Nasty, Brutish, and Short: The Promised Neverland and Human Nature

The nightmarish final boss of hit manga The Promised Neverland is... philosopher Thomas Hobbes??

Content warning for major late manga spoilers for The Promised Neverland, cannibalism, gore, monarchy, body horror.

Film Theory Theory: MatPat's Star Wars Theories Are Nazi Garbage

"Save the Death Star!" shouts MatPat, "because destroying it would make the money sad!" How does someone argue himself into supporting Space Nazis? Why do fandoms eat it up? And might Star Wars itself have something to say about the way that the culture we live in clouds our vision, preventing us from seeing the stories in front of us?

A Galaxy Very, Very Near: Are Time And Space in Rogue One Core to its Resistance Narrative?

Rogue One is a film about resistance and domination, time and space, environment and technology. Can linking these concepts together tell us more about the film's science fiction storytelling... and reveal something about our own forms of contemporary resistance?

If The Train Stops We All Die: 2016 In Review

2016 sucked. Let's talk about Snowpiercer, clipping., and seceding from a broken reality.

All art in this article is by Kathe Kollwitz, queer revolutionary socialist engraver.

Populism, Politics, People and Superpeople: Luke Cage and This Fucking Election

Luke Cage is a narrative drawing heavily on popular antiracist politics, so why is it so suspicious, narratively, of populism? And how did the Democratic ruling class's own contempt for populism cost them an entire election and usher in four to eight years of proto-fascist stoogery? This article's two interwoven threads explore these questions and freely allows Perfect to be the enemy of Good, because sometimes "good" doesn't translate to "good enough," and god dammit, there's a whole lot of things that just aren't good enough anymore. 

This article is basically a 4500 word primal scream and it is not designed to make anyone feel better about anything at all. Instead of reading this deeply bitter article you could play this as loud as possible. The experience is probably roughly the same.

I Have Played Agar.io

I have played agar.io quite a bit over the past month, but the way I've played hasn't exactly been consistent. Oh, I think I've gotten better at playing the game the way I think it's meant to be played, and the way most (though not all) other players play it, but I've also played it a whole slew of other ways as well. I probably should have played it a year ago, when it was culturally relevant, but I have played it now, so now is when I've got to write about it. And I've got to write about it because I feel compelled to parse out all the different ways in which one might play what is really a fairly simple game.

In agar.io you are a cell among other cells floating in agar, in some sort of petri dish. As you float around you can eat nutrients, or eat the other players in order to grow larger. You control your floating direction with the mouse, and you have the ability to divide explosively in half with "space," and jettison nutrients, shrinking your size, with "w."

What's fascinating to me is that it's very possible to play the game a number of different ways that all constitute achievements of victory through a variety of self-generated goals. The strict "goal" of the game is to stay as huge as you can for as long as you can and the game does encourage this by way of the leaderboard and leveling system, which seems to be based on raw size, time spent at that size, and cells consumed. So the game does have rewards--in the form of skins and a minutely larger starting mass--that encourage certain playstyles, but it's also possible to totally rewire your sense of the game's goals, and I think that helps us consider what a gameplay experience should look like, and what that says broadly about other forms of interaction and communication.

So let's talk a bit about how I have played agar.io.

I take great pride in my terrible jpg artifact covered pictures thank you very much.

Black Lives Matter and Public Art

I have been worried for a while that several of the articles I had planned to write six months ago would no longer be relevant once I finished my thesis and was able to write semi-regularly again. ^one

Though obviously the “semi-” is important here: this article has been delayed several weeks by a combination of overwork in my day job and a bout of my old friend, Depression. Writing, it turns out, is Very Hard.

Much to my disgust, that which was politically topical six months ago remains politically topical now. As Zoe Quinn put it on her blog, August never ends, and my previous article on Gamergate and Wikipedia is just as relevant now as when the story of the hostile takeover of the open access encyclopedia first broke.

