PopCult Reviews

TV Review – Orange is the New Black Season 4

Orange is the New Black: Season 4
Created by Jenji Kohan

orange 01 I have fully embraced the power of Netflix at this point. While I have not watched every original series they have released, I love the ones I have. When season one of Orange is the New Black came out I wasn’t very keyed up about it. The selling point at the time was “from the creator of Weeds” a series I didn’t find that interesting. I had watched the first two seasons of Weeds and it didn’t compel me to keep going. And I didn’t find Orange too intriguing in the first and second seasons mostly due to one character: Piper Chapman.

Piper Chapman. I get it. She’s meant to be an audience surrogate, the fish out of water through whom we will learn the ins and outs of Litchfield Prison. And this is no slight to actress Taylor Schilling, the character is grating. Even more grating than just Chapman is her relationship with Vause (Laura Prepon). I have never bought the thing these two have and the directions their plots have gone don’t help either. Is it bad that I have started the last two seasons hoping Chapman would get shivved at some point and then the series could just go on without her? She became more interesting separate from Vause and getting caught up in her panty-smuggling ring in Season 3. In Season 4 she continued to be interesting by having to deal with her inflated ego and the fallout of that attitude. But when the season concluded with she and Vause getting back together I had sigh annoyedly.

When Season 3 rolled around, something about the show just completely hooked me and reeled me in. I think the de-emphasis on Chapman’s character and the spreading out of storylines to the characters in the prison who are actually interesting. There’s no way I could say a single character stands out as my favorite because I am so happy when so many of them pop up on screen and we explore their lives. I love the friendships between characters: Taystee and Suzanne, Flaca and Ramos, Red and Nichols, Pennsatucky and Boo. In many ways, the reason I love Orange is because I love Lost. The moments when Lost really clicked for me was when it explored pairings of characters and how they played off each other and then, over time how those relationships evolved. Funny enough my least favorite character in Lost would probably be Jack for the same reasons I dislike Piper, main characters seem to start out as such bland ciphers.

Season 4 is probably my favorite run of Orange to date. I am excited to see where these characters go next and the season asked some very tough questions but didn’t feel the need to answer them. I love when a television show brings up complicated topics, creates difficult situations where there is no clear villain, and then lets the audience live in that space. Breaking Bad and Mad Men did this often and it is what made me love them, especially the latter. In real life there aren’t clear lines that define hero and villain, it’s more complicated. The conflict between Pennsatucky, Boo, and Donuts is a perfect example.

orange 02 I genuinely believe that Donuts didn’t have bad intentions when he began his sexual encounters with Pennsatucky in Season 3, and I believe that at the start she was into him. But things became very complicated and messed up quickly. Donuts has a duty as a prison guard so their relationship should never have even gone to that place. In many ways, this relationship was offered as a counterpoint to Daya and Bennett, which I felt was a very dangerous portrayal. When one person has clear, direct authority over another there are clear lines that should not be crossed. So, on the one hand, I felt bad for Donuts, but I also totally sympathized with Boo’s stance on what had happened to her friend and knew she was right. It’s that sort of complicated writing that makes me love this show. It’s not going to answer the moral quandary, it’s going to pose the question.

Another thing Orange does so well is to rotate the spotlight on its cast, and it has an even larger and growing cast than Lost could have imagined. Season 4’s spotlight on Ruiz was very interesting and her evolution into a leader has me interested to see the fallout between her and Mendoza, the acting “mother” of the Latina group. The release of Diaz was one of those moments I hope we see more of in the next few seasons. A show set in a prison allows lots of flexibility from a casting perspective, prisoners can be released and new prisoners can be incarcerated. I do hope the show refrains from showing too much of life after prison on the outside. Keeping the focus on life on the inside is more important. Having moments where someone leaves and both the audience and characters know they will likely never see them again helps convey what these relationships are truly like. Prisoners bond with each other out of survival and need for companionship, but the system they are living in can pull these bonds apart at any moment.

I find Caputo is one of the most infuriatingly fascinating characters in the series. I can never exactly pin him down and that is what makes him so interesting. I believe he genuinely wants to do good, he has pure intentions, but he is so easily undone by crises. It reminds a lot of seeing upper-level leadership in teaching who deep down truly care about the students but get so tangled up in the absurdity of administrative policy and thinking they instead make destructive choices.

