Category Archives: General Features

A Bibliographic Resource for Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011)

I’m planning on writing about Melancholia in the near future, and a short fact-finding mission to get a lay of the land of the scholarship on the film turned into something quite different (and much larger) than I imagined. What … Continue reading

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Weedopia and Everything

Just wanted to crosspost two pieces I wrote that were published today: I wrote a short essay on the game Everything and what I think it does as a game (and how it is in conversation with the creator’s previous … Continue reading

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Bad Affect as Game Design, Or It Feels Good For Overwatch To Feel Bad

This was originally written as a monthly essay for my Patreon. If you like it, consider chipping in $3 a month. There’s a lot of talk in game design about how to make people feel things. For the Skinner Box … Continue reading

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Donald Trump Is Created In Postproduction

https://twitter.com/ckunzelman/status/755050805414260736 I just wanted to take a minute to expand on this tweet I made the other day. It is increasingly apparent that Donald Trump does not exist on the same timescale as other people in the material world. I … Continue reading

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Justified and Military Discipline

Spoilers for Season 6 of the television show Justified. The last season of Justified opens with a plot that brings three Iraq War veterans to Harlan County as mercenaries for a hostile takeover of the county by outsiders. There’s the commanding officer, Walker, … Continue reading

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Adam Kotsko on “pure dismissal”

Adam Kotsko has a post up at AUFS about how one can engage in dismissal in a world dominated by critical thinking. This is something I’ve advocated before, and I’ve always gotten an almost extreme reaction of “how dare you not take … Continue reading

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Ian Bogost on Campus Carry Laws

A while back, a student at Georgia Tech, where I teach, showed me a series of anonymized “threats” that students in a notoriously difficult class of mine had posted in an online discussion forum. I’d just returned grades, and nobody … Continue reading

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On Firewatch (2016)

1. When I finally, after weeks of not being able to get to it, launched Firewatch, I was struck by how beautiful it was. One hundred and fifty Ubisoft hands can’t make a European capital city, with its iconographic shortcuts to … Continue reading

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Emily Short on the almost-remake of Galatea

Doing the conversion was a strange project. For one thing, I myself have a kind of weird love-hate relationship with Galatea at this point — a lot of people love the piece, but it’s pretty much the first thing I wrote that … Continue reading

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Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday

I enjoy Pee-Wee Herman. I have no further statement.

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