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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 years ago

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Published: Apr 5, 2023

Prisha Mosley was 17 when she was first given testosterone in a clinic in North Carolina, after she had declared to her parents that she was a boy. She had struggled through her teen years with anorexia and depression after a sexual assault. Luka Hein had both breasts removed as a 16-year-old in Nebraska. Chloe Cole, in California, was a year younger when she had her double mastectomy. She had been on testosterone and puberty-blocking drugs since 13, also after a sexual assault.

All three girls were experiencing “gender dysphoria”, a feeling of intense discomfort with their own sexed bodies. Once a rare diagnosis, it has exploded over the past decade. In England and Wales the number of teenagers seeking treatment at the Gender Identity Development Service (gids), the main clinic treating dysphoria, has risen 17-fold since 2011-12 (see chart 1). An analysis by Reuters, a news agency, based on data from Komodo, a health-technology firm, estimated that more than 42,000 American children and teenagers were diagnosed in 2021—three times the count in 2017. Other rich countries, from Australia to Sweden, have also experienced rapid increases.

As the caseload has grown, so has a method of treatment, pioneered in the Netherlands, now known as “gender-affirming care”. It involves acknowledging patients’ feelings about a mismatch between their body and their sense of self and, after a psychological assessment, offering some of them a combination of puberty-blocking drugs, opposite-sex hormones and sometimes surgery to try to ease their discomfort. Komodo’s data suggest around 5,000 teenagers were prescribed puberty-blockers or cross-sex hormones in America in 2021, double the number in 2017.

Dysphoria furoria

The treatment is controversial. In many countries, but in America most of all, it has become yet another front in the culture wars. Many on the left caricature critics of gender-affirming care as callously disregarding extreme distress and even suicides among adolescents with gender dysphoria in their determination to “erase” trans people. Zealots on the right, meanwhile, accuse doctors of being so hell-bent on promoting gender transitions that they “groom” vulnerable teenagers—a term usually applied to paedophiles. In October supporters and critics of gender-affirming care held rival, rowdy protests outside a meeting of the American Academy of Paediatrics. Several American states, such as Florida and Utah, have passed laws banning gender-affirming care in children. Joe Biden, America’s president, has described such laws as “close to sinful”.

Almost all America’s medical authorities support gender-affirming care. But those in Britain, Finland, France, Norway and Sweden, while supporting talking therapy as a first step, have misgivings about the pharmacological and surgical elements of the treatment. A Finnish review, published in 2020, concluded that gender reassignment in children is “experimental” and that treatment should seldom proceed beyond talking therapy. Swedish authorities found that the risks of physical interventions “currently outweigh the possible benefits” and should only be offered in “exceptional cases”. In Britain a review led by Hilary Cass, a paediatrician, found that gender-affirming care had developed without “some of the normal quality controls that are typically applied when new or innovative treatments are introduced”. In 2022 France’s National Academy of Medicine advised doctors to proceed with drugs and surgery only with “great medical caution” and “the greatest reserve”.

There is no question that many children and parents are desperate to get help with gender dysphoria. Some consider the physical elements of gender-affirming care to have been life-saving treatments. But the fact that some patients are harmed is not in doubt either. Ms Mosley, Ms Hein and Ms Cole are all “detransitioners”: they have changed their minds and no longer wish to be seen as male. All three bitterly regret the irreversible effects of their treatment and are angry at doctors who, they say, rushed them into it. Ms Cole considers herself to have been “butchered by institutions we all thought we could trust”.

The transitioning of teenagers has its roots in a treatment protocol developed in the Netherlands in the 1980s and 1990s. It is built on three pillars: puberty-blockers (formally known as gnrh antagonists), cross-sex hormones and surgery. The goal was to alter the patient’s body to more closely match their sense of cross-sex identity, and thereby relieve their mental anguish. A pair of papers published in 2011 and 2014 by Annelou de Vries, one of the Dutch protocol’s pioneers, reported on the experiences of some of the first patients. They concluded that symptoms of depression decreased among patients taking puberty-blockers, and that gender dysphoria “resolved” and psychological functioning “steadily improved” after cross-sex hormones and surgery.

Transition ignition

Puberty-blockers do what their name suggests. The idea is that suspending unwanted sexual development can give patients time to think about their dysphoria, and whether or not they wish to pursue more drastic interventions. The same family of drugs is used to treat “central precocious puberty”, in which puberty begins very early. Some countries also use them to chemically castrate sex offenders. As with many other medicines used in children, the use of puberty-blockers in gender medicine is “off-label”, meaning that they do not have regulatory approval for that purpose.

Patients who decide to proceed with their transition are then prescribed cross-sex hormones. Males will see the development of breasts and alterations to how fat is stored on the body. Giving testosterone to females boosts muscle growth and causes irreversible changes such as deepening the voice, altering the bone structure of the face and the growth of facial hair.

Under the original Dutch protocol, surgery was permitted only after a patient turned 18, although as the cases of Ms Cole and Ms Hein show, in some places mastectomies occur at a younger age. Male patients can have artificial breasts implanted. More elaborate procedures, in which females have a simulated penis built from a tube of skin harvested from the forearm or the thigh, or males have an artificial vagina made in a “penile inversion”, are performed extremely rarely on minors.

In 2020 the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (nice), a British body which reviews the scientific underpinnings of medical treatments, looked at the case for puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones. The academic evidence it found was weak, discouraging and in some cases contradictory. The studies suggest puberty-blockers had little impact on patients. Cross-sex hormones may improve mental health, but the certainty of that finding was low, and nice warned of the unknown risks of lasting side-effects.

