genuinely I think one of the best features of Death Stranding is that you can get likes from people and from NPCs and even from the little half-stillborn fetus you carry on your chest, and in this unbelievably systems-dense game there is absolutely no reward for it beyond the satisfaction of a job well done.

and then on top of that in case you were getting too invested in them the game has an entire class of enemies whose origin story is "they cared so much about getting likes for deliveries that it drove them insane"

on the one hand, the quotidian joys of being embodied—sun on my face, fresh air in my lungs, embracing a loved one, aching legs after a long walk—are among the things I consider most holy about being human. on the other hand, the embodied need for sleep and food are among my fiercest enemies. life is contradiction

This month's film is another lighthearted one that I suspect people may not have heard of. I ran across Jeffrey (1995) last year and I found it to be a charming and offbeat examination of the psychological fallout of AIDS. It's full of gleefully expressionistic directorial choices, and it's got Patrick Stewart playing an old gay interior decorator. It's a lot of fun!

• What: Jeffrey
• When: 11AM on Sunday the 25th of May
• Where: The Beacon in Columbia City, 4405 Rainier Ave S. It's about a 15 minute walk from the Columbia City station, and the 7, 9, and 50 stop right outside the door.
• RSVP: At this link! The theater seats 48, so we shouldn't run out of space, but please RSVP nevertheless!
• Price: If you can send $10 to @nweiz on Venmo to help keep these going, I'd appreciate it, but if you can't afford it please come anyway.

COVID precautions: Please wear a mask (N95 or better) and run an over-the-counter test day-of or the night before. If you can't afford one, Mask Bloc Seattle can probably hook you up. Outsider Comics in Fremont usually sells them at-cost as well. The theater will be selling concessions, but we ask that you eat them outdoors rather than during the film. The theater itself is not a masks-required space at other times, although we will be the first event of the day and I'll ask the person running the show to mask and test as well and I will be bringing a large portable air filter.

Hope to see you there!

After two pretty intense films, I wanted to switch it up this month. We'll be showing the classic conversion therapy comedy romp, But I'm a Cheerleader, featuring early performances from Natasha Lyonne and Clea DuVall. Hope to see you all there!

• What: But I'm a Cheerleader
• When: 11AM on Sunday the 30th of March
• Where: The Beacon in Columbia City, 4405 Rainier Ave S. It's about a 15 minute walk from the Columbia City station, and the 7, 9, and 50 stop right outside the door.
• RSVP: At this link! The theater seats 48, so we shouldn't run out of space, but please RSVP nevertheless!
• Price: If you can send $10 to @nweiz on Venmo to help keep these going, I'd appreciate it, but if you can't afford it please come anyway.

COVID precautions: Please wear a mask (N95 or better) and run an over-the-counter test day-of or the night before. If you can't afford one, Mask Bloc Seattle can probably hook you up. Outsider Comics in Fremont usually sells them at-cost as well. The theater will be selling concessions, but we ask that you eat them outdoors rather than during the film. The theater itself is not a masks-required space at other times, although we will be the first event of the day and I'll ask the person running the show to mask and test as well and I will be bringing a large portable air filter.

Hope to see you there!

if I'm being honest, I find the visual design of the people in Of The Devil very off-putting and it is to a degree affecting my enjoyment of the game as a whole

Like, I can understand Harriet Tubman. She was not in any sense a "world leader" or even a politician, but it's really desirable to have a black leader for the US to represent some of the less horrendous aspects of this benighted country and if you want to choose someone with name recognition who's outside living memory^[1] you've got slim pickings. Tubman was at least involved in politics, and the espionage side of hwr story fits well with the game's mechanics. It's definitely uncomfortable seeing her operating treasure fleets and colonizing the new world, but that's just table stakes for Civ as a whole.

I have no idea what possessed them to choose Ada Lovelace, though. Not only was she not remotely a political figure except in that she was technically a member of the English aristocracy, she wasn't a figure at all in her own lifetime. Her contributions to computing weren't recognized for generations after her death, and even then she's mostly impressive for her foresight rather than any actual contributions that might have changed the flow of history. If you're just going to pick arbitrary famous people from history to be "leaders", what's even the point of calling them that anymore? Just say "mascots" or "avatars" and call it a day.

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1. Not that this has always been a rule! Gandhi was assassinated a mere 43 years before he became a leader in the original Civilization. By that metric someone like Malcolm X or Fred Hampton who was more explicitly involved in nation-building projects would be fair game. ↩︎

the day Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson star across from one another in the sort of fucked up art film about inventing new kinds of emotional disorder that both of them have made their stock in trade is going to be a glorious day

every time I remember that Wendy Carlos is still alive some little muscle I didn't even know I was tensing relaxes

World where demons are real and around and ontologically evil but with an extremely Christian-fundamentalist definition of "evil". They don't care what sins they facilitate as long as they're sins. Murder is just bad economics: you're getting someone killed who would do sins of their own. Even labor exploitation isn't great, because ideally everyone has free time for the real big-ticket sins like lust and sloth and gluttony.

So of course a bunch of demons end up working as pornographers, musicians, chefs, and so on. But it's also rare to see a queer youth center without at least a few demon volunteers absolutely dead set on helping everyone accept themselves. There are even a few who really play the long game doing labor organizing and base-building so that one day humans will be free from the shackles of capitalism and the sins of idleness will really start rolling in.

Angels exist in this setting too but they're such dour killjoys that barely any humans will tolerate spending time with them and they mostly just live off in their own towns in the middle of otherwise deserted areas.