User Profile

1) "It was YouTube's algorithm that catapulted me to prominence with an essay on a hidden secret in Shadow of the Colossus and that algorithm (for now) continues to favor even my most esoteric topics. Is it a deeply alienating experience to surrender success to an unknowable piece of code that understands neither quality nor morality? Yep!!!!!! But that code also helped most of you find this book, and for that, I'm appreciative."

2) "While writing this book, the entirety of Game Informer's website was unceremoniously shut down; decades of reviews, interviews, and more (like everything I wrote as an intern), flushed into the same non-existence as my original blogs. Every disappeared article, every piece of lost media, hurts our understanding of its subject. Simply playing a game (or watching a movie, or reading a poem) cannot contextualize its impact. Conversation defines a piece of art's cultural legacy. This is how a game dies: when all the context of its life is stripped away."

3) "This tendency for conceptual art to provoke thoughts even after the viewer rejects it is what makes it defensible as art. It is also what makes it threatening to fascists."

4) "Part of being a kid is wondering why a grown-up is crying while reading a book about a tree out loud, and a part of being an adult is being the crying reader."

5) "I will not attribute my current-day politics to Animorphs. I do not think they're the reason I don't like war. But I read these books so much as a kid. I read them far before I read about World War II, or Vietnam, or Iraq. And Applegate knew that, one day, I and all the other kids reading her books would read books, and watch movies, and consume propaganda, about war. She knew that the world we lived in wasn't frictionless, and to pretend it was would be doing us a disservice. The darkness wasn't just Animorphs' hook — it was central to the series ethos."

6) "The problem, ultimately, is what that darkness leaves you with. I could write 90% of an essay on how any of these games are the darkest in their series, but then you get to the end, and... what? 'Isn't it crazy how messed up this is?' It's an empty reading, substanceless. Ironically, it's juvenile. Being 'messed up' is not a theme. Darkness is not a narrative. Violence on its own is not mature. Every description I've given thus far is missing the crucial piece, the so what, the why should I care? [...] Every Zelda is the darkest Zelda because every Zelda is about growing up. Every Zelda is about gathering the strength and grace you need to face a world that is fundamentally harsh, alienating, and unjust."

7) "It seems like every few months, we have the same conversation about game reviews: should they factor hour count into their assessment? Is a 100-hour game inherently better for the money than a two-hour one because you get this much entertainment per dollar? I, as expected, don't like this idea. I don't judge my favorite TV shows on number of episodes, my favorite songs on their runtime. While I understand the desire to stretch one's money as far as possible, this equation just seems like another way to throw the dial all the way toward games-as-product. I have an alternative proposition, although even more impossible to implement. What is the hour count that a game lives in your memory? How often do you think of it, reference it, dream about it?"

Un beau bouquin. On sent pointer le "réalisme magique", sans magie mais avec beaucoup de réalisme. Une riche plongée dans un village colombien reculé, au début des années 60 ou fin des années 50 (le livre semble très ancré dans cette époque historique et politique très particulière de la Colombie, la sortie de la Violence et ses répliques). C'est aussi une satire très caustique de la société colombienne rurale à cette époque.

Un livre pas forcément très chatoyant, moins spectaculaire que d'autres œuvres du même, mais vraiment une bonne lecture.

@s_mailler@bw.heraut.eu un de mes écrivains préférés

ça fait des années que je n'ai pas relu ce livre, je me demande si j'ai encore une copie papier à qq part...

Deuxième édition, première lecture, ça fait des années que j'avais envie de le lire, même en tenant compte certaines critiques.

Finally, started listening to this while doing yoga this morning (I've been taking an audiobook break by listening to podcasts lately). I enjoy the combination of detailed engineering knowledge with a vulnerable memoir. The way that Chachra builds scenes of our real-world infrastructure having a purpose down to the smallest, easily disregarded, parts reminds me of the in-depth world building of acclaimed sci-fi novels like "Red Mars" yet describing instead the marvels of the real world. Those lengthy paragraphs that set the scene for our characters always strikes me as what sets the immersion into that world apart from any other book, centered far more on the action and drama between characters than anywhere else (should it even matter that they're in space?). What might be even more critical to the form of Chachra's writing is in bringing us out of pure fantasy through the recognition that all this is intrinsically grounded in racial capitalism.

I like the connection between how nature is often described as "the green stuff" as people with plant awareness disparity (I'm referencing the term from nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ppp3.10153 ) may struggle to define the specifics of all that surrounds them until it all blurs into a green blob- to how infrastructure is often lost into its own blur of "grey stuff". As someone who's interested in the formation of identity as a result of the environment and grew up in an urban setting, I'm very interested in bringing attention to the diversity that exists around us at all times, subconsciously influencing what we assume to be the norm, but also empowering us when we are better able to define, enact, and tend to those relations.

Furthermore, I'm reminded of "Detritus, trophic dynamics and biodiversity" ( onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2004.00606.x ) where it notes "This review incorporates the 'brown-world' of detritus into the largely 'green-world' of food web theory by integrating population, community and ecosystem ecology" (Hedin 1991; Pomeroy 1991 as cited by Moore et. al 2004). Being an amateur mycologist, it's important for me to bring attention to how the green could not function without the brown.