For both classes of drug, nice assessed the quality of the papers it analysed as “very low”, its poorest rating. Some studies reported results but made no effort to analyse them for statistical significance. Cross-sex hormones are a lifelong treatment, yet follow-up was short, ranging from one to six years. Most studies followed only a single set of patients, who were given the drugs, instead of comparing them with another set who were not. Without such a “control group”, researchers cannot tell whether anything that happened to the patients in the studies was down to the drugs, to other treatments the patients might be receiving (such as counselling or antidepressants), or to some other, unrelated third factor.

The upshot is that it is hard to know whether any of the supposed effects reported in the studies, whether positive or negative, are actually real. Reviews in Finland and Sweden came to similar conclusions. As the Swedish one put it, “The scientific base is not sufficient to assess…puberty-inhibiting or gender-opposite hormone treatment” in children.

Two American professional bodies, the Endocrine Society (es) and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (wpath) have also reviewed the science underpinning adolescent transitions. But es’s review did not set out to look at whether gender-affirming care helped resolve gender dysphoria or improve mental health by any measure. It focused instead on side-effects, for which it found only weak evidence. This omission, says Gordon Guyatt of McMaster University, makes the review “fundamentally flawed”. wpath, for its part, did look at the psychological effects of blockers and hormones. It found scant, low-quality evidence. Despite these findings, both groups continue to recommend physical treatments for gender dysphoria, and insist that their reviews and the resulting guidelines are sound.

One justification for puberty-blockers is that they “buy time” for children to decide whether to proceed with cross-sex hormones or not. But the data available so far from clinics suggest that almost all decide to go ahead. A Dutch paper published in October concluded that 98% of adolescents prescribed blockers decide to proceed to cross-sex hormones. Similarly high numbers have been reported elsewhere.

The reassuring interpretation is that blockers are being prescribed very precisely, given only to those whose dysphoria is deep-rooted and unlikely to ease. The troubling one is that puberty-blockers lock at least some children in to further treatment. “Time to Think”, a new book about gids by a British journalist, Hannah Barnes, cites British medical workers concerned by the latter possibility. They say patients received blockers after cursory and shallow examinations.

The Dutch researchers weigh both explanations. “It is likely that most people starting [puberty-blockers] experience sustained gender dysphoria,” they write. But, “One cannot exclude the possibility that starting [puberty-blockers] in itself makes adolescents more likely to continue medical transition.”

Perhaps the biggest question is how many of those given drugs and surgery eventually change their minds and “detransition”, having reconciled themselves with their biological sex. Those who do often face fresh anguish as they come to terms with permanent and visible alterations to their bodies.

Once again, good data are scarce. One problem is that those who abandon a transition are likely to stop talking to their doctors, and so disappear from the figures. The estimates that do exist vary by an order of magnitude or more. Some studies have reported detransition rates as low as 1%. But three papers published in 2021 and 2022, which looked at patients in Britain and in America’s armed forces, found that between 7% and 30% of them stopped treatment within a few years.

The original Dutch studies published in 2011 and 2014 were longitudinal—that is, they followed the same group of patients throughout their treatment. Yet three recent critiques published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy nonetheless find fault with the studies’ data.

One of the new studies’ concerns is the small size of the original samples. The 2011 paper looked at 70 patients. But the outcome of treatment was only known for between 32 and 55 of them (the exact number depends on the specific measure). And even then, the final assessment of outcomes occurred around 18 months after surgery—a very short timeframe for a treatment whose effects will last a lifetime. (The first patient, “FG”, was followed for longer. In 2011, when in his mid-30s, researchers reported his feelings of “shame about his genital appearance” and of “inadequacy in sexual matters”. A decade later though, things had improved, and FG had a steady girlfriend.)

The critiques also suggest that the finding that gender dysphoria improved with treatment may have been an artefact of how the participants were assessed. Before treatment, female patients were asked to agree or disagree with such statements as, “Every time someone treats me like a girl I feel hurt.” This established their desire to be seen as male. After blockers, hormones and surgery the same individuals were asked questions on a scale originally developed for those born male. It offered statements such as, “Every time someone treats me like a boy I feel hurt.” Naturally, patients who preferred to be seen as male disagreed. In effect, the yardstick was changed in a way that might be seen as making positive outcomes more likely.

Finally, the original studies seem to have inadvertently cherry-picked patients for whom the treatment was most effective. The researchers started with 111 adolescents, but excluded those whose treatment with puberty-blockers did not progress well. Of the remaining 70, others were omitted from the final findings because they did not return questionnaires, or explicitly refused to do so, or dropped out of care or, in one case, died of complications from genital surgery. The data may therefore exclude precisely those patients who were harmed by or dissatisfied with their treatment.

In a rebuttal published in the same journal, Dr de Vries insists that the original papers found a significant improvement in gender dysphoria, the condition the protocol was designed to treat. She concedes that the switching of assessment scales is “not ideal” but says this does not imply the studies’ results were “’falsely’ measured”. In response to worries about the relatively short follow-up, she noted that a study reporting longer-term outcomes is due “in the upcoming years”.

What is more, whatever the merits of the Dutch team’s original research, the patients passing through modern clinics are strikingly different from those assessed in their papers. Twenty years ago the majority of patients were pre-pubescent boys; in recent years teenage girls have come to dominate (see chart 2). The findings of older research may not apply to today’s patients.

