Pocket Lint #27: dragons

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Five stories about how, why and where we move.

That Dragon, Cancer – in its final hours of funding on Kickstarter.

“Mr. Jones, 64, has an intellectual disability and a swollen right hand that aches from 40 years of hanging live turkeys on shackles that swing them to their slaughter. His wallet contains no photos or identification, as if, officially, he does not exist. And yet he is more than just another anonymous grunt in a meat factory. Mr. Jones may be the last working member of the so-called Henry’s Boys — men recruited from Texas institutions decades ago to eviscerate turkeys, only to wind up living in virtual servitude, without many basic rights.”

What it’s like to be pregnant, bipolar and at significant risk of post-partum depression in the UK.

The truth about the teenager who disappeared in the Michigan State University steam tunnels, sparking a national panic about Dungeons and Dragons.

“Do your best. Every deity and the spirits of your dead comrades are watching you intently. It is essential that you do not shut your eyes for a moment so as not to miss the target. Many have crashed into the targets with wide-open eyes. They will tell you what fun they had.”

Parable of the polygons: a playable post on how a small amount of bias leads to segregation in society.

“Whites can live, love, study, work, play and die in segregation … and still profess that race has no meaning in their lives.”

The woman who saw dragons.

The Magic Circle is set inside a high-fantasy remake of a fictional 80s text adventure, also called The Magic Circle, that has been in production for many years. The original was made by Ish Gilder, “a mild-mannered game designer who won’t let us call him a genius” in the words of a fake website for the game. An audio diary early on (of course there are audio diaries) reveals that The Magic Circle has been in production for two decades. It’s vapourware. The environment resembles a whiteboard outline that has been erased and redrawn – a beautiful, sinewy vision of sketch lines and uncertain clouds, with only occasional flashes of colour showing live elements.”

The Rosetta landing, cartooned live, in gif form.

“The moon is much larger than it appears to be. This is worth remembering because next time you are looking at the moon you can say in a deep and mysterious voice, “The moon is much larger than it appears to be,” and people will know that you are a wise person who has thought about this a lot.

Poem of the week: Us Two, A. A. Milne

Game of the week: Detritus, which I made last time I moved 10,000 miles around the world.

Tumblr of the week is an Instagram instead: Follow Me.

Pocket Lint #26: implicit

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“The 22 bus is the only route that runs 24 hours in Silicon Valley and it has become something of an unofficial shelter for the homeless. They call it Hotel 22.”

The problems with capitalism, as explained by a Minecraft hedge fund manager.

A medical actor who fakes illnesses so trainee doctors learn empathy. “Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes a seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response.”

What does an orgasm look like?

Every email is a ghost story.

Harvard’s tests for implicit associations about race, gender and sexual orientation.

“With my form of multiple sclerosis, I quickly started to realise that while the disease would likely never kill me by itself, the sheer weight of time could still do some serious damage. You know. All the wonderful things I should have done before. All the terrible things that might now happen. Playing Spelunky’s genuinely refreshing in this regard: it’s a reminder that the only moment that really matters is the moment that’s currently unfolding. Strategy dries up and blows away in the present, and in its place you’re left with tactics, with what to do for the next thirty seconds. Forget the City of Gold – how do I handle this frog that’s blocking the exit? Forget my plans for the afternoon, what’s with this stutter?

On being a black male, six feet four inches tall, in America in 2014.

“Capturing Knight was the human equivalent of netting a giant squid. He was an uncontacted tribe of one.”

Revenge bento.

It’s a bad fence.

Poem of the week: Epistle: Leaving, Kerrin McCadden

Game of the week: Crossy Road

Tumblr of the week: To My Unborn Son

Pocket Lint #25: permeable

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She’s not playing it wrong.

“The euphoria made time pass quickly, and the light outside faded as it got later and later into the evening. We were sitting at a table drinking, and talking, and she was telling me about a tattoo she planned on getting on her upper arm. She grabbed my hand, and ran my fingertips slowly over the spot she wanted it, staring into my eyes. Oh yes, something was building. The moment is burned into my memory, the moment before everything changed.”

The line between terrorism and mental illness.

How extreme isolation – as used in prisons and as a torture tactic – breaks down the human mind.

Climate change is a mental health issue: “The ability to process and understand dense climatic data doesn’t necessarily translate to coping with that data’s emotional ramifications. Turns out scientists are people, too.”

NASA has posted a huge library of free-to-use space sounds.

“A few weeks ago I killed a patient.”

