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oddlyunadventurous · 4 years

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BOOK REPORT 2020

I’ve always been a sparse reader but 2018 and 19 had me accelerate my reading habits to the point that I think I’ve read the most books this year that I ever had. I suppose I’ll count them all here, just to make sure!! I said something or other about the Moomin books at the end of last year’s Inkt*b*r so, this being the month of traditions, let’s make a new one by tallying up my literary “yays” and “nays” at the end of the season.

Video game text boxes don’t count, online publication articles don’t count, psych/aesthetic papers and 1000 page biosemiotic textbooks don’t count, but they have sure pursued me in my sleep during the year as well. This list is really mostly for my benefit (and no I won’t get a Goodreads account tyvm), so under the cut you’ll find a list of titles in roughly the order I read them, along with short notes. I’ve done longer reviews of these books elsewhere and I need not bore you with them here.

K. Stanislavski - An Actor Prepares (1936) I started reading this book in 2012, then dropped it because I couldn’t understand it at the time. Kostya attends acting school and gets lessons from The Director. He learns to sleep like his cat.

K. Stanislavski - Building a Character (1949) Supposed to have been published along the first one in a single volume. Kostya continues his lessons. A lot of thoughts on walking, gaits, eloquent speech, phrasing, etc. Both these books are wonderful looks into the author’s artistic life. It’s very heartfelt and down to earth, considering it’s quasi-fiction made to edutain. Very inspiring.

M. Polanyi - The Tacit Dimension (1966) A book on the origin of knowledge, the integrated performance of skills, the emergence of life and other phenomena in the universe, marginal control between levels of reality, the moral death of the communist regime caused by the unbridled lucidity of the Enlightenment, the responsibilities of science, and thoughts about open societies of the future. This is one of the two shortest books I’ve read in the list, it covers all of this under 130 pages and manages to do it well.

B. Rainov - Eros and Thanatos (1971) A communist propaganda book attacking western mass media and escapist culture. It gets no points for being correct, as the author mostly swiped the truths from french philosophers. Very variable in its intellectual prowess, almost as if it picks its arguments in order to push an agenda. Informative but also infuriating. Also expectedly homophobic.

J. Hoffmeyer - Signs of Meaning in the Universe (1997) A somewhat pop-sciency book about biosemiotics. Forgettable but also humbly written and explicative.

A. Noë - Varieties of Presence (2012) An unimpressive book about sensory perception. Noë’s theory on sensorimotor action is worth considering but the book is poorly edited and mostly spent arguing with peers.

E. Fudge - Quick Cattle & Dying Wishes (2018) A look into a registry of last wills and testaments from the period 1630 - 1650 in Essex. The book is about early modern people’s relationship to their animals and what they meant to them in life, as well as in death. Fudge’s argumentation is sharp and her style is modern. Being a scholarly book it is really overwhelming with the footnotes sometimes, but otherwise satisfying. One gets beautiful glimpses of family relationships, thoughts and feelings that people now dead for 400 years once held.

G. Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) The Buendia family get all their sons killed. The Banana Company sucks. People love each other. A lot happens, generally. It is a hundred years, after all. The upper class sucks.

K. Polanyi - The Great Transformation (1944) The Industrial Revolution sucked. England sucks. It reduced all its workers to subhuman wretches. Every single decision made after the empiricists made labour and land fictional commodities has been a band-aid to the essential contradiction that the market economy wants to annihilate its human host. Laissez-faire sucks. It caused WW1. Fuck everything. Fun book.

R. Coyne - Peirce of Architects (2019) Talks about architecture and the ideas of logician/father of pragmatism Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Informative about both. Brisk and not very in-depth, but to its benefit rather than its detriment.

R. Williams - Culture and Society (1958) A survey of the 18th and 19th century England, and the emergence of the concept of “culture” as defence against the horrors that the Industrial Revolution inflicted upon society. Consists of some two dozen outlines of contributors to the romanticist tradition, from Adam Smith, through Ruskin, to Orwell, their beliefs, contributions and literary works. Very eloquent and interesting.

E. Fudge - Brutal Reasoning (2006) A fantastic book about much: early modern views of the difference between a human and an animal, the Christian discourse of reason, the logical fallacies that lead to its implosion, the advantageous use of dehumanisation by imperialists in other to genocide natives, Montague and Shakespeare, and the ethical hell of animal murder that led Descartes to deem animals as machines so as to allow his buddies to perform live vivisections on dogs without feeling guilty about it (this is the real reason, don’t let anybody tell you otherwise). There is even space for an entire chapter about an intelligent horse who could tell a virgin from a whore and learned Latin at Oxford. This is my favorite book I read this year, so it gets an extra long review.

R. Williams - The Long Revolution (1961) A sequel to Culture and Society that’s worse. The start and end are brilliant but the middle sags. It contains some historical reviews of English cultural elements, like the newspaper industry, the Standard English vernacular and the realist novel of the 19th century, but honestly if the book was just about about the creative state (intro) and Marxism (outro) it would’ve been fine, if not better.

P. Klee - The Thinking Eye (1956 & 1964) Bauhaus boy in 1920s Germany! Love you Klee, xoxo. You really have to read his thoughts to understand his work imho. You can appreciate it just fine on the surface level, but his completely eccentric (though very self-consistently logical and sharp) views on art creation open a new outlook into his primitive approach.

F D.K. Ching - Architecture: Form, Space & Order (1979) A staple book for architecture students. Or so I hear. Steeped in gestalt psychology. Very good, though not necessarily stuff I don’t know already. Very nice looking pencil illustrations, Ching looks to be an accomplished technical draughtsman.

H. Wölfflin - Principles of Art History (1915) A strong contender for second place in the tier list. The book examines the transition between Classical to Baroque in Italy and Germany (and all the Germany clones, like the Netherlands). It is a systematic, precise aesthetic treatise that reveals much by conceptualizing and grouping characteristic art features in which the two styles differ, then explaining their bearing on their decorative content as well as the outlook on life that they embody. Lovely.

M. Porter - Windows of the Soul: The Art of Physiognomy in European Culture 1470-1780 (2005) A historiographical treatise about early modern views on physiognomy. The book deals mainly with the extant literature on the subject and tries to gleam what it could mean for the customs at the time - palmistry reading, occultism, persecution of the “gypsies” and the Christian scientific project of attaining meaning. Macro- and microcosms, as above so below, hermeticism, that sort of stuff. It’s an interesting read but it’s too long, the quality of writing varies greatly from chapter to chapter, and it is far too expensive. Wouldn’t recommend it.

S. C.Figueiredo - Inventing Comics: A New Translation of Rodolphe Töpffer's Reflections on Graphic Storytelling, Media Rhetorics, & Aesthetic Practice (2017) This is the shortest book I read, mainly translating Töpffer’s 1845 "Essay on Physiognomy" along with giving his biography and some other paraphernalia. It’s not worth the price for the content contained within, but Töpffer is the father of the modern comic book, so I thought I’d learn what his philosophy was. On that front, at least, very interesting! If only I knew French I’d save myself the trouble and read the original, which is now public domain.

D. Bayles - Art & Fear (1985) A useless self-help book. Not entirely bullshit but completely banal from all angles. Shouldn’t even be on this list but I did read it, so...

I. Allende - The House of the Spirits (1982) A child rapist gets a redemption arc. Well, kind of. All women are queens. Men are awful. The poor are wretches and it’s their fault. Oh no, the communists are going to take our land! Pinochet’s concentration camps sucked. Overall a better magical realism book than 100 Years of Solitude, to be honest. Very well written characters.

R. Arnheim -To the Rescue of Art: Twenty-Six Essays (1992) What it says on the tin. Wide range of subjects, from art appreciation, to schizophrenic and autistic child art, to gestalt psychology, to philosophy of science, to Picasso’s Guernica and the fate of abstract art, to reflections on the 20th century and the writer’s life in pre-nazi Germany and America. I love Arnheim, I’ve read many of his books and I’m glad I picked this one up.