In that same vein is Healy, one of the most tragic figures in the series, and that is saying a lot. Here is another instance of Jenji Kohan and writing staff refusing to make someone an easy villain. Healy is both a victim of life and an abuser of his position of authority. He is what I wish Ben Linus had been able to be developed into on Lost. Someone who comes across as the obvious bad guy but as we peel back the layers becomes more and more broken and sad. Healy’s relationship with Lolly and it’s heartbreaking conclusion was one of those pinnacle moments in a season with so many great plots. My hope from a narrative and character point of view is that we just never see Healy again, maybe a short cameo in the final season by someone who gets released. The moment where he checks himself into the mental health facility is a perfect period on his story. He’s going to hopefully get the help he needs, but the audience, just like the inmates, will never know exactly where he vanished to.

orange 03 The moment everyone is going to remember of course will be the sudden death of Poussey. This was a very delicate moment and I think it was done in the right way. My only complaint was that a tragic ending for the character felt very telegraphed from about mid-season onwards. I suspected something would happen, I just didn’t know it would be so horrible. I’ve read a lot of criticism online about how the show dealt with Bayley, specifically that they made him too sympathetic. Much like I said earlier on how the show likes to raise difficult questions and present challenging situations, I believe that’s what this episode was about.

So often police brutality and murder is not the result of a malicious spirit but a frightened and improperly trained mindset. Bayley’s murder of Poussey was a result of leadership in the prison failing. Caputo kept leaving and not realizing things got worse when he did on top of Piscatella instituting a very cold, dispassionate policy of control in the prison. Add to that Suzanne’s trauma from being made to fight her ex by Humphreys and you had a confluence of people that could only end badly. If Bayley were a real person then I would expect he’d get charged with manslaughter, but he never wanted to kill Poussey. It’s a condemnation not of an individual but of corporations like MCC who cut corners on training and as a result, withdraw a sense of humanity from prisons. I think everyone’s grief and pain were touched on wonderfully and we saw the full spectrum of perspectives. What Bayley did was something we are all capable of, in a moment of extreme crisis if you can’t handle the pressure you can end up doing horrible things to another human being. You should be simultaneously held accountable to the full extent of the law but also shown compassion and love. Like a lot of the prisoners in Litchfield, Bayley had the worst day of his life and he’ll now pay for it. We could see that in the scene where he’s driven home by one of the army veteran guards and he looks genuinely broken when the man says he and Bayley are the same.

As a writer, it would have been extremely easy to make sadistic guard Humphreys the murderer. But that would not have had the emotional impact on the narrative that choosing Bayley did. Humphreys is easy to hate and he doesn’t challenge us. Including him as the focus of the final scene was a smart move. The dynamics in place bring up a lot of emotion. The audience truly hates Humphreys but does he deserve to die? Maybe you think he does. But Daya holding the gun not only gets her an extended sentence if she were to kill him she would also go to max and get life. She’ll never see her child on the outside if she does this. In the same way, Pennsatucky finds it in herself to forgive Donuts because *she* needs to do that, the audience has to find a way to let its hate go. Revenge killing a guard, even Humphreys, may satisfy a momentary emotional need for revenge but its long terms effects will be the destruction of Daya’s soul and her life. As in life, we don’t get to get back at those who have wronged us. Many times we don’t get proper justice is supposedly promised to us. What people have to do is find a way to forgive so that they can move on, so that they don’t have to live in that pain and hate for the rest of their lives.

I am very excited to see where Orange goes in its 5th season. I’d love for the opening to have let some time pass, to not show Daya or Humphreys right away. Slowly unfold those details, show the grieving process for Poussey continuing. Show Caputo facing the blame for what he is ultimately responsible for. Continue to tell these wonderful stories about these dynamic characters. And especially, I hope it continues to challenge the audience to think beyond black and white spectrums of morality, and be forced to face the fragile nuance of human existence.

The Purge: Anarchy (2014, dir. James DeMonaco)

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Whenever I’m playing through a video game and it suddenly forces me to engage in an escort mission, bringing a character I can’t control from point A to point B and keeping them alive, I will groan and slog my way through it. The Purge: Anarchy is a video game escort mission as a feature length film. I have not seen the first Purge film but was told it was unnecessary viewing and that this second film would fill me in. That was true, they deliver a lot of first act exposition to explain what is going on.