The Dutch team’s approach was deliberately conservative. Patients had to have suffered from gender dysphoria since before puberty. Many of today’s patients say they began to suffer from dysphoria as teenagers. The Dutch protocol excludes those with mental-health problems from receiving treatment. But 70% or more of the young people seeking treatment suffer from mental-health problems, according to three recent papers looking at patients in America, Australia and Finland.

Despite the protocol’s caution, says Will Malone of the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, an international group of concerned clinicians, the reality is often the reverse, especially in America, with mental-health issues becoming a reason to proceed with transitions, rather than to stop them. “We are now told that if we don’t address young people’s mental-health problems caused by dysphoria with transition, they will kill themselves.”

Gender agenda

The original Dutch protocol emphasises the need for careful screening and assessments, as do official guidelines in most countries. But whatever the guidance, there are persistent allegations that it is not being followed in practice. “I had one 15-minute appointment before I was given testosterone,” says Ms Mosley. Many American patients contacted by The Economist reported similarly brief examinations.

The possibility that many teenagers presenting as trans could instead be gay has long been discussed. The Dutch study of 2011 found that 97% of the participants were attracted either to their own sex or to both sexes. In 2019 a group of doctors who resigned from gids told the Times, a British newspaper, of their worries about homophobia in some patients and parents. They worried that, by turning children into simulacra of the opposite sex, the clinic was, in effect, providing a new type of “conversion therapy” for gay children.

Both within America and without, whatever the loudmouths may claim, the vast majority of practitioners are simply trying to ease the genuine suffering of adolescents afflicted by gender dysphoria. But in America in particular the charged atmosphere has made it very difficult to separate the science from the politics.

European medical systems have not concluded that it is always wrong for an adolescent to transition. They are not trying to erase distressed patients. They have simply determined that more research and data are needed before physical treatments for gender dysphoria can become routine. Further research could, conceivably, lead to guidelines similar to those already in use by American medical bodies. But that is another way of saying that it is impossible to justify the current recommendations about gender-affirming care based on the existing data.

[ Via: https://archive.is/oeQ6F ]

#queer theory #weak evidence #gender ideology #medical transition #puberty blockers #cross sex hormones #wrong sex hormones #ideological capture #affirm or suicide #affirmation model #gender affirming #gender affirmation #affirmation #Dutch protocol #gay conversion therapy #conversion therapy #medical experimentation #medical experiment #religion is a mental illness

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oswlld · 2 years ago

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Eight (8) Shows to Get to Know Me

tagged by @talays-portkey ♥ ty for tagging me and having me walk down memory lane for the past few days (spent too much time in all the tags microdosing on my upbringing)

DISCLAIMER: i wanted to showcase defining eras in my life/made an impact in a substantial way; i’m also recommending an ep to watch with each one, which isn’t part of the tag format but imma do it

i. LOST (2004-2010)

this was my whole world for my entire hs existence and into my early college years. half of the shows listed here stems from my first love of the ensemble cast, their interwoven yet clandestine storylines, and the mystery box. at my first sdcc, half of the cast was present when they debuted p1 of the series finale (you’d think i was dead the whole time fksfsk;lv)

the jessi special: The Constant (04x05)

ii. Fringe (2008-2013)

yes, i faithfully followed jj abrams into another insane show. i think it actually altered my brain chemistry, rewired something in me, devoured a piece of me. once LOST was over and Fringe brought in the alternate universe, i dove in head first and never resurfaced

the jessi special: Making Angels (04x11)

iii. Doctor Who (2005-Present)

i think it was technically winter 2010 when i started binging this show because s6 was my first time catching it live (was young and naïve, i caught it on bbca lol) ive been on hellsite for almost two years at the time and fully became a fandom blog, so it was inevitable i would love this series. i think it was the first show i made gifs/edits for???

the jessi special: The Doctor’s Wife (06x04)

iv. Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012-2013)

oh look, my dna makeup shifts again. i actually started watching this show the week leading up to Darcy Day and can still vividly remember the migraines from binging 8-10min eps times 60ish worth of content. this show got me into writing my first fic, running an rp blog, creating instrumental playlists, making a DWxLBD blog, AND eventually flying my ass back to CA to meet the cast and beloved mutuals at VidCon

the jessi special: A New Buddy (ep56)

v. Orphan Black (2013-2017)

happy international women’s day to this show and this show only! i think of all the shows listed here, this is the first time since LOST i caught all the eps in real time from the very beginning. this was filling the hole Fringe was about to carve deep in me. but if you cut me open, you will find the beth-shaped hole that nothing/no one has been able to fill and likely will never fill til the end of time

the jessi special: The Collapse of Nature (04x01)

vi. Shadowhunters (2016-2019)

im willing to admit that the reason i got into this show was because of the wedding kiss haha i saw the clip, signed the adoption papers on the spot, and went on to write a 100K+ wip series. admittedly, i confess that this was a DNF and never finished the last season... i abandoned my boy.gif

the jessi special: Of Men and Angels (01x06)

vii. Sense8 (2015-2018)

a show about eight children than i gave birth to, that i raised on my own, that i will defend on my death bed and beyond??? that show sense8?? yes that show sense8. fun fact, when they did the screening of the finale in Chicago, the cast ended up sitting three rows behind me in the theater and i could hear them talking in between scenes the entire evening. wish i could bottle that feeling up

