Consumption – Page 34

Can I get The Witness?

May 11, 2016May 11, 2016 CaptainFez3 Comments

A fairly straightforward question. Not a witness. The Witness. The game, Jonathan Blow’s follow-up to Braid, and a game I’d really looked forward to playing ever since I saw the first demos of it. Here’s a trailer for the most recent version, on PS4.

Yeah, that’s my kind of jam right there. Or was it? At first glance – puzzles, a weird island, an almost-real-but-not rendering style – it seemed right up my alley. But was it really? I mean after all, the game’s designer once said he wanted to make games for people who read Gravity’s Rainbow, and I’m exactly that lit-wanker audience. Continue reading “Can I get The Witness?” →

Book review: Drive

May 6, 2016August 15, 2019 CaptainFezLeave a comment

Drive by James Sallis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

He just drives. The guy. Here. Driver. Just drives. We know this because it’s his name – he has no other. Having one name is badass, having no name (and a gritty backstory) is superbadass and generally an indicator that you’re at the intersection of pulp and noir.

James Sallis’s slight novel is wonderful. It’s economical, but sprinkled with ten-buck words. It’s a world away from the sci-fi that began his career, and though it’s a modern work, seems to be written under the influence of the best sort of taut technique: Thompson and Cain, say. Interlocking jobs (criminal or otherwise) and lives, none of them pristine, tell a largely criminal narrative, though without any sort of opprobrium. If anything, the action taking place in the Hollywood sun say just that This Is How It Is, and nothing more. It’s nihilism with better catering. Continue reading “Book review: Drive” →

Loving the alien (per album)

April 27, 2016April 28, 2016 CaptainFez2 Comments

A little while ago my friend Andy made a fairly lengthy Facebook thread detailing his favourite David Bowie songs from each of Bowie’s albums. It sparked a bit of conversation, and I figured I’d like to do the same, as it would give me – if nothing else – an excuse to play all the albums again. (You know, as if I needed one.)

What I learned from this endeavour is: 1) post-anaesthesia listening is weird (I did most of the thinking in the days after a brief hospital trip) and 2) that fucker makes it difficult to choose one song on an album. Let alone articulate why you like the bloody thing in the first place

Let’s go. Continue reading “Loving the alien (per album)” →

Book review: The Magic Cottage

April 23, 2016August 15, 2019 CaptainFezLeave a comment

The Magic Cottage by James Herbert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I recently spent some time in hospital, and thought this work might make a good companion. From the blurb, it suggested a zippy, not thoroughly taxing read. Fair enough, I thought: I’ll zip through it while waiting for day surgery and that will be that. Popcorn consumed.

So somehow, it’s ten days later and I’ve only just finished it. And why? Because I kept feeling like I had to flog myself onwards toward a finish line that wasn’t really worth it when I got over it.

Ugh. Continue reading “Book review: The Magic Cottage” →

Borderlands and breaking ice

April 19, 2016October 21, 2020 CaptainFez3 Comments

This post may contain spoilers for Tales From The Borderlands and Cryostasis. If you’re planning on playing either of those you might want to read this later, perhaps.

I’ve recently finished playing Borderlands 2, a 100-odd hour epic jaunt which I mostly enjoyed. While I had reached my fill of that game’s mechanics, I was not quite ready to leave the world that had been created, so I decided to whip through Telltale’s episodic Tales From The Borderlands adventure game to get my fill of Handsome Jack action. (Jacktion? Ew.)

Continue reading →

Book review: Girl in a Band: A Memoir

April 10, 2016August 15, 2019 CaptainFezLeave a comment

Girl in a Band: A Memoir by Kim Gordon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The title of Kim Gordon’s autobiography is a neat reduction of how she’s been interpreted by media outlets and observers for years: the girl in the most apparently sausagefesty of bands, the fringe-and-pedals, truculent beast that was Sonic Youth. It is, naturally, reductive, a fiction pushed by those who’d copy to file, or those whose musical penates was the Kim and Thurston power couple.

The quote on the back of the book – pulled from its instant-in first chapter – best describes the artist’s feelings of being observed, categorised.

Onstage, people have told me, I’m opaque or mysterious or enigmatic or even cold. But more than any of those things, I’m extremely shy and sensitive, as if I can feel all the emotions swirling around a room. And believe me when I say that once you push past my persona, there aren’t any defenses there at all.

Of course, I’m guilty of this reduction. I like to defend this with the acknowledgement that Sonic Youth are a band I seem to ‘get’ more now that I’m older: I had some albums when I was growing up, but I always seemed to miss something, that there was a big secret that I couldn’t understand, an enjoyment others had that I couldn’t grasp. I couldn’t get a read on Gordon: she seemed like she took no shit, from my limited pre-internet knowledge, and that probably frightened me, as teenage-terrible as I was parsing women. Continue reading “Book review: Girl in a Band: A Memoir” →

Farewell, Handsome Jack!

March 24, 2016 CaptainFez6 Comments

Today was the day I finished playing Borderlands 2.

Well, let me clarify. It’s the day I finished the main story and reached the New Game Plus mode. It’s a point I’ve reached after playing on and off since before Christmas, and according to Steam’s inbuilt counter, I’ve spent just over 100 hours reaching this point.

That’s four-and-a-bit days straight. Continue reading “Farewell, Handsome Jack!” →

Book review: Levels of Life

March 5, 2016August 15, 2019 CaptainFezLeave a comment

Levels of Life by Julian Barnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This, a short book in three parts, is as accomplished a work as you’d expect from a long-term, much-awarded novelist such as Julian Barnes. It’s a meditation on flight (ballooning, in particular), photography and grief, and while the first two sections of the book focus on historical figures’ experience of those areas, the final third is about Barnes’ own grief, over the death of his wife.

The first two sections, detailing loves and legs lost in the pursuit of amour and altitude – with a cast including Sarah Bernhardt, Fred Burnaby and Félix Tournachon – are well written but also somewhat disconnected from the final chapter. They fit together well enough, and the lack of a complete mesh is forgivable given that this is writing informed by deep grief, but sometimes the paths from start to end seem a little forced. The turn of phrase are still effortlessly polished; describing his wife’s illness as “37 days from diagnosis to death” is brilliantly economical, indicative of the rapidity with which death can make itself known. Continue reading “Book review: Levels of Life” →

Book review: Hebridean Sharker

January 26, 2016August 15, 2019 CaptainFezLeave a comment

Hebridean Sharker by Tex Geddes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tex Geddes is very well-spoken. At least, his written voice is well-spoken. I suppose that I’d somehow expected him to write in a kind of Irvine Welsh-style rendition of accent, partially because his story is a deeply Scottish one – cold beauty and rough elemental life – and partially because he was, as far as I can ascertain, a mad old bastard. As you’d expect from a man who spent a lot of time shark-fishing, game-stalking, and convincing the British government that as the Laird of Soay, he needed a postal service goddamnit.

This link will take you to a write-up of his life on wikipedia, but I think it’s important to highlight the fact that he died while returning home from a bagpiping competition. Continue reading “Book review: Hebridean Sharker” →