Unending, too, is the ongoing crisis of police brutality, white supremacy, and state sanctioned murder. This article in a sense is a response to a protest that happened here in Toronto, my adopted city, back in December, but the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement has not diminished over the course of six months. Far from it. Every few days news of another atrocity comes in, while the political establishment and corporate media continues to turn a blind eye to the crisis where it can, and vilify them where it cannot.

This article is triangulated upon three different sources of information that I want to put at the front and center of my analysis for this week. In a sense, this article is a vehicle for these resources, which are the real voices I want to elevate here, but while my role here is something akin to a curator of this information, I do want to try to contextualize these a little bit with my sense of the broader art world and the world of public art in particular. As a white writer, it’s not my job to speak for black writers, but I might be able to use my privileged access to the (white) art world to dig into some of the behaviors of that world and the contradictions and racist practices that underlie those behaviors… and the actions of liberal art and culture patrons.

So, with this in mind I want to start, before the cut, by putting the three resources I will be working from front and center.

If you can only pick one article to read through today, please read one of these.

The first article, by Kirsten West Savali from The Root, is about a recent art exhibit which features a mannequin dressed to look like Michael Brown’s body. Obviously, trigger warnings for… everything related to that. This article drags the thought process behind this piece over the coals, labeling it a “revictimization” of Brown and his family carried out by a white artist.

The second is a statement by artist and activist Bree Newsome. Newsome, with a group of collaborators, engaged in a daring takedown of the confederate flag in front of South Carolina’s capitol building several weeks ago, and her statement eloquently articulates the issues at stake in what some see as “vandalism.”

Finally, I want to link to the facebook page of the Toronto iteration of Black Lives Matter, which has been my main source of information for actions happening in the city. This source in particular is important because it seems like many white commentators perceive this to be a uniquely American problem. This organization and others like it demonstrate the ways in which the movement transcends national boundaries to challenge white supremacy in a variety of locations. In particular I think it’s worth noting the response to the recent police shooting of a mentally ill Somalian man, and the way in response the group has highlighted the particular vulnerability of the mentally ill to police brutality. This represents one of the most admirable aspects of the movement: the way in which the movement has centered itself upon those who are most at risk--the mentally ill, the homeless, the queer, and those who face similar difficulties.

This final resource is particularly important because it leads into the main event that this article revolves around: a protest in Toronto last December. This protest started with a rally at city hall and a march to Dundas Square, one of Toronto’s largest and most garish commercial hubs. The march concluded with a die-in which took place in the center of the square. Not in the center of the sidewalk, but in the center of the intersection, the bodies of the protestors blocking the street. At the conclusion of the protest, the words BLACK LIVES MATTER were spraypainted on the road, and participants were invited to leave their signs around the spraypaint.

From my perspective, this protest represents a temporary artistic intervention into the space, and the difference in reception between this form of artistic expression and more culturally sanctioned forms of “protest art” exposes the hypocrisies of the white liberal art establishment.

The Image of the Body: Ferguson, Agency, and Leftist Appropriation

Photo of Twitter user @eyeFLOODpanties taken by Robert Cohen

I want to center this week's article in a somewhat odd way--around a bibliography. I'm doing this for ethical reasons--as a white person writing about the murder of Michael Brown and the resulting protests and violent, militant police repression of the people of Ferguson, MO, events that are fundamentally a product of racism both systemic and individual, I want to do my best not to co-opt the events for the sake of an abstract academic argument. This is particularly important in the context of the specific ideas I'm going to attempt to grapple with, since I want to talk about issues of agency, the use of images and signs, and the political transformation of people into signifiers. Centering this article upon the bibliography of information I drew upon in writing it is, in part, an attempt to avoid the behaviors I'm trying to call out.

