CATMITTS'S PROFILE

I just finished 'If This Is A Man' and 'The Truce' by Primo Levi. The first is a memoir about being in the Auschwitz concentration camp and just uh trying to survive and is pretty depressing and dizzying to read! It's almost too much to take in but it's still really good and brings it home as much as is possible for spoilt 21st century firstworlders to relate to the fucking Holocaust I guess?? Also made me have markedly more sympathy for Zionists but idk how I feel about that yet. 'The Truce' is really fucking good and is a sequel to the first book, except it starts off right at the liberation of the camp by Russian troops and is about the author slowly making his way back to Italy and just gradually rediscovering small kindnesses and the lust for life ~ i. pop. I'm making it sound more trite than it is but it's really good and fucking funny and cheering because its about the end of the war so there's a whole carnival atmosphere through it all. Like the Russian troops don't give a fuck any more and just get wrecked on vodka and mushrooms and speed around in motorbikes hell yeah. Basically they're good books read them both!!

someone make a videogame with this as music do it now

Yeah Edmund is pretty awful and even speaking as someone with a high tolerance for pretentious bullshit I couldn't recommend playing it at all. I don't particularly care about debating the moral aspects of art or whatever the fuck but part of what annoyed me was that it was just such a dumb game! Like it's almost a parody of trite sophomoric (horrible word but jesus christ if there was ever a reason to use it) stuff. Look it's a rape heh offended yet kiddies......... Also it's portrayed in terms of a platform shooter because uh videogames I guess?? And it turns out to be because of Vietnam. I think the Vietnam reference is kind of TELLING in the sense that I have no idea why a 21st century vidcon developer would try to make a statement about NAM as opposed to more current and uh thematically interchangeable wars. Actually that's a lie it's because Vietnam has become more associated with the horror the horror etc and this guy didn't bother to detatch the message from the form it takes.

Also uh even for a game about rape it is p misogynistic?? Character development and action is for men, women are literally mindless passive blobs to be beaten and penetrated and killed. If the rest of the game had any level of substance to it I'd let it go as being possibly intentional but NOP.

Basically I think ARTGAMS get a disproportionate amount of hate for what they're at least trying to be but stuff like this really drags the problems with them into focus: the problems with making things whose only purpose is to demonstrate artiness. Everyone wants to make some incredible masterpiece which shows GAMES: NOT JUST FOR KIDS ANYMORE and encompasses life death love the horror of our age ~ n. mailer but that shit tends to be so generalized that it doesn't actually say anything. Edmund is basically a pastiche of high art in terms of uh terse melodramatic garbage with a BIG MESSAGE because all art needs a BIG MESSAGE and should be SHOCKING. And maybe a hamfisted message about audience implication in this stuff because there's nothing like turning the mirror around on the imaginary bourgeoise and j'accusing majestically to make up for a complete lack of thought or perspective and coincidentally take the spotlight off the developer's role. He's just an objective student of humanity (a "social experimenter" if you will heh) and it's not his fault if people play the rape game he developed and distributed, the sick fucks.

Basically uh short answer is that this is cargo-cult art. It's a crude simulation which tries to superficially replicate the structure and feel of "important" art without understanding what any of it actually means or is used for. I don't want to be some Daily Mail curmudgeon and start shouting about pretentiousness etc because there's absolutely a place for that but I'd kind of like it if game developers just tried to honestly explore their own ideas and medium instead of scrabbling to be the first to make the Ulysses of vidcons or whatever the fuck.

The West Wing

I haven't seen it but I hear Sapphire & Steel is meant to be pretty good! It's an old british series about two aliens investigating time distortions or something and all the episodes are apparantly about haunted phonographs and subway stations and things. Basically like an even more b-list Doctor Who I guess?? Being b-list is a good thing because it sometimes means more likely to be bizarre and off-key. Also my dad swears by Blake's Seven but I haven't seen that either sorry. Definitely watch old Doctor Who stuff though, some of it probably hasn't aged well but BBC Radiophonic Workshop music rules