#ellaguro

[eccentric-nucleus]

so ellaguro/liz ryerson made a big blog post about games, nostalgia, let's plays, etc which touches on a lot of stuff i've been thinking about recently

i think a lot of what my feelings come down to is... videogames, the internet as a whole, used to be a scene. it was something new and weird that people weren't really sure about. how it fit into society or how it was possible to interact with it, nobody knew. you could do whatever. and as time has gone on the scene has ossified into a market: people know precisely what these things are for and they are for advertising and consumer products.

(that was definitely one of the weird moments i had when i was posting on royalroad. i thought i was trying out a writing exercise and sharing it with some people who might be interested, but lots of people reading were definitely assuming i was positioning a marketable offering for an initial release.)

and like, it doesn't really escape my notice that yeah the idyllic pre-capitalism time i'm ascribing to the earlier internet also took place when i was a kid and thus incidentally unaware of any monetary influence already there. you did, after all, have to pay to get a dial-up internet connection. there's no actual, like, prelapsarian state of grace here. there's just the world. & probably a big part of getting older is seeing the things you used to enjoy either fade away or be streamlined to fit with the rest of society. i used to be with it. now what i'm with isn't 'it'. it'll happen to youuuuuu

[ellaguro]

i have a new song out! it's called "Terrible Town" and it's the first preview to my album "Saint Elizabeth" coming in 2024

you can also listen to it on youtube here, if you prefer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua0EAF25K6c

and you can hit the follow button on my bandcamp page for more updates about the album here: ellaguro.bandcamp.com

[titleknown]

[The lack of support for avant-guarde artists] is frustrating partly because there is a history within consumer tech companies providing more holistic and powerful tools to artists - tools which often have now been laid dormant or actively suppressed because they don't fit in with the current "closed box"-style tech business philosophy. Hypercard was a programming tool for Apple computers in the late 80's and 90's. it was a bit like Twine in how it made programming accessible, except it was more visual and intuitive. it was also, to be honest, much more powerful than Twine. Hypercard was well integrated with the Mac, it was full-featured, and its interface was much less piecemeal and clunky than something like Twine. it was as if Apple actively had an interest in making it as simple as possible for its users to look inside the computer and learn something new about how they work. some games you might have played - like Myst, were made with the backbone of Hypercard. yet nothing like it has been well-supported or embraced since then. from an essay called "Why Hypercard Had to Die": 'HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the “use” and “programming” of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure.  A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone.  A world in which Apple’s walled garden aesthetic has no place. ...(When Steve Jobs came back to Apple)...He returned the company to its original vision: the personal computer as a consumer appliance, a black box enforcing a very traditional relationship between the vendor and the purchaser.'

Liz Ryerson, a 21st Century Digital Art Manifesto.

While I rant and rave about Ryerson’s more punching-down snobbish opinions, hell I did so just today, I will say that the parable of Hypercard is an important one; because how it shows how quickly tech is willing to pull up the fucking ladder on tools that help artists after they’ve gotten their use from them.

And, with @staff and @support‘s doing of such actions as “Best Stuff First” (HA) and the blacklisting of external links; and how that appears to be related to larger independent-artist-disempowering trends in tech, I think that we need to learn from this parable; and we need to fight the hell back.

And, if you’re a member of the tech industry working towards/complicit in these practices that fuck over artists I hope somebody breaks your legs in with a shovel.

You can find the essay at ellaguro.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-21st-century-digital-art-manifesto.html, which I keep in its unabridged form not as a direct link to see if Tumblr will not eat it, tho be warned it also contains some of the parts that’re bullshit about her work too...

[queenlua]

“Recovering addicts are often advised not to go out in the world; they are too raw to cope with society without the buffer of drugs or drink. In a sense, [Hannah Gadsby's] “Douglas” is an act of recovery, or an act about recovery. Gadsby’s story about a failed love affair is especially painful to hear once she reveals that she has “high-functioning autism and it’s a terrible thing to have, in that it gives you the impression that you are functioning highly.” Of course, this confession silences or nearly silences any criticism you may have been harboring: how can you criticize that? Gadsby then said that a recent lover had referred to her, in a group text, as “retarded.” The audience gasped, but I wondered if the woman’s insensitive remark had perhaps been taken out of context to give Gadsby’s act a boffo ending. Gadsby, in her work, espouses a kind of puritan-minded radicalism in which someone else is always to blame for how messed up she feels. But isn’t that messed-up feeling life? And what about other lives? What about the millions who have it worse, who are fighting to survive? On Gadsby’s stage, solipsism masquerades as art.”

—from Hilton Als’s review for The New Yorker, emphasis mine (h/t ellaguro)

[mendelpalace]

Chris Crawford - “The Dragon Speech” from CGDC 1993.

Quoting a review of his game Balance of the Planet:

"It is the closest thing to art to be sold as computer entertainment, but it's just not fun! Therefore, as the game is not fun, it simply wouldn't be right to endorse it."

A more explicit rejection of my dream cannot be imagined.

This speech wound up an interesting conversation between my bud @radicalhelmet and @ellaguro on Twitter.

[selfauthoringsuite-blog]

@ellaguro: dudes are killing whoever they see as weak to them just to feel slightly more like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson is their daddy. what a fucking depressing reality.: https://ift.tt/2GKoP0z

[maxofs2d]

As a videogame designer who used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’m intimately familiar with the sort of asshole who thinks they have a perfect formula for solving the problems that face the world today. I refer to this sort of person as the “boy genius” — someone who makes their career off repackaging old ideas in a new form and marketing themselves as a brilliant new entrepreneur/thinkfluencer with the secret knowledge to transform society. In reality, they’re just presenting the same old cynical capitalism with a fresh coat of paint. Aspiring entrepreneurs like this exist across the Bay Area in many different forms, from all across the tech world to independent game development and beyond, but they are most obviously embodied by celebrity tech industry billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

(...)