First, for the background details of what's happening in Ferguson, I'd recommend the article Ferguson is Fighting Back from Socialist Worker, which, unlike corporate media outlets, recounts the story from the perspective of the oppressed rather than the militarized police that have been terrorizing a small town for over a week. In particular, it is worth considering this quote from the article:

"Eavesdropping on questions asked of residents by the mainstream media was instructive. Again and again, reporters wanted to know about "looting" and "violence," entirely missing the main point of what was unfolding before them: every resident, if asked, could have told them about the routine police violence they've experienced." --Socialist Worker: Ferguson is Fighting Back

Instructive indeed. That framing is important to the questions I want to consider about the way this is not merely a war waged materially but waged with symbols. This is a battle of words, and corporate media has sided with state terrorism in this battle.

I also want to highlight the ongoing commentary from blogs Gradient Lair and This Is Bobby London, without which I could not have composed this article. In particular, it's worth reading over Bobby London's piece which frames looting not as a random act of greed but an act of political resistance and rebellion (particularly relevant now that we're seeing reports of people breaking into McDonald's in order to get milk to sooth the suffering of civilians who were assaulted by the militarized police with chemical weapons), and three pieces from Gradient Lair, one on avoiding the consumption of black bodies in discourse about events like Ferguson (which I've tried to take to heart here), one on the transformation of black bodies into metaphors for other forms of violence elsewhere in the world, and one on the history of the terrorist/psychological warfare of lynching and the way the treatment of Michael Brown's body fits into that history.

In the interests of contextualization, it's worth taking note of a few other stories about images, image sharing, and the desperate iconoclasm of the militarized police. From Tech Dirt comes a story of a police campaign in Washington to (incorrectly... illegally?) get people to stop filming them with a remarkable statement about responding to smartphones the way they respond to guns; from Z-Net comes a story about Apple's new patent to kill cell phones automatically, because hey, another week, another instance of Apple or Microsoft furthering corporate fascism, and lastly, from Medium, comes an excellent analysis of the way Ferguson represents proof positive of the dangers of a non-neutral Net, as Facebook algorithms systematically sank information about the atrocities being committed against civilians while Twitter sank the #ferguson tag in the US despite it trending globally.

If you want to get involved in pushing back against the militarization of police and the state terrorism on display in Ferguson, here is a list of resources (updated 4:08 Eastern 8/19):

• This Tumblr post provides a list of ways to get involved and spread information
• This petition requests that Obama actually do something leftist for once in his life and work towards enacting federal anti-police laws.
• Similarly, this petition involves having police wear cameras, and while it's on the ridiculous pseudo-democratic site We The People you might want to sign that too. You know, in case you want to get a limp, Good Liberal, noncommittal placatory response from some aide you've never heard of.
• This petition, in contrast, involves demanding a special prosecutor to investigate Mike Brown's death, as the current prosecutor has demonstrated bias in favor of the police.
• And this bill would put a stop to the military's sale of equipment to police. Keep an eye on this; it'll be worth raising some hell with our representatives over this.
• Anti-State STL is raising money for bail for the Ferguson protesters. I have no idea how I'd begin going about vetting this organization, but this is a way to get involved.
• Similarly, no vetting here but someone has set up a wishlist for getting supplies to the protesters via Amazon.
  
  Updates:
• Here's yet another post with various other links that might be useful to you (there is some overlap between this and other lists obviously)
• iwriteaboutfeminism has been covering the events in Ferguson extensively, largely by pulling from Twitter, which is useful for those of who who, like me, find the flood of information on Twitter to be utterly overwhelming.
• Twitter user @SheSeauxSaddity has been tweeting information about how you can get involved, and among other things seems to be leading an effort to sell t-shirts to raise money for the protesters under the name #OperationHelporHush
• As school has been cancelled in Ferguson, a Ferguson teacher put together a funding site to get food to the kids who depend on school lunches.
• Feel like supporting the community at large? The Ferguson Youth Initiative is one place to start.
• And perhaps most importantly, the gofundme campaign for the Brown family is still live. Although they've reached their goal, I can't imagine that they WON'T have a use for more money, and in a country where the law is determined by the free market by way of lawyer fees, justice might very well depend on every extra bit of cash the family can get.

