1.) IF game - I think Alias ‘The Magpie’, as it was one of the first ‘modern’ IF games that I played when I discovered text games were still a thing, five or six years ago, and it delighted me. Exactly my sense of humour.
2.) Non-IF game - pass. I’ve never really played any! Unless I can have backgammon? Let’s go for backgammon.
3.) Book - I read a lot but hardly ever re-read (except poetry). Forever reading, as it were, in a forward direction. So favourite here would be the ones I particularly remember (most are forgotten immediately). On that basis, fiction: The Green Child by Herbert Read. Read was an art historian and poet, but they say everyone has a novel in them and this is the one he had in him (his only one, I think). Odd and unsettling. Also, slim. The details are hazy, but the atmosphere left an indelible impression. Non-fiction: Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm. Not an easy read! But well worth it. You’ll feel profounder and cleverer at the end, even if you can’t remember a single thing it told you (pretty much my experience). Poetry: Philip Larkin, every time.
4.) Movie: I’ve watched very few, honestly, so hard to pick a favourite. Just not a movie person, I guess. But I do like The Wicker Man. The Corman print with all of Paul Giovanni’s folk music in it though, rather than the original British Lion version, with half of it hacked out. No wonder Christopher Lee was so upset.
5.) Band (and/or composer). Béla Bartók and Olivier Messiaen are two composers that fascinate me at the moment.
Wow. The number of people with no movie opinions may be a testament to just how bad movies have gotten. There used to be a few every year that were worth watching but these days the pickins are mighty slim. I have to go back twenty years to think of movies I really enjoyed… not that I’m a movie expert, but I used to watch quite a few.
I mostly watch horror movies, and we’re entering a renaissance in which good horror is finally being recognized as art. So if you’re a horror fan, these are fine times, because there’s been some really good stuff over the last decade.
Not sure about anything else though, as I’d usually rather eat a bug than watch a serious drama or a romance.
I mean, I grew up with movies from the 90s and 2000s, but I still don’t remember ever being excited to see a movie. I was excited to see Chappie, just because it was extremely similar to a story I was writing when it came out, and both stories had themes that I thought were being completely ignored by pop culture robotics and narrative philosophies.
I enjoyed Interstellar, quite a lot, admittedly more than I enjoyed Chappie, but even then: I was not excited to go see Interstellar; it just happened to be on at the time, after it had left theatres.
So, for me at least, it wasn’t like “oh movies have been descending in quality”; I just have never had much of an interest in movies. Not sure why. Maybe it’s pacing? I usually enjoy stories with more buildup. I’m also not really interested in presentation; the mechanics of an idea are more important for me. I also don’t connect with characters very well.
It sorta feels like some colossus blazing by at speed. Like, that was neat, but it was gone as fast as it arrived.
I have a Letterboxd page here if anyone is interested. I haven’t written any reviews (just star rankings) so it probably doesn’t mean anything to anyone unless you are really curious about my tastes.
I try to watch one movie per day but it looks like I’ve managed about one every four days.
I think being a text-based forum could definitely be correlated with not being super into movies as a medium (not a perfect correlation, but non-trivial!)
Yeah, agreed with all of this – like, if you want to stop every time you get to a part where Leopold is musing to himself about politics, then interjects “Parnell!” and gets sad, you can read the canonical annotations and learn that Charless Parnell was a 19th Century Irish politician who almost won the adoption of Home Rule brought to his downfall by an adultery scandal, or you can just figure that whatever animal, vegetable, or mineral Parnell is, Leopold sure gets bummed out when he thinks about it, and do just fine (that’s what I did when I read it).
And there are enough beautiful images and clever gags that even if you only get a portion of them, IMO it’s still worth it – one of the things I love about fiction is the way it lets you claw your way into the head of someone else, across time and space and identity, and I find here Joyce’s techniques do that in spades. At the basic level it is rather accessible; you don’t need to dig into too much obscurity to realize the book’s about a young man who thought he was going to change the world gradually coming to terms with the reality that he won’t, and a middle-aged man second-guessing the contentment he finds in his unassuming life, both of whom are pretty engaging and relatable.
I’d readily admit that much of it is a little self-important and Joyce can get carried away with demonstrating his own cleverness – and it has major blind spots when it comes to women, despite the one significant female character getting the best bit of the novel – but I partially picked it to rhyme with How to Be Both, which is another stream-of-consciousness novel by a British author, but with a much different perspective!
Anyway all that to say that I can definitely understand not enjoying it – heck, I love Ulysses, like Dubliners, am kind of meh on Portrait of the Artist, and have never gotten past page five of Finegans Wake – but l do find it a very rewarding book, and the three or four people I’ve nagged into reading it have generally agreed though one of them stopped after two hundred pages feeling like they’d gotten enough out of it which is fair enough. So if any of this seems like it helps create a different mindset for approaching the book, it might be worth another go – but if not, probably not.
It’s a “sightless” medium. If you’re not sighted, you play with a screen reader. If you are, then you’re reading, and not watching a visual rendition of something, like you would in a movie.
As if the list of books I need to get my hands on is not long enough already, now I have to be on the lookout for Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution (the title alone makes me really want to read this) and The Secret History.
Thanks a lot.
EDIT: Wait. The Secret History? By Donna Tartt? I’ve read this in the Dutch translation (De Verborgen Geschiedenis). Amazing novel. I never linked it to Mr. Norrel though.
Several of his novels are high on my list, especially Lisey’s Story and Dolores Claiborne. The Dark Tower-series is a portal to another world, not a book. Otherwise I would include it too.
IF game: well, given how often I’ve said “I bet Nord and Bert would’ve tried something like this if there’d been more disk space/memory” it’s the most inspirational, but H2G2 gave the most laughs–maybe just because I also enjoyed wondering what a sequel would be like.
Non-IF game: Ultima IV/V. V was a very clever apology for IV’s excesses, and I love the introduction. I’ll also throw in Deathlord (1987,) a really tough, big RPG which I thought nobody liked until it was remade to be a bit fairer a year or two ago.
Fiction: Money and Success by Martin Amis, or Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes. Non-fiction: There are a lot I like but perhaps I’ve gotten the most practical stuff from Cialdini’s Persuasion. It made a lot of sense out of some very bad actors. Poetry: Philip Larkin and not just that one funny poem with the bad word in the first line.
Movie: Amadeus. One almost has sympathy for Salieri, because we’ve all been jealous. But it seems every single actor in that film is brilliant. The scene where Mozart apologizes to Salieri is heartbreaking.
Music: Nobody’s listed Tom Lehrer yet. I can repeat a lot of his songs by heart. He has some clever, clever rhymes.
I like Ulysses. I think the key (for me, anyway) is just to avoid taking it too seriously, at least as a linear narrative. I mostly appreciate the language. I could enjoy it just reading chapters at random. I prefer Portrait and Dubliners, and rather detest Finnegan’s Wake as what seems a bit of literary trolling.
The real news is that I downloaded Planescape: Torment for a play on easy with the debug console live (does anyone play it for the combat? Compared to the Baal games, it isn’t so good on that front).
Oh man, I don’t think we ever played any of the Avernum remakes, but I remember spending so much time playing the original Exile: Escape from the Pit. Still one of my favorite examples of an RPG doing a lot with simple writing and mechanics…
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