The film tells the story of the night of the sixth Purge. The Purge is an annual event instituted by an upstart extreme Libertarian political party as a way to help people release their rage. For twelve hours, all crimes are legal and the use of most weapons in committing these crimes is permitted. In Anarchy, we have an unnamed man (Frank Grillo) embarking on a mission of revenge. On his way, he makes the decision to help out a mother and her daughter and his Purge night takes an extreme divergence from his plans. A couple more characters join up with the group and they make their way across Los Angeles trying to survive the slaughter and mayhem around them.

It was probably not a good idea to make this my very next film after Green Room because the former definitely highlights the huge problems with the latter. Read my review of Green Room here. The Purge: Anarchy has five protagonists and none of them die until the last 15 minutes of the film and then it is only one. If the goal of the film is to make me feel that the event is the most dangerous and insane thing I could go through then it fails big time. Green Room kills off the most well prepared and confident character in a snap of your fingers. Here we have Frank Grillo essentially playing The Punisher and making it to the end and, spoiler, he’s the main protagonist of the third one currently in theaters. The film undercuts any sense of true fatality by keeping its main character alive the entire film.

Then we get to the metaphor of the film, and by god, it’s pretty hard to miss because they have shaped it in the form of a Mack truck. When I was in college, I stumbled across the film Mississippi Burning about the murder of three civil rights activists and directed by Alan Parker. I was astonished at how on the nose and disingenuous the message of the film felt. They kept beating you over the head with “Racism is bad”. Yes, I know that. But what interesting avenues in regards to racism do you plan to explore? Oh, none. Ok. Then why make this movie? But at least Parker’s film had a cogent message. I can’t tell you what Purge: Anarchy was attempting to say about anything. I suspect writer/director James DeMonaco is a little confused himself.

The first guess you might have is a message about Americans and their addiction to guns and the violence in our culture. Well, we have an allegedly anti-Purge group led by Carmelo (the always awesome Anthony K. Williams) telling us that the Purge concentrates its violence on the poor and minorities. Okay, a little on the nose, but let’s go with it. However, in the third act Carmelo and his group show up at a warehouse where One Percenters are hunting people down and state “It’s our time to Purge”. And the film portrays this as good and justified. I don’t think messages can get more mixed than that. They’re moments where we find young black men rounding up people from their own communities and selling them to the rich. We have two battling sisters who end up spilling blood over their shared love, one of the sister’s husbands. There’s a dude in an American flag baseball cap traveling around in a semi-truck with a personal army and mowing people down with a minigun. But the film never manages to compose a semi-cohesive point about any single thing it brings up. They’re bits of fictional media sprinkled throughout that build up the world but I never saw an underlying statement to any of it.

Even without a coherent thesis, the film could have done something stylistically interesting. The cinematography is sloppy and derivative. The pacing is dull and it becomes a movie where you are checking the time to see how much is left. If they had gone the route of Pulp Fiction-esque anthology that could have been interesting, playing with time and narrative order. They could have had the main character in one story as mere cameos in another. There were some points where we could have delved deeper into the racial impacts of the Purge but the film never has the guts to. I think having a late 40s white male director is going to keep the film from exploring those elements in any interesting way. I thought of a very different film, Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon (1990), that wanted to say something about race relations and came off as one the most insultingly dumb movies I’ve ever seen. This is sort of like Grand Canyon but with more guns, and even then I never felt the flinching and queasy sense of danger I got from Green Room.

The only moment in the film that got me truly interested were the final moments between Grillo and his target. There could have been some amazing themes explored there, some really complex and challenging performances. But then it just whimpers out and we cut away. The resolution is implied but I frankly would have rather seen a one room film set on the night of The Purge about Grillo and his target. Explore how people use the Purge to enact revenge and explore the psychological effects on those who do purge. The film just ends up being less than the sum of its parts. It didn’t make me interested in watching the newest film. Even looking at it as an ultra-violent escapist film you have to note it took the whole movie for even one of the five main characters to die! It just feels like a very surface level dip into sociology that other films have explored in more interesting ways.

Video Game Review – Asemblance

Asemblance
Developer/Publisher: Nilo Studios
Available on Steam and PS4

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You’re immediately greeted by the sound of alarms and a computerized voice issuing warnings. As your vision goes from dark to blurry to focused you find yourself a dimly lit, cold metal chamber. A console sits in front of you, a room resembling Next Generation’s holodeck beyond that. This is the stage set for Asemblance, a game in the walking simulator genre that is heavily influenced by the mechanics and gameplay of P.T.