Since I'm adding links, I figure it's worth making a point of mentioning the way in which I'm curating this. I can't vet every one of these donation drives, because I'm honestly not sure how I'd even begin doing so, so that's a limitation I have when I'm posting links. But one thing I can do as a curator of these links is vet the voices being heard. And a great way to make sure you DON'T get included on this list is to post shit about how everything would get better if the left and right would just listen compassionately to one another, or how Obama's hands are tied and he's just doing the best he can politically, or any of that other weak Liberal nonsense. Last I saw, it wasn't the Left lobbing tear gas at civilians. The point here is to boost voices that are drowned out by the corporate media shit show.

With all that said, let's get to the secondary content of this post. Let's talk about the man in the photo at the top of this post, that photo, and its use.

I want to frame this discussion with these three tweets:

Please consider not purchasing shirts of my image. None of that money is going to me or the #MikeBrown family.
— Your New Friend (@eyeFLOODpanties) August 15, 2014

Salute to @eyeFLOODpanties for being practical AND political. We don't waste lives or chips. That shot of him is EVERYTHING.
— Princess of Zamunda (@Artemis_J) August 15, 2014

Yo @eyeFLOODpanties ----> the new Captain America. I thought of this when I saw your pic. #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/2si2t8V4k5
— dj spydermann (@djspydermann) August 15, 2014

Everyone Hates Grant Ward: Strung Up By Your Own Bootstraps

"You didn't tell me he was this crazy."
"He's really stepped it up a notch..."

There's a fascinating contrast in episode 21 of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD between big bad John Garrett and big... good Agent Coulson that effectively conveys the basic messages of SHIELD and Hydra. These messages are worth considering in light of the wider conversation I highlighted on Monday about how utterly loathsome Agent Grant Ward is. After all, Grant Ward wasn't "born evil" as the show has put it over the last few episodes, he was made that way by Garrett. Understanding the ideology that Garrett instilled in his subordinate, and what that suggests about SHIELD and Hydra, is essential to understanding--although not necessarily forgiving!--Ward's actions and character motivations and how they relate to the show's wider themes.

There will be some mild spoilers here for the show's finale, which debuted last night, but I'm trying to keep them largely to a minimum, and none of the really major moments will be spoiled, just some of the kicker lines (of which, because this is a Whedon project, there are many). Still, if you haven't seen the finale yet, you may want to hold off reading this article till you get a chance to get caught up.

Everybody Hates Grant Ward: Agents of Chauvinism

Isn't Grant Ward awful? I mean, what a guy. You almost have to kind of love him, in that it's so easy to love to hate him. A lot of fans of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, the television component of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the property most currently related to the titanic events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, have been a part of the Ward hatedom for a long time, so the revelation that he's actually an agent of evil Nazi science conspiracy Hydra came as a shock, but not necessarily as unwelcome a one as you might expect.

What's fascinating to me about this hatedom is how totally strange it is within the context of wider media culture. Ward is, after all, the perfect grim antiheroic masculine figure, present in media everywhere: a brooding loner, with multiple romantic prospects, a tendency to buck authority, a powerful fighter... Ward could have been transplanted from just about any action film.

But the thing is, Ward's been transplanted into a show about some stuff that doesn't fit so well with his character archetype: teamwork, openness with your allies, the power of god damn friendship of all things, and the need to carry the responsibility of power carefully and not cross the line into world-policing authority and authoritarianism. These are ideas dramatically opposed to the singular authority of the male antihero and Ward feels out of place to some extent in the show's narrative. For a while it seemed like the team would succeed in changing him, but in the end it's turned out that he's been playing them all along in a weirdly metatextual game of tropes and expectations.

And that's what makes this reveal so successful, ultimately. It's a metatextual move, not just a textual one, because our understanding of Ward's character is partly a construct in-show by Ward in accordance with some of these tropes, as he revealed in a lengthy speech a few episodes ago.

So what I'm going to do, over the course of a series of shorter (by my standards) articles over the next week, is analyze all the ways in which Grant Ward sucks, and what his status as the ultimate heel of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, what his place as the guy we love to hate, says about the MCU's place in culture and take on other action movie narratives.