In the view of the technocrats, their systems are a true level playing field that erase the need for systemic critique. But in reality, the belief in perfectly balanced systems is the driving force behind how neoliberal capitalism engages in the oppression of the people it supposedly serves. When every person’s worth — in terms of cultural value, in terms of job performance, in terms of power in society — is fully defined by measurable outcomes, then it becomes easier to dismiss people who don’t meet favorable outcomes as in some way deficient. If the system is in perfect balance, the complex fields of thought that have emerged out of the long-term human struggles of civil rights, feminist, and LGBT movements must not be the true reality.

Forget artificial intelligence: the alt-right is the true mutant child of our neoliberal technocratic society.

https://medium.com/@ellaguro/how-technocratic-hyper-rationalism-has-birthed-right-wing-extremism-ec8ec2ace9ed#.9xfj30hik

[champagnesupermama]

“How Technocratic Hyper-Rationalism Has Birthed Right-Wing Extremism” @ellaguro

[itsthesawofthetable]

Sequoia Forest Swords

Over the weekend, temptingcuriosity and I drove up to Yosemite for a long weekend. We had made plans for her birthday, but it was also Earth Day, and the park was free admission, which was a pleasant surprise. Only the valley-floor roads were open, due to lingering snow, but the waterfalls we visited were magnificent (in no small part due to the same snow). We were hoping to see some sequoias, but they were either beyond closed roads or in areas closed for preservation. The trip was a good reset button for work. In the earlier part of the month, I was once again struggling to solve problems caused by nebulous interactions with code not fully under my control. My coworker and I had delivered a solution to the problem a few days before I left, but the stress didn't quite abate until the long weekend. Now, I'm feeling a little more relaxed at work, on the one hand, but I'm also noticing that I've stayed late by accident pretty much every day this week, so I need to keep an eye on that as well. After a recommendation from ellaguro, I've been listening to Engravings, by Forest Swords. I'm looking forward to listening to more of their music. comments Crossposted from Tablesaw! http://ift.tt/2paMvBu

[ellaguro]

my new album LP ZERO - out NOW!

my new album LP ZERO, a pseudo-narrative of melodic experimental electronic music, is out NOW

https://ellaguro.bandcamp.com/album/lp-zero

some influences: Aphex Twin, Björk, The Knife, Burial, obscure videogame soundtracks

this is an extended version of my earlier released EP YEAR ZERO, presented in its ideal and final form. please share on here & twitter: https://twitter.com/ellaguro/status/913674811385069568

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ellaguro/posts/1703188103025069

and elsewhere!

YT streaming link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H82g2Yxm9ZY

also subscribers to my Patreon (www.patreon.com/ellaguro) will get a free download code of this album to show my appreciation for their support!

i’m really excited for everyone to hear this now. i’m so proud of all of this material and i hope you will be too! please share far and wide!

[titleknown]

I accidentally stumbled across this bit on Liz Ryerson’s Twitter, and TBH, I think it sums up not only where we disagree; but also what I loathe about critical theory in execution.

Namely that its ideas of “pure art” vs the ideas of “entertainment” or “mass culture” dating back to Adorno and Horkheimer are pretty much just a repackaging of the horseshit “high art/low art” dichotomy with a pseudo-Marxist coat of paint, and it fucking pisses me off when critics; even ones I otherwise agree with; say that nerdery got to such a bad place because of some inherent reactionary tendency and ignoring the way they culturally left it to rot like that.

Like, they ended up treating fandom culture as a backwater and ignoring great artists working in disrespected media, and then got surprised by the fact that the treatment of popular art as worthless ended up alienating them to that subculture.

Not to mention the fact that there’s a reason it was so easy for those kinds of right-wing reactionaries that misused such principles as cultivation theory or their basic tenets for their own purposes of social engineering.

And that’s because; at its core; the idea of “mass culture” punches down at and diminishes the agency of the audience and the artists who create it; rather than at the corporate structure that abuses it.

Fuck Mass Culture vs True Art. If somebody created something with love; if somebody loves that thing, it’s fucking art no matter whose oily hands smear on it, and it should be our goal as creators to get the oily hands out of control; not to act like everything touched by them is now vapid.

And, if I may get nasty here, it annoys me to see her endlessly; snobbily scorn people for liking The Mainstream on her blog (In particular the articles “Fuck Mario” and “An Itemized End Of Year List”), and then wonder why nobody pays attention to her work or the arthouse games she barely mentions in passing...

[ung]

Catt Small 🤠 #GDC19 (@cattsmall)

Still thinking about this line from @ellaguro's Indie Soapbox talk in regards to the #GDC19 Amazon's sponsored punk… https://t.co/HWJDELscq0

faved by your 1 friend and 6 others

[stubfeedart-blog]

We appreciate ellaguro Its a music epis... Publication from twitter.com/artspace #art #stubfeed #stubfeedart - stubfeed.com/art https://ift.tt/2E75qF9

[thesepeopleproject]

i'm tired of having to react to their shitty ill-formed conspiracy theories and total self-aggrandizing dumbassery. they're making the world a worse place for everyone, and these people need to be fucking stomped out.

— Liz Ryerson (@ellaguro) July 19, 2018