ranzware
Sundays are for playing a bit of Split Fiction and tinkering with that new expensive camera you bought, the latest in a long line of attempts to adopt a new hobby. You’re almost 40 so if this one doesn’t stick you may as well just give up and start a Band Of Brothers re-watch.
For Eurogamer, Florence Smith Nicholls wrote about their experience at a Disco Elysium-inspired LARP.
97 Poets of Revachol is run in a former military hospital in Terezín that they rent from the town and help repair. The LARP was completely designed around the building. In Poets, you are one of 96 players who live in this derelict military hospital, known in-game as “La Cage”. They converted it to include not only apartments, but workshops, a bar, two music clubs and even a church with a stained glass window. It’s important to stress that the LARP doesn’t contain any of the characters or plotlines from the original game, instead offering an opportunity to embody a person in that world. As František Wagner put it, they could edit Disco Elysium out of the LARP “and it would still make sense, but we could not edit out the hospital.”
I link to a lot of articles, posts, toys about the indie web and 2000s-era blogs and I will not stop. To that end, I enjoyed this love letter to the personal website.
It feels like we’ve lost this decades-old art form; the individuality of design and the uniqueness of content you used to see on these webpages. The notion of experimenting with HTML and CSS without worrying about something looking weird or out of place. The beauty of a website built by a person, because they wanted to.
Relatedly, Henrik Karlsson wrote some advice for writing a blog. There’s plenty here that I feel RPS attempts to embody.
What if you want to write 5000 words about the history of French grammar but fear people will get bored by that? What should you do? You should write 5000 words about the history of French grammar. It will filter your readers so you attract those who appreciate the grooves of your mind.
Writing for Wired, Jessica Lucas covered the anonymous YouTubers making videos about street-racing in New York. Can’t wait for EA to make a really insufferable Need For Speed game about this.
It would be easy to write this all off as bravado from a bunch of high-speed clout-chasers, except for one thing: In September, more than three months after Ginestri’s arrest, while he was still in custody, a new video appeared on the Squeeze.Benz YouTube channel. It showed footage of several vehicles—one purportedly being driven by Squeeze—drifting and doing donuts in the center of Columbus Circle and Times Square, surrounded by pedestrians they narrowly missed hitting with their convoy of cars.
The New Yorker turned 100 years old. Tina Brown, its former editor and the person most credited with (controversially at the time) modernising the magazine in the ’90s, wrote in her recently launched newsletter about her memories of that time.
Si had offered me the job a year earlier, but I had dithered. With an increasingly geriatric readership and advertising in a nosedive, its prospects were shaky. And with two children under the age of five, the idea of facing weekly deadlines (instead of my monthly rhythm as editor of Vanity Fair) had been too daunting, a problem solved when my parents agreed to move from the UK and live in an apartment across the hall. Plus, I felt that the magazine’s DNA didn’t fully resonate with me as Vanity Fair’s did. There was a stuffy, windowless quality to its book-length articles on deliberately arcane topics. What was the point of coming out weekly if you were running a piece on beekeeping the week that General Noriega was stealing the Panamanian election? I tended to agree with Tom Wolfe — that The New Yorker had become “easier to praise than to read.”
This is long but good. Jason Pargin “declared war” on Bo Burnham, which is less critical of the comedian than you’d expect but an analysis of Inside and the problems with what it came to exemplify. Although the problem with most criticism of Inside is that it feels like it simply urges Burnham, and other creators, to respond by being more self-aware, more meta. The backlash to the backlash to the backlash to the backlash to the…
Likewise, in “All Eyes on Me,” Burnham says, “You say the whole world’s ending, honey, it already did.” Inside presents the impending apocalypse as a given and I find it fascinating if Burnham genuinely doesn’t see what’s going on here. He clearly understands his depression and anxiety are irrational responses to a life lived almost entirely free of danger or deprivation, yet does not seem to understand that his apocalypse fixation is simply a scaled-up version of that same irrational response.
I’m feeling kind of basic today, so music this week is For Tomorrow by Blur. Aren’t we all just 20th century people holding on for tomorrow?
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Kurt Indovina
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