typebarmagazine

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In these subversions there is nothing so commanding, right, or natural in the powers that be that a child cannot toss them aside.

—Carrie-Edmund Laben, Ritual & Responsibility: Subversion in The Wasp Factory and We Have Always Lived in the Castle

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Architect Mario: Video Game Cities and Lost American Urbanism

By Addison Del Mastro

The first time I remember meeting Zess was by accident; she lost her contact lenses, and I accidentally stepped on them. A quick run to the store patched that up, and every time I ran into her as I passed through town, she’d chat with me briefly, though she was a little standoffish. At some point she invited me to her home, which doubled as a sort of unlicensed restaurant, where she got to enjoy her passion for cooking without the trouble of running a full business. The twist was that I would bring her the ingredients, and she’d work her magic with them. After a couple of visits, she even made a recipe that she hadn’t made in years, since her husband had tragically died. All that because of the proximity we shared in town.

I met a fellow who runs a small business on Main Street, and because I grew up right outside town and visited often, I’d always stop by his place. At first it was just chatting about business and whatever was going on in town—mostly, a big and controversial redevelopment project involving the town’s historic hotel. It turned out we shared an interest in development and housing issues, and our chats would involve big ideas (from me) and bits of insider town news (from him). I felt like a detective questioning a guy on the street: “Say, know anything about that building that just went up for sale?” After awhile, my connection with this business owner led to me meeting the mayor, who gave me a tour of the big construction site and took me to the basement of the town’s little newsstand/convenience store to see a piece of history: an old manhole that opened to the basement where the store—an oyster house many, many decades ago—received deliveries of ice and oysters.

One of these is a true story. The other is a side quest arc from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. The more you think about it, the more striking it is how much the NPC interactions and side quests in video games feel like a busy, full urban life.

You could describe civically involved small-town or city-neighborhood life as “living life like a video game protagonist,” as a commenter on one of my articles put it. In other words, you can imagine the business owners and important people in your town as the NPCs or villagers, and you can see the chats you have, questions you ask, errands and favors you do, as real-life side quests.

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No Country for Cringe Men: Remembering the Channel Awesome Anniversary Trilogy

By Christopher Sloce

From bedroom pop to Tommy Wiseau, amateurism in pop culture carries its own charm. If there’s any reason the amateurism of Doug Walker invites so much fascination, it’s because of how much Walker curdled that natural charm by creating some of the worst, most uniquely nasty films ever made. Films so infamous they turned a popular internet reviewer into a reviled piece of internet lore–Grendel wearing a red tie and a white t-shirt.

Despite Walker’s inability to write a joke, he initially rose to fame for a web comedy series called The Nostalgia Critic he created in 2007. Walker, as adept at acting as he was at all things comical, starred as the titular character. The series, however, had one thing going for it: late aughts internet video consumers needed an angry guy who screeched at cartoons to go along with their angry guys who yelled at video games.

Walker settled into a then-fertile niche, simultaneously pushing 80s & 90s nostalgia, faux-outrage, and jokes so Reddit-y they’d make even the surliest narwhal bacon at midnight. Doug Walker was our Nostalgia Critic not because he was uniquely charismatic or insightful, but because his nostalgia was our nostalgia. He remembered it so we didn’t have to. 

What kept Doug from falling by the cultural wayside, compared to other angry Internet reviewers, was ambition. A hit web series wasn’t enough. 

Walker founded a video hub of internet reviewers called That Guy With the Glasses (which eventually became Channel Awesome). The site hosted reviewers of various media formats, but mostly promoted The Nostalgia Critic and Doug Walker’s other projects like Bum Reviews and Ask That Guy With the Glasses.

Walker celebrated the site’s first anniversary innocently enough, with a crossover episode featuring his kayfabe rival, the Angry Video Game Nerd. The battle between the Nostalgia Critic and the Nerd became pitched as a battle between Gamers and Critics. This sort of small-fry fanservice internet video is cringey, but over in twenty minutes. 

The next year, Walker rang in the site’s anniversary with a full-length movie, Kickassia (2010) . Two more, Suburban Knights (2011) and To Boldly Flee (2012), would follow. It was this trilogy that would lead to Doug’s legend, a legend that includes his fall from such great heights, when his former collaborators released an open letter called “Not So Awesome”, detailing the alleged incompetence and horrible business culture of Channel Awesome. Suddenly, the movies weren’t just cringe. They were evidence. 

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Sworn Brothers: The Connection Between Theater and Gaming

By Anna C. Webster

I spent a lot of time in basements as a kid. 

