Good morning, weekend wanderer of the World Wide Washout. Or if it isn’t morning where you are, good afternoon. Or if it isn’t afternoon, good evening. If it’s neither morning, afternoon nor evening, then you are clearly in outer space. I hear life up there can be dull. Perhaps these articles will lift the monotony.
Erin Maglaque writes for the London Review of Books about hot, slightly broken Italian philosophers and whether the Renaissance was really the Renaissance.
Giovanni Pico, count of Mirandola and Concordia, was 23 when he travelled to Rome to become an angel. It was 1487. Christendom’s most important priests would be there; the cleverest theologians would debate him. The pope would watch. Pico was going to dazzle them all. He planned to begin with a poetic, densely allusive speech, which almost no one would understand; then he would make nine hundred pronouncements, each more cryptic than the last, e.g. ‘251. The world’s craftsman is a hypercosmic soul’ and ‘385. No angel that has six wings ever changes’ and ‘784. Doing magic is nothing other than marrying the world’ and ‘395. Whenever we don’t know the feature that influences a prayer that we pray, we should fall back on the Lord of the Nose.’ In an ecstatic trance he was going to leave behind his worthless, handsome body and ascend a mystical ladder to join with the godhead, the transcendence of his soul so absolute that his body might accidentally die. This was the Death of the Kiss.
Samanth Sabramanian writes for The Guardian about what happens when one of those hosepipes full of enchanted talking glass beneath the sea gets swamped by a volcanic eruption.
The Reliance returned to the cable that ran out from Tongatapu, untied it from its buoy, and spliced it to one end of the spare cable on board. Then, unspooling the spare cable as it slowly headed west, laying it down carefully so that it had plenty of slack, the crew spliced its other end to the cable from Fiji. The splicing is intricate work: first the peeling back of the cable’s various protective layers; then the cleaning of the glass fibres in a sonic bath, with what is essentially high-frequency sound, because even the most delicate physical contact with them might shatter them; then the soft placement of the two ends in a fusion splicer the size of a shoebox. An arc of electricity melts the glass fibres and fuses them. Then the glass has to be re-sheathed all over again. The entire process can take the better part of a night, sometimes longer – and it’s all done in a room that rises and sinks and sways with the ocean’s swells.
I’m still finishing Silent Hill f – I’ve been waylaid by a very LOUD review commission – so I glanced over Madeline Blondeau’s piece on its “erotic and grotesque roots” through parted fingers. It seems worthwhile if you’ve completed the game.
Whether or not the player chooses to learn about Japan’s pervasive history of misogynistic violence, America’s complicit enforcement of it, or the artistic movement that attempted to reckon with both is up to them. Because Silent Hill f’s puzzles don’t stop after the final ending. Like Saeki’s art–and the erotic grotesque movement itself–there are decades of discourse nestled into each and every polygon, line of dialogue, and everything in between–right down to the very last red pill.
William Volk, Activision’s vice president of technology from 1988 to 1994, has donated a hard drive full of development timelines, memos and correspondence about new products and hardware to the Video Game History Foundation. There’s some good stuff in there for retro computing anoraks.
Of greatest interest to our community: Activision had planned to relaunch some of their old Atari franchises with new versions of River Raid, Kaboom, and Pitfall. Although Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure did come out, we never heard much about River Raid: Mission of No Return or Kaboom!: The Mad Doctor’s Revenge, apart from some limited coverage in Electronic Gaming Monthly.
It was National Poetry Day this week in the UK, and the theme was “play”. So where are my videogame poets, ludopoets, verses mode specialists, l-l-l-line breakers and sanity metricists? I will kick things off by sharing an old favourite: Owen Vince’s The Adrift of Samus Aran. Here’s an excerpt.
Some music to finish: Boris Lyatoshynsky’s Symphony No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 50. Happy Sunday all. Don’t let the bastards get you down.
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