Day: April 6, 2015

Exploring The Old City

Today marked my first completion of a game on my newly-built Steambox.

(Catch-up: Steam is a very successful online games marketplace/management tool which I’ve successfully used to enable a virtual hoarding proclivity while simultaneously ameliorating my physical collection, so win-win I suppose. Anyway, the company is in the process of creating PCs for the lounge-room – called Steamboxes – and I recently built one of my own which, miraculously, didn’t catch fire. It’s named after Stephenson’s Rocket.)

The game I completed was Leviathan: The Old City, which has copped a lot of stick for being nothing more than a walking simulator. (more…)

Book review: Seven Japanese Tales

Seven Japanese Tales.Seven Japanese Tales by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Japanese culture, when compared to what’s generally passed off as Western culture, seems to be a little off. That’s not a value judgement, but an observation that compared to what Western Canon readers are used to, there’s more dissonance, and a willingness to examine topics which (at least in the time Tanizaki was writing) were either not covered in polite society, or were swept under the rug in bowdlerised editions.

It’s not the case here. Incest and fetishes, and the annihilation of the self in the service of one’s object of desire are the cornerstones of these works. (more…)