Where I grew up, many homes were built into the side of a hill due to the lack of level ground, so they often had basements that opened up into the back yard. One such basement contained my childhood bedroom. But another, arguably one that shaped who I would become even more so, was the basement where our local community theater group rehearsed. 

Maryanne’s basement was magical. Not because it was expertly decorated or even particularly lavish, but because of where it could take you. That basement quickly fell away once rehearsal started, and suddenly you were in Neverland, or Narnia, or interwar Austria. I started acting at age 8, and I truly believe it’s what would ultimately lead me to go on to write video games (possibly more than my English degree).

If you know me, you’ve likely already heard my soapbox about the similarities between theater and games. Theater has fewer degrees of separation from video games than even film or television. There are the more obvious parallels: roles within a theater company mirror that of a dev team. There are actors, directors, lighting artists, set designers/level designers, costume workers/tech artists, and engineers. Everyone works together from their respective disciplines to tell the many facets of a story. And while you could argue that film and television do similar things, theater and games are closer kin because of their unique relationship between the media itself and its viewer. 

Theater is an art form wherein the viewer has undertaken an unspoken social contract. There are certain theoretical conventions that the audience has opted into (or rather, out of) when they have taken their seats in the house and the lights begin to dim. The components of this social contract are vast and varied, but there’s one critical concept that theater and games use like none other.

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Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman, and the Horror of False Freedom

By June Martin

Near the end of Hangsaman, a 1951 novel by Shirley Jackson, protagonist Natalie Waite stands on the railing of a bridge and stares down at the water, contemplating jumping and finding death after returning from the culmination of a psychotic episode in the woods. Her moment of suicidal contemplation is interrupted by a man pulling her back to earth, and the urge passes. She looks toward the women’s college, a Bennington analogue where she’s spent the last several months of her life. The final paragraph of the novel reads, “The reassuring bulk of the college buildings showed ahead of her, and she looked fondly up at them and smiled. As she had never been before, she was now alone, and grown-up, and powerful, and not at all afraid.” To take this statement on its face is to enjoy the warmth of a coming-of-age accomplishment, but Shirley Jackson is best known for horror and there is horror to be found here. It lies in the reading that Natalie truly has integrated this self-knowledge, that she has expanded herself, and that even this irrationality and madness was all accounted for in an expansive rationality represented by her father. It is not merely that she fails to escape, or chooses not to escape, but that the only escape available to her was suicide because everything else can be digested by rationality.

On the first page of the novel, Arnold Waite, Natalie’s father, declares, “I am God,” as part of a joke he frequently makes in order to belittle his wife’s belief in God. Shortly after, we are introduced to a weekly ritual that underpins the relationship between Natalie and her father: she submits her writing to him, and he rigorously critiques both her prose and her mode of thinking with all the authority that he possesses as a professional critic and writer of some renown–though with only a single book to his name. He critiques her thoughts and demands total honesty from her, offering her no privacy except for what she calls “the farther places of her mind,” in which she engages in fantasies of travel to strange countries or the interrogation of a detective.

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Outta the Pool: Remembering the Adult Swim Live Streams

By Chris LaVigna

On its face, Adult Swim should not exist. It’s a programming block that started airing after midnight on a cable channel for kids. Its antecedent was Space Ghost Coast To Coast, a mixed-media talk show that starred a largely forgotten cartoon superhero, deliberately edited to be as disorienting and off-putting as possible. When the block launched properly in late September 2001, it came out swinging with Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a show which concerned sentient fast food products getting into non-adventures at eleven minutes a pop. 

One aspect of Adult Swim’s programming that cemented its image, more than the shows it aired, was the way it made use of its “bumps,” those little graphic interstitials between the shows and the ads. For almost the entirety of its run, Adult Swim has employed black screens with a white Helvetica Neue Condensed Black font, often speaking directly to the viewer in the same tone your shit-talking friend employs to let you know they appreciate you, while also roasting every single one of your life choices.

And yet, in spite of its insanely niche sensibilities, Adult Swim slowly but surely grew in popularity, taking up more and more of Cartoon Network’s runtime, exposing the next wave of artists like Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim, Eric Andre, Wham City Comedy, Current SNL cast highlight Sarah Sherman (aka Sarah Squirm), and Adam Reed (co-creator of Sealab 2021 and creator of the hit FX series Archer) to the masses. We even have them to thank for the formation of one of the biggest hip hop acts of 2010s. They also helped spread the gospel of The Room, Tommy Wiseau’s tour-de-force of filmmaking incompetence, by airing it in its entirety as an April Fool’s Day prank (twice!). The block’s sardonic, offbeat voice has influenced an entire generation of American humor, and continues to be discovered by younger audiences.The main tastemaker of the block was Mike Lazzo, who served as the President of Adult Swim from its inception in 2001 until his retirement in December 2019.

