Defiant Sloth

But Not Necessarily Made in 2012

It's a series of lists. But they're good lists.

Favorite Films Viewed

While these may not be the best films of the year, they certainly were favorites. Note that not all were released in 2012, and they were viewed across a variety of formats: in the theater, or rented/streamed via Netflix, iTunes, or MUBI.

• Shame (dir: Steve McQueen, theater)
• The Cabin in the Woods (dir: Drew Goddard, theater)
• Dredd [2012] (dir: Pete Travis, theater)
• Looper (dir: Rain Johnson, theater)
• Hugo (dir: Martin Scorsese, Netflix)
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (dir: Tomas Alfredson, iTunes)
• Time Crimes (dir: Nacho Vigalondo, Netflix)
• Fantasmagorie (dir: Emile Cohl, MUBI)
• Time to Leave (dir: François Ozon, MUBI)
• Yojimbo (dir: Akira Kurosawa, iTunes)
• The Mirror (dir: Andrei Tarkovsky, MUBI)

Favorite Novels Read (Fiction/Non-Fiction)

• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Haruki Murakami)
• A Special Providence (Richard Yates)
• It Will Be Exhilarating (Studio Neat)
• The Orchard Keeper (McCarthy)
• Childhood's End (Arthur C. Clarke)

Favorite Games Played (Cross-platforms)

• Thief II: The Metal Age (Windows)
• FTL: Faster Than Light (Mac)
• Limbo (Mac)
• King of Dragon Pass (iOS)
• Dishonored (Xbox)
• Witcher 2 (Windows)
• Chivalry (Windows)

Bonus! Worst Films Viewed in 2012

Who doesn't like condemning the worst shit produced every year, regardless of your distaste of "lists"? I certainly do. These are the worst films I've seen in the past year. B-movies are a great style of filmmaking, but several of these were pitched as A-class releases and completely bombed on pacing, script, production, and overall enjoyment. Thank me later. (Again, not all were released in 2012.)

• John Carter
• Immortals
• Cowboys & Aliens

Everyone does the "best-of" lists around this time of year. If you're interested in a list of the best grammatical films, AV Club has a great compilation.

Long dismissed as mere entertainment (as most mediums, like literature and film were in their own eras), games have manifested into the pinnacle of all art forms: they are the culmination of story telling, dialogue, cinematography, animation, sound design, musical scoring, voice acting, hardware interaction -- even mathematics. Because of this, a breadth of genres exist more so than in any other medium. Over the last several decades, these genres have mutated and blended into one another, spawning new directions based on the maturity of the medium, improvements in hardware, and the ambitions of project scope.

One such genre I was exposed to back in the mid-late 1990s has since become my favorite. It's one of the few genres I care to take interest in anymore, so when games of this type are released -- which is, unfortunately, far rarer than its fans would like -- it's a momentous occasion. Luckily, 2012 has seen Dishonored released, an exemplary title for the genre.

Built from the heritage of exploration/interactive fiction/choose-your-method game series like Deus Ex, Thief, System Shock, Half-Life, and Bioshock, Dishonored plays like a tightly crafted love letter to the game studio (and contributors) that started it all: Looking Glass Studio.

The Genre Traits

To glean the most insight into this genre, it's important to start with the efforts and innovations of Looking Glass Studios. The game studio had a prolific ten-year life during which it cranked out memorable, immensely influential titles until its unraveling in 2000 when parent company Eidos Interactive had to pull back on spending. Luckily, many of the great contributors moved into other shops, including Ion Storm, Valve, Irrational Games, and Arkane Studios. These folks (including game designers Warren Spector, Ken Levine, Seamus Blackley, Harvey Smith) have woven their influence over titles that have stood the course of twenty years' technological progression. And their inventive gameplay mechanics continue to seep into modern games -- Dishonored included (from Arkane Studios).