And what better place to start than with an idea I've complained about before: the authority of the male antihero above that of female characters.

Pictured: A Toolbag.

Love Me, I'm A Liberal: Arrow and Faux Leftism Pt. 2

Last week on Storming the Ivory Tower, the evil villain with a tragic backstory Penstroke the Terminator, having gathered a team of supervillains, was attempting to use the dread power of close reading and critical analysis to destroy Arrow. The show, not the character. Having explored the various ways in which the character Brother Blood serves as a representation of more radical leftism on the show to be attacked in favor of at best weak centrism and at worst pro-corporate, pro-1% ideological positions, Penstroke the Terminator now brings forth two more villains in order to demonstrate, once and for all, the failures of The Arrow Show!

Can anyone stop this madman?!

Stay tuned after these messages from our corporate masters!

BWAAAAOOOOM SERIOUS JOURNALISM FOR SERIOUS MODERN SUPERHEROES

Liberal from a Distance: DC's ARROW and Faux Leftism (Part One)

No, Lord Humongous, there's no point in raiding any oil refineries at this stage of the plan. Yes, I know, but you'll just have to--

Wait, wait... it looks like our... guest... has finally woken up.

No, no, don't pretend you're still asleep! The sedative should have worn off by now. I know you can hear me. Why don't you... open your eyes?

Pictured: a media producer's worst nightmare

Yes, you understand now, do you not? You recognize my face and know the true meaning of fear! For I, of course, am the dreaded Penstroke the Terminator! 

And I have vowed to destroy... Arrow.

Breaking the Habit RPG

For a long time now I've been fascinated by the way games suggest certain modes of play, modes of behavior, narratives, and, ultimately, ways of understanding the world. As games as a medium grow in cultural prominence, it's always worth taking a step back and analyzing just what games are teaching, not just from a lit crit kind of perspective often mobilized in these conversations but from a purely play-oriented perspective.

It's especially relevant in the case of a game like Habit RPG, which is explicitly built to help you reorder your existence. The game's premise is simple: it provides a framework whereby you can gamify your existence. You create a customized system of tasks to complete and rewards--in multiple forms--that you receive upon fulfilling them. The interface is simple, with three major task classes--repeated habit-formation classes that have simple plus/minus inputs, daily tasks that are checked off (with rewards for completing streaks of those tasks), and one-off to-do tasks that you simply add once and complete once.

The core of the game, however, is the interaction between these three task classes and an RPG-like system whereby you gain experience and level up for completing tasks, and lose health for failing to complete them. There are other bells and whistles--costume upgrades that can be bought, pets that are randomly dropped by defeated tasks--but that's the core gameplay. You complete tasks to level up. The reward system is hooked right into the same system that has been used by diverse entities such as skinnerboxy Facebook games or the maddeningly addictive click and wait games such as Candy Box, Cookieclicker, or A Dark Room: Humans seem to really like big numbers turning into bigger numbers.

The central logic behind the game is that a habit takes, according to the site at least, 21 days to build or break. Thus, built into the system are rewards for streaks of 21 days. Tasks change color as you complete (or don't complete) them, which allows particular interactions with certain abilities (i.e. spells that when clicking on a different colored task provide a different amount of XP). The game thus offers both instant and long-term rewards for adhering to the tasks you set for yourself, which of course contrasts to the often arbitrary, hard to discern, intangible rewards for good behavior in real life.

It's already been quite useful for me, ensuring, among other things, that I actually bother to eat three times every day, no matter how depressed or lethargic I feel. Oh, and I've got a perfect streak of waking up before ten every day, which is pretty remarkable. Even something as seemingly untamable as sleep habits can be rewired if you're provided with an external reward system. It's pretty great! It's even helping me slowly but surely get over my anxieties about actually replying promptly to people's messages.

All in all, it's a good game, and I see no reason to dig deeper into its workings. See you next week!

Yup just look at my cool pixel avatar and don't read further! Nothing to see here folks!