Pop Up Playground are crowdfunding to support Melbourne’s Fresh Air festival next year. Without them, Spirits Walk and Ludonarrative Disco Dance would never have happened. If you like fun, accessible, games in real space, even if you can’t make the festival, please support them; they help keep game makers making.

Poem of the week: since feeling is first, e. e. cummings

Game of the week: TAKE CARE

Tumblr of the week: Clickbait Dissertations

Pocket Lint #24: hills of beans

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“People do still donate at churches and other places. We literally have ten tonnes of beans. We have a ‘bean room’ at our central storehouse. People for some reason associate a foodbank with beans. But actually what we need is coffee, sugar, UHT milk, tinned fruit, tinned fish. A whole range of things. So we try and get the shopping list to people and ask them to buy from it. But whatever you do, you still get lots of beans.”

The rise and fall of Default Man: “When we talk of identity, we often think of groups such as black Muslim lesbians in wheelchairs. This is because identity only seems to become an issue when it is challenged or under threat. Our classic Default Man is rarely under existential threat; consequently, his identity remains unexamined. It ambles along blithely, never having to stand up for its rights or to defend its homeland.”

Of GamerGate and disco demolition.

Trouble at the Kool-Aid point.

The paranoid style in gaming misogyny.

I Know This Sounds Like Spam, But I Really Did Double My Mass In TWO WEEKS And Now Women Can’t Get Enough Of Me And I’m SCARED

If you only come into contact with one thing about GamerGate, make it this video.

Robert Webb on growing up male: ‘Nobody ever told me: you don’t have to waste years trying to figure out how to be a “man” because the whole concept is horseshit. We are people, individuals comprising a variety of sexes, races, shifting sexualities and all the rest of it. Every convention that tries to reinforce this difference is a step back. Notions of gender pointlessly separate men from women, but also mothers from daughters and fathers from sons. The whole thing is – at best – just a stupefying waste of everyone’s time.’

Shadows of Mordor, Watch Dogs, and the politics of NPC agency.

‘The first funeral parlour he went to, in Hoxton, east London, told him they needed £2,500 upfront for the church and the vicar. “I said: ‘I can’t afford that.’ They said: ‘You won’t be able to bury him without that money’,” he says, at his flat. His father’s finch whistles in a cage by the window. Griffin is a former landscape gardener who gave up his job to care for his father when he became unwell. Another firm quoted him costs of around £4,000, asking for £1,000 upfront. “I told the funeral office I would just go to the unemployment office to see what they can give me. They said, ‘Oh no, we need the money upfront’. That’s when I started to get worried.”’

Tip sheet and resources for journalists – and others – dealing with graphic images and material.

What to expect when the internet tries to ruin your life.

Poem of the week: Proserpina, Going Deeper, by Jack Hollis Marr

Game of the week: Realistic Kissing Simulator

Pocket Lint #23: the work we do

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What do homeless veterans look like?

The women I pretend to be.

“I have never been more resolved, in 18 years of practising journalism, of the absolute importance of our function in a democracy. I have never been more sure that the opportunity cost associated with doing this job is, actually, worth it. I believe we matter. I know I’m not alone in that belief. Yet we act as though we don’t matter, and facts don’t matter, and truth doesn’t matter. Call this Dispatch this particular weekend a love letter to my profession, and an outpouring of grief at its failings.”

The mother question.

‘Two days before CoverGirl, the NFL’s “official beauty partner,” was forced to respond to the league’s handling of the Ray Rice case, I helped three girls on the internet find concealer to cover up their bruises and self-harm scars.’

A woman is in jail in the US for helping her daughter have an abortion.

Is it a crime to raise a killer?

Gender disparity in corporate fraud. Even in white-collar crime, the pay gap persists.

This Is Katie Fucking Ledecky: A Thesis About Kicking Ass. The only column I’ve ever read that has instantly made me watch several videos of swimming on YouTube.

A non-definitive ranking of the Mitford sisters.

What Kim Kardashian: Hollywood can teach us about Carl Jung.

[shameless self-promotion] “Some people find it easier to put aside their fear than others; I find it almost impossibly difficult. It would be easy to give up, knowing that even if I manage to conquer my lack of coordination enough to run up a wall, I’d still struggle with the fear of getting down again.”

“The right leg of Leo Bonten broke after a stupid accident. There was an infection, it was off. But Leo wanted to keep his leg per se. To make a lamp out of it.”