Given Lazzo and company’s penchant for experimentation, it’s no surprise that in the early 2010s, Adult Swim began drifting from the stagnant waters of the swimming pool that was its main linear broadcast, and waded into the rapid rivers of the then-nascent world of internet video live streaming.

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Rabbits with Eyeliner: Gender and Prosocial Education in LEGO Sets

By Gwen C. Katz

Being an American adult of a certain age, I own a lot of LEGO. They were a standard Christmas-and-birthday gift throughout my childhood (space LEGOs were the favorite), and we still pick up a couple of new sets every year.

Continual evolution is one of the key’s to LEGO’s longstanding success. New lines get introduced and retired on the regular. But in the past few years, a subtle but marked trend has popped up that denotes a major shift in the company’s history. We see it in sets like Beach Cleanup and Dog Rescue Center. In a deeply unusual move, LEGO is releasing sets that actively promote engaged prosocial civic behavior. There are now LEGO sets that not only model things you could do, but things you should do.

Why is LEGO telling us to pick up garbage? And who is LEGO telling to pick up garbage? On one level, of course, the answer is “anyone who wants a sea otter figure, ie, everyone.” But to really answer the question, we need to examine the lines involved, which requires us to step back and look at LEGO’s history—specifically, its complex history with gender. In this article, I’ll be focusing specifically on two LEGO lines: LEGO City and LEGO Friends.

In LEGO’s early days in the mid-20th century, it was simply a building toy, similar to Erector sets and other popular toys of the era. You could build things with it, but there was a limited amount of play you could do with the completed car or house (or jumble of bricks a child likes to pretend is a car or house). Then came two major changes. First, in 1975, LEGO introduced the minifig. It was now possible for LEGO sets to have stories and characters—which meant that LEGO had to make a proactive decision about which stories and which characters. 

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The Death of The F*ck: Neopuritanism and Commercial Fiction

By Emily Lynell Edwards

By most accounts, there’s never been a sexier time to be a reader. The romance genre is making so much bank there’s a romance-only bookstore boom. The fae are so hot in A Court of Frost and Starlight frigid Republicans are trying to ban people reading about them.  “Romantasy” is officially in, (although, I’m begging y’all to work on that name). Colleen Hoover, queen of shocking plot twists is a New York Times Best Seller. You’re looking for a book where the heroine fucks a door? Don’t worry, we have you covered. 

Yet, I smell a rat. There’s something sinister going on in our reading culture behind glowing headlines extolling the romance genre’s success. It’s not merely playing out in our legislatures, but on BookTok, the side of the app devoted to discussion of books and reading, and in literary criticism. Other writers have clocked the trend in television and film; “that everyone is beautiful, and no one is horny.” While the romance genre ostensibly seems replete with smut, this trend of neopuritanism is coming to a bookstore near you. And it’s not only championed by far-right politicians but readers themselves. Readers are arguing for a return to “clean,” classical literature focusing on “pain, love, passion, and deep thoughts,” which apparently is antithetical to sex. Readers and critics alike are condemning the representation of sexual dynamics that are morally troubling to progressive or even polite sensibilities. In other words, the call is coming from inside the house. But, playing on Roland Barthes’ musings, must the birth of contemporary reader criticism be ransomed by the death of the fuck?

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Bringing Sherlock Holmes to the 21st Century (or The Adventure of Japan Having All the Fun)

By Cezary Jan Strusiewicz

Sherlock Holmes is the most filmed book character ever. Going by this specific metric, he is literally bigger than Jesus. What’s more impressive, Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation achieved this level of success in a much shorter time frame, only having been around since 1887. 

But the two still have something in common: a lot of people nowadays like to pretend that both are jerks who relish in the suffering and discomfort of others. This has been a particularly thorny issue with the BBC series Sherlock (2010 to 2017). Benedict Cumberbatch plays a Sherlock Holmes who is so rude that him walking around non-face-punched feels like a clever way to let the audience know the show is fictional. This has sadly become one of the two main takes on the character in Western media. But there is one place that still knows how to have fun with bringing Sherlock Holmes to life: Japan, even if the Insensitive Jerk interpretation has also reached the island nation. Let’s examine the issue more closely.

