Oh right! Another thing that has been slowly changing about the actual HTML markup of xorph dot com slash nfd is the “My Town” and “My Neighborhood” menus that appear at the bottom of any given archive page. The latter is a good old-fashioned friend blogroll; the former is the roll of links for friends who have nice internet sites that are not blogs. If you, like me, are avoiding tasks at the moment, you could do a lot worse than picking one of them to click on! You can even use this special magic link to do the picking for you.
Category: Plugs
“If you are intrigued by the idea of writing a sequel but you haven’t yet written the first thing, may I suggest pretending the first thing is already a sequel. It really greases the wheels for me.”
Two Books
I became a fan of actor and writer Jo Firestone because of her role on someone else’s perfect television show, and when Kat made me watch her documentary Good Timing I became… uh, even more of a fan! Also, last month Kat and I went to the Grand Canyon. We saw this bird.
We also got up early to see the sunrise and looked sleepy, which was accurate.
But to the point of this entry, on the drive to and from the canyon, we listened to almost all of an audiobook, and specifically an audiobook written and read by Jo Firestone. It’s called Murder on Sex Island and it lives up to its title. Also, it’s free to listen to! You can just put it in your podcast app and get the whole thing right now! And then you should pay for a copy also, because it is very good.
In news about books I have not read, but have purchased nonetheless, my longtime and dear friend Holly has her debut novel coming out next spring! It is called The Husbands and I am really excited to obtain and review it. It will be a positive review, so don’t expect me to be objective or anything, but it will be an accurate review too. Accuracy is the surprise emergent theme of this blog post.
“But That’s The Point”
Among my growing collection of Australian-hosted cultural review podcasts, about which more anon, is actor Angourie Rice’s venture The Community Library. Rice is quite young to have been producing a solo podcast for four years, and is also quite busily famous, so the continued sincerity and thoughtfulness of her self-driven work is something I find an interesting rarity. I was moved to link to it in particular by an archival episode from the depths of 2021, dissecting a poor-faith argument tactic that has long irritated me for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate. But Rice articulates them well, and now I have an easy reference for when I want to counter that kind of circular justification myself.
The NFD Annual Blog Post of the Year Award 2022
If you’ve been heeding my exhortations then you have long since already subscribed to The Roof is on Phire and no doubt caught this months ago, when it went up. But I’ve been trying to figure out how to do something more emphatic than simply quote from “labour of love” ever since I read it (and read it again), so here it is: the extremely legitimate and hallowed NFDABPOTYA for this very long year, presented to my friend Jenny, for extraordinary work.
“Loving this planet enough to fight against the man-made systems that harm us all, instead of retreating, is the hardest work there is.”
“It’s certainly a beautiful film to LOOK at.”
So you were really hoping to wrap up your weekend reading five thousand words about a movie you haven’t seen and literally can’t watch anywhere online even if you pay for it, right?
I started a tinyletter for recommending youtube channels two and a half years ago but then I was like, wait, I have a blog
If you are one of the six people who signed up for said tinyletter then I am sorry I never sent a second emission from it; I might still use it someday. (The same goes for my neglected dreamwidth account.) But I feel like I’ve got a little writing momentum here on NFD and I’d like to keep that up for a minute. So here’s a plug for an incomprehensibly deep dive into video games that I didn’t even really like that much when they were the only ones I had!
There are a lot of white dudes who like to talk about old nerd media in videos on the Internet, but mostly what they do is offer their own opinions, at best seasoned with a little intro lifted from Wikipedia. I find it hard to spend minutes of my one precious life absorbing those opinions. I have too many opinions already. What I value, instead, is the dudes who can explain and explore something I don’t understand in a way that makes me feel like I do understand it (although I very much still don’t).
This is why I subscribe to a channel with the mildly concering name of Displaced Gamers, which is not about gamers or being displaced. It’s a series of exegeses on the assembly code that composes old video games, mostly NES games, and the startling things that tiny changes in that code can bring about. I myself could not read assembly code if my life were at stake, but the channel creator’s steady, patient narration helps me feel like I can almost follow along in real time. I’m thinking in particular of these most recent two videos, about how and why one can glitch into unplanned memory areas in Super Mario Bros to find the apocryphal Minus World…
… And then discovering 256 completely new Minus Worlds in the Super Mario All-Stars iteration of the game, using only three Game Genie Codes. (!)