the jessi special: I Have No Room in My Heart for Hate (02x07)

viii. Bad Buddy (2021-2022)

and we finally made it to the current decade! its nov 2021, im fresh off leaving my previous job and still getting situated in my new position, yet this show was a siren calling to me in the dark mist of my life. i ended up saving the binge watching for the week of my bday and my whole life shifted again. it must have been so alarming on the outside, seeing me go from making 1-2 edits a month to 1-2 edits a day for almost THREE MONTHS. the fact that i still cont to avg two edits/week since then... oy lol

the jessi special: Ep10 (shocked pikachu.jpg)

and ill also throw some honorable mentions too: Chuck, The Good Place, Vice Versa, Twenty Five Twenty One, Once Upon a Time, and Elementary

now tagging @pranink, @icouldhyperfixatehim, @noxclara, @curious-earth (no pressure tho!)

#tag meme #tagged #this is jessi #i am a tree and these are the most defined rings #the ones people would study and say 'tf happened in this era'#now i feel obligated to make an edit for fringe #its the only show of the eight listed that i have never made something for #made a few LOST edits maybe two remakes ago #theres still some LBD edits in the archive tag #now all the new mutuals since bad buddy ended know me on a molecular level

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kaitlin-murphy · 3 years ago

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"After John James Audubon (American Woodsman)" 2021.

Vintage posters, Franklinia alatamaha seeds, cotton, antique frame, plywood, plexi, glue, hardware, vintage lumber, iron oxide stain, light-reactive sound device, 1950s sound recordings of Vermivora bachmanii, vintage darning egg, vintage needle and spools, Sturnus vulgaris skull, wool socks knitted by Bobby Wilcox, original wallpaper digitally designed using copyright free historic images, printed by SpoonFlower Inc, self-published zine.

I was invited by Goucher College Curator and Director of Exhibitions Alex Ebstein to create this installation for the "Rediscovering Goucher's Lost Museum" exhibition in fall 2021. Documentation photos generously made by Vivian Marie Doering @vivianmariephoto on Instagram.

Artist Statement:

“On the whole, the task of turning Audubon’s original images into marketable engravings proved to be an extremely labor-intensive process that relied, almost immediately, on the work of dozens of artisans, often working directly under Audubon’s ever-critical eye. But the work process went well beyond the engraver’s shop. Unseen and unheralded others likewise made a critical contribution to the project: the papermakers who produced the huge, high-quality sheets Audubon required; the copper smelters who turned raw ore into clean ingots; the miners who extracted the ore from the earth in the first place; and so forth, back through all the prior steps of production. In that sense, The Birds of America was not just an extensive work of art, not just an example of the sole genius of the lone, struggling artist. It was, rather, an ambitious business venture that relied on a complex labor process and an extensive supply chain, an enterprise in which the artist became not just the designer of the work, but the administrative manager of dozens of people, many of whom could be called artists in their own right, and a marketer to prospective customers, many of whom he had to track down wherever he could find them, on both sides of a very wide ocean.”

--Gregory Nobles, John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman, 2017. p103

Beyond the ‘supply chain’ of compensated workers existed a backdrop of the truly Unseen and Unheralded – the enslaved Black people whose supportive labor was violently coerced; and the work of Maria Martin, an ‘artist in [her] own right’ whose labor was given, and taken, freely due to her faith and her standing as an unmarried, white woman in the Antebellum South. Utilizing the exquisite Martin-Audubon collaborative painting, "Bachman's Warbler", as a jumping-off point, this installation is a visual exploration of the cultural and structural scaffolding that made such erasure possible during that era, as well as two examples of natural history showcased by the painting that have been lost and found - the now extinct Bachman's Warbler (Vermivora bachmanii) for which this painting and a few short sound recordings are our best documentation of the species' existence, and Franklin Tree (Franklinia alatamaha) a species native to the southeastern US that narrowly avoided utter extinction thanks to the collectors John and William Bartram, and that now exists in scattered cultivation across the country.

This project is not meant as a wholesale ‘cancel’ of John James Audubon or early American naturalists – whose work, at times disturbingly tainted by prevailing beliefs and customs, nevertheless paved the way for the scientific fields of biology and ecology today. This installation is, rather, an acknowledgment of the conflicted entanglements between history, nature, people, race, gender, ideology, belief, imagery, and power.

Collections are essentially a grandiose form of appropriation, recontextualizing objects for myriad purposes. This installation plays with two traditions: collections and appropriation, by appropriating and recontextualizing Audubon’s work, as well as other historical illustrations from various collections, and using metaphor and allegory as tools to tell the story. It would not have been made possible without the help, labor, and/or support of many unseen and unheralded, including the anonymous archivists at the Internet Archive, New York Public Library Digital Collections, and Cornell’s Macaulay Library, collectors on Ebay, Etsy, Facebook Marketplace, and Bazaar in Hamden, the production team at Spoonflower, and most especially Alex Ebstein, Bobby Wilcox, Seth Adelsberger, Denise Wilcox, Patti Murphy, Wyatt Hersey, Jenny Rieke and Oona McKay.

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romualddem · 4 months ago

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Permeation

Agnieszka Brzeżańska, Judith Hamann

@ MOS, Gorzów Sep 13—Oct 20, 2024 sound performance by Judith Hamann: Oct 19, 2024 at 6 pm

Permeation juxtaposes the recent paintings and sculptures of Agnieszka Brzeżańska with the sound installation and drawings by Judith Hamann. The joint exhibition of two interdisciplinary artists, who use a variety of methods and approaches in their work, subjecting the surrounding world to sensitive observation and listening, creates a space for experience and joint contemplation of the immediate future.

