CodexArcanum

Other than what everyone else has said (great taste in film, lemmings) I’ll throw out…

In the Mouth of Madness. People tend to rank The Thing as his best movie, but the other two parts of the “Apocalypse Trilogy” are also excellent. Prince of Darkness has plenty to reccomend it, but I actually have watched IMM at least 10 times. The practical effects hold up well, and I feel like I catch new little details or acting quirks on each watch. Sam Neill and Julie Carmen are both really on their game and amazingly bring a lot of both subtlety and camp to the roles. The soundtrack is really banging too, if you’re a fan of Carpenter’s synth-rock.

And for something completely different, but still an “at least 10 views” favorite: Rian Johnson’s Brick. You’ll probably need at least 2 viewings just to catch all the dialogue, which is very fast and uses a weird made up slang. The main victim makes a phone call in the first act that basically reveals everything if you understand what she’s saying, but it takes the whole movie for that to happen. It’s just a fun, good mystery story too. Great sense of style, great (slightly off kilter) acting choices all around. Its one of those movies that’s a little like poetry or a great album, just fun to watch and enjoy for itself.

Alright, so here’s my case for Thief, the Looking Glass Studios game.

Thief, on its own, is a great game and basically shares the claim to originating a lot of ideas behind stealth in games along with MGS, which came out the same year.

What many don’t know is how incredibly innovative what they were doing with their engine tech was. In another timeline, id software were mildly successful action game makers while LGS became the industry defining mega success. The Dark Engine refines a lot of ideas present in Ultima Underworld and marries them to tech that was decades ahead of its time.

Check out the opening and closing of this long talk: https://youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI

Thief had, probably, the first ECS in gaming. They also had their own rendering technique using “portals” that was a bit slower than id’s BSP trees but allowed for insane geometry. They also had an incredible system for events called stimulus-response that was doing things like Breath of the Wild’s “chemistry engine” again, decades before it would be rediscovered.

They weren’t just making games, these were really simulations of a limited world with complex interactions. If the rest of the industry had caught onto their good practices, who knows what the landscape would look like today!

Doom

I could write an essay significantly larger than the game itself and it wouldn’t be as powerful of an argument as just saying the name with the weight of legacy it commands.

You’re correct that it’s actually a non-issue: trans people are a ridiculously small minority, most Americans who don’t live in a city have probably never met a trans person, yet the entire nation has been whipped into frenzied “debate” about fairness in sports, bathroom needs, and other very unserious issues.

The answers are also very obvious. No trans person has ever dominated a sport, otherwise you’d have heard about this. The actual problem with hormones in sports is rampant steroid abuse, trans issues distract from that. Likewise, just have unisex private bathrooms. Treating humans like indistinguishable cattle is already a problem.

None of this, however, relates to the issue of Mayor Pete. Politicians don’t really “raise issues” from their constituents, not primarily anyway. They raise issues from their donors, and they shape public discourse with what they draw attention to. Buttigieg could support trans people with a word and move on to real issues. He could ignore trans people and call out Republicans for distracting people. He could do so many things, but he chooses to focus on this. It can’t be ignored that he’s a gay man also. The intent here is to further wedge between LGB and T.

The ruler class has been working overtime on this for years, because breaking the solidarity of LGBTQ+ people destroys an important progressive bloc held together by shared oppression. If you convince male gays that lesbians and trans people are making too much noise and drawing bad attention, you can split them up and push the whole lot of us back into the closets.

These issues aren’t isolated concerns that operate as pure distractions. They’re various fronts in the class war; you can’t ignore a flanking maneuver as a “distraction” while the cavalry runs rampant over you.

The author taking Camus’ other advice, and imagining Sisyphus happy, then going farther, into realms of the fantastical, and imagining Camus happy too.