R. Arnheim - Film as Art (1957) A book about cinematography, one of his earliest, actually, mostly a personal translation from an original German book he published in 1933. Somewhat outdated, but foundational. Not as informative to me but I don’t regret reading it.

G. E. Lessing - Laocoon; or, On the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) A book by a greekaboo about a fucking dumb poem and a statue of a naked dad and his two sons getting fucked by snakes. It’s misogynistic and authoritarian in several places, and altogether awfully full of itself. 100 pages of interesting observations stretched over 400 pages of boring Greco-Roman literary discourse.

L. Tolstoy - Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (1852, 1854, 1856) One story serialized in a magazine then later collated in three separate books. Aristocrat boy grows up in pre-revolution Russia. A very, very relatable coming-of-age story. Tolstoy is a lovely writer.

F. Dostoevsky - Poor Folk (1846) An epistolary novel consisting of letters between literally Dobby from Harry Potter and his maybe-niece, whom he wants to fuck. Starts bad, gets better by the end. A bit rough and tumble for Dostoevsky’s first, so I forgive him for wasting my time a little bit. A decent character study of the middle/lower classes, at least.

L. Tolstoy - Family Happiness (1859) An amazing romance novel for the skill employed in writing it. It is very short yet delivers so much emotion. Rather simple narrative at its core, but executed with such bravado one cannot help but be impressed.

F. Dostoevsky - The Double (1846) In which the Author starts swinging. A pathetic, neurodivergent old man gets used and abused by the people around him and nobody cares. Satirical and biting, better than his first.

A. Lindgren - Pippi Longstocking (1945) I last read this when I was 6 years old so I thought I’d refresh my memory. I remember disliking the book then and I can see why. Pippi’s kind of an asshole. Still very enjoyable to read. I know it’s meant for a younger audience’s reading level yet I cannot help comparing it with Tove Jansson’s books and how much better the prose in there is. Sorry.

***

I think that about rounds them up! That’s about 30 books, give or take. For next year I’m hoping to:

Finish Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s bibliographies

Read more econ and marxist writing (low personal priority but i have to, in THIS economy *rolls eyes*)

Finish the Tintin and Moomin comics, as well as Jhonen Vasquez’s collection of edgy humor

Read more about botany and biology in general

Get started on Faulkner’s and William Golding’s bibliographies

Read more children’s books

Search for more Latin American fiction from the Boom

Read more psych/aesthetics/pedagogy literature, which seems to have become my main area of interest

Thanks for sticking till the end of the list, hope you’ve learned something and maybe you’ll pick one of these up if it took your interest. I don’t have to be a philistine just because I’m drawing video game fanart! Bye now!

#books #book report #reading #2020 #blogging #i'm busy reading i'll go back to drawing in a bit #not art

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mockky · 5 years

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A sad story how Russo bros reminded us about the crappy world we live in

Disclaimer (kinda). Preventing the arguments like “read the comic-book to understand the movie”. First of all I've never read the comics and never will. I shouldn't do that to watch a movie. It's the director's job to tell me a story. It can be changed a bit, but it still has to have a logic. This is author's priority.

I guess there's no need to run through the movie again and get to details, it's too many of them. Just a few big ones. Firstly, the time travel idea is pretty lame by itself. Every time-travel-movie does the same mistakes – PARADOXES, no one managed to escape it. So if you can solve your problem only by time travel – please don't do the movie, this job is not for you.

It's like the creators don't know the rules of their own universe. Nebula translates her thoughts to Past-Nebula, they're connected somehow even being far from each other, killing Past-Nebula literally doesn't do anything. How does it work? All this plan just fucked up the previous movies. And then some random rat actually saves the universe? Seriously? I don't know but I think it’s called “lazy writing”.

OK, there's no movie without a sin. But what's really important is the screwed up characters. No one did or got anything what one was supposed to.

Loki. His extremely stupid, reckless and suicidal lunge actually was extremely stupid, reckless and suicidal. The God of Guile threw himself with a toothpick against titan and dropped dead. Bravo!

Thor. I never really was a fan of him. But this is officially the worst comic-relief ever. Why he should be like some sort of that whiny drunk dumbass, especially after him being so cool and strong in Infinity war? Gods saved us from fart-jokes and slow-mo-food-fight. Thor lost his parents, lost his brother and Asgard. He's broken and crushed, and Marvel just points finger at him and laughs. Very mature.

Doctor Strange showed up to show us a very important finger.

Captain Marvel is a whole new level of pain in the ass. Skip the Boring-IMBP-part. Though it's hard to forget how they just shoved her in fan's throats, and expected them to have the same empathy for her as for Tony or Cap. But we know them for 10 damn years! The biggest problem that she's not a person, she is God ex machine with magic GPS in her head, invincible, strong-independent-woman and all. With that cockish face of hers, kicked Thanos's ass, but when it comes to the gauntlet, it's up to Hulk and Tony. What da hell? All that power, it's the only thing she could help with. And don't give me that "it's a big universe, not only you've got problems" crap. Thanos's snap affected THE WHOLE universe. Isn't he the main threat here and now?

And what really pissed me of is the ending and the way it fucked up the most interesting and deep part of it all – Steve and Bucky.

Allow me to remind you few points.

CATFA

We see Steve as this tiny subtle guy with heart of gold and strong will, he is hero inside. I can do this all day. He wanted to go to war, he took the serum, he's like walking embodiment of self-sacrifice and heroism. But he became “the chorus girl”, this empty symbol, a fake. Actual soldiers don't believe and don't respect him, cuz he’s never been in real fight. He does not respect himself anymore. But when his friend got in danger in the blink of an eye Steve transforms into this Rambo, alone against the world, flipped like a switch. He dashed headlong to the enemy's base just for tiny possibility his friend might be alive. At that very moment Steve becomes what he meant to be – the real Captain America.

CATWS

Steve managed to get through 70 years of brainwashing with only one phrase, and refused to fight Winter soldier hoping that there was still Bucky somewhere. The entire movie revolves around two of them.

CATCW

Some fans said that Cap and Tony should switch sides on this one, but it doesn't feel right for me. Cap's got a point. What if there's somewhere we need to go, and they don't let us. Obviously it is CATFA reference, where he goes against orders to save Bucky. And he's afraid cuz he knows that it could cost lives. And now he's running around the city protecting Bucky from the government and T'Chala. He fights Tony, bloodily, everything to protect Bucky.

What a lovely deep drama! It's a comic-book story here we’re talking about. I bet in CATFA no one really noticed sweet little Bucky. But the Winter soldier just stole the movie and fan's hearts. Steve and Bucky have this strong almost cosmic bonds, it's stronger than brotherhood or friendship, it was so since 40s. After all this freezing thing they became totally unique for each other. You can smash vibranium shield with that bonds (which Cap actually does symbolically when gives up the shield TWICE, both times for Bucky). It's unbelievable that after all he did for Bucky Cap could ditch Bucky for anyone or anything. Creators teased the fans and encouraged that bromance. It was openly a queer-baiting, it was a canon, and you can't stop the shippers.

Three movies were built up on this relationship. It was work of art if you ask me – so many details, so much depth, and the amaizing acting, I mean you can watch it over and over, and every time you find something new in their eyes or words. And they not just talk, they actually do anything to proof their devotion to each other. It's absolutely beautiful. And it's Bucky who made Steve interesting and alive as a movie character and a real hero as a person.