Their earliest works -- Ultima Underworld II and System Shock-- broke new ground for role-playing gameplay rendered in the first-person perspective)). Remember, back in the early 1990s (when these two were released), American PC gamers played RPGs from a "top-down" isometric view (an angled, bird's-eye perspective of miniature characters on-screen); first-person perspectives were reserved for the shooter genre (like id Studio's Doom). Ultima Underworld II and System Shock defied the assumptions behind this type of perspective. The first-person perspective, of course, permits an immersion into the gaming environment that no other point of view can yield. And immersion is one of the critical components to this genre. Tom Bissel's essay, Looking at the Uncertain Fate of Single Player Narrative Videogames Like Arkane Studies' Dishonored, explains the kind of immersion I'm talking about:

Game design that allows the player’s decisions not only to bypass but actually foreclose important narrative or gameplay beats isn't just a way to make the player feel like he or she matters; it’s a way to make gameplay itself feel like something deeper, stranger, and more irrevocable than play.

The releases of Thief: The Dark Project (1998), System Shock 2 (1999, co-developed by Irrational Games studio), and Deus Ex (2000, produced by Ion Storm) continued -- as well as improved -- this trend of immersive gaming. These games benefited from three critical components¹:

1. The inclusion of customization to character through inventories of items, weapons, and modifications (but with limitations to inventory storage capacity)
2. Environmental narrative, whereby story is implied or shown through conversations/encounters with non-playable characters and world-building notes/books/audio/log devices dispersed through the games' areas (in a sense: direct and indirect world-building)
3. Choices and paths of level/puzzle completion so that there is never truly one "best" way to complete a task, but many different routes that the game permits. Oftentimes certain choices made have a dramatic influence on how the game continues to unravel (in the same spirit of "choose-your-own-adventure")

In the case of point #1, System Shock 2 employed an interesting training concept that slowly segues you into the world by having you choose and qualify in a career at the "interstellar space organization" of the game world before on-boarding you to the setting on which the remainder of the game plays. These career choices (of which you may only choose one) specifies your skills, weaponry, and/or psionic powers -- in a sense, informing the context of your play style.

Likewise in System Shock 2 for point #2, as the player moves throughout the areas of the game world, the discovery (by choice, of course) of audio logs hosted in small computational devices (eerily like the modern tablet) and ghostly apparitions (yes, it's a bit of a mutation of role-playing and horror genres) reveal rich narrative, slowly building on the backstory of what happened to the two space ships and bringing the player closer to the reality of the mysterious person communicating and guiding you throughout.

Thief and Deus Ex are good examples for point #3. Both games offer areas of play that present environmental and narrative puzzles that the player may address in a number of different ways. In Thief, for instance, you play as a stealth-based character (as the title implies) who moves through environments to the chorus of a light indicator -- if you're in a well-lit area, you can be seen by enemies; if you're in the shadows, you can move unnoticed. So when you're presented with infiltrating a well-guarded mansion to steal a valuable item from the owner's safe, you can either sneak up behind the guards' on their patrol routes, knock them out, and hide their bodies; or, you may wander around the back of the mansion, shoot a rope arrow² near the balcony and grapple in without harming anyone. (Or, if you're inclining towards role-playing the homicidal type, you can kill everybody.)

Arkane's Take on the Genre

A few games that have trickled out in the past several years that continue this legacy include Half-Life 2, Bioshock (spiritual successor to System Shock), and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Dishonored -- the most recent title in this blended genre -- reminds me most of the inventiveness of Thief and Bioshock. One-part stealth game (as an option, of course), and all-parts customizable character, the game has so many wonderful design successes that it's hard to be critical towards it. The game is, unfortunately, far from perfect, but its play mechanics far outshine the blemishes.

The game satisfies each of the three main components of the Looking Glass Studio genre. You're presented with an established character within the game world (Corvo Attano, lord protector of the Empress), and after a fatal incident that triggers the main story arc of the game, you're on your way to becoming a supernatural assassin. (You may argue that bestowing nonsensical powers upon the playable character is an effort by the game developers to satisfy every "wouldn't it be cool" urge they had while producing the game, but this worked to excellent extent in Bioshock and System Shock, and since this is a videogame, it fits perfectly into the aspirational fulfillment of the medium.)