Confessions of a former internet troll: “If there was a difference between trolling and schoolyard taunting, it was trolling’s particular take on the best way to be an outsider. The prototypical rebel without a cause is either a nihilist or self-serious, disappointed by a vapid world or giving up on it entirely; in either case, he is not content to gossip while there are motorcycles to be ridden in stoic search of the real. For us, it was neither possibility: the world was the place that cared too much, but the way to be above it all was to take aim at its vanity, to embarrass those who thought themselves too composed and too in charge to ever be caught flustered by something petty. We engaged. We had a cause. Whether it was a worthwhile one was a separate issue entirely.”

The Ballad of Marine Todd: how the internet created a morality play and remixed it into infinity. Little Red Riding Hood for the modern age.

Cat performance review.

Tumblr of the week: Women in space.

Poem of the week: Interview, Dorothy Parker

Game of the week: You won’t tell anyone, right?

Pocket Lint #22: tomorrow, and tomorrow

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THE FLOOR IS MADE OF HOT LAVA AND THE GIRLS ARE RUINING IT.

A history of ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’, a relationship advice column in Ladies’ Home Journal, founded in 1883.

There’s an adage amongst storytellers: “Show, don’t tell.” With games, you should go a step further: Don’t even show! Let the audience find the answer. Put interesting things in your game — you were going to do that anyway, right? — and then don’t call attention to them. A cool thing that can be missed makes the world feel more like a real place and less like a clockwork puzzle constructed purely for the benefit of the player. And don’t worry about people missing your cool thing, because players will tell each other about what they’ve found.”

A first-person account of Cotard’s delusion, in which the sufferer believes they are dead.

[The old man offers a response—and thinks it came out OK—but sees on the face of the other guy that not one word was understood. This other guy, he resembles the old man—the old man of a few years ago, at least—and is speaking to him now, but the old man is not sure which language he’s using.] Take the steps slow, your correspondent is telling him as they duck into the subway station. Real widow-makers, these. [The old man looks up at him with lamblike credulity in his eyes. He has no choice but to believe he is being led somewhere in good faith.]

Women have always fought.

“It sounds bizarre, in some ways, to talk about creativity apart from the creation of a product. But that remoteness and strangeness is actually a measure of how much our sense of creativity has taken on the cast of our market-driven age.”

Who is U2?

A definitive and important ranking of animal penises.

Tumblr of the week: Grandpa and Grandmaster Flash.

Poem of the week: Japanese Maple, Clive James.

Game of the week: Stop the Boats, a Tony Abbott simulator.

Pocket Lint #21: sound and fury

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The Times of London is pumping increasingly frenetic typewriter noises into its newsroom.

An excellent primer on this week’s implosion in videogame culture.

Today, videogames are for everyone. I mean this in an almost destructive way. Videogames, to read the other side of the same statement, are not for you. You do not get to own videogames. No one gets to own videogames when they are for everyone. They add up to more than any one group.”

“When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur.”

Stereotype lift persists online with virtual, gendered avatars.

The Man Without a Mask: How the drag queen Cassandro became a star of Mexican wrestling.

How social media silences debate.

“Banning comments—or moderating with an iron fist—is not squelching honest and open debate in the public sphere, anymore than refusing to publish every letter to the editor, unedited, in a print publication. Telling people to take their bullshit to Reddit is not a harbinger of Orwellian dystopia.

Classic first lines from novels in emojis.

How to listen to the radio properly: BBC guidance from 1940.

Tumblr of the week: Slug Solos.

Poem of the week: Mr. Grumpledump’s Song, Shel Silverstein.

Game of the week: Gridland, a match-3 game with a building/fighting day/night cycle.

Pocket Lint #20: Snowblind

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10 Beautiful Interracial Arrests.

We study white people. We are taught this as a tool of survival. We know when there is unrest in the souls of white folks. We know that unrest, if not assuaged quickly, will lead to black death. Our suspicions, unlike those of white people, are proven right time and time again.”

Can we imagine, for a minute, what it would look like if officers were trained in mediation? What if you called the police when you witnessed a violent fight; officers arrived ready to separate the parties, come to a non-violent resolution, and make sure each person got home safely. As long as they are connected to the system of incarceration, we cannot expect the police to take this role.”

Fark adds misogyny to its moderation guidelines.

Hellhole: on the US prison system’s use of solitary confinement as torture.

Ted talks are lying to you.

Adderall’s technology problem: “Tech should to be a viable career path, not an investment market for a wealthy select few who aren’t on the ground floor. And it should be an inclusive industry that doesn’t favor the young, able, and self-destructive. But if we maintain this idolization of high-producing individuals, the rat race will persist. As long as there is an economic incentive to harm oneself in hopes of performing the superhuman, those who will not — or, for those of us with ADHD, cannot — will remain subhuman.”

