Wednesday, 15 January 2025

We Literally Live in a Society



CW: Transphobia, Death

...And Justice for All (1979) begins with a black, trans-coded character, named Ralph Agee, being escorted into a holding cell block at the local police station wherein she is subjected to all manners of humiliating and degrading practices.
The cops force Ralph to strip naked right in front of a cheering crowd of inmates, who stand a few centimetres away from where she is, the jail bars being the only thing keeping them at bay. The entire scene is deliberately framed as horribly dehumanizing.

I Played Every "BioShock" Game in One Month, And I Must Scream!


On January 2nd 2023, I made the sporadic, partially ill-begotten decision to buy all three BioShock videogames. Up to that point, I had never experienced these titles directly save only through cultural osmosis, the occasional meme and, naturally, The Discourse!

I would spend the following lunar cycle playing them, writing down my thoughts and posting them on Twitter dot com. Today, after enough time passed for my heightened feelings to reset, I have collected those floating brain bubbles and transliterated them into some manner of structured essay for your reading pleasure - or utter lack thereof.
Did I have anything meaningful to add to the conversation on one of the most dissected and dissertated franchises in the history of the art form? You may be the judge of that.
It begins.

Brok the InvestiGator - Embracing the Flaws of Unrestrained Artistic Expression




I wish to express my ponderance over Brok the InvestiGator, a truly wondrous videoludic experience. A many-faced entity upon which I cannot stop gawking in bewilderment.

This reptilian bonanza is the second game developed by French Auteur Fabrice 'COWCAT' Breton after Demetrios: The Big Cynical Adventure. On paper, it's about a croco-gator (actual species unknown) who's an investigator, as the title suggests. He solves mysteries, beats up the bad guys, makes a few wisecracks and all that jazz. He's got a nerdy sidekick, a teenage son and a dark past. You would be forgiven to marinate in the false belief that anything about such a vague premise would imply any level of conventionality... but do not be fooled! Beyond its approachable yet unassuming Disney Afternoon aesthetics lies a much deeper truth.