As the player, you're presented with several ability and weapon choices. Abilities include passive forms, such as an increase in health, agility, and/or adrenaline; or, they may include active forms, such as an enhanced vision for seeing through walls, possession of other life forms, and teleportation of short distances. The active abilities present very unique gameplay opportunities, and the blink ability specifically (which allowing short bursts of teleportation horizontally or vertically) really opens up the playable environments. I quickly upgraded this ability to move slightly farther early in the game, and enjoyed the reachability of roofs, crawling along pipes that hugged building walls, and drop-assassinating from above. The developers allow you to upgrade any ability at any time in the game -- a testament to the game's flexible environment design. Often games prevent you from affording or acquiring certain abilities until late in the game, but you're free to use whichever ones whenever you want.³ The ability choices build successfully upon themselves throughout the acts of the game, rewarding investments in different types depending on the situation. It's also neat that the acts become much more vertical later in the game, and even if you don't invest in upgrading the blink ability (teleporting), for instance, you still can navigate these heights with other options (like possessing a rat and scurrying through air ducts, a whimsical nod to Deus Ex's endless air duct sneaking).

Narrative is handled through several different methods: non-player character (NPC) interactions (required or otherwise), notes/letters/books/materials scattered throughout the acts' environments, rides with Samuel (the boatman who segues you from finished act to hub to next act), and the Heart, which is by far the most unique. A couple notable games in this genre employ a sort of sidekick narrator that is assisting you throughout parts of the game, communicating through an audio device (Atlas in Bioshock, Janice Polito in System Shock). The Heart is a bit different -- it's an object you may use, but is entirely optional. It can be used in a number of ways:

1. To identify and home in on a rune's hidden location in an act
2. To guide you to an act's objective
3. To extrapolate information and backstory on buildings, areas, and people

Unlike other games, the Heart isn't necessarily stringing you along to different objectives within the game; instead, you're choosing to unearth information about the world around you to either better understand it or assist you in making decisions. I've debated whether or not to knock out a guard or assassinate him on a number of occasions, and by learning his backstory through the Heart, it's much easier to choose how to handle him. It's details like these that improve the immersion element of playing the game as a morally-conscious character instead of an apathetic one.

Finally, the game environments are designed for multiple paths and access points to completing any given objective. Need to enter a building? Think Thief or Deus Ex, but with several more methods of infiltration with all the abilities from which to choose. And as with moral decision-making like assassination vs. non-violence, your choices have a direct effect on the changing environments and narrative of the game. The city of Dunwall, which is the game's over-arching environment, is slowly being overrun with a plague seemingly catapulted by a rat infestation. Rats attack the living in destructive packs, and feast on the dead whenever a corpse is exposed. By setting this stage early in the game, you feel slightly duped into thinking you'll play the game as a relentless, revenge-seeking assassin; rather, you must now make choices about how you want to play out the game. More corpses mean more rats, more plague, more violence. Fewer deaths (or none at all) could mean a more peaceful playing environment (and, subsequently, game world).

As of this writing, the next game to build on this heritage is Irrational Games' Bioshock Infinite, set for release in early 2013. Though it is not directly related to the other two games in the Bioshock series, it is thematically and spiritually related -- much in the same way that Bioshock is related to System Shock 2. How this genre will continue to improve and transform in the future is anyone's guess, but the current crop of games are moving in a promising direction whilst retaining what made the original Looking Glass Studio games so fascinating: a sense of discovery, wonderment, and reward through gameplay and narrative.

Chuck Kolsterman's documentary review of Room 237 has me itching to see it at the Chicago Film Festival before it lapses into hibernation until, apparently, March 2013. Sounds like an inventive, critical film analyzing Kubrick's The Shining through five different critics' lenses.

Regardless of whether you're interested in the film or not, Kolsterman's essay focuses more about his idea about a style of film (or, frankly, art) criticism he's coining Immersion Criticism:

It’s based on the belief that symbolic, ancillary details inside a film are infinitely more important than the surface dialogue or the superficial narrative. And it’s not just a matter of noticing things other people miss, because that can be done by anyone who’s perceptive; it’s a matter of noticing things that the director included to indicate his true, undisclosed intention. In other words, it’s not an interpretive reading — it’s an inflexible, clandestine reality that matters way more than anything else. And it’s usually insane.

I'm all about this insane, irrational way of perceiving any kind of art. I've played and completed Super Metroid over a dozen times. If I could analyze that experience with Immersion Criticism, I'd likely be fanatically claiming its underlying notions as analogies to WWII missions of recovering enigma machines across the earth.