And what we get in the end? Bucky turned into dust in front of Steve, but on the group meeting Steve talks about... Peggy? Where did it come from? He doesn't mention Bucky the whole movie. Steve goes to return the Infinity stones and comes back an old man. For us, for Bucky, it was 5 sec, but for Steve it was 70+ years. He left Bucky and lived 70+ years without him. Besides he never said Bucky about his plan (or just desire or whatever), didn't say a proper goodbye, didn't consider it as a betrayal. He just decided to live for himself. By the way Bucky reacted as if it was a big surprise for him and even bigger disappointment. He was anxious during that scene when Steve suddenly didn't show up on the platform. And if you wanna say “Bucky knew it was gonna happen and was happy for his friend” then it's the great time to keep your mouth shut. He obviously wasn't happy with it, and he didn't know. Post-movie interviews don’t count! Don’t tell me that it was off-screen. It’s a MOVIE! If something is important – it’s on the screen and it becomes a canon. Stupid scene in a cafe with selfie and kids IS on the screen, apparently it’s important af and it’s a canon. Fat greasy-haired Thor yells at some gamer in chat – that’s VERY important and it’s a canon. But a talk between best friends when one of them decided to leave the other for good and go to the past doesn’t deserve screen time. Are you sure you set your priorities right? By the way Sebastian asked Russo about this. He thought there would be some dialogue between Steve and Bucky, but director said No, you already had that conversation.

No wonder Bucky didn't approach to Steve and only looked from distance. What can you possibly say to the man who claimed himself your best friend and then easily abandoned you just like that, lived without you for 70+ years and apparently was OK with it.

Steve just goes to Peggy. Because that's how it must be, that's natural, that's happiness. This cliché stuck so deep in the people minds, so they can't see anything behind it. I'm sure that not so many people knows what it actually means, but they believe that it's the right thing.

I might blow few minds now. Here it goes – the closest person is the one who shares with you your life experience, not the bed. NO WAY! I'm not saying than your partner can't be your friend. Spouses are not always the closest friends and the closest friends are not always spouses. You just can't screw up all Steve's emotional baggage that related to Bucky just for Peggy, which was in Steve's life, what, like 15 minutes? Steve knows Bucky since childhood, they were best friends, they supported each other, lived together, protected and saved each other many times. They share the same fate (war, serum, man out of time), there's no one who can be closer. “He loves her so much!” arguments can't erase too much of a history. It just doesn't work that way! You can't exchange one for another. A loved one can't replace your best friend, cuz of damn emotional baggage! You can have both, you can have none, but you can't trade it!

And what about Peggy? CATFA-Peggy was not a good person actually. She's whimsical and eccentric damsel. For example she shoots 1) at the experimental read not properly tested shield 2) with a chance to kill someone by ricochet 3) in enclosed space without ears protection for her or everyone else; she punches a soldier for an inappropriate commentary. And the scene in the bar shows Peggy as a simply impolite person – she ignores the soldier who just got back from captivity, it's very rude, especially when Bucky was polite with her. And on top of this I think she picked interest in Steve only after the serum. I bet Pre-serum-Steve was friendzoned for the rest of his life.

In TV-series though she appears to have a strong personality. She is an interesting character and not just love interest for Steve. She founded the S.H.I.E.L.D., had a happy fulfilled life. She let Steve go. And when she died, Steve let her go. I don't believe for a one second she is the love of his life. Staring at the photo is NOT a depiction of love. Not in my book. It's just a woman Steve once kissed.

So what went wrong? They made such a great Steve's character development, they put so much in his relationship with Bucky. Countless details, shades and layers. Every scene, every dialogue. An all of it just... puff... vanished.

Actually it wasn't so sudden as it seems. First signs of it appeared in Civil war. Did you noticed how the creators put the distance between Bucky and Steve? It's like “Hey guys! You know this whole story gets kinda pansy. We stand for cliché, for heteronormativity and happy ends! Every man got a girl! You can't have best friend, not the same sex, only hetero! So quit with the hugs end eye-fucking, more masculinity! Sebastian, you must get as thick as you can, so nobody could say you're gay. And Steve's gonna make out with a girl, just to be safe”. And this kissing scene is the most awkward I've ever seen. This weird kiss out of the blue, the fact that Sam and Bucky are watching (BTW how often do you stare at your friends kissing? Please, share at the comment section). Even actors call this scene awkward and weird, they basically hate it. And in fact that this scene wasn't it the script, it was added much later.

Then the forced friendship between Bucky and Sam. Moreover, they tried to replace Steve'n'Bucky's friendship with it. Sam rather has a chemistry with Steve, not Bucky. And the way Mackie and Stan here and there together on comic-cons where Mackie acts like he's Stan's BBF and Stan's just embarrassed. This whole all of a sudden friendship thing feels so unnatural and stretched. It's not like I don't wanna Bucky has friends and all, adaptation and stuff, But it doesn't mean Bucky doesn't need Steve, no one can replace him. And it all was only to make their friendship NO HOMO. But the way I see it, there wasn't anything gay about them (BTW I'm not a shipper and not homophobic), just some people have dead opossum's emotional range. In their head the man wants either bang you or kill you, nothing in between. I'm sure nobody took seriously the idea that they make them gay, or that they look like gay. It's just bromance. But noooooooo. They must've done this to them, cuz Happily ever after.

Eventually we got what we got. In Endgame Steve and Bucky are barely shares the screen together, even if they actually next to each other, they don't hug, don't talk, don't even look. Even after Bucky got back from the dust. It's like they never cared for each other.

Steve considered Bucky recovered after being tortured and brainwashed for 70 (it still blows my mind how long it is!) years, he's OK. No one said he's OK though, even Bucky himself. He's still the same wrecked man lost in time and his own head with tremendous weight of guilt and torn apart personality. It's not the same Bucky from 40es, and he never will be. Steve’s the only one who could break through to him, for Bucky Steve is like the ground he stands, the only guide light in this chaos that left of his life. According to Stan – Steve is the only thing that keeps Bucky alive. Well, Bucky, sorry pal, gun or rope?

Steve is an asshole. He thinks he's so special and good enough to rewrite Peggy's life (which was good for Peggy without Steve) just because he wants it. Abandons Bucky, who has nothing but Steve, abandons the world he fought for and called his home, and the friends called family. All this for the woman, who was almost nothing to him especially compared with Bucky and the others. All the things Peggy said in a hospital, all the character development and his words about the man died in the ice, new home and new family – all of it was fucked up, buried under that shit. You need to move on. Until you get a time machine. Then you can go back. So what is it? Maybe Steve never was a hero and hence he doesn't deserve our respect. Or, what is the most likely, creators think we are idiots.

Steve gives the shield to Sam. And I wouldn't mind. Why not. This job definitely is not for Bucky. He's tired, he's semi-stable 100 years old man, he had enough of war for two lifetimes. It's too much for him, it would be cruel for Bucky. Symbolism is a cool thing, but life doesn't work that way. Pep-talks don't heal. Get real, OK? Sam is a new Cap, fine, it's logical. But it's always about the How, not What.

From the moment Bucky sees the old man on the bench til the end of the movie Bucky didn't even think about to approach Steve, he sent Sam instead. They didn't talk, Steve didn't even look at him. This entire scene Bucky has this endless sadness in his eyes. There's a glimpse of a smile when he looks at Sam, but in the moment it's gone. And then it's pain and sorrow on his face again. I don't really see happy Bucky.

Just look at his eyes and tell me you look the same when you’re happy

And actually Steve doesn't sparkle with joy either. He kinda lived his “happy life”, but there's no sign of it, especially that he refused to talk about her.

But it's confirmed information – Peggy's mysterious husband IS Steve Rogers.In the end Bucky got this last slap on his face. Bucky asked himself if he worth all of it. NO. No, Bucky, fuck you.

I find it funny (seriously I don't) that it's the same directors and screenwriters, who did Winter soldier and Civil war. How could they screw it up? One might say “Cuz there's TV-series Falcon and Winter soldier coming, it needs to be this way”.

A few little ideas for ending that wouldn't do any harm.

Behold!