And like P.T., who you are is a big question. It would be easy to assume you’re the scientist who built all this equipment, the same scientist where the virtual memory simulations were harvested from. But the game is a mystery without clear answers. The first memory the computer allows you access to is a simple walk in the woods where you saw a butterfly. That butterfly serves as a motif through all the memories though it is not so easy to spot as in the first. The game is fairly small, only four memory files can be accessed in total. There are multiple endings though and each ending sheds light on different parts of the overall mystery.

During my own playthrough I found it became important to pay attention every single detail, no matter how significant. The contents of memos spread across office desks or placement and absence of framed photos were crucial in uncovering and progressing the story. The graphics are not spectacular. They are attempting to reproduce the near photo realism of P.T. but have some muddied textures and are rough around the edges. The biggest problem is the pacing of reveals. Early on you uncover one secret after the other and then suddenly there’s a wall. I spent an hour or so wandering back and forth between memories trying to figure out the next step. This is where those minor details play a crucial role.

The developer has said they see this as a potential anthology franchise, along the lines of the brilliant Black Mirror series. With some more polish I would be all in on something in that style. I’m personally a very big fan of the P.T. style of gameplay, particularly because I see good horror not as something where the protagonist can successfully fight back, but where exploration of the horror is encouraged and stepping into darkness is inevitable. Asemblance doesn’t break new ground but it provides a decent story and the promise of interesting things down the road.

Green Room (2016, dir. Jeremy Saulnier)

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green room

There’s something dangerous about the woods. Yeah, the city is dangerous, but there’s something worse about the woods. You’re so far away from help. You’re isolated. The woods are cold and indifferent. So when the members of punk band The Ain’t Rights roll into the parking lot of neo-Nazi club plunked right down in the Oregonian forest there’s sinking feeling that hits your gut. I am ashamed to say I have not dedicated the time to watch Jeremy Saulnier’s previous picture Blue Ruin after hearing great things. Having seen Green Room, I must see this older film.

Green Room tells the story of a punk band that stumbles upon something they shouldn’t see in the back of a club. As mentioned before, neo-Nazis own the club and the band quickly become prisoners and involved in a brutal and violent standoff. Saying more would spoil the suspense of the film. The tension is built up beautifully through the moody ambient music of Brooke & Will Blair and the washed out cinematography of Sean Porter. Scenes are painted with pale green and blue ambiance and the tense drone that builds in the score. Right before all hell breaks lose all these elements come together and then explode into a nightmare.

The violence in Green Room reminded me a lot of Simon Rumley’s Red, White, & Blue. Harm to human beings is presented as realistically as possible, taking into account what actually happens to a body when hit with these sorts of traumas. There are many moments where you have to look away and the film doesn’t pull punches about who gets hurt and killed either. These are a group of young adults who aren’t trained to fight for their lives and they make the sorts of mistakes and show ineptitude with weapons that they truly would. I also loved the confidence of a couple characters going into extremely bad situations. That confidence is dealt with appropriately.

The acting is done very well with Patrick Stewart and the late Anton Yelchin heading up the cast. Stewart gives a great muted performance as the patriarch of this skinhead operation. He handles the band with just the right amount of calmness at the start, escalates as each side gets in their hits. Yelchin does a fine performance and is going for something very muted, unsure, and contemplative. You can’t watch his work now and not reflect on what we’ve lost. In the same way that seeing James Dean in Giant and East of Eden made me sad there weren’t films spanning decades featuring this actor, I feel the same way about Yelchin. I don’t believe we had truly seen his best work and films like Green Room show hints of that.

The supporting cast is excellent. Imogen Poots plays a local who ends up locked up with the band and brings a lot of physicality to the role that sold it. Her look and demeanor feel so real. The rest of the band does a great job, but it is the other neo-Nazis that are truly terrifying. Macon Blair plays Tad, the manager of the club and shows a lot of nuance. He’s not comfortable dealing with dead bodies and there’s a lot of unspoken and hinted at history that make him intriguing. Eric Edelstein plays an incredibly menacing skinhead that gets locked up in the room with the band. The stand out, though he is only on screen for a handful of minutes, would be Brent Werzner as Werm. He comes across a complete and total sociopath in his short screen time and is one of those people you pray to god you never meet in real life.

