Clashing with Star Wars
Two items where Star Wars runs up against participatory culture: the completely awesome Animals with Lightsabers and the completely logical one-off joke The Hook.
Carol
Carol Borden was editor of and a writer for the Toronto International Film Festival’s official Midnight Madness and Vanguard program blogs. She is currently an editor at and evil overlord for The Cultural Gutter, a website dedicated to thoughtful writing about disreputable art. She has written for Mezzanotte, Teleport City, Die Danger Die Die Kill, Popshifter and she has a bunch of short stories published by Fox Spirit Books including: Godzilla detective fiction, femme fatale mermaids, an adventurous translator/poet, and an x-ray tech having a bad day. Read and listen to her other shenanigans at Monstrous Industry. For her particular take on gutter culture, check out, “In the Sewer with the Alligators.”
The Right Social Circles
Bill Harris on Play: “When I meet a grown-up who does not know how to play, I’m not interested in talking to them. I would much rather talk to children, who always understand play and always know how to laugh.”
The Gamer Generation’s Parenting Style
In Properly Molding the Gamer Child: “I strongly encourage both girls’ fascination with Pokemon. Pokemon provide fulfillment to every human being’s basic desire to have an army of monsters. Also, Pokemon spend all their time fighting each other, which is good. For what other reason would one want […]
A Cast of Thousands and Still Token Females
Marie Brennan over at SF Novelists looks at epic fantasy and the Bechdel test: “Two hundred pages into the book, and there’s been three named female characters. One is evil. The second existed only for a brief scene, for the purpose of highlighting how attractive the third one […]
More Ninjas!
Ninjas throwing swords and flipping in the forest and Ken’ichi Matsuyama from Death Note and Detroit Metal City plays another manga hero in Kamui Gaiden.
Spectacularly… Bad!
Presenting a flashback to Tattoo Assassin, a rather startlingly awful Mortal Kombat clone.
The Cultural Gutter 