1. If they want Steve out of it, why don't kill him? Canonic, right?

1.1 In final battle Steve is dying. He tried to shield Bucky and dying on his arms. He can give the shield to Bucky, so his broken and lost friend could have purpose in life that helps him to move on. Or he can just die and Bucky takes the shield as something in memory of Steve. And then Bucky gives the shield to Sam, like saying “I've lost it all, I've lost my friend, but you're a good guy and maybe we can become friends sometime”. If it happened like this I could in time accept Sam as a new Cap and Bucky's friend.

1.2 Or perhaps Steve, still dying, gives the shield to Sam.

2. This one is not so good idea, but OK. Steve goes to the past, his a douche. But if you want a TV-series he can’t take Bucky with him. And it's still the same – Steve gives the shield, doesn't matter who would it be (pick anyone you like). But Steve can’t leave without saying goodbye.

Oh my god! It's two of it and we still got the TV show! Fascinating! And there is more of it.

3. Oh that's the good one. The one with the Steve we know and love. Steve stays. Steve goes to the past to return the infinity stones. Steve could allow himself just a moment to be selfish and have that dance with Peggy, or stay for not so long, a year maybe. And then he must go back, knowing that there are people who need him more, than Peggy. Of course if Steve is young, fit and tight, he won't retire. But Sam and Bucky are still with us, they're cool enough to have a TV-show.

4. And what if like this? Shuri did the research to find a way to clear Bucky's head from the Hydra's code. What if she did? Or what if with Hydra's code some memories are gone too? Maybe Bucky could be an antagonist.

And just for me. We don't care about the money, and give Steve and Bucky the final they deserve.

1. Bucky and Steve dying fighting together. The most obvious and sad final. Till the end of the line

2. Bucky dies. It's tragic for Steve and he could say “I've lost it all”, and goes to Peggy. A little OOC, but not so bad.

3. What if we go back to that brain-cleaning option? Steve dies, but Bucky's so broken he can't stand it, and he goes to Shuri so she could wipe up his memory. Tragically and symbolically, cuz first time he was forced to forget Steve's alive, and now he does it voluntarily to forget Steve's dead.

I'm not a screenwriter, and my head's not crowded with ideas. But this is still better than what we've got in the Endgame. I could step on my own throat and accept the Endgame only if Bucky says that Steve is a traitor and he hates him. I'm not saying that Steve doesn't deserve this dance or happy ending. He does. Everybody Does. Everybody've suffered enough. But Steve doesn't deserve to become such an asshole. Bucky doesn't deserve to be forsaken in such a way.

Honestly, I don't care about forced bromance with Sam, or Sharon, even love interest for Bucky (it would be kinda specific I guess). They could do anything, but they can't throw away Bucky and Steve. These characters are alive, their world is real. Sometimes happy ending is impossible. And if you force it, you can ruin everything. And this is what they actually did.

And it just bugs me – why, why did they do this? Maybe it's too much pressure and they screwed up. Or maybe it's Big studio' bosses. You know maybe if they just shut up about it.. time heals you know. But it gets worse. On the interview directors says one thing and screenwriters say the other, they all can't string sentense together. And only Bucky's face speaks for himself. I mean did you see this fresh Sebastian's panel at London comic-con? I’ll show you few moments, but you've got to watch the whole thing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=-KQpzG49exM). When he asks the audience did they like the movie, many people say “No!”, when he approves the final of Endgame one shout “Liar!”. Look at the body language. You'll see how he sincerely and emotionally talks about anything. As soon as it comes to Endgame, he is immediately clamped, his leg begins to twitch.

The previous question was that he was interested in - what kind of heroes he wants to play. Therefore, he sits on the edge of the couch, leaning over to the public. The next question about the final and Steve going to Peggy. He immediately moves and leans back, he covers his belly with hand. The question is unpleasant to him.

Then the speech becomes confused, although before that it flowed freely, he literally gasps as if he doesn't know what to say, his micro-mimic denies his words.

He says he agrees with the final, Bucky is happy, Steve deserves it. But his body screams just the opposite - a sharp wave of his hand and chin say "no"

And this is the worst one. On the words “He (Bucky) was happy,” his whole pose just screams “NO!”. This insincere smile, this tilt of the head and a slight denying swaying. All this says more than any words

It's so obvious that he so tired of it. I bet that under the contract, he has no right to scold the movie and must promote the policy of the studio. But when he said that “Bucky was happy for Steve” .... This is the most forced smile I've ever seen. This is the most unconvincing lie in my memory. You can see just right through it, it's like an open book. But he has to do it, because crossing with the Big Studio Boss when your career just went uphill is not the best idea. The truth is important, but the dream is too. He started the career since the age of 15, which is quite long, considering this is not such a brilliant career, but he definitely worked so hard for it. So he caught between the hammer and an anvil now. On the one hand, acting career is the only thing for him, on the other hand studio bosses who can bury the dream, and on top of it the fans who are looking for his support. So "Steve is happy, Bucky is happy, awesome film, kill me, please!". By the way where is his best buddy Mackie? Why Seb's cleaning this mess all by himself? Seeing him like this just breaks my heart

And I honestly do not understand the people who liked it. How can you not see all this?? And there are those who claim that we didn’t like Endgame because we didn’t see any movies at all and didn’t read comic-books. There are Stucky fans who liked Endgame. Are the clichés so strong that people just don’t see all this... The story of Bucky and Steve was way too deep. Bucky is too tragic and well-developed character for a superhero comic-book story. All this deserved so much more. And the creators simply could not finish the job; mass cinema is simple and flat and it's made that way on purpose. They pull the most primitive triggers, so that people do not have to think. The most simple patterns help to reach more people. In other words, they are doing everything to raise more money. And it works. Thus we’ll get more of it in the future. No doubt about that.

For me, Endgame marked the victory of the corporate moneymaking machine over creativity. And the box office speaks for itself. It's an awful world to live in...

#avengers #avengers endgame #avengersendgame #notmycap #notmysteve #bucky barnes #bucky deserves better #bucky #stucky #endgame #steve rogers

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qwertsypage · 7 years

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Why Kotlin language, Android? Why did Google choose Kotlin ?

Why Kotlin language?

If today I was asked what is one of the characteristics that distinguishes the development of Android applications from the rest of the fields, I would not hesitate to answer that the possibility of executing the same application on devices with a different hardware in a native way is one of them; but … how is this possible? And today I would like to start my series of Kotlin language articles, explaining the language and the benefits of it.

At this point no one is surprised to see the same web application running on any device and on any platform (Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS …), we all know that these applications are slower and more unstable than any native application; but in exchange we only have to develop one application for all platforms. A similar problem would arise when talking about the number of different devices on which Android works right now; and I say would if it wasn’t because of Java. The power of Java and the fact that it is used in billions of devices today, it’s ability to work on any device regardless of its hardware and software, as long as it has an interpreter of the pseudo-compiled code generated by the Java compiler (The official Java interpreter is the Java Virtual Machine, although on Android Dalvik was used in the first versions and ART today).

Does this mean that Java is the solution to all evils? Unfortunately, nothing is further from the truth … Although Java solves the problem of interoperability between devices, it opens a new range of headaches that we would like to be able to remove from the equation, some of them *:

* Note: Many of these problems, although resolved in Java 8 and 9, are not available in the Android SDK below API 24, which makes them practically unusable)

There is no native support for optionals (although we do have it for immutable collections). Although there is the Optional <T> class, its use implies the generation of a large amount of boilerplate code, which we could save if the support for the options was built within the language itself and not as an extension of it.

There is no native support for functional programming: In Java there is the Stream Api (Once again it only has support in Android starting from API 24), but its integration in the language is similar to the one of Optional, it exists poorly in the objects associated with primitive types (IntStream, DoubleStream …), and through a Stream class <T> for all other objects.

