The Flick Filosopher thinks The Village mistakes a twist ending for good writing: “[Shyamalan] figured Let’s go all the way and make a film that’s nothing but secret sauce. It makes for a film that is frustrating and tedious and then — bam! — slams the audience with […]
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“I find it sadly ironic that in worlds only limited by our imagination, no one seems to have one.” Bill Harris (on his blog on sports videogames, Dubious Quality) talks about why City of Heroes doesn’t excite him.
Tee Morris at Strange Horizons worries about elitism in science fiction, gets scathingly rebuked by Nick Mamatas, and less scathingly commented on by Matthew Cheney over at Mumpsimus.
“A sprawling, ambitious form of comic-book meta-fiction”
Zachary Houle writes about Michael Chabon’s latest: “The Escapist project is a sprawling, ambitious form of comic-book meta-fiction that bounces back-and-forth between rediscovered potboilers from the ’40s to ’80s and scholarly essays offering context and academic takes on these works.”
Clive Thompson wrote a terrific article on the economics of massive multiplayer online games that goes beyond the usual “people are making money with their hobby!” coverage and explores what virtual economics says about capitalism at large. Wonderfully readable, too.
People who’ve discovered the joy of stashing a couple of interviews on the mp3 players should check out The Agony Columns archive of interviews with SF writers and beyond like Jonathan Lethem.
The Cultural Gutter 