Agnieszka Brzeżańska uses a variety of media, focusing on the relationship between living beings and other entities inhabiting the Earth. In what appear to be abstract images, her search is for the representation of that which remains beyond the boundaries of anthropocentric reality. Biomorphic shapes represent extraterrestrial bodies, lost, non-existent or imagined entities. Brzeżanska works with a precise, formal shorthand, which can be seen in compositions built from almost a single line—delicately swirling, forming regular circles like ripples on the water, or spreading out in many directions.

Disorderly thoughts/forms, phantoms smiling mysteriously, or perhaps representations of nature, which, according to Agnieszka Brzeżańska, is in principle favourable to all beings? The artist’s ceramic sculptures from recent years seem to capture her interests and fascinations in both form and meaning. The collection of candelabra-like objects with organic shapes (Metaphor of Everything, 2017) is presented as an installation and serves as a symbolic element in the exhibition. Set on mirrors and equipped with candles that are lit during the visit, the figure- like plants enhance the polysensory dimension of the exhibition, while inviting a more intimate contact with the art.

The intangible element that fills the exhibition space is sound, present in the form of Judith Hamann’s audiospheric installation. The composition, based on field recordings, is only a small part of Hamann’s wider research-performative practice, which is rooted in experiments with the instrument and the non-human voice. Hamann refers to the many audible and perceptible properties of sound as a living medium that not only accompanies humans but is above all an intrinsic part of nature. In addition to the auditory form, the exhibition presents an excerpt from the series Paper Membranes (2020/24), for which Judith Hamann uses the technique of frottage, treated as a performative action akin to field recording. She imagines landscapes, interior and exterior spaces as ‘recordings’ made up of the surface of a wall, the trunk of a tree or the texture of a stone. These become part of a single trace, a recording of an impossible-potential landscape.

Agnieszka Brzeżańska (born in Gdańsk) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and Warsaw in Prof. Stefan Gierowski’s Painting Studio, and at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music. Her work includes paintings, drawings, photography, film, ceramics and other media. Brzeżanska draws on various registers of knowledge, from physics and philosophy to systems of cognition marginalised by modern science, such as alchemy, parapsychology, esotericism, indigenous knowledge or matriarchal traditions. Since 2016, she has been organising Flow/Przepływ, an artist residency on the Vistula River, together with Ewa Cieplewska. She has presented her works in many solo exhibitions, most recently including ‘Incantations and Ancestors’, Willa Polonia Gallery in Busko-Zdrój (2023), ‘Ancestors’, BWA Warszawa (2023), ‘So Remember The Liquid Ground’, eastcontemporary in Milan (2021), ‘World National Park’, Królikarnia, The Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture — a division of the National Museum in Warsaw (2019), Gdansk City Gallery (2018). She took part in the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2018). She collaborates with the BWA Warszawa gallery in Warsaw and the Nanzuka gallery in Tokyo. She lives and works in Warsaw.

Judith Hamann (born in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia) is a composer, performer and sound art maker. They are described as an “extraordinary Australian cellist” (the Guardian) who “destroys the fiction of the musician who lives and works outside conventional parameters and puts in its place a series of compositions that are fundamentally humane” (WIRE). Hamann’s work encompasses performance, improvisation, electro-acoustic composition, field recording, electronics, site specific generative work, and micro-tonal systems in a deeply considered process based, or even ‘nomadic’ approach to creative practice. Hamann explores acts of shaking and humming as formal and intimate encounters; explores ‘collapse’ as a generative, imagined surface; and considers the ‘demystification’ of bodies, both human and non-human, in the context of instrumental practice and the pedagogy of colonial heritage. They have performed at festivals such as Tectonics (Glasgow, Athens, etc.), UnSound (NYC), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), Maerzmusik (Berlin), CTM (Berlin), Biennale Musica — The International Festival of Contemporary Music (Venice), Tokyo Experimental Festival (Tokyo), and AURAL (Mexico). Hamann enjoys thinking and working with other artists which includes Marja Ahti, Joshua Bonnetta, Pascale Criton, Charles Curtis, Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Anike Joyce Sadiq. Their music was released on labels including Blank Forms, Black Truffle, Another Timbre, and Longform Editions. They hold a Doctor of Musical Arts from UC San Diego. Judith Hamann lives and works in Berlin.

