Alphabetology Vol.16
Posted: 20 May 2021
Imported from substack so the formatting is messed up, it looks better on substack.
This is a classic 70's love song by Peter Frampton i simply uploaded it for people to enjoy, this is Peter Framptons song, not mine and it was also on family guy
- It’s Joopz, YouTube video for [Peter Frampton - Baby I Love Your Way]
———————
Existentialism
Achieving Goals, and Then…?
Books
(quotes) Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary (1857)
Games
Nier, Undertale, Games as Art
Music
Róisín Murphy
Jeromes Dream
* Origami Angel
Algae Bloom
Pity Sex
Pomegranate Tea
Existentialism
———————
Achieving Goals, and Then…?
I lied when I said I was going to write about Andy Warhol this week, but I realized I didn’t have that much to say about him. [1]
Instead, here’s this: I came across this article: [link], about a scandal in TV game shows in the 50s which led to rigging game shows becoming a federal crime (!!???). What really grabbed my attention though was the quote it ends on:
“But you bring down a major TV Show, you alter the way that TV networks conduct their business with producers. You alter the way that producers deal with sponsors. You bring about major changes in the way shows are conducted as a result of your testimony to Congress. That’s great. But what do you really do after that? What from that can you put on a resume and what job can you get hired for with that experience? I mean, it’s a big thing, but it’s not a big thing that translates to anything. You can’t take away from that kind of accomplishment to bring that kind of major change to television, but it’s not a transferable achievement. It’s nothing that you’ve can turn into anything.”
What do you do after that? The eternal question! Always applicable. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to do something like the above, make a lasting impact on television law, and have nothing to show for it. You get a story you can tell.
And that’s life, isn’t it? [2]
Books
———————
Madame Bovary Quotes
t. Steegmuller
Many parts of this book make me laugh but are hard to translate into bite sized quotes because they really depend on the context of… the entire book. It’s satirical but it’s not entirely satire. So these quotes are more on the somber side, because the humor is hard to capture in boiled down chunks.
She longed to travel; she longed to go back and live in the convent. She wanted to die. And she wanted to live in Paris.
Had they nothing more to say to each other? Their eyes, certainly, were full of more meaningful talk; and as they made themselves utter banalities they sensed the same languor invading them both.
Charles and the older Madame Bovary put their heads together to figure out how to improve Emma’s health:
So it was decided to prevent Emma from reading novels. The project presented certain difficulties, but the lady undertook to carry it out: on her way through Rouen she would personally call on the proprietor of the lending library and tell him that Emma was canceling her subscription. If he nevetheless persisted in spreading his poison, they would certainly have the right to report him to the police.
I like this next quote because it’s the first thing we see go through this guy’s head:
This one seemed pretty, so the thought of her and her husband stayed with him.
“I have an idea he’s stupid. I’ll bet she’s tired of him. His fingernails are dirty and he hasn’t shaved in three days.”
“Would you believe that a simple sternutative could work such havoc in the organism of a quadruped? It’s extremely curious, don’t you find?”
“Yes,” said Charles, who wasn’t listening.
Out of cowardice or stupidity, or perhaps yielding to that indefinable impulse that leads us to do the things we most deplore, he let himself be carried off to Bridoux’s.
Everyone should read Madame Bovary.
Games
———————
Nier, Undertale, Games as Art
There are going to be a bunch of spoilers for both Nier (Automata and Replicant) and Undertale and I’m going to mention some other games like Hotline Miami. These are the only games that I think I’ve played that have tried to do anything really meaningful with the idea of what a game is. Take heed.
This is kind of a spicy topic? I’m not sure. I always feel a little embarassed about bringing up video games in any kind of social context. It’s hard for me to get away from thinking about them as a waste of time, no matter how good they are or how untrue this may be.
On some level, games are hard to make accessible. They’re hard to share with others. [3] People complain about movies that run for longer than two hours, meanwhile every single video game takes between eight and forty hours, and also usually involves having to actually play the game and succeed at it. It’s not enough to just watch all of the cutscene or whatever. It’s kind of like TV, in a way, where you build a relationship with the characters. I sincerely believe that most games only work in any kind of artistic sense because of the immense amount of time you spend with your characters, facing the same conflicts they do.
Time spent is one of the main things that sets video games apart from other mediums. What else? Why make a video game rather than a TV show or a book? There has to be something about the interactivity that is essential to the experience. I think games that have strong artistic messages approach this in one of two ways: they take a meta-narrative approach and draw explicit attention to you as a player and your interaction with the game, or they lean into the interactivity and allow you to shape the game with your choices as you play.
Undertale and the Hotline Miami games lean strongly into commenting on the relationship between you as the player and the game. I think most games that do this kind of thing are commentaries on violence: you don’t have to inflict this virtual cruelty onto others. You can put the game down or do something else. Hotline Miami, an ultra-violent game about entering buildings and killing everyone in them in an arcade-y way, is in your face about this. It asks the player things like “Do you like hurting people?” during intermission segments. A question directed at the player character but simultaneously at the player: why are you playing this? DO you like hurting people? What kind of person plays a game where all you do is hurt people?