Support for anonymous functions (Lambdas). Although Java 8 incorporates support for Lambda functions, these are not first-class citizens; this means that, although we can use lambdas to implement anonymously interfaces with a single method, Java does not support passing functions as arguments to a method. In addition, the lack of type inference makes the statement of Lambdas quite uncomfortable, especially in the attempt to simulate functions such as composition of functions or currying; lack of support for them in the language.

Type nullability: Although this can be included within the section referring to the optional, the dimension of this problem deserves a special mention. How many Java programmers didn’t fill their code with if (foo! = Null) to try to fight the dreaded NullPointerException? (Actually, it’s creator apologised for what he calls a “billion-dollar mistake”) And how many of those check ups are more than patches to avoid a crash in our application?

Binding of manual views: Although this problem is specific to Android as a Platform, and not Java as a language, it is also worth pointing out the amount of boilerplate code needed to obtain a reference to an Android view. Although we have managed to eliminate the hated findViewById (int id) thanks to dataBinding, we still have to store a reference to that binding.

It is more general, but not less important, Java is a very verbose language, it requires writing a large amount of code for any operation, as well as generating a large number of files (one per class). The first problem can lead us to a code more expensive to maintain and more prone to errors. The second is a problem of class proliferation.

Why Kotlin language breaks with all this?

It is for all these reasons that, today, Java is considered as a language that, at least in Android development, does not evolve at the speed that the industry does.

As time passes, the need to have a language with real and native support for everything mentioned above becomes more imperative, as well as maintaining the main feature of Android exposed at the beginning of this article, its ability, writing and compiling a single application, make it work on any device and version of it. In this direction many possibilities have been explored, some of them being the use of Swift or Scala, although none has been very promising.

All this changed with the appearance of Kotlin language. Kotlin is a language designed and developed by Jetbrains, focused on being a modern language, in constant evolution and, above all, that can be executed on the JVM. This makes it a perfect candidate to be used on Android.

To begin to demonstrate it, we can list down all the cons we face with Java and how Kotlin language acts in front of them:

Optionals. They’re built in inside Kotlin, all you have to do is declare the type of a variable ending in a question mark ? so it becomes an optional type. Kotlin language also provides the possibility of safely unwrapping those optionals listener?.onSuccess() without checking if there’s a value for this optional, and also provides the Elvis Operator.

Functional programming: In Kotlin we find native support to work with collections and datasets like Streams. We can directly call .flatMap {} in a collection, as well as .filter {}, .map {}, and many more. The inference of types makes the use of Lambdas especially manageable.

Lambdas and high order functions: The previous point is completed with the fact that in Kotlin language, the functions are first class citizens. We can define functions that receive other functions as parameters. An example of this is the definition of the map function itself:

inline fun <T, R> Iterable.map(transform: (T) -> R): List (source)

Although at first sight this code may seem a bit chaotic, the part that interests us is

transform: (T) -> R

This means, the map function has a parameter called transform, which is itself a function that has an input parameter of type T and returns an object of type R.

Thanks to this native support for lambdas, in Kotlin language we can use the map function such that:

collection.map { item -> aTransformation(item) }

This code snippet will return a collection of elements of the type returned by aTransformation.

Type nullability: In Kotlin language, since there is an integrated support in the language for optionals, we should have the minimum possible number of nullables in our code. But even so, if it exists, Kotlin offers us tools to deal with them easier than in Java. For example we have the operator safe call (?) to avoid NullPointerException when accessing an optional, or with the operator safe cast to protect us in case of wanting to perform a casting. The compiler of Kotlin, in addition, forces to control the types that could have null value, and even introduces runtime checks in case of compatibility with Java code.

Binding of views: This being a specific Android problem, Jetbrains offers us Kotlin Android Extensions; an official support library to simplify this problem (and some other) through a gradle plugin.

Verbosity of language:

Java

Public interface Listener { void success(int result); void error(Exception ex); } Public void someMethod(Listener listener) { int rand = new Random().nextInt(); If (listener != null) { if (rand <= 0) { listener.onError(new ValueNotSupportedException()); } else { listener.success(rand); } } Public void fun(Type1 param1) { param1.someMethod(new Listener() { @Override public void success(int result) { println(“Success” + result); } @Override public void error(Exception ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); } } }

Kotlin

fun someMethod(success: (Int) -> Unit, error: (Exception) -> Unit) { val rand = Random().nextInt() if (rand <= 0) { error(ValueNotSupportedException()) else { success(rand) } }

Or even, using expressions:

fun someMethod(success: (Int) -> Unit, error: (Exception) -> Unit) { val rand = Random().nextInt() if (rand <= 0) error(ValueNotSupportedException()) else success(rand) }

It is up to the reader to decide which of the two snippets is easier to write and interpret.

All the discussed above, along with another large number of features that did not fit in this article or that were not the ones that really matter to us shows us that Kotlin language seems the most promising bet for the next few years in the world of mobile development. In my next articles, we will study more in detail what benefits we get by using Kotlin in Android development and its impact on the industry.

And if you are interested in mobile development, I highly recommend you to subscribe to our monthly newsletter by clicking here.

If you found this article about Kotlin language interesting, you might like…

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Mobile development projects

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MVP pattern in iOS

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inhandnetworks-blog · 7 years

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President Obama Argues for the Need to Concede Privacy at SXSW Keynote

www.inhandnetworks.com

The 30th edition of South by Southwest commenced Friday in Austin, Texas, and to celebrate three decades of existence, the renowned music, film, tech and ideas conference introduced its highest-profile speaker ever: the president of the United States. Inside Dell Hall at the Long Center for Performing Arts, Barack Obama sat down with Texas Tribune editor-in-chief Evan Smith to discuss civic engagement within the tech community. Silicon Valley, of course, has traditionally has been at odds with the government, the most recent example being Apple’s legal dispute with the FBI.

Obama isn’t the most tech-savvy individual—he kept saying “early adapter” instead of “early adopter”—and the most noteworthy tech issue of his time in office is probably the failure of the Affordable Care Act’s website, which Obama says helped inspired the bourgeoning U.S. Digital Service (USDS). During a conference call with the press on Thursday, service director Haley Van Dyck described the USDS as “a network of startups organized across government to help bring about radical change." The service's website describes itself as aiming to transform "how the federal government works for the American people."

Obama can't be faulted for not knowing the ins and outs of how encryptions works, but this is partly why it has been difficult for him to forge a bond with the tech community. His message on Friday was vague and idealistic, calling for civic engagement and stressing that the government is not the enemy. He spoke of how tech can increase voter turnout, improve education and help take down violent extremism. ISIS has a vast online network, and Obama noted that, for several reasons, the government cannot take the lead when it comes to preventing the group from getting through to young people.

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“You figure out how we can reach young people who might be vulnerable to extremist messages,” he said, speaking to the tech community. “You tell us—based on the analytics and the data and the algorithms that you’re working with on a daily basis to sell products—what is it that’s really going to penetrate? How can we amplify powerful stories that are already taking place so that they’re on platforms that can reach as many people as possible?”

What hovered over the proceedings, however, was the ongoing dispute between Apple and the FBI, a glaring example of the discord between the tech industry and the government. The issue didn’t come up in his interview with Smith, but when it came time for Obama to answer questions submitted by Texas Tribune readers, the case was the first issue the site's editor-in-chief asked him to address, broadening the question to where he stands on the idea of “balancing the need for law enforcement to conduct investigations and the needs of the citizens to protect their privacy.”

Obama responded by pointing out that we have always conceded our privacy in small ways to ensure that the government can do it’s job, noting that law enforcement can tear apart someone’s house searching for evidence if they were suspected of child abduction or a terrorist plot. We concede to have our bags searched at the airport for good reason, we concede to drunk driving checkpoints for good reason, and these concessions need to extend into our digital worlds as well.