Text by Romuald Demidenko Contemporary Art Library

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fabioperes · 5 months ago

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youtube

Why Some North Korean Defectors Want to Go Back Nearly 34,000 North Koreans have defected to South Korea since figures were first collected in 1998. While the number of new arrivals dropped to a trickle in recent years due to strict Covid controls in North Korea and China, they are almost certain to start rising again now that border constraints are easing. For many, the journey is arduous. Since the border between the two Koreas is one of the most militarized in the world, almost all defectors first flee to China until they can gather enough money to reach a third country, such as Thailand. Then they can apply for asylum in South Korea, which grants them citizenship after a security screening. Their resettlement should in theory be easier because they’re moving to a country with a common language, culture and traditions. But North Korea’s decades of isolation and lack of uncensored information has caused a wide rift with South Korea. Once North Koreans arrive, South Korea offers an initial settlement funding of 9 million won ($6,900), vocational training and subsidies for employers for hiring defectors. Many live near each other in blocks of inexpensive apartments, oftentimes the so-called 25-square-meter “rental apartments” provided by the government. When the support runs out, they must provide for themselves — often leading to grim outcomes. The unemployment rate for defectors is about twice the national average. Many older defectors retain a northern Korean accent, making them stand out each time they speak. Others bear scars such as psychological trauma or physical problems such as lung damage from digging for coal in unsafe mines with no protective equipment. Nearly 90% of defectors in Seoul said they’ve had trouble settling into their new homes after a decade, according to a 2022 study from the Seoul Institute. North Korean defectors between 2017 and 2021 experienced suicidal impulses more than double the rate of South Korea population, which is already among the highest in the world, according to a survey from the Seoul Institute. In some cases, leaving could prove fatal for family members who don’t flee. Lee, who defected to South Korea in 2017, and only gave her surname due to safety concerns, could only afford to bring one of her sons with her. When the North Korean authorities found out about her defection, they beat her oldest son to death. “I am so lonely,” Lee said. “I want to go back and die there — South Korea is as suffocating as the North.” -------- Like this video? Subscribe: http://www.youtube.com/Bloomberg?sub_confirmation=1 Become a Quicktake Member for exclusive perks: http://www.youtube.com/bloomberg/join Bloomberg Originals offers bold takes for curious minds on today’s biggest topics. Hosted by experts covering stories you haven’t seen and viewpoints you haven’t heard, you’ll discover cinematic, data-led shows that investigate the intersection of business and culture. Exploring every angle of climate change, technology, finance, sports and beyond, Bloomberg Originals is business as you’ve never seen it. Subscribe for business news, but not as you've known it: exclusive interviews, fascinating profiles, data-driven analysis, and the latest in tech innovation from around the world. Visit our partner channel Bloomberg Quicktake for global news and insight in an instant. via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmmKNGMI9F8

#IFTTT #YouTube #Youtube

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theultimatefan · 2 years ago

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NLL Names Kurt Hunzeker Executive Vice President of Commercial Operations

The National Lacrosse League (@NLL), the largest and most successful professional lacrosse property in the world, today announced industry veteran Kurt Hunzeker has been named to the newly created position of Executive Vice President of Commercial Operations. Hunzeker brings more than 20 years of executive sales, marketing, and brand building to the NLL, most recently as Vice President, Minor League Business Operations for Major League Baseball. He will report directly to NLL Commissioner Brett Frood and will begin his work this week.

“The National Lacrosse League is enjoying a post-pandemic rebirth on and off the field, as evidenced by our rise in attendance and revenue, media exposure and the expansion of partnership programs by our teams,” Commissioner Frood said. “Kurt has the perfect blend of creative and practical business experience to help us capitalize on this next vital phase of enterprise growth. His experience with disruptive properties like the XFL’s St. Louis BattleHawks, and with emerging businesses like MiLB, provide the right mix to help shape and grow the NLL business and promotional platforms like never before.”

“I look at the NLL as a property that has exactly what brands and consumers want—fast paced excitement, great athletes, a growing fan base, a solid ownership structure, and great media partners in ESPN and TSN—and I am looking forward to helping the League realize its business and brand potential beyond what exists today,” Hunzeker said. “The industry has heard about the emerging growth of lacrosse as a sport, now it’s time for the NLL to push the narrative to an even wider audience, while continuing to engage and develop that stronger base of fans who have enjoyed the NLL for years.”

Hunzeker joins the NLL after overseeing all business-driving and revenue-generating functions of MLB’s restructured player development system and its 120 MiLB teams since 2021, including: national commercial sales and partnership activation, marketing and communications, content strategy and creation, media production and multimedia platforms, community relations and fan engagement, ticketing strategy, licensed consumer products, and ecommerce. He also authored the initial five-year business strategy and activation plan for MiLB’s new centralized business fully integrated within MLB, and generated the most commercial revenue in MiLB’s 122-year history in 2022.

It was Hunzeker’s second successful stint in baseball, having served as Vice President, Marketing Strategy and Research for Minor League Baseball from January 2015 to June 2019 where he built, enacted and measured the go-to-market corporate partnership and fan engagement strategies, focused on brand amplification, consumer acquisition, and unprecedented revenue growth for MiLB’s national commercial sales and marketing enterprise representing all 160 MiLB communities at the time. He led the creation of MiLB Copa de la Diversión™ (the “Fun Cup”), and designed and implemented MiLB’s 10-year strategic marketing plan in 2017, including its first-ever national campaign, MiLB It’s Fun to Be a Fan®, amplifying all 160 MiLB Clubs’ fan recruitment and engagement efforts.

Between his time at MiLB and MLB, Kurt was President of the St. Louis BattleHawks of the XFL, leading the team to landmark growth for the startup league before it was shut down due to the pandemic. The BattleHawks were the XFL’s leader in almost all business categories, surpassing all sales, social media and marketing goals by as much as 97% before the league shutdown. That success also included the signing of a record 12 Founding Partnerships, including national brands with deep, local market connections such as Anheuser-Busch InBev, Centene and McDonald’s.

The St. Louis native and University of Missouri graduate was also Senior Director, Brand Marketing for the Rawlings Sporting Goods Company for four years before MiLB, where he managed the global brand marketing and media buying efforts for the iconic sports brand, focusing on creating engagement platforms targeting next-level players, coaches and parents to maximize brand awareness, drive purchase intent and generate revenues with high potential consumers worldwide.

