Phil Tippett (born September 27, 1951) is an American movie director and Oscar and Emmy Award-winning visual effects supervisor and producer, who specializes in creature design, stop-motion and computerized character animation.Over his career, he has assisted ILM and DreamWorks, and in 1984 formed his own company, Tippett Studio.
“Disco Elysium, an award-winning game from developer ZA/UM, created what I would consider one of the most brilliant pieces of interactive literature in recent memory. For this, we explore its foundational philosophy and narrative(s) throughout.” (Epoch Philosophy channel)
I continue to admire the incredible quality of these YT channels, and Epoch Philosophy is one of the best (although I just watched the Deleuze & Spinoza and Friedrich Engels, Socialism and Utopia ones – Engels which I have learned to appreciate during the years). This one is again on gaming and a particular game – a push to analyse games and treat them as true objects of philosophy or as applied philosophy, with movies (or anime or cartoons) already being the established medium of such exercises. This particular game dwelling on the intricacies of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the pervasiveness of ideology and the role of relationships in a dysfunctional world with its own history seems like a prime example, one that makes (in the words of the maker) it on par with Kafka, Sartre or other examples of the modernist canon. What i like is how, without spoilers encourages a certain critique or critique and dialectical analysis. Even if it psychoanalytic determinism is there (including neuro- determinism), there is a lot to be said about how political identity works nowadays. Politics is somehow everywhere and discussions in the game always turn into political discussion without transforming it all into a permanent critique or postmodern irony.
A terrific debut. I have read a free sample of the book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. It is important for me to place Strange Labour within the vague contours of Eastern Europe for some reason. Eastern Europe, if such a thing exists, feels post-apocalyptic precisely in the sense that it does not fit with various standard post-apocalyptic tropes of existing SF. It feels like all the imaginings, fabulations, extrapolation of post-apocalypticism did not prepare us for this. Maybe in the same way that Laurie Penny wrote about the inability of ‘catastrophe porn’ or post-apocalyptic entertainment to prepare us for the new reality we are living at this moment.
The world-building – and this is not a building (but a world to be built?), is a work of Strange Labour that exposes us to the effects of abandonment, to the shadows of massive labyrinthine earthworks that suddenly ungrounded everything. I am maybe wrong but I feel there is a deep affinity with the outcome of rapid de-industrialisation, privatization, the dismantlement of welfare systems and abandonment of everything that happened after 1989 in Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Poland etc And I say this trying to avoid here the entire charge of Tarkovsky’s “The Zone”. The Zone appears as something immutable and thus zoned-off behind the specifics of a certain time and place, or even cordoned off by a particular historical chain-of-events. In a sense, Penner introduces us to something else, the dispersed drop-offs, the neurodivergent that cannot join the immense Stahanovist Çevengur voluntarism that has suddenly pushed the majority of humanity into a febrile and inescapable activity. Strange Labour has some affinity to most of what the best recent new weird (I am thinking about the works of VanderMeer – Borne, The Strange Bird) tells us – that definitely, something major happened, that it affected everything that came after, we just do not know exactly what. It does that without appealing to a biotechnologically-enabled posthuman frame, but at the same time, all the epileptics and the dementia nurses already inhabit that strange space. In a way, if we try and inhabit the world of Robert Penner it will not save us from disaster, it will maybe spurn us to appreciate its inchoate beauty and scavenge our own cosmology out of its shipwreck entrails. Such a world is not the wasteland of cannibals, murderous mutants and exotic dangers that most of post-apocalypticism abounds, but of care-work to be done, of temporary respite and mutual associations that do not settle into predictable patterns.
Somehow it makes us perceive the strangeness of that absent work. There is something else besides all the brutalist petroglyphs, cosmist mountain top sublime. Yes, the impossible monuments of Communist heyday – hold an almost intangible (for now) finality. At the same time, as a good friend wrote about The Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party on Buzludzha Peak such remains became very quickly quite alien, almost unintelligible, its purpose unknowable or aims completely and increasingly irrecoverable. These are just the most scenic ruins apt for majestic ruin porn tourism – but what about this labyrinthine goings-on? What about the various lives, the experiences of people who live amongst such ruins, en route towards something else? What about that something that is being slowly digested and is digesting these natural-industrial habitats. Environments and habitats are indissociable from an entirety that is not larger than its parts. Many have made a home there, masses of people that once called it a place of work, are now rambling, searching, almost shambling but there is incredible wayside beauty. It is enough there is an after – but this after – has fused so seamlessly with what came all of a sudden as to be unrecognizable.
timespace coordinates: Valheim, the tenth Norse world.
A brutal exploration and survival game for 1-10 players, set in a procedurally-generated purgatory inspired by viking culture. Battle, build, and conquer your way to a saga worthy of Odin’s patronage!
Valheim is an upcoming survival and sandbox video game by the Swedish developer Iron Gate Studio, released in early access on 2 February 2021 for Windows and Linux on Steam. It was made by five people.
The premise of the game is that players are Vikings in an afterlife where they have to craft tools, build shelters and fight enemies to survive. The game uses stylized 3D graphics with a third-person perspective and a combat system inspired by action games. Co-operative gameplay with up to nine people and optional PvP gameplay are also supported.
The game was a surprise hit. Three weeks after its release, it had sold three million copies and was one of the most-played games on Steam.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (Windows / MINIMUM):Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system / OS: Windows 7 or later / Processor: 2.6 GHz Dual Core or similar / Memory: 4 GB RAM / Graphics: GeForce GTX 500 series or similar / DirectX: Version 11 / Storage: 1 GB available space
Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is a feature documentary exploring the remarkable life and legacy of the late feminist author Ursula K. Le Guin. Best known for groundbreaking science fiction and fantasy works such as A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed, Le Guin defiantly held her ground on the margin of “respectable” literature until the sheer excellence of her work, at long last, forced the mainstream to embrace fantastic literature. Her fascinating story has never before been captured on film.
Produced with Le Guin’s participation over the course of a decade, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is a journey through the writer’s career and her worlds, both real and fantastic. Viewers will join the writer on an intimate journey of self-discovery as she comes into her own as a major feminist author, opening new doors for the imagination and inspiring generations of women and other marginalized writers along the way. The film features stunning animation and reflections by literary luminaries including Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Michael Chabon, and more.
Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin was created with the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, California Humanities, the Berkeley Film Foundation etc (description taken from the original website of the documentary)
The documentary is truly one of the best I have seen dedicated to an author, the more to such an incredible and inspiring one such as Ursula K LeGuin. Take some time to explore her website https://www.ursulakleguin.com/
One of the best documentaries about Sci-Fi indeed and one to carefully and attentively thread along and listen to one of its most cherished authors. It wanders elegantly from personal life, the landscapes that shaped her novels, the childhood memories, her rise and response in Sci-fi fandom and canon, her relation, acknowledgment and understanding of the first nation people genocide in the Americas and in particular her knowledge of indigenous peoples of California.
It also combines some really great animation work that blends in very well with her world building. There are in fact very few movies based on her actual work.
To her previous mentioned works I would like to add The Lathe of Heaven about dreaming and the universe (also a movie) and the wonderful short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Also mentioned in the documentary is her 1985 experimental work Always Returning Home written and situated in the Napa Valley, a speculative anthropology works and tapes made by a future ethnographer and anthropologist Pandora with the rituals, the musical instruments, chants and language of a post-apocalyptic people named the Kesh, a sort of anarcho-primitivist tribe that combines elements of hunterer-gatherers, agricultural and industrial civilization while rejecting city building.
TimeSpace Warps 