“Part of us preventing terrorism, or preventing people from disrupting the financial system, or the air traffic control system, or a whole other set of systems that are increasingly digitized, is that hackers, state or non-state, can’t just get in there and mess them up,” Obama said. “We have two values, both of which are important, and the question we now have to ask is if it is technologically possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there is no key, that there is no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we disrupt a terrorist plot? What mechanisms do we have available? Even with simple things like tax enforcement—if in fact you can’t crack that at all, if the government can’t get in, then everybody’s walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket.”

He continued, “My conclusion so far is you cannot take an absolutist view on this. If your argument is strong encryption no matter what, that we can and should create black boxes, that I think does not strike the kind of balance that we have lived with for 200, 300 years. It is fetishizing our phones above every other value. That can’t be the right answer.”

The right answer, Obama says, is to create a system of encryption that is as strong as possible while still being accessible to the smallest number of people necessary to ensure the country is kept safe. This is easier said than done, especially given that the rift between the tech industry and the government only appears to be growing wider and wider as tech companies grow in influence. How to achieve this, Obama does not know. He is not a software engineer, as he mentioned earlier in the interview. He came to SXSW to try to reach out to the innovators and call on them to actively consider these issues. But not only did he reach out, he cautioned as to what could happen if that gap is not bridged.

“I’m confident this is something that we can solve, but we’re in need of the tech community, software designers, people who care deeply about this stuff to help us solve it,” he said. “Because what will happen if everybody goes to their respective corners and the tech community says, ‘You know what? Either we have strong, perfect encryption or else it’s [a] big brother, Orwellian world,’ what you’ll find is that after something really bad happens, the politics of this will swing and it will become sloppy and rushed and it will go through Congress in ways that have not been thought through, and then you really will have a danger in terms of civil liberties, because the people who understand this best and care most about privacy and civil liberties will have disengaged, or taken a position that is not sustainable for the general public as a whole over time.”

It might not come to that, but the prospect of real collaboration between the private tech sector and the government looks bleak. Obama can reach out all he wants, but the current reality of Silicon Valley’s relationships with the government is Apple’s dispute with the FBI, which is only driving an even bigger wedge between government and tech. It’s going to take a lot more than an SXSW keynote to bring them closer.

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itchy-archive · 7 years

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Playing ideology | Essay for Videogames as socialcultural phenomenon

Introduction

Primary idea behind this text is searching for way to express my understanding how games are reflected by contemporary ideologies. For this purpose I chose text Games of Empire : Global Capitalism and Video Games - which promised arguments based on Marxist’s perspectives at first glance. This perceiving gives me ground for critical thinking about contemporary experience but I don’t consider such ideology as essentially my own although very useful. I preferred Neo-Marxist theoretics instead of pro Capitalism theoretics of Austrian School because they are strictly economic or Objectivism theoretics which constitutes art in very limited boundaries and hence doesn’t deal witch vast amount of cultural complexities as Marxist tradition does.

What is empire?

“There is no alternative” | Margaret Thatcher

Authors use concept of Empire based on Hardt and Negri’s works Empire and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire which introduces concept of Empire. “What distinguishes Hardt and Negri’s Empire from these earlier empires is that it is not directed by any single state. Rather, it is a system of rule crystallized by what Karl Marx called the “world market.” Empire is governance by global capitalism. This domination works, Hardt and Negri say, through “network power”. Its decentered, multilayered institutional agencies include nation-states but extend to include multinational corporations, like Microsoft and Sony, world economic bodies, like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, international organizations like the United Nations, and even nongovernmental organizations, like the Red Cross. What results from the interaction of these nodes is an imperium more comprehensive than any preceding one.” In such way are clearly established two interlinked agencies, states and organizations. But another argument is in play. Embodied idea behind Empire is there is no outside to it. “They claim we are witnessing the emergence of a new planetary regime in which economic, administrative, military, and communicative components combine to create a system of power “with no outside” .

This idea resonate in contemporary left thinkers like Mark Fisher in constitution of term Capitalistic Realism. In his book bearing same name, which acts as guide in contemporary capitalistic criticism, he argues that Fukuyama’s The End of History made thru emergence of liberal democracies and capitalistic market brought ideal of human history and such ideal is broadly accepted in our cultural unconsciousness. Fisher’s argument comes from Žižek’s Lacanial psychoanalysis. My own experience with mainstream media construction of subjectivity correlate with such conclusion. Mainstream narrative refer to capitalistic excesses in sense of flaws of individuals, not in sense of structural or ideological criticism which is used against well known old or new enemies as Radical Islamists, Maoists, Bolsheviks etc. Once democracy and capitalism are established, state and capitalistic policies are open to alternation thru established processes, but thinking outside of capitalistic box is observed as radical. In psychological terms living in system of power with no outside establish cynicism as preferable way to perceive idealism, there is not other political ideal then one you are living in. End of ideology brought ubiquitous ideology of capitalism. God bless Marxist publishing industry and commodification.

Empire thus deal with more then geopolitical power it deals with social subjects which is it based on. It offers “... comprehensive account of conditions of work, forms of subjectivity, and types of struggle in contemporary capital. Empire is global in terms not only of its geographic reach but also of its social scope. Capital now taps its subjects’ energies at multiple points: not just as workers (as labor power) but also as consumers (the “mind share” targeted by marketers), as learners (university degrees as vocational preparation), and even as a source of raw materials (the bio-value extracted for genetic engineering). Empire is thus a regime of “biopower”— a concept borrowed from the philosopher Michel Foucault — exploiting social life in its entirety.”

Immaterial labor in Empire

Hard and Negri used for their analysis term immaterial labor. It is such work which involve information and communication, “the labor that produces the informational, cultural, or affective element of the commodity” . Immaterial labor is work that “creates immaterial products such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship or an emotional response. It is not primarily about making a material object, like the work that makes a car roll off an assembly line or extracts coal from a mine. Rather, immaterial labor involves the less-tangible symbolic and social dimensions of commodities.”

We can find wide range of immaterial labor, from coordinational and tutoring and lecturing labor thru working with symbolic languages as programmers to journalistic, artistic or advertisements proffesions. Core of immaterial labor is production of subjectivity, which vital for Empire because “central media, marketing, communication, and surveillance are, not just in creating new commodities— such as video games— but also in managing the workplaces that produce them and in appealing to the consumers who buy them. It is through the fiber-optic cables and wireless connections of digital networks run by immaterial labor that the tendrils of business stretch around the planet, the equivalents for today’s Empire of the Roman roads that tied together Caesar’s dominion”. As such immterial labor is hegemonic form of work in the global capitalism, because it lies in most dynamic a strategic sectors of capitalism.

Empire of authors

Authors of games of Empire slightly modulated concept of Hardt’s and Negri’s Empire, hence it didn’t missed wave of criticism. By Empire they mean “the global capitalist ascendancy of the early twenty first century, a system administered and policed by a consortium of competitively collaborative neoliberal states, among whom the United States still clings, by virtue of its military might, to an increasingly dubious preeminence. This is a regime of biopower based on corporate exploitation of myriad types of labor, paid and unpaid, for the continuous enrichment of a planetary plutocracy. Among these many toils, immaterial labor in information and communication systems, such as the media, is not necessarily most important. But it clearly occupies a strategic position because of its role in intellectually and affectively shaping subjectivities throughout other parts of the system. This Empire is an order of extraordinary scope and depth. Yet it also is precarious.”

In such definition they feathered importance of immaterial labor, which was as another genre of labor vastly criticised by scholars. But kept essentiality in production of subjectivity. Also they stressed different interlocking crises as ecological, energetic and epidemilogical and tensions between declining US and rising China which could either result in supercapitalist accommodation or split world in Eastern and Western empires.

