the warrant, the civilian says, “Slide it under the door.”
“I would slide it under the door, but there’s no room under the door,” the agent says, stuttering.
The civilian pauses. – Well, this seems like a personal problem.
On the London Review of Books blog, Liam Shaw writes about Soil bacteria and their ongoing attempts to confuse scientists. Despite decades of research into streptomycetes and the antibiotics these bacteria produce, which are now widely used to treat patients, people studying them still don't know how the terrestrial organism actually produces them.
Then as now, our ignorance of what goes on inside cells is often much deeper than the neat diagrams presented in textbooks suggest. One of the authors of a recent article owns shares in a company that promises “chemistry from nature.” This is a painful way to learn. Unraveling the biochemical cat's cradle that fuels life can be a nightmare. But there are many reasons to persist. How [John] Sheehan said, “Nature created the penicillin molecule to teach organic chemists a little humility.”
I liked it too Jon Hendricks' review of the film adaptation of Manu Larsene's graphic novel The Road. It's a work that attempts to explore his own connection to stories of the apocalypse, a legacy McCarthy has changed since then. allegations published in Vanity Fair magazinethat he had a relationship with an underage girl – but ultimately he is focused on adaptation. What is gained and lost from the story that moves from prose to panel.
Larsene's gorgeous drawings create a wonderful new tension on their own. How can something so terrible be so amazingly beautiful? What McCarthy did with sharp, elegiac prose, Larsene does with kinetic, jarring imagery. Walking quietly through the evil ashes is a place you want to linger. Each page is a formal symphony of thoughtful black shapes, gestural lines, white highlights, and pleasing splashes of texture and tone. Ironically, the endless downed power lines, wrecked cars, and lovingly decorated shelves of rotting consumer goods reveal a strange truth: The Road's story is about the impermanence of beauty. Over millennia, humanity has created a rich cultural tapestry that can be erased with the touch of a button.
(Although I haven't found many examples of the kind of art Hendrix describes online. So a copy of the book will likely end up in my cart soon.)
While this isn't specific to gaming, it was while playing Double Fine's Keeper—a game in which you play as a sentient, articulated lighthouse on a mission to save the world from a parasite called the Wasteland—that I dug up an old magazine article about the history of a Florida lighthouse.
It can be difficult to view lighthouses beyond their symbolism as beacons of hope or, conversely, as signs of deep isolation. Part of this is because they are no longer a significant part of our daily lives. Shipping technology has advanced, making sea travel safer, and the remaining lighthouses are largely automated. But, reading stories, for example Article by James Taylor in Florida Historical Quarterly.which tells the story of one lighthouse on Anclote Key, you can see how these buildings served as homes and part of the local community. For example, the lighthouse keeper's daughter recalls her time spent on the island.
To the keepers, the lighthouse was their job, but to the children it was a huge toy, as Betsy Meyer recalled: “The tower with its 105 steps stood guard over us all, although I thought it was a special play equipment that allowed me to walk and balance from one pillar to another.” She ran up and down the stairs, only resting by the windows. Her father affectionately called her “Jolly Legs” throughout her run. When Betsy and her brother Gus weren't playing at the lighthouse, they were cruising along the beach, amused by the many fiddler crabs that scurried away from their feet. At dusk, Mary reached the end of the pier and watched “a magnificent sunset, which made it clear that God was in his heaven, and I, in my own way, was in mine.”
Music for this week? Honestly, as December approaches, I'm going to listen to Taylor Swift's Evermore album and “It's the damn season” in particular. This causes Joni Mitchell Riverwhich has been a Christmas constant for me over the years. But as the sun disappears earlier and earlier, December is also a time for… listen to Lankumtheir music tickles a part of my soul that hides deep underground.
