5 Comments
Oct 8, 2020Liked by Connor Wroe Southard

I have no opinions on video games as I don't play them but they seem like an okay way to kill time. What are your favorite short stories? It's so hard to choose but I really love The Country Husband and Symbols and Signs.

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Oct 7, 2020Liked by Connor Wroe Southard

I’m about 2/3 of the way through Ghost and very much enjoying it, but I can tell you not to expect more depth or particularly interesting characterizations. Very competent, but nothing special. Only disappointing part really, everything else is polished to a shine

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Oct 7, 2020Liked by Connor Wroe Southard

I would say to stick with Ghost (although it seems like you're already doing that)! Without giving too much away, Jin walks on this grey line throughout the game. The character of Jin is not very interesting. I think that might be the point, though. A noble's orphan, predetermined to be the leader of Tsushima is in fact uninteresting and Jin would have led a very uninteresting life had Khotun Khan not arrived on the island of Tsushima.

I hate to sound cliche, but the friends that Jin meets along the way characterize him and the world. Don't get me wrong, Tsushima is one of the most polished games around (and the pristine quality never wears off) but the narrative blurs as the story progresses.

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Oct 7, 2020Liked by Connor Wroe Southard

You got me to spend my morning wondering about the specific politics of Calvin’s parents. If they were, say, 35 when the strip started then they were Great Society liberals, I guess. They liked Carter a lot as a guy without knowing what they were getting into, then hated Reagan but later voted for HW over Clinton.

But by the end of the strip they were 35ish in 1995, and I can’t believe they wouldn’t have voted for Reagan after graduating high school into the Carter economy.

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Oct 7, 2020Liked by Connor Wroe Southard

The whole 'videogames as art' debate always reminds me of the century-old discourse about whether cinema was an art, which started around 1900 and lasted through about 1960. It started with a lot of technical sorting of what cinema brought to the table that saved it from being a mere sub-category of photography or drama and ended with a bunch of people basically saying 'well we talk about it like it's an art so it's an art.' If anything video games, appropriately, did the discourse speed run.

One of the best lines out of that discourse, though, was Jean Cocteau (I think; I'm not going to check) saying that cinema would be an art only when camera and editing bay were as accessible as pen and paper. In that reading, art is less a measure of creative heights than of breadth and expression, and by that measure Twilight is a fulfillment, rather than a betrayal, of the promise of Middlemarch.

Middlemarch is much better, though.

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