Green Room is a brutal story. But is is a very well told one. The narrative choices that are made help ratchet up the tension. Almost every moment of the film will leave you feeling the queasy, uneasiness, truly having no idea what horror is happening next. And this is definitely a horror film, not about the supernatural and not about a mindless slasher, but a horror story that preys on our fears of the big evil in the woods. This is what happens when you leave civilization and enter the realm of a vicious beast.

Book Review – While Black Stars Burn by Lucy A. Snyder

While the Black Stars Burn by Lucy A. Snyder
(Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press)

27181342._UY400_SS400_ The collection begins with a story that only hints at the supernatural tales to come, keeping things fairly mundane. By the second piece, you are pulled into a beautifully created fantasy world. While the Black Stars Burn is a mix of Lovecraftian horror, fantasy, and science fiction and author Snyder handles each genre perfectly.

Personal highlights from the collection are:

“Spinwebs” – a story set in a medieval culture where humans and spider-like beings live in mutually beneficial relationship. The world of this story is very well developed in its few pages. You understand why the protagonist has such a love for her weaver and the way the world operates. The end of this story had me ready to read Chapter 2.

“The Strange Architecture of the Heart” – a science fiction story that hits the same buttons as “Spinwebs”. We learn all the details of the world that we need to know and it feels fleshed out. The piece is focused on a lonely housewife and her only friend, the family android. Dark and sadly tender. I wanted a second chapter on this one as well.

“Through Thy Bounty” – This might be my favorite story in the whole collection. A science fiction story set after a nightmarish alien species has conquered the Earth, we hear it from the point of view of a human enslaved to work as the alien’s cook. These creatures’ appetites are for the cook’s fellow humans so she was forced to butcher and prepare everything from infants to children to the elderly. I was genuinely surprised by the places the story goes and it has a very satisfying conclusion. Could imagine the movie version of this one.

“The Abomination of Fensmere” & “The Girl With the Star-Stained Soul” – This duo of stories is connected through a continuing plot. Penny is a teenage girl whose mother has just died in a car accident. A mysterious man appears on her doorstep and claims to be from the girl’s estranged aunt who wants her to live with the old woman. The girl ends up in a small town in the American South straight out of a Lovecraft story. There are familiar tropes but where the story goes is with these elements is very entertaining. The second part takes a very interesting divergence to a landscape most Lovecraft fans would know and provides some beautiful imagery.

While the Black Stars Burn is a collection well worth your time, I can’t say you will enjoy every single story, as with collections there is always one or two that just don’t click. The overwhelming majority of stories here are wonderful, though. Very confident prose with a strong sense of world building.

Games for Two – Dice Heist & Welcome to the Dungeon

Dice Heist

In Dice Heist, each player is a master thief about to take on the four major art museums of the world: The Hermitage, The Met, The British Museum, and the Louvre. There are famous paintings, jewels, and artifacts to snatch up but you’ve got to be skilled and bring in sidekicks to help you out.

The four museums are each given a dice rating from easy (The Hermitage with 2 pips) to the hardest (The Louvre with 5 pips). Each player starts with one black die and each turn has the option to roll for a heist or recruit a sidekick (a white die). There is a limited pool of sidekicks and once you claim one it is yours for the rest of the game. Each turn, a player draws a card and places that item under the matching museum. If you roll on a museum and succeed then you get every single treasure that has accumulated there. When you roll your dice you look for at least one that beats the target value on the museum.

At the end of the game you add up the values of your total paintings, first place gets 8 points and the second gets 5. For each artifact you get 2 points and each set of gems scores in an ascending order (first red gem is 1 point, second red gem is 2 points, third red gem is 3 points, etc).

The game was very fast paced and there was some strategy in which museums you wanted to target based on their target value and what treasures they held at the moment. This was a game I think would benefit from a third player just to increase the tension. An okay game, very simple and easy to learn, very light on strategy.

Welcome to the Dungeon

WelcomeDungeon_3Dbox Welcome to the Dungeon is a game about a staple in tabletop gaming: heroes going into a dungeon and fighting monsters. The twist in this small card based game is that players all play the same hero. The first round of play is bidding which consists of pulling a monster card from the deck and either placing in the dungeon deck face down or keeping the card which allows you to take a piece of equipment from the hero. This mechanic does a couple things: the players are trying to make the dungeon as uninviting to the other players yet still beatable by themselves. There is the danger that you will think you are going to Pass and leave the dungeon in another’s lap only to have them drop out and leave you with a hellish dungeon.