Applying the criticism to the movie that I actually did see at the film festival this year -- Franck Khalfoun's Maniac, starring Elijah Wood -- would be quite a challenge. That film left me dangling at the fault line between horror and unease.

Slate has a fantastic essay on Cormac McCarthy's writing style and production. The man is a literary legend in a similar way that Terrance Malick or Stanely Kubrick are film ones: He is a master of his own craft with deliberate, hardened prose.

In particular, I love this glimpse into his editing process during the post-production window of his grandest achievement, Blood Meridian:

In drafts, he writes sentences that make the contemporary reader sit up straight in his chair in revelation—“the kid could have shot the judge … His fatal weakness” or “The kid gives his own moral stand”—only to omit them in the next draft. It’s as if McCarthy writes these expository moments only for his own reference, knowing that later he’ll erase them and leave the reader to navigate by as dusty and torn a map as possible.

(Via @michaelpnoga)

From the The Verge's Siri detective work.

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Though it should be obvious to the intrepid filmgoer, pretentiousness should be avoided when enjoying motion pictures (and reading literature). So often can one be abhorrently judgmental to the tastes of mainstream audiences that your enjoyment of well-crafted entertainment can be compromised. Such is the case for Pete Travis's excellent film, Dredd 3D. It's one of those films you could so easily dismiss by glancing at its emblematic poster for presumably mindless action. But you'd be doing your movie night a disservice with such premature judgement. You see, as hard as is it to imagine, every once and a while an action movie miraculously sneaks through Hollywood unblemished. And here we have one that is savage, comic, and unabashedly strutting in B-movie glory. It shines with future-smacking dissolution and hard-boiled totalitarianism mockery.

So, does it matter what the film is about? Likely not, but the plot isn’t half bad. Narcotic gangsters of a broken future American city - one in which 800 million people live in the ironic sanctuary of a megalopolis, barring exit to the grand post-apocalyptic wasteland -- trap two of the film's law enforcement agents inside an immense, towering residential complex. The place is like a decaying, hell-spawn version of a futuristic Mall of America. It is here that the stage is set for our heroes to evade annihilation by every malevolent being in the building. The heroes of this grim world are heavy-leather garbed law enforcement agents equipped with an all-in-one super pistol. No need for elaboration on the costumes or weaponry, because it doesn't matter. It just works. (Lucas, take note, you fool.) Their hard-lined perspective on world order is enough to garner the backing of the audience, I presume. I mean, they operate as judge, jury, and executioner -- what's not to like?

Dialogue is spartan, and holy shit does it feel perfect in its minimal fulfillment for this kind of action flick. The sets and characters inhabiting the world are also top-notch -- they function just right, whereby we can unobtrusively understand the complications of this future populace, the buckling of an over-saturated city, the poverty, the crime, the instability. Whether it's being prophetic or cheeky, it doesn't matter; it's fluid world building that doesn't get in the way of the narrative, and doesn't digress into any political shenanigans.

The film speeds along to a crunching soundtrack and competently-executed scenes. This is important: here's an action film that finally isn't shot with maddening quarter-second cuts and drunken hand-held camera men. You have no idea just how relieving this is in 2012.

Now, what could be potentially off-putting is that Dredd’s viewing is required in 3D. At first, this is an annoyance, especially when I've long held to the opinion that 3D is the bane of this new era in moviemaking. But Dredd 3D follows in the footsteps of Prometheus whereby the extra dimensionality is smartly employed. It is actually better used in Dredd 3D -- almost, dare I say, to the brilliance of Wizard of Oz's use of color 73 years ago -- through the film world's inventive drug, "slow-mo" (with which its users experience life at one percent speed). When the drug is used in the film, color saturation and details intensify on the screen in ultra-slow motion (my guess is they used the Phantom camera and shot at 1,000+ frames per second). Travis cleverly uses these opportunities for grand action sequences, ones that end in bloody splashes of rainbow-blasted brutality. Only with 3D do you feel the extra punctuality of the scenes, so much so that watching it without glasses would be a disservice to the film’s integrity.

I would call Dredd 3D a film with self-actualization: it is completely conscious of itself but never stands still to explain itself to the audience. It just keeps moving. And so it's enormously enjoyable as an action-blockbuster that requires very little thinking but plenty of genre appreciation. Perhaps the film is so enjoyable because we forget how nice it is to watch something like this; it’s been so long since we've have a fun spectacle that isn't stupid that we welcome it heartily, no questions asked. So: see it.