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bluemoonmetaverse · 2 years ago

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How To Buy Metaverse Land: A Step-by-Step Guide

The metaverse gained more popularity than ever this past year as we experienced a transition into a new era of digital connectivity in 2022, especially with Facebook officially changing to “Meta” in October 2021. The main idea of the metaverse lies in creating an entirely immersive replica of our existing reality without any physical boundaries meaning the potential of this new digital universe is almost beyond comprehension!

Decentraland staged its first metaverse land sale before the end of December 2017, selling individual acres for about $20. The cost of the parcels rose to $6000 towards the end of 2021, and by the middle of 2022, prices had more than doubled to about $15,000. It’s these unprecedented spikes in value that has major players flocking to invest.

Interest in Metaverse Real Estate has risen higher after multiple celebrities have purchased digital land. In 2021, a purchase of $450,000 was made for the land adjacent to Snoop Dogg's virtual home, allowing the owner to become digital neighbors with the hip-hop icon. In this article, we will delve into the specifics of why the value of metaverse land is growing and shed light on how you can invest in digital real estate as well.

An Understanding of the Metaverse Land

With the Metaverse gaining so much traction, it’s natural to wonder how to capitalize on it. You should understand that metaverse land works similarly to physical land. There are many different areas more suited for particular businesses; farmland, residential land, commercial land with high foot traffic, etc. With metaverse land, you should focus on your business goals. For example, Snoop Dogg’s Snoopverse would be a good place to buy a plot of land to sell hip hop oriented NFTs or avatars.

The Metaverse enables gamers or users to run applications that let them create avatars that are either identical to or superior to them. These avatars can interact socially, work, and make money from investments. These users can then buy Metaverse land to build gaming centers, online shops, and art galleries; the possibilities are endless. Essentially, the Metaverse provides a connection between the virtual and physical worlds.

How Can One Purchase Land in the Bluemoon Metaverse?

You must first acquire cryptocurrencies if you wish to purchase virtual real estate. For instance, if you're thinking about purchasing land in the Bluemoon Metaverse, you might need to first acquire Ether (Ethereum) or MANA.

Currently, metaverse platforms have some of the best-developed and well-organized real-world infrastructures, which new owners are free to alter as they see fit. Land can be purchased directly from owners or investors. Follow these steps to learn how to purchase metaverse land.

Step 1: Choose a Metaverse Platform

The success of your investment is significantly impacted by the platform you select for your metaverse land. It all depends on what you want to do with the land you acquire, but be aware that there are a variety of possibilities available. For example, the Bluemoon Metaverse enables businesses to enter the Metaverse with their own digital worlds for a variety of uses spanning from entertainment, finance, healthcare, and more.

Step 2: Create Your NFT or Cryptocurrency Wallet

A wallet where you can access your cryptocurrency is necessary. Before choosing, you must confirm that the cryptocurrency is compatible with the platform where you intend to buy your Metaverse land. The Bluemoon Metaverse eases this process by allowing its users to shift their assets across networks with a few simple clicks using multi-chain compatibility.

Step 3: Connect Your Wallet to the Metaverse

Each metaverse platform has a different registration procedure. You will link your wallet after initially creating an account. It takes just a few clicks to link your wallet, and you may install browser add-ons that take care of the integration for you.

Step 4: Purchase cryptocurrency and add it to your digital wallet

Cryptocurrency can be bought via online markets like Binance. Make sure you have enough ETH or MANA in your wallet to make your desired investment whenever you are ready to explore, bid, or buy. Inside Bluemoon’s Metaverse, users can display their NFTs while automatically listing these NFTs on multiple NFT Marketplaces, including the Bluemoon Marketplace. This allows visitors to buy NFTs on a single platform.

Future of Investing in the Metaverse

In the long term, the vitality of virtual real estate will depend on the future of the Metaverse itself. Several wealthy and influential companies, from Facebook to Microsoft, are betting big that it will be the next evolution of the internet. If the Metaverse can become as essential to business and society as the internet has become, digital real estate will become a progressively more profitable asset.

From large corporations to personal brands and influencers, people love the opportunity the internet gives them to create followings and build new products and services. The Metaverse might be the next big thing, but much more immersive than its predecessors, like social media. This likely points to a promising future for the virtual real estate market. Now that you have a basic understanding of how to buy Metaverse land do your research and choose the investment that best suits you.

#Metaverse Real Estate #Metaverse Real Estate Market #Metaverse Real Estate Marketplace #Metaverse Land #NFT Marketplaces #Digital Wallet

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old-school-butch · 1 year ago

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I highly recommend subscribing to the Economist btw. But they will let you have access to a few free articles a month anyway, and there are a couple more on trans issues in this edition. https://www.economist.com/briefing/2023/04/05/the-evidence-to-support-medicalised-gender-transitions-in-adolescents-is-worryingly-weak

PRISHA MOSLEY was 17 when she was first given testosterone in a clinic in North Carolina, after she had declared to her parents that she was a boy. She had struggled through her teen years with anorexia and depression after a sexual assault. Luka Hein had both breasts removed as a 16-year-old in Nebraska. Chloe Cole, in California, was a year younger when she had her double mastectomy. She had been on testosterone and puberty-blocking drugs since 13, also after a sexual assault.