Each successful run through the dungeon earns the player a Success card. The number of Success cards up for the getting varies depending on how many players you have. If you are killed in the dungeon you must flip an Aid card you individually have over to its red side. If you die again with this card on its red side you are out of the game entirely. To defeat the monsters you either expend a piece of relevant equipment (the Dragon Spear defeats the dragon for example) or be able to absorb the hit point damage based on the card value and your total armor added to your base HP.

While the game works with two players, the Bidding phase screamed out that it would work so much better with at least three. Bidding between two is a little lacking in the tension while adding a third would create some more variables. There are four different heroes to choose from at the start and we did only play once so with additional playthroughs some things might shine forward.

The BFG (2016, dir. Steven Spielberg)

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On a dark night, at the witching hour, an orphan named Sophie glimpses a strange shadow on the streets, quickly realizing it’s a giant. She rushes to hide under the blankets of her bed, but a massive hand reaches in through the window and carries her off to Giant Country where her adventure begins. There she learns that her abductor is big friendly giant and that his kin are the ones she needs to watch out for.

I have been a lover of Roald Dahl since I was very little and had Charlie and the Chocolate Factory read to me chapter by chapter at night. From there I remember books like The Twits, Matilda, and of course The BFG. Of Dahl’s children’s books The BFG is one I don’t think about often. I remembered the illustrations by Quentin Blake with the giant’s comically oversized ears, but as for the story I didn’t remember much of it. Steven Spielberg is another figure I remember vividly from my childhood. I can’t say what the first Spielberg movie I saw was, I have memories of a some scenes from E.T. early on, but I would guess the first one I watched in its entirety was Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg is known for the sentimentality he tries to weave into his work, which would seem to be in opposition to the sometimes caustic wit Dahl brings to his writing.

The acting in The BFG is pretty much perfect. Mark Rylance as the titular giant has captured every aspect of the character from his soft garbled understanding of language to his jumps from hunched shuffler around his cave to nimble leaper through the city streets. Ruby Barnhill as Sophie delivers a very confident performance, never coming across as an act-y kid, but feeling like an actual Dahl protagonist. The supporting cast doesn’t have much screen time, but they do their jobs adequately, the evil giants being the big standouts. The film lives or dies on the performances of Rylance and Barnhill and they are very strong.

The plot of The BFG is quite different than I think we’ve become accustomed to lately. This is an older style of Spielberg storytelling, where there is no epic battle between the forces of good and evil. The conflict is solved fairly quickly with a short exciting moment. The emphasis is on our two central characters and their relationship. An element of the Tim Burton directed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that irked me was the addition of backstory to Wonka. It felt like the most unnecessary and pointless addition to a story that didn’t need it. In the same way we got the backstory of the Grinch or prequels attempt to fill in the gaps, these choices miss the point. We don’t need to know the origin of Santa Claus to love Santa. We don’t need to know how the Easter Bunny got his eggs to love Easter.

Dahl understood the details children are truly concerned about and he knew that they would accept larger than life characters without questions about where they came from. This is where the film shines because it flows like a Dahl narrative more than any other adaptation of his work I’ve seen. The plot is a lovely mess and not much really happens. But the time we spend with these two characters as they learn about each other is action enough. I loved how long some conversation scenes were, just these two bantering and hearing The BFG transformation of the English language.

I enjoy the latest superhero beat ‘em up very much. But it is very heartening to see a film like this still being made. It’s a picture about kindness and understanding. The BFG loves to help other but is very insecure about his speech and what other might do to him if they discover his existence. Problems are not solved through violence, but through peaceful means. Yes, the mean bad giants get what’s coming to them but it’s not being blown away and destroyed. Even they have a place in the world. And in this current climate, learning to understand that even your enemies deserve life and place in the world is a refreshing idea.

My Favorite Disturbing YouTube Videos and Channels

Unedited Footage of a Bear

Adult Swim decided in 2013 to experiment with its deep late night programming. They took the banal infomercial that you come across if you’re up in the wee hours and turned it into some of the most powerfully transgressive film making out there. Most of you have probably seen their most famous output, Too Many Cooks, which, while funny, is nowhere near as powerful as this short film from director Alan Resnick. It starts out with what looks to be footage of people watching a grizzly bear, then becomes a commercial for allergy medicine, and then evolves into a nightmare. I’ve watched this around half a dozen times and there is a lot to take from it.