Kudos to xkcd's ADD.

If you happen to be interested in my recent jaunt to the northern lands of Wisconsin (specifically, Milwaukee), I've published a few photos to peruse at your leisure.

Our dinner at Hinterland was unmatched during the entire trip. This self-proclaimed gastropub has incredible food and drinks. Their scallops melt in the mouth while lightly brushing your tastebuds with blackened spices -- a notch above Longman & Eagle's back here in Chicago (which is really the only appropriate comparison). The Andouille-crusted halibut defied expectations: sitting in a bed of Spanish chorizo, potato-pepper hash, cilantro aioli, and red hot butter sauce, this was just as succulent as the scallops -- incalculably soft and palatable. I also decided to destroy my esophagus with the cocktail battering ram that is Robo's Antifogmatic, a devlish concoction of house-infused Thai chili vodka, coconut water, lime, and ginger. The waiter kept telling me that the chef just makes the stuff in the back; after two sips, "you should be accustomed to it". Yeah, well, it took a few more than that. But I did order two glasses of it, so that counts for something.

I've also begun cranking away at a uniform series of photographs tentatively called Intimidating Beverages. Wide-angled but intense -- you get the idea below. Only have one that really expounds upon the idea, but I hope to accumulate several more over the remainder of the year.

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Tumblr has been a fantastic writing platform that I used -- admittedly, infrequently -- since September 2009. My first post was the declarant Economist Goes On-Demand. I stated about the publication's digital transformation:

Sounds like it would have been a useful service about three years ago, but now that you can get your news hot-wired via Kindles, iPhones, and computers, it hardly seems as important. And… the news industry rages on in attempting to figure out what it is, exactly, they want to do to save themselves.

Three years later and the news industry still hasn't figured themselves out. In the marketing world, we were talking about fragmentation with devices and broswers and laptops three years ago -- a sickly, ill-defined word then and now -- but it could just as easily describe the state of publications. Print, digital, e-ink -- all with various pricing schemes. This is an unfortunate condition of the news world that will go on for some time, but it's clear that some publications are finally wringing sense out of it. I can now subscribe to the New Yorker via print and choose to read issues on my iPhone or iPad. Same goes for the Economist (finally having adopted this version of subscription-pricing). There's promise, to be sure.

But there is another area of the digital world that grows more convoluted and broken than even the news industry: social media. Though the Internet has always been social, things like discussion forums never got trendy -- it took timing, modern development standards, and (an initial) network exclusivity to bring it to a boil. When Facebook first set itself against wicked college students at the beginning of the new millenium, it likely had no idea what kind of travesty into which this party would turn. At first, it was sharing photos from the night before, throwing sarcastic insults at someone's profile, and digitally poking a student. It was fun while it lasted. But here we are, nearly a decade later, and everyone is sharing their immediate thoughts, sharing their immediate thoughts about their lunch, commenting on their lunch, liking their friends' lunches, taking photos of their friends' lunches, commenting on photos of lunches -- they may even be declaring their love for the brand of a ketchup used at lunch. It's happening. It's strange. It's incoherent. And, actually, that's fine.

The Internet has always been incoherent and strange. We're talking about the deranged digital universe that was built with the hard work of reddit, Something Awful, the pre-dickbar Digg, YTMND, The Best Page in the Universe, 4chan, Ebaum's World -- even Angelfire sites. While several of these have degraded into corporate drudgery, some still press on as modern Walls of Curiosity. But social media sites -- and we're really just talking about a few notables, like Facebook, Twiter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and LinkedIn -- are here to stay. At least in some form. They'll evolve. They'll need to monotize. They'll need to stay competitive. New platforms will rise and erode old ones (Evan Williams's new blogging project, Medium, just launched, for instance, and we all know what happened to MySpace). It's an on-going saga with faddy, shiny things.

For these reasons, it was imperative to move away from a free, fairly socialized platform and use something more solid and true to form. I want to focus on writing, with or without an audience. So here's my defiant stab against the incurable social media fatigue and egomaniacal poison that runs thick throughout the Internet: A website, owned and operated! How daring and defiant.