Current Times 20

So I have been working hard and heavy on a conference paper, which is coming along nicely (I might post about it sometime soon), but I am taking out a few minutes to give you some sweet links that I have found over the past few days.

1. This is a great article about the nature of process photography. The creation of insular communities is something that I am heavily interested in, and this is precisely that. When does a project become communal? We like to talk about art as a conversation (I am skeptical of that, actually), but this is the logical end of that line of thinking: the conversation becomes the art.

2. This is a pretty old Gawker article about the real infrastructure of Tumblr: pornography. It runs the world.

3. This is an article by Steven Grant from ten years ago about The Punisher. Grant wrote the first Punisher miniseries, Circle of Blood, and he does a lot of work explaining his intentions in developing the character. The Punisher is, for Grant, a fundamentally existential antihero who lives only as a figure for violence. It’s pretty amazing, and really close to my own interpretation of the character, though I avoid the existentialism.

4. This is a great story by Ursula K. LeGuin called “Island of the Immortals.” Do yourself a favor and give it a read.

5.Things Could Be Worse is an amazing blog. Things like this appear there:

6. I think that the world needs to be more educated about video games. This story is circulating around, and it’s a really dumb one; the game that is being touted as horrible and offensive is a modification that a couple dudes have cooked up in their basement. This is the equivalent to making a movie at home or writing your own fanfiction. We don’t get up in arms about those things, and we shouldn’t get up in arms about this; it does not represent the video game industry.

7. Read this series of articles about video games. Just fucking read them.

8. Steven Shaviro and some other people talk about post-cinematic affect and the Paranormal Activity films. I don’t like the movies, I like the theories. Read it.