Multitude

Such political, cultural and ecological tensions bring last subject of Empire which is multitude. Multitude means pro and contra movements in Empire. In Negri’s and Hardt’s work multitude is only way how to transform reality of capitalism into something new, it is soil of change, soil where resistance can emerge and create something new. Although they restrain from precise definition of multitude, multitude is not meant in positive or negative connotations. It is space for transformation from beloew, brewery of new idealism. It contains disastrous regressive forces as alQaueda and at same time justice movements, emancipation or whatever. Chaos of multitude is place for ideology of games. For me it is place where subjectivities clash hence it is place for battle of ideologies.

Empire and games

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” | Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

Games are exemplary media of Empire. “They crystallize in a paradigmatic way its constitution and its conflicts. Just as the eighteenth century novel was a textual apparatus generating the bourgeois personality required by mercantile colonialism (but also capable of criticizing it), and just as twentieth century cinema and television were integral to industrial consumerism (yet screened some of its darkest depictions), so virtual games are media constitutive of twenty-first-century global hypercapitalism and, perhaps, also of lines of exodus from it.”

Games are integral for Empire because they are originated in U.S. military-industrial complex. They have been created in free-minded hacker knowledge community, which emerged as new type of intellectual worker: immaterial labor. Which was vital for fresh phase of capitalistic expansion. Such culture was incubator for most advanced ways to production and communication and game machines tutored entire generations into digital technologies and networked communication.

“The game industry has pioneered methods of accumulation based on intellectual property rights, cognitive exploitation, cultural hybridization, transcontinentally subcontracted dirty work, and world-marketed commodities. Game making blurs the lines between work and play, production and consumption, voluntary activity and precarious exploitation, in a way that typifies the boundless exercise of biopower. At the same time, games themselves are an expensive consumer commodity that the global poor can access only illicitly, demonstrating the massive inequalities of this regime. Virtual games simulate identities as citizensoldiers, free-agent workers, cyborg adventurers, and corporate criminals: virtual play trains flexible personalities for flexible jobs, shapes subjects for militarized markets, and makes becoming a neoliberal subject fun. And games exemplify Empire because they are also exemplary of the multitude, in that game culture includes subversive and alternative experiments searching for a way out.”

Such positive statements are hard to accept in memory of Guy Debord’s criticism in Society of Spectacle. What is meaning of subversive subjectivity when “it is obvious that no idea can lead beyond the existing spectacle, but only beyond the existing ideas about the spectacle. To effectively destroy the society of the spectacle, what is needed is men putting a practical force into action.” Or are words of game developer Pedercini from Culture Jamming: “We often claim that it is important for us not to produce games to entertain radical people, but doing radical games.” really enough to get from spectacle to real action.

Are we realizing détournement or recuperating? Is subversiveness enough to bring man into action or is another form of mere representation of spectacle in which he dreams his dream about real action? Recuperation, cultural appropriation and commodification can be clearly seen in capitalistic ever-lasting life cycle.. Music and culture from which it came from like jazz, rock’n’roll, punk, rap, rave lost edge of subversive nature. They are no longer bear threatening criticism. Radicality is always coming from outside and is slowly transformed into spectacle and commodity. In such context it is sticky to admit such positive perspective, but quite acceptable is idea that games are protagonists of multitude who tries to wake up man for act outside of spectacle.

Empire and war

“In their structure and content, computer games are a capitalist and deeply conservative form of culture” | Julian Stallabrass

However innovations created in hacker community proved to be impossible to control. In the hands of the immaterial laborers who made them, the communications and information technologies created for the military-security state were subverted into playful expressions of digital delight. The irony, however, was that in liberating computers, and games, from the Pentagon, “deterritorializing” them from the realm of nuclear death, hackers inadvertently set the stage for their “reterritorialization” by capital in pure commodity form.

But apart from commodification, games still incorporates and exemplifies war-fighting apparatus of Empire, “in ways that render developers and players material partners in military technoculture, and Defense Departments' systemic cullers of gamer subjectivities: this is what makes virtual play integral to "banal war," the normalized state of perpetual conflict Empire's global control demands.” Connections between simulators and pilotless armored Drones or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicle) used in Iraq, interfaces used in military technologies resembling and exploiting pre-military gamer skill of soldiers are on plate at first glance.But such ubiquitous manifestation of normality of conflict and war have no better bearer then games.

War in empire is “waged not to resolve disputes between states but to maintain order within a global territory where there seem to be minor and elusive enemies everywhere”. Unlike wars between two nation states ended by formal surrender or negotiation, there is rarely a definitive moment of victory over today’s foes, so that one cannot win such a war, or, rather, it has to be won again every day; war thus becomes a permanent social relation, a general phenomenon.” In such diffusal situation war doesn’t have strict limits. In sense of security boundaries between civilian policing and war fighting blur. “The separation of tasks between the external and internal arms of power (between the army and the police, the CIA and the FBI) is increasingly vague and indeterminate.” This produces state of exception that is, “an exceptional, but ongoing, suspension or erosion of civil rights, declared necessary for the preservation of democracy itself. This environment of nebulous, dispersed, and protracted conflict means that quasi-war conditions tend to become a way of life—the new normal. War organizes not just military forces abroad but civilian life at home. War has, in other words, become a regime of biopower, as daily life and the normal functioning of power [have] been permeated with the threat and violence of warfare”

“The socialization necessary for populations to endure and endorse such an ongoing condition of life brings us to the concept of banalized war. In this situation, war becomes part of the culture of everyday life, with the enemy depicted as an absolute threat to the ethical order and reduced to an object of routine police repression. The long-standing interaction of video game culture and the military apparatus is a component in this process of the banalization of war.”

Authors analysed game Full Spectrum Warrior which embodies culture industry obedience to War on Terror and reproduction of state’s paranoias. Digital games and military simulations have shared same genealogy. Commercial sector overpowered military simulations and after 9/11 attacks, military contacted entertainment industry in order to produce sophisticated trained aids for their soldiers. Full Spectrum Warrior has been released in military and commercial version. Term Full Spectrum is coming from military terminology and means new concept of scalable warfare across full spectrum of military technologies. Primary purpose is to train decisions in such scalable warfare, and give experience to soldier about perspective from higher hierarchical rank, where more than 8 persons are commanded.

Full Spectrum Warrior use as background geopolitical situation based on contemporary mainstream media as CNN. Position of warrior is on our good side, actually one of the friendly troops have helmet with NYPD on it, which kind of express idea of global police. In the game reason behind intervention in virtual scenario is based on UN unresolved problems and NATO voted to intervene. Name of country in need for intervention is Zekistan which is quite self explicate. Whole background ideology is summarised by one one troop “I think just by being here we help.”

Troops in games are embodied “In their mix of ethnicities and classes, Alpha and Bravo are an equal opportunity paradigm. Of their eight members, three are Caucasian, two black, one Arab, and one Polynesian. There are four high-school diploma holders, one graduate from university (pre-law), two from college, and one from police academy. Though painfully programmatic in its inclusiveness, this is actually a semiplausible representation of a combat squad in the actual contemporary army, which is “in essence a working class military,” enlisted from people who are “upwardly mobile,” but from families “without the resources to send them to college”. With “minorities overrepresented and the wealthy and underclass essentially absent,” its composition resembles that of “a two year commuter or trade school outside Birmingham or Biloxi.” Alpha and Bravo are somewhat better educated, and more” In narrative troops are buddies and enemies are nameless and usually faceless, there is no place for enemy as human being.

“That video games are too violent is a common claim. But Full Spectrum Warrior (FSW) is perhaps not violent enough. … It is essential to FSW that time can be reversed, and every mistake undone; the “savedie-restart” sequence makes Alpha and Bravo immortal. This is, of course, the big lie of war-as-video-game.” This argument surprised me, i usually deal with games as with other cultural artifacts, i don’t care about realism, i care about meanings, and game over means death for soldier very clearly. But important point in game is in not violent enough attitude. Represented violence usually lacks brutality of reality, violence is usually something which you experience in its aesthetical and emotional impact is vast and raw. Especially once you realise you couldn’t witness whole squad annihilation, which is actually possible option in real world but not in context of game which work by rule: “The U.S. Army has zero tolerance for casualties! This is war where no one lies for hours gut-shot and shrieking for his mother; has his testicles blown off; or wakes in the hospital finding he has lost a limb. It is war without mutilation or post-traumatic stress disorder. It is also war without moral dilemmas.”