This House Has People In It

Another short from Alan Resnick. This one is harder to crack than “Bear”. It’s a series of CCTV feeds from a home security system. There is weird stuff right from the get go. A couple arguing, a teenage girl lying stiff as a board face down on the floor, grandma watching a bizarre pottery show, the baby wandering around. Things just get more odd and you will need to watch every window to catch what’s happening in the yard. It all culminates in creepy climax that leaves you with tons of questions. This one has a very extensive alternate reality game attached to it. See if you can discover the clues and get lost in this strange art piece.

Hey Kids

Get your sport shoes ready! At first glance, the majority of the content on Hey Kids is just a series of repetitive and dumb finger family videos. However, you eventually come across the strange bald figure with over-sized eyes and mouth superimposed on its face. It speaks in a hard to pin down accent and talks in almost nonsensical sentences. The more recent videos on the channel seems to show an obsession with the Illuminati and creepypasta. Is there meaning behind this string of increasingly insane gibberish? What mind generates all of this demented content?

Poppy

I always felt there was something off about Ariana Grande. I thought the apparent overnight flip from tween star to twerking Molly enthusiast by Miley Cyrus was bizarre. The entire assembly line of female pop in America is strange to me. Even stranger than American pop is the highly manufactured KPop and JPop scenes. This is where we come to That Poppy. She is influenced by the Asian pop scene and has a very polite demeanor in all her videos. Watch closely though, something is wrong with Poppy. All that Illuminati iconography in her video for “Lowlife. Such cryptic sentiments in her videos. Something is wonderfully wrong with Poppy…

Moving, Reading, and Digital Media

Google Infinite Bookshelf — The experimental digital bookshelf developed by Google.

I just moved into a new house. We bought it, first time homeowners. After having moved multiple times in my 20s, I decided I would spend the money to hire professional movers to handle the furniture and heavier boxes. It went off so smoothly, I was literally stunned. They arrived at 8am and by 11:30am everything was in the new house and unloaded off their truck. Yet, somehow I still ended up pulling a muscle in my neck (I blame unhooking some very tight washer hoses).

One thing we did before moving was sell off most of our books and DVDs. Once upon a time, I was a rabid collector of physical media. I used to go into bookstores and have an almost euphoric and disorienting haze come over me, being unable to recall a single title or author I might look for. I started keeping a piece of notebook paper folded up in my wallet with these names in case I happened to go into a bookstore. When I was in college, we would regularly visit the local Blockbuster and pour through their cheap DVD selection, growing my collection by dropping $100 a trip. Once I was out of college, I hit some hard times and sold off most of my DVDs for some coin to buy groceries with. Slowly but surely they whittled down.

Now, I only have a very minimal collection of things I consider fairly obscure: Seasons 1 & 2 of Frisky Dingo, Wainy Days, Seasons 1 & 2 of Upright Citizens Brigade, and so on. Mostly things that aren’t easily accessible on the streaming platforms I subscribe to. I no longer own many physical comic books and my weekly reading is done purely digital. For literature, I mostly read off the Kindle app on my iPad and only buy a physical book if I don’t have a digital option.

Throughout my graduate school days and into the present I still hear people bemoan this shift from physical to digital. Whether it be with movies, books, music, or anything else you can find someone who is slightly saddened by a decrease in the tangible. I remember sitting in the Writing Center where I worked at my university, where freshmen came to have their papers critiqued and revised, and having conversations with a couple fellow tutors who were totally against the idea of reading off a screen. Having been through an involuntarily move that forced by books into storage I was on the side of the digital. Their arguments touched on the sensory aspects of a physical literature mostly (feel, smell). I have begun to think of this as the fetish-zation of physical media. The same way a music lover might wax poetic about the groves on a vinyl record, so does the book lover talk in erotic tones about the smell of a used bookstore and the crack of a hardback spine. I personally just don’t get much from those sensory experiences.

Digital means a few different things to me. Because of my personal experiences moving so often I felt that my physical books were either not accessible or a burden I had to think about when going from place to place. Since I got my first iPad and started reading digitally reading and literature feeling freer to me. I can carry my whole library around with me no matter where I go. I can stream movies where ever I have a connection and I can sideload video files onto my devices for watching whenever I choose.

