Author: Oli
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Sexy stabby
Illustration is a word that usually implies instrumentality, a visual work that’s auxiliary to something else. More broadly, you might illustrate a point, which implies one utterance in support of another. But illustration also suggests an approach to drawing (or potentially to any kind of picture-making) which locates its meanings…
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A dark, involute surface
Monstress is pretty much the only commercial comics series I’m following, other than 2000AD and its associated properties. I enjoy it basically for Marjorie Liu’s straightforward fantasy storytelling and Sana Takeda’s absolutely sumptuous art: it’s something I can enjoy as entertainment without having to think about it too hard. Its…
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A new loop
I’ve been lucky with Star Wars games. I played X-Wing and Tie Fighter in the early 90s. both of which are now regarded as classics of their genre, and when it made it onto Mac I played the RPG Knights of the Old Republic, which is sometimes cited as one…
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Tilting at reality
I’ve read a lot of popular science books over the years, but never until now have I felt a real urge to go and learn the maths I’d need to properly understand the work. I feel as though, if I had read this book twenty, or even ten years ago,…
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Narrative serving violence
The experience of being the protagonist of a story, rather than simply the player of a game, became a characteristic form of engagement with videogames with the arrival of the first-person shooter, I guess. I recall reading a prediction by Gary Gygax, the co-author of Dungeons & Dragons, sometime around…
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Oblique unfolding
The world of stable objects and simple, obvious relations between them is not the real world. It’s one we like because it’s easy to think about, but it’s a fantasy, lacking in both beauty and truth. Truth emerges in art when it makes its way obliquely between the big colourful…
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Insightfully commonplace
I was initially underwhelmed by Michelle Theodore’s Cavity. Where were the insights? Where was the peek into an unfamiliar experience? Where was the pleasure and escapism? Then I re-read it, and realised that I had resisted its affect and dismissed its perspicacity because the subjective experience it represented was so…
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The cost of survival
Late the year before last, when I bought my first console, and played Red Dead Redemption 2 quite soon after its release, I was completely bowled over. ‘This game changes everything!’ I ranted enthusiastically to you, my journal. Of course if I hadn’t been in the Mac gaming ghetto all…
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A trajectory
General relativity tells us something enticing about time. It doesn’t tell us what many would like it to tell us, that time is simply another dimension which our limited perspective turns into the one-way-street of our experience; it tells us instead that time has a particular relation to entropy, that…
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Dwelling together
A labyrinth can be a lonely place. In a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, Asterion, the most famous of labyrinthine inhabitants, is consoled in his solitude only by a prophecy that his redeemer will some day seek him out. That redeemer, the son of Aethra, fathered by both Aegeus…
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For the readers
There’s something wonderful about being immersed in the world of a book, something which for me is even more pronounced when that world is invented. Even when a secondary world is dystopian, like Margaret Atwood’s theocracy of Gilead, there’s something about inhabiting it which excites the explorer in me, which…
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This stomping mechanistic racket
This, stomping, mechanistic racket has the distinct sound of its era, despite sounding decidedly atypical. Its huge, rectangular, electronic drum beats have that 80s electro vibe, and its guitars are heavy in a harsh, post-punk sort of a way. KMFDM is a band with a recognisable sound, and the elements…
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Complex simplicity
This sweet-natured, simple tale of friendship and love is as straightforward as comics get – except that it’s completely backwards. Unusually for an English-language publication, it’s laid out as a manga, running from right to left, from the front cover, through each page, to its conclusion. When I first picked…
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For the birds and bees?
Money, it’s a gas Grab that cash with both hands, and make a stash – Roger Waters Generally speaking, I think of money as a crime. I can imagine, quite easily, a variety of economies in which it does not figure, and I analyse its function in the real world…
Oliver Arditi 