The P.T. Twitch stream that first revealed the game’s secret: a strange, extremely scary free demo released on the PS4 turns out to be a trailer for an absolutely huge videogaming collaboration. And will probably be better than the final game.

My partner’s Kickstarting his game Goblin Quest, and a Twine game coauthored with me is one of the stretch goals. It’s going well so far.

The etymology of “cladly dressed”.

“Many of these women come from hours away, one from a little town on the Kentucky border that’s a seven-hour drive. They don’t know much about Dr. Parker… What they do know is this: He is the doctor who is going to stop them from being pregnant.”

Tumblr of the week: If They Gunned Me Down.

Poem of the week: Common, A Letter To The Law.

Game of the week: Kindness Coins.

Pocket Lint #19: make me a mandrake

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The American Room: “But for most of us life happens against a backdrop of intersecting off-white walls. Those are our homes, plain and a little grim. Our fantasy homes are busy with bright things yet old. Our pins and dreams are not beige. When we sleep we leave the computer behind and step out onto the widow’s walk, to wait for our sailors to come home from the sea.”

“I used to be a covered woman. I know what it’s like to be invisible.”

We are Sansa: “A Song of Ice and Fire is, in part, a series of books devoted to examining what happens when systems break down. Arya, who was never comfortable with the Westeros status quo to begin with, is slightly better set up to deal with immediate consequences of Ned’s execution and everything that follows. Sansa, on the other hand, becomes a prisoner of the chaos that develops around her. She has no coping mechanisms and no fallback position because she’s been raised to trust the system that is failing her.”

“If you’ve spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are.”

First night in Kyiv: “This was the third country in which I’d cried in a shower and checked my body for bruises as a by-product of trying to become a journalist.”

He’s still alive: Jenn Frank’s Game Journalism Prize-winning essay on That Dragon, Cancer.

Fish plays Pokemon, presumably in an attempt to update the infinite monkey theorem.

Turning postpartum depression into performance art.

I write this with a baseball bat by the bed.

BrbXOXO: live streams of sex webcam feeds when the performers are away.

Tumblr of the week: Manfeels Park, with apologies to Jane Austen and the BBC.

Poem of the week: Twickenham Garden, by John Donne.

Game of the week: One Chance.

Pocket Lint #18: mean meaning

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“We are still at a point that emoji semiotics are extremely malleable and where meaning can be actively created. This is especially true where the gaps between Japanese and Western culture have created a vacuum between original intent and subsequent interpretation, leading to a corral of seldom-used emojis, ready to have new meaning assigned to them.”

Here are some very small things Twitter could do to begin to address the problem of widespread abuse and harassment on its service.

The problems of understanding cunnilingus in the Middle Ages: “This constant emphasis on the male experience is all we have to try and see the full range of sexual experience.”

NOW THEN: an extraordinary piece by Adam Curtis on the history of surveillance, computing, AI, crime prediction and a great deal else. I’ve read it three times looking for a key quote and it’s too enmeshed to produce one. You should read it.

“The reason sickness is undesirable is not that it causes distress or discomfort but that it results in what is often called “lost productivity”. This is a sinister and absurd notion, predicated on the greedy fallacy of counting chickens before they have hatched. “Workplace absence through sickness was reported to cost British business £32bn a year,” the researcher claimed in Metro: a normal way of phrasing things today, but one with curious implications. The idea seems to be that business already has that money even though it hasn’t earned it yet and employees who fail to maintain “productivity” as a result of sickness or other reasons are, in effect, stealing this as yet entirely notional sum from their employers.”

Law of unintended consequences: Key-copying apps, designed to help you out by storing backups of your keys in case you get locked out, are also a potential boon for burglars.

The Darkness, an excellent comic drawn in 24 hours.

Pathfinder’s new iconic shaman is a badass trans dwarf woman.

The simple ways in which Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is more progressive than most AAA games.

“what tech-focused people often see of the games industry is the ugly side — for example, the rampant misogyny of mainstreams game developers, thoroughly illustrated by Anita Sarkeesian’s series Feminist Frequency. In response, there are frequent calls for better representation (of women, people of color, queer people, etc) in games — but what we often miss is that these people are, themselves, making games, which usually do include such representations — but which all too often go ignored or financially unsupported” – the missed connections between tech feminism and videogame zinesters

Tumblr of the week: Annals of Nope

Poem of the week: not one of my choosing, this week; instead I’m going to direct you to Ars Poetica, a new twice-weekly email of hand-picked poetry by a friend of mine.

Game of the week: Nested, because of reasons.