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Invisible Cities 2: Neopets as a Lived Space

By Anna C. Webster

Italo Calvino frames his 1972 novel Invisible Cities as a dialogue between famous European explorer Marco Polo and the founder of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty of China, Kublai Khan. Together the two chat about their many philosophies and commentaries on the world, all sandwiched between various profiles of completely fantastical, fictitious cities. And because of the esoteric nature of the novel, a person could walk away with an enormous variety of meanings and personal ponderings. But one scene in particular often sticks in people’s minds.

Kubulai Khan notes his surprise that after all of their chatting, not once has Marco Polo brought up his equally fantastic (and yet very real) hometown of Venice, Italy. Polo famously replies: “every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”

But this is not about Italo Calvino, Venice, or even literature. This is about Neopets. Because, if you’re like me, and you grew up spending your after-school hours on your family’s singular, chunky desktop computer bathed in the signature yellow of Neopets.com: every time I describe a video game, I am saying something about Neopets. 

In case you haven’t heard,  Neopets is thriving after once again becoming an independent company. What a time to be alive.

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Nostalgia Ends Here: The 2000s Sucked, Actually

By Gwen C. Katz

Inexorably, nostalgia grinds on, ingesting and crushing everything in its path into an unrecognizable, homogeneous slurry. The ironclad law stating everyone in their 30s must get obsessed with resurrecting childhood media assures no decade can escape. But as said threshold creeps through the 80s and 90s and draws unavoidably closer to the 2000s, remembering the era fondly is requiring more and more ludicrous amounts of cognitive dissonance. Rife with war, fearmongering, and recession, and the 2000s were not a fun decade to live through, especially as a teenager.

Nostalgia culture’s defenders assert that we can just jettison the bad stuff. Forget the politics, wars, recession, and so on and just enjoy the Nu-Metal and clear plastic electronics. But is that really possible? Can you simply excise popular culture from the context in which it was created? I submit that you cannot, and while that’s true for every era, the politics of the post-9/11 era invaded our everyday lives so pervasively as to make it a particularly futile exercise in sophistry when you’re talking about the 2000s.

It is impossible to overstate how completely 9/11 dominated the American popular consciousness in the 2000s. COVID is the only subsequent event that has had the same impact, but while COVID has been diligently written out of the cultural record by movies, TV, and music, 9/11 was everywhere. Bands sprinted to the studio to record tribute songs in genres ranging from country to punk rock. Disney aired spots where Whoopi Goldberg and Hillary Duff held candles and flags. It was impossible to go online without seeing a picture of a bald eagle shedding a single tear.

While these examples have mostly been forgotten today, the influence of the attack was not limited to the immediate flash-in-the-pan responses. All media of the 2000s was made in light of 9/11, the Bush administration, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their many repercussions. Let’s look at some examples.

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Doug Walker Was Right: How To Boldly Flee Predicted the Modern Internet

By Sean Dillon

The problem with talking about To Boldly Flee–one of the most infamous movies ever made–is that it is an absolute mess. Sadly, the cinematic farrago of To Boldly Flee is not kin to a film like Southland Tales, the 2006 alternate future dystopian black comedy, where the mess ultimately reveals an order evident through historical hindsight.

Rather, To Boldly Flee is the kind of byzantine trainwreck that has five different main characters, seven plots interposing themselves over three and a half hours (that feels more like eight due to the languid pacing ), and a genuine sense that everything was being micromanaged to hell. 

Despite all this, To Boldly Flee–the last in a trilogy of movies created by Doug Walker, better known by his internet movie reviewer persona the Nostalgia Critic–is prescient in a way countless snarky YouTube reviews of the film frequently miss. A truly horrific thesis, nay a prediction, lies at the heart of the film: The crux of all criticism is cruelty.  

To Boldly Flee represents a vision of what the media landscape would become. Not so much a prediction of the internet’s future, but the ugly, blood and cervical mucus-soaked birth.

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How Aeon Flux Deconstructed the Mystery Box TV Show (Before It Existed)

By Will Greatwich

In 1991, long before adult animation became an established genre on our TV screens, MTV produced a compilation series titled Liquid Television. It served as both a showcase of film festival shorts and an incubator for young animators. Nestled amidst a lineup of surreal humor and pop culture parody was a strange, atmospheric sci-fi serial named Aeon Flux. These two-minute segments eventually added up to a complete episode, which in turn was spun off into a standalone series.

With its moody, dystopian backdrops and ugly-sexy character designs, Aeon Flux looked like nothing else on TV. Its unique art style blended together influences from anime, French sci-fi comics, and the Expressionist portraiture of Egon Schiele. Little wonder it became a cult classic among animation fans, handed down through generations of recopied VHS tapes.