It’s that last bit that really gets me. I had a Game Genie for our Super Nintendo when I was young, and I made heavy use of it, which is to say that I never got to be good at video games. I never had a solid grasp on the device’s methods of operation or how to explore a game’s code with it. I was not, as noted above, an ardent Mario fan (I preferred Mario Kart and the RPG spinoffs) though I respect the ground the games broke and their own interesting design constraints. But this particular video essayist earns my attention not only because he’s doing original research in the history of software—a field which, I will keep shouting forever, is ahistorical to the ongoing detriment of the entire world—but because he keeps at the work until he can fit his proof of concept into the “you can do this with your own Game Genie” constraint. That’s powerful Brendan-bait.
Some websites that exist
types of websites that exist anymore:
– algorithmic feed of whatever makes the rat keep pushing the lever
– we hope you enjoyed your 3 free articles
– ENABLE NOTIFICATIONS? SHARE LOCATION?? GET NEWSLETTER???
– labor of love by an actual person, last updated 2009— Cliff Jerrison 🌻 (@pervocracy) March 12, 2021
I think about this tweet a lot, even though I don’t actually read twitter anymore. It has achieved what I believe user @BAKKOOONN has called “barium dye” status, inescapable in any segment of the internet’s digestive tract—in part because it so succinctly captures the ache inherent in our cultural surrender to platforms that do not care for us. This paragraph should make it clear that I myself do not find it easy to escape the reach of those platforms. But it has never been easier to carve out your own platform, either.
For that reason I would like to point out some labors of love that have been updated in 2022. I link to my favorites all the time: Leonard and Sumana and Lucy and Rachel are indefatigable. I will enthuse at anyone about longtime stalwarts Derek Guy and Tom Murphy and Audrey Watters and their respective fields of expertise if given the slightest opportunity, and I hope Molly White never runs out of dry schadenfreude, even if her current beat (I hope) fades from the headlines. Jenny is a great and terribly clever friend whose archives I still have to go back and savor. Adam Cadre seems never to have flagged on updates for the last two decades. David Bordwell has been giving away just masterful levels of accessible, expansive teaching on film for even longer than that!
Blogspot, never my favorite platform, has begun to acquire a certain old-timey charm to me, via its placid refusal to become a redesigned algorithmic nightmare (for now!). I’ve been following Peter Gainsford for years, interested in his Classical-era mythbusting even when I am far from understanding its academic context. Kerry Callen has a unique style and sense of humor that recalls the days when lots more comics artists kept delightful sketchblogs. I wish I could remember how I stumbled across Dan of the Salty Throne; not only does reading his posts feel like stepping into an idea stream just as the flash flood barrels down upon you, but his blogroll also helped me realize where all the RPG hobby writers went when Google Plus died. I put five more URLs into my RSS reader yesterday, and I look forward to following them toward more.
There are sites still marching onward that are almost suspiciously me-shaped, too, perhaps because I was shaped by them. If you ever want to learn how to undertake the arcane rituals of BlogNomic, let me know, I’m currently an active mentor. Cyberdelia seems like I made it up for my own amusement (but I didn’t!). And just today, I made a tiny update to my ancient tilde.club page, and I’m not even the only one!
I thought about including my Patreon subscriptions, and some of my favorite podcasts, and my favorite email newsletters—okay, well, I am going to link to Sophie’s newsletter because Sophie is wonderful and her latest letter arrived in my inbox as I was writing this. But I think I will save those for other entries. I just want to remind myself that Cliff Jerrison and despair can be disproven. Not all love’s labors are lost.
I used to read the AV Club every day and now I don’t read it at all and it’s probably not hard to gather why
But Caroline Siede’s retrospective analysis of romantic comedy as a film genre just wrapped up, after a hundred reviews, and I think they are all worth reading if you can manage three quarters of your browser being occluded by ads. Even when I have drawn different conclusions from Siede I have found her work exemplary, and have in fact used her work as an example when thinking about how to structure longer writing about movies. I can recommend in particular her highlighting of gems like Saving Face (2004), The Big Sick (2017), Brown Sugar (2002), and of course, the movie that guaranteed I would one day fall for a Chicago brunette.