Such lackness of externalities is from my standpoint crucial for capitalistic society. Pain, enemy as human being is not really part of narratives, they are usually based on conservative rhetorics afronting mainstream values instead of simply accepting moral seriousness of killing someone with all inner consequences for rest of life. I therefore end this essay with two quotes: “But the interesting example that I always bring up is Rwanda. A lot of my friends were really angry that we didn’t do something there. These are really liberal, typically anti-war people. And I wonder if they realize that if we had gone into Rwanda—a very good war from a moral standpoint, most people would probably agree—I wonder if they realize that you would have had soldiers at checkpoints at night firing in panic at civilians, slaughtering people by accident. You’d have all sorts of terrible things happening. And I think that the problem with American society is we don’t really understand what war is. Our understanding of it is too sanitized.” In spectacle, it is hard to find accurate representation of ongoing stream of life, we are always watching thru idelogies. "Real rule of war is that the people who suffer the most are civilians." Such subjetification is still waiting for game production.

Bibliography

Bainbridge, William. The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds in Science 317, 2007 http://files.harc.edu/WWW/About/Internships/2007/ScienceArticle.pdf

Barnes, Trevor J. Review of Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games.

http://www.geog.ubc.ca/~tbarnes/pdf/REVIEW_Games_of_Empire.pdf

Debord, Guy. The Society of Spectacle. 1967. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA). BAA 07-56 Deep Green Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). 2007.

http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/files/PUB_BAA_DARPA_07-56_Deep_Green.pdf

Dyer-Witheford, Nick and Peuter, Greig de. Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism. in Ctheory.net http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=608

Dyer-Witheford, Nick and Peuter, Greig de. Games of Empire : Global Capitalism and Video Games. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Access from NKP:

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/natl/docDetail.action?docID=10408965

Fisher, Mark. Kapitalistický realismus. Rybka Publishers, 2010.

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001

http://www.angelfire.com/cantina/negri/HAREMI_printable.pdf

Levitz, Jennifer. Playing the Market, These Kids Are Losing a Lot of Play Money in The Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2009

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122523644863577999.html

Pedercini, Paolo. An Interview with Paolo Pedercini of Molleindustria http://www.culture-jamming.de/interviewVIIe.html

Poole, Steven. Working for the Man: Against the Employment Paradigm in Videogames.

http://stevenpoole.net/trigger-happy/working-for-the-man/

Simon, Bart. Critical Theory, Political Economy and Game Studies: A Review of "Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. in Game studies http://gamestudies.org/1102/articles/simon

Wright, Evan. Into Iraq With 'Generation Kill': An Interview with Evan Wright.

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minjukim013 · 8 years

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Think piece: Understanding “Netflix and Chill”

In 2009, one Twitter user uploaded a casual post on his account: “I’m about to log onto Netflix and chill for the rest of the night.” Little did he know that he would become the first person to say the phrase “Netflix and Chill” that would become an internet sensation in following years. In 2015, “Netflix and Chill” became a meme and a slang that swept the web, now used as a code for having a sexual affair rather than watching Netflix. This “Netflix and Chill” phenomenon is an interesting example that illustrates for both Berger’s and Hall’s analysis on the construction of meaning, representation, and the media. This essay will explore how technology affects the way we consume and appreciate images in 21st century, especially focusing on the formation of discourse around web-based images.

One of the central concepts in Berger’s “Way of Seeing” is the complex relationship between technology and Art, specifically about the impact of mechanical reproduction on traditional Art world. For example, he argues that the invention of camera enabled the isolation of momentary appearances and therefore destroyed the idea that images were timeless, virtually changing the way men saw the world (Berger 18). Camera’s ability to reproduce a painting destroys the uniqueness of its image, forcing its meaning to be fragmented and multiplied (18). However, this does not mean that mechanical reproduction of image irrevocably harms the authority of the image. On the contrary, Berger argues that there is a newly convened religiosity that “surrounds original works of art, which … has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible” (Berger 23). Furthermore, some Art Historians believe that the birth of impression was partly catalyzed by the invention of camera. They argue that the mechanic reality of photograph forced painters to explore new ways of depicting the world, encouraging them to express more emotion and humanness that machines cannot capture.

While some of these arguments are open to further debate, it is true that for hundreds of years, media technology has brought immense change in the way humans understand and interact with the world. Especially, as Berger notes, “[w]hat the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority of art and to remove it from any preserve. For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free” (Berger 32). For Hall, evolution of images means evolution of languages. This is because he believes that “[a]ny sound, word, image or object which functions as a sign, and is organized with other signs into a system which is capable of carrying and expressing meaning is … a language” (Hall 5). Furthermore, Hall explains that language produces knowledge by defining and limiting our understanding of the world. Discourse disciplines us by creating rules of what is normal and abnormal, acceptable and unacceptable, desirable and undesirable, and so on. Based on this theory, as new media technology develops, new discourses form and redefine the way we see and position ourselves in the world.

“Ways of Seeing” was published in 1972. Since then, means of communication and representation has transformed drastically. The prevalence of world wide web, personal handheld devices, social network services, and many other platforms have revolutionized the way people access information. Images and information started to reach millions of people in a second in a way that traditional magazines, newspapers, films could not. Therefore, it is worth speculating the relationship between the development of media technology and the discourse around it.

It is highly relevant to revisit Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Massage” when discussing the impact of media. In his book, he describes that “[m]edia, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act — the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.” In essence, McLuhan believes that the medium itself is as important as the content that the medium delivers. According to him, seeing a Mona Lisa in the Louvre, in a magazine, in a film, or on a website are completely different experiences. Recently, a magazine called Quartz released a shocking statistics that an average American spend 7.5 hours a day staring at some kind of screens – televisions, laptops, PC, phones, tablets, etc. How does this 21st century lifestyle – completely inundated with digital images – reflect the way we live our daily lives?

Before the age of Netflix (and the propagation of personal computers, without which Netflix could not succeed), movie watching was generally a public activity to some extent. You had to go to the movie theatre and sit next to dozens of people to watch a film. Even when videotapes and DVDs became popular, they usually required viewers to sit in a living room and watch the film on a television. Furthermore, they required viewers to purchase or borrow individual films, which forced them to interact with video shop vendors as well. On the contrary, Netflix is all about personalization and private viewing. The site analyzes your taste and suggests films you might like. It remembers the exact place you left off and shows you where to continue. You can watch your favorite shows and films right from your bed, without having to worry about going out to the theatre or family members passing by the living room. Considering how the most natural place to watch Netflix is on your own bed in a private room, it is not surprising how “Netflix and Chill” became a slang for “date night turning into a sexual affair.”

Simply put, “Netflix and Chill” reflects a new culture around consuming films. It is an idea that film watching is a personal and private activity, so readily available that you can choose any time and place to watch them. However, it is important to realize that Netflix is just an example that reflects a broader discourse around consuming images and information, not just films. It represents a growing power of individuals who consume and utilize visual information. Just like a Netflix user can browse through thousands of movies in their own room, average user of the internet can access trillions of images at one’s disposal. It is a completely different dynamic compared to when consumers had to rely on magazines, newspapers, televisions, or books for their only source of information. Now, people are developing novel ways to navigate through the plethora of information, communicate with each other, and express themselves online — whether it be a meme culture, social network services, or a “favorite” bookmark on Netflix. They are adapting to the new technology faster than ever, getting more and more used to the speed which information travels. Perhaps the new discourse in this age might be the very speed and fluidity of discourse, too fast and ever-changing to be defined by any one discourse.

#writing

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