But viewed in hindsight, Aeon Flux is notable for more than just its visuals. What’s striking about the show today is how closely it mirrors, and even parodies, the “mystery box” TV format, which it predates by at least a decade.

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Nobody Wants to Buy The Future: Why Science Fiction Literature is Vanishing

By Simon McNeil

A recent Washington Post article indicated that only 12% of the reading public were interested in reading science fiction.  A perusal of bestseller lists for science fiction shows an even more alarming truth: the science fiction books that do sell are a shrinkingly small number of reprints, classics and novels that had been adapted into movies. 

The December 2023 bestseller list on Publisher’s Weekly contained only two novels published originally in 2023: Pestilence by Laura Thalassa (an odd addition to the Science Fiction list as it is marketed as fantasy / romance) and Starter Villain by John Scalzi. The bestselling SF novel in that time period, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, sold almost 17,000 copies. This puts it far below the bottom of the top 10 overall fiction bestseller list where Sarah J. Maas’ romantasy novel A Court of Mist and Fury sits at 19,097 copies sold. 

Science fiction is not selling.

This marks a significant change from the 1980s, a decade in which science fiction novels like Carl Sagan’s Contact and James Kahn’s novelization of Return of the Jedi appeared amongst the bestsellers of any given year. Many of these were adaptations of blockbuster films or were connected to movie projects, but not all, as Contact did quite well on its own merits.

What’s the cause for Science Fiction literature’s decline? 

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Science Fiction and the Death of the Sun

By Gwen C. Katz

Why is early speculative fiction so grim?

From potions that turn people into psychopathic murderers to alien invasions only defeated by coincidental quirks of biology, turn-of-the-20th-century sci-fi carries a distinct tone that the arc of history bends towards catastrophe. Most commentators have looked to social and political factors to explain this tone. There are plenty to choose from—runaway income inequality, rampant corruption, crushing working-class living conditions. These issues were certainly present in the minds of early sci-fi authors, many of whom—such as H.G. Wells, who drafted a precursor to the UN Declaration of Human Rights—were progressive reformists. 

But there’s another factor that isn’t often mentioned: They thought the sun was on the brink of death.

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The Barbie Typewriter: Cracking Codes in Trademarked Pink

By Sarah Everett

As a former little girl, I could tell you exactly which one of my friends had a Barbie Dreamhouse. First unveiled in 1959, Barbara Millicent Roberts, Barbie for short, was invented with the sole purpose of allowing young girls to envision themselves in  roles besides wives and mothers. Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie, had seen her child playing with a series of baby dolls when she had an epiphany: there must be more to girls’ toys than just feeding a fake doll. 

Barbie went from her initial release at Mattel in 1959 to $1.92 billion in sales in 2023 (Richardson, 2023). With the release of the 2023 film of the same name, Barbie branded products have had a resurgence in popularity. From curling irons to clothing, a Barbie Dreamhouse Airbnb, and even a bright pink Barbie branded toothbrush, the identity of this toy is in every marketplace…even in typewriters. 

But there’s more to the Barbie typewriter than being a writing machine that’s trademarked Barbie Pink (yes, Mattel trademarked a color). This machine can type in secret codes.

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The Digital Dilemma: Why Writers Are Abandoning Modern Word Processing Software

By Erica Hanger

In today’s world, it feels like everything is designed to be more connected, but not necessarily more meaningful. As writers, we constantly juggle the demands of productivity, technology, and staying focused. A few years ago, my gal pals complained about how difficult it was forging friendships as newcomers to Denver. Sure, there are meetups, community classes, or simply pursuing real-life hobbies, but striking up conversations with strangers can be intimidating (especially for my fellow introverts, I see you). 

So one “crafternoon,” I got my 1976 Gabriele typewriter (I call her Gabby) out, and with the hammer of keys, I created conversation starters, with a few cheesy pickup lines thrown in the mix. The task was to build confidence and empower my friends to talk to strangers at a bar or in a public space with crib sheets of witty one-liners in hand. 

When I provided my friends the fortune cookie-sized conversation starters, they laughed. They were open to testing this method in hopes of it leading to more organic conversation. They mustered up the courage to talk to strangers, typewritten conversation starters in hand, and I witnessed these strangers raise their eyebrows and instant laughter with every engagement. 

Laughter is a powerful way to build connection and rapport, reinforcing its authenticity, and what could be more authentic than typewritten notes? Bumble BFF? I don’t think so. There is much beauty in the lost art of the analog.  

In an era where technology promises to “simplify” everything with cloud saving and invasive AI tools, writers are increasingly turning away from – or at least growing skeptical towards –  modern word processing software and other digital office programs. 

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