Undertale similarly comments on violence but gives you a lot more agency in the matter and makes your agency meaningful. Throughout the game you get to choose whether you want to fight enemies or get around them peacefully, doing things like petting dogs or telling a joke. The outcome of the game varies significantly based on this, and there are a huge number of branching paths the game can take. The feeling is really that you are interacting with the world of the game, and it responds to your actions. You change the story. It also breaks the fourth wall in a few ways, changing significantly based on actions you have taken in prior playthroughs of the game. It comments on your ability to save and load your game and make different choices: are the characters just playthings to you? Do you think you get to do whatever you want willy nilly and just erase the results if you don’t like them?
The two Nier games (Replicant and Automata) are also about violence, but more than that they deal with sentience, morality, and duty. They are very similar games in a number of ways, and both, like Undertale, use save files to turn the game into something larger than just a linear story. In the Nier games, after you finish the game once, you can replay sections and see additional dialogue and cutscenes that peel back more of what is going on behind the scenes. You revisit familiar locations and redo familiar parts of the games but with new insight into what is really going on. You may be hesitant to annihilate robots, sold to you as mindless killing machines from the start of the game, after you realize some are slowly gaining sentience and just want to live in peace. But you can’t erase what you have already done: it is knowledge you live with as a player.
Really please don’t read this next part if you plan on playing Undertale or either Nier game:
I think the really brilliant thing that Undertale and Nier do is erase your save file after you “complete” the games. They ask you to sacrifice your character to accomplish something within the games. And it’s a meaningful sacrifice for players, more than anything else the game could ask: erase hours of progress, the ability to jump back in with the characters you have grown and spent time with, just to give closure. Erasing yourself to do something good for the characters of the game.
Games like Undertale and Nier would be nowhere near as moving if they didn’t directly engage with the meta-mechanisms (like saving or opening menus) that you, as a player, use to play them. Choices are truly final - you can’t just load up an old save file and change your mind. These experiences are so radically different from what other video games offer, and leave such a mark, that they really transcend the medium. They’re what video games are capable of when they put their heart into it and try to do something meaningful. They’re absolutely beautiful games.
Music
———————
Róisín Murphy - Róisín Machine
This is like. Very downtempo feeling disco. Some of the sounds make me feel like an alien.
Jeromes Dream - Presents
I understand why some of these older bands put out big compilation albums on Spotify instead of their individual releases but I don’t like it!!! Anyway a lot of places online call this band emo but they seem like cut and dry grindcore to me, and grindcore is a genre I have a mixed relationship with. I like it, but I really have to be in the right mood to listen to it, it’s intentionally abrasive and grating. As far as Presents specifically, it’s good grindcore. Really good! Just make sure you’re in a good place mentally to listen to grindcore before diving in, like for example, if you are putting off vacuuming.
Jeromes Dream - Seeing Means More Than Safety
This is closer to contemporary grindcore than Presents. They do more of the classic kind of shrieking/wailing grindcore screams on this, compared to the echo-y vocals of Presents. I liked the song “The Monologue of the Century” — I wish they got into more of the tech death metal-type melodic guitar lines like on that song on the rest of the album. Otherwise, like their other album, if you’re in the mood for grindcore, A+.
* Origami Angel - Gami Gang
I love this band. Perfect party punk-y emo.
Algae Bloom - I Am Everyone I’ve Ever Met
This is a really good album. There are these videos some people do where they put noodly emo guitars over cringey tiktoks, which are funny on their own, but are also funny because they are exactly what I think a lot of the really good emotive hardcore stuff sounds like. Maybe the lyrics are too clear though, they need to be more metaphorical and sound like they’re sung in a faraway cave:
Pity Sex - Feast of Love
I’ve listened to this album a bunch and think it’s great. Great indie-rock-y shoegaze.
Pomegranate Tea - life is getting so ___.
Is it indie rock? Is it emo? Who cares. They do gang vocals, all aboard.
———————
[1] I have for the past year been under the mistaken impression that Warhol started out as a photographer, and, not attaining much success with his photos, decided to get into pop art because he knew it would sell. I have no idea why I thought this. For what it’s worth, I’m generally not very interested in photography, and I like his photos a lot. I like his pop art work too. He was an excellent artist. But I don’t have much to say about him besides that he was a great artist. Lichtenstein I’m a little more torn about — he made some good art but I think he had very twisted sensibilities about what “art” is and was a little too into copying. I don’t think it’s common knowledge that his “comic book” paintings are straight up plagiarised with no recompense to the original artists. I dunno. He has a Mondrian phase, he has a Picasso phase. I don’t know enough about him. Warhol, though: great.
[2] I was starting to write something about art-making and goals and that study about how happiness returns to baseline pretty soon after you accomplish a goal but. Realized I would rather just write about art making on its own without writing anything about goals. So I scrapped it!!!! But here’s a quote I was going to use, from the excellent book Art & Fear, from the section titled “ANNIHILATION”:
Annihilation is an existential fear: the common — but sharply overdrawn — fear that some part of you dies when you stop making art. And it’s true.
[3] I think Undertale is the only really accessible game of any that I listed. You could play it having never touched a video game before and have an incredible experience. Hotline Miami is difficult and doesn’t make any sense unless you’re used to how much violence video games usually have. The Nier games are kind of in their own realm? They’re like the comedian’s comedian of games. Replicant explicitly copies the style of other games at various points. Automata is independent of but contains tons of references to replicant. They are games that assume you are familiar with video games. Postmodern games. Totally possible to play and enjoy without any of that context, but very different experiences with and without an implicit “this is how video games usually work” knowledge.
———————
Thanks for reading, have a great day.