0956 – Mortal Engines (2018)

timespace coordinates: Following a cataclysmic conflict known as the Sixty Minute War, the remnants of humanity regroup and form mobile “predator” cities. Under a philosophy known as “Municipal Darwinism”, larger cities hunt and absorb smaller settlements in the “Great Hunting Ground”, which includes Great Britain and Continental Europe. In opposition, settlements of the “Anti-Traction League” have developed an alternative civilization consisting of “static settlements” (traditional, non-mobile cities) in Asia led by Shan Guo (formerly China), protected by the “Shield Wall”.

“After the Ancients destroyed themselves in the Sixty Minute War, there were several thousand years in which nothing much happened. These were the Black Centuries. The great civilizations of the Screen Age had been utterly swept away, and humanity was reduced to a few scattered bands of savages’ ‘The Traction Codex’

Mortal Engines is a 2018 post-apocalyptic adventure film directed by Christian Rivers and with a screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson, based on the novel of the same name by Philip Reeve, and starring Hugo Weaving, Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan, Jihae, Ronan Raftery, Leila George, Patrick Malahide, and Stephen Lang. An American–New Zealand co-production, the film is set in a post-apocalyptic world where entire cities have been mounted on wheels and motorised, and prey on one another. (wiki)

imdb

953 – Saints Row IV (2013 video game)

Saints Row IV is an open world action-adventure video game with third-person shooter elements developed by Volition and published by Deep Silver. It is the fourth title in the Saints Row series. In the game, the playable character is the leader of the 3rd Street Saints, a street gang that has become the world’s most powerful and popular organization, and must fend off an alien invasion after becoming President of the United States and receiving superpowers.

The player is free to explore their environment while completing main and side missions at their leisure. The game incorporates elements from science fiction video games and films, and continues the series’ reputation for over-the-top parody. It was released in August 2013 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, and was later ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Linux in 2015.

The game is set in a nearly identical simulation of Steelport, the fictional city setting from Saints Row: The Third, though individual story missions have new, custom-designed levels. 

Saints Row IV‘s story parodies science fiction video games, especially Mass Effect 2, as well as films like The Matrix and Zero Dark Thirty, and other “nerd culture”. Some story missions are propelled by individual characters’ existential crises, as each Saint character is stuck in a personal simulation of their own hell, and must be rescued by the player. Other elements borrowed from video game culture include BioWare-style character romances games and a Metal Gear-style mission with an unhelpful partner.

Saints Row IV received several limited and summative edition releases, and was briefly banned in Australia.

System Requirements (Minimum) CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 | AMD Athlon II x3. / OS: Windows Vista (x86 or x64) / VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GTX 260 | AMD Radeon HD 5800 series. / FREE DISK SPACE: 10 GB. / DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 896 MB.

steam

873

Nick Land (born 17 January 1962) is an English philosopher, short-story horror writer, blogger, and “the father of accelerationism“. His writing is credited with pioneering the genre known as “theory-fiction”. A cofounder of the 1990s collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, his work has been tied to the development of accelerationism and speculative realism.  (Wikipedia)

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 Dark Enlightenment

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Left Accelerationism and Xenofeminism (Helen Hester+Nick Srnicek)

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post-scarcity economy   /   Post-contemporary

868 – William T. Vollmann

The Most Honest Book About Climate Change Yet

“Vollmann’s undertaking is in the vanguard of the coming second wave of climate literature,  books written not to diagnose or solve the problem, but to grapple with its moral consequences.”

No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies

No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies: 2

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William_T._Vollmann

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William T. Vollmann | Carbon Ideologies

|YouTube

862 – Vexille (2007)

timespace coordinates: Japan, 2077

Vexille (ベクシル 2077日本鎖国 Bekushiru 2077 Nihon sakoku, full Japanese title literally “Vexille: 2077 Japanese Isolation”) is a 2007 Japanese CGI anime film, written, directed, and edited by famed Ping Pong director Fumihiko Sori, and features the voices of Meisa Kuroki, Yasuko Matsuyuki, and Shosuke Tanihara. (wiki)

A female agent named Vexille is dispatched to Tokyo to investigate whether Japanese are developing robotic technology, which has been banned by the U.N. due to its potential threat to humankind. (imdb)

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live-action film

655 – The 12th Man / Den 12. mann (2017)

spacetime coordinates: 1943  Norway > Sweden, via Lyngenhalvøya and Manndalen

The 12th Man is a 2017 Norwegian historical drama directed by Harald Zwart and written by Petter Skavlan. The main role of Jan Baalsrud is played by Thomas Gullestad, who escapes from Germans in Rebbenesøya, via Lyngen Fjord and Manndalen, to neutral Sweden in the spring of 1943.

The film is based on the same historical events and has the same protagonist as the Arne Skouen Oscar-nominated film Nine Lives, in which Baalrud’s courage and stamina were also emphasized. The 12th Man is also based on the book Jan Baalsrud and Those Who Saved Him, written by Tore Haug and Astrid Karlsen Scott. Unlike the book, the film puts much emphasis on the efforts of those who helped Baalsrud escape, which was in line with Baalsrud’s own statements about the local population’s courage. The 12th Man’s plot also details the pursuit of Baalsrud from the Gestapo leadership’s perspective, with the escape being depicted as cat-and-mouse game between Sturmbannführer Kurt Stage and Baalsrud. According to German documents, the Nazis believed that the entire Resistance had perished in a blast, meaning that there are no reports indicating that the Germans even knew to hunt for Baalsrud. Baalsrud himself, however, claims that he killed two German soldiers in the fight, which would have definitely created a sharp German response. (wiki)

imdb

053 – eXistenZ (1999)

Existenz (stylized as eXistenZ) is a 1999 Canadian science fiction body horror film written, produced, and directed by Canadian director David Cronenberg. It stars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law.

As in Videodrome, Cronenberg gives his psychological statement about how humans react and interact with the technologies that surround them, in this case, the world of video games.

organic virtual reality game consoles known as “game pods” have replaced electronic ones. The pods are attached to “bio-ports”, outlets inserted at players’ spines, through biotechnological umbilical cords. Two game companies, Antenna Research and Cortical Systematics, compete against each other. In addition, a group of “realists” fights both companies to prevent the “deforming” of reality.  wiki