In a world where we have to become increasingly more aware of our impact the environment, moving from printed paper texts to digital ones seems like a necessity. I admit I haven’t researched the carbon impact of a tablet computer versus analog media, but I would have to think that over time the digital option is more environmentally friendly. It also takes less space on a planet that is becoming increasingly overcrowded. Being able to compress media is one way we create more space for each other and our environment.

Digital media is also revolutionary is what it can do for developing countries. Distributing books to people in rural, poor areas through pre-loaded devices would be easier in a digital format. In the same way I would have been able to move my library throughout my 20s if it had been digital, I can imagine how helpful it would be for refugees to hold onto their books despite having to leave their homes. Add in digital photos as a way for them to preserve memories instead of the sad reality of leaving physical photo albums behind when you don’t have time to pack up your life.

There’s a lot of fears around dropping physical media that are very valid. The infamous case of Amazon wiping DRM copies of 1984 off users Kindles rang as one of the most ironic thing our culture has experienced. DRM should be a major concern for digital users. It’s the one great hurdle to making digital media a universal form of the free exchange of information. This ties into copyright law which transcends the digital and affects all forms of media currently.

The future is always uncertain. But I feel very passionate and sure that the future of media lies in the virtual world. The ability to compress an entire library into a single handheld device is one of the most revolutionary things humankind has accomplished. My generation and the next will likely be the transitioners, but in handful of decades reading on screen will be the norm. Like vinyl, there will always be a niche market for physical books, but the way to open the doors of communication across the globe will be in how we develop digital literature.

Games for Two – Above and Below

Above and Below
Designed by Ryan Laukat
Published by Red Raven Games
Purchase here

Above and Below is the story of rebuilding after disaster. Your village was destroyed by barbarians and you’ve moved your people to a new place to start a new life. However, you find beneath the ground is an intricate series of tunnels and the opportunity to discover great treasure. You’ll need to build new buildings, recruit new villagers, harvest resources, and explore the world below to win.

You start the game with three villagers: one builder, one trainer, and one explorer. All are capable of going cave diving, the explorer just has the chance of rolling better. You can spend income to purchase new buildings, each of which have special actions, or purchase new villagers to train. If you choose to go into the caverns you take a cave card and roll one die. The pips correspond to a paragraph number in the adventure book. Another player reads and gives you options to choose from. Different options provide different rewards but you won’t know what those rewards are until after you roll. The game is played out over seven rounds and at the end you calculate points based on the number of buildings you have, how many of each resources you’ve accumulated, your reputation score, and any bonuses you get from specific cards.

My wife and I had a wonderful time playing Above and Below. Sometimes you come across games that say they are for two players, but as you play them you realize the experience would be more complex and interesting with at least a third. Above and Below works beautifully as a two player game and plays surprisingly fast. My wife actually commented that she wished there were a few more rounds. In total we played three full games. The first game was naturally a lot of figuring out the mechanics and making sure we were comprehensive in our actions. About halfway through that first session things began to click. By the third game, we were deep in the strategy and realizing what benefits delving into the caves beyond creating a very fun, light fantasy story.

Above-and-Below-board I was reminded a bit of IDW’s Machi Koro, a city building game, where certain cards are considered top shelf premium ones based on their cost and benefits. In Above and Below, there are six star buildings that provide multiple benefits if you can afford their large cost. There’s also four interchangeable star buildings that provide similar but less powerful benefits. Three pools replenish during your rounds of play: new villagers, regular buildings, and underground buildings. Each playthrough created vastly different villages for the both of us. Resources are harvested either from buildings or going into the caves. Once you have resources you can either stockpile them (which increases your income) or offer them up for sale to other players. At the end of the game you add up the resources you have stockpiled and multiply them by a point value based on where they were place on the stockpile track. So, selling resources can help the buyer increase that score while giving the seller a few quick gold pieces.

Above and Below is a game we would definitely play again. It takes a little more time to set up than the simple card games we had been playing, but nowhere near the set up time of games like Eldritch Horror and the like. If you are looking for a very deep, complex resource management game this is not for you. A perfect game to introduce someone to resource management without overwhelming them with too many actions and options. Because of the numerous building and variety of villagers, including special villagers that can only be recruited through going into the caves, there is a lot of replayability. Highly recommending this game.