All three girls were experiencing “gender dysphoria”, a feeling of intense discomfort with their own sexed bodies. Once a rare diagnosis, it has exploded over the past decade. In England and Wales the number of teenagers seeking treatment at the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), the main clinic treating dysphoria, has risen 17-fold since 2011-12 (see chart 1). An analysis by Reuters, a news agency, based on data from Komodo, a health-technology firm, estimated that more than 42,000 American children and teenagers were diagnosed in 2021—three times the count in 2017. Other rich countries, from Australia to Sweden, have also experienced rapid increases.

Dysphoria furoria

The transitioning of teenagers has its roots in a treatment protocol developed in the Netherlands in the 1980s and 1990s. It is built on three pillars: puberty-blockers (formally known as GnRH antagonists), cross-sex hormones and surgery. The goal was to alter the patient’s body to more closely match their sense of cross-sex identity, and thereby relieve their mental anguish. A pair of papers published in 2011 and 2014 by Annelou de Vries, one of the Dutch protocol’s pioneers, reported on the experiences of some of the first patients. They concluded that symptoms of depression decreased among patients taking puberty-blockers, and that gender dysphoria “resolved” and psychological functioning “steadily improved” after cross-sex hormones and surgery.

Transition ignition

In 2020 the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), a British body which reviews the scientific underpinnings of medical treatments, looked at the case for puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones. The academic evidence it found was weak, discouraging and in some cases contradictory. The studies suggest puberty-blockers had little impact on patients. Cross-sex hormones may improve mental health, but the certainty of that finding was low, and NICE warned of the unknown risks of lasting side-effects.

For both classes of drug, NICE assessed the quality of the papers it analysed as “very low”, its poorest rating. Some studies reported results but made no effort to analyse them for statistical significance. Cross-sex hormones are a lifelong treatment, yet follow-up was short, ranging from one to six years. Most studies followed only a single set of patients, who were given the drugs, instead of comparing them with another set who were not. Without such a “control group”, researchers cannot tell whether anything that happened to the patients in the studies was down to the drugs, to other treatments the patients might be receiving (such as counselling or antidepressants), or to some other, unrelated third factor.

Two American professional bodies, the Endocrine Society (es) and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (wpath) have also reviewed the science underpinning adolescent transitions. But ES’s review did not set out to look at whether gender-affirming care helped resolve gender dysphoria or improve mental health by any measure. It focused instead on side-effects, for which it found only weak evidence. This omission, says Gordon Guyatt of McMaster University, makes the review “fundamentally flawed”. WPATH, for its part, did look at the psychological effects of blockers and hormones. It found scant, low-quality evidence. Despite these findings, both groups continue to recommend physical treatments for gender dysphoria, and insist that their reviews and the resulting guidelines are sound.

Newer longitudinal studies have been published since, but they have drawbacks, too. One published in January in the New England Journal of Medicine by Diane Chen of Northwestern University and colleagues looked at teenagers after two years of cross-sex hormone treatment. Although participants did typically report improvements in their mental health, they were small—generally single-digit increases on a scale that runs from 0 to 100. The study lacked a control group. Two of the 315 patients committed suicide.

Gender agenda

The possibility that many teenagers presenting as trans could instead be gay has long been discussed. The Dutch study of 2011 found that 97% of the participants were attracted either to their own sex or to both sexes. In 2019 a group of doctors who resigned from GIDS told the Times, a British newspaper, of their worries about homophobia in some patients and parents. They worried that, by turning children into simulacra of the opposite sex, the clinic was, in effect, providing a new type of “conversion therapy” for gay children.

Anyone have a full version of this they can send me?

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sharethecareph · 3 years ago

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Share the Care: Breaking the Gender Bias

Care work, whether paid or unpaid, is essential for all societies to function properly and is mostly seen as a woman’s responsibility. However, despite the impact of care work on our lives, it continues to be undervalued. This article hopes to shed light on the importance of sharing the care at home and beyond.

Unpaid Domestic and Care Work

Photo by J. Aliling for the ILO

“Care work is central to human and social wellbeing. It includes looking after children, the elderly, and those with physical and mental illnesses and disabilities, as well as daily domestic work like cooking, cleaning, washing, mending, and fetching water and firewood.” – Oxfam International

Sharing responsibilities in the home can bring us one step closer to stopping all forms of gender inequality. Various societal norms have reinforced the gender division of labor wherein women and girls are expected to do most of the domestic and care work at home, while men assume the role of being the primary breadwinners of the family. These gender norms have limited the opportunities that give women and girls a better quality of life as they spend more time taking care of responsibilities at home. This situation is even worse for women and girls who live in marginalized areas, where resources are much more limited.

According to the International Labour Organization, “...women perform 76.2 per cent of total hours of unpaid care work, more than three times as much as men” (2018). These statistics have increased drastically due to the COVID-19 pandemic, due to the government mandates and work-at-home setups. However, despite women and men spending more time at home, the former still do most of the domestic and care work. According to the 2021 National Household Care Survey, women have spent 13 hours a day on domestic and care work, while men have only spent 8 hours daily.

Valuing Domestic and Care Work

youtube

“To really value this work, it's important to appreciate its significance for any society or economy.” – UN Women expert, Shahra Razavi (2017)

In the video above, UN Women expert Shahra Razavi says that the value of unpaid care work done in Switzerland would rival the country's banking and insurance industries. Similarly, UN Women reported in 2016 that unpaid domestic and care work almost amounts to 10 to 39% of a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Despite these numbers pointing to a high economic value of unpaid domestic and care work, this invisible labor continues to be ignored. Notably, the value of care work should not be limited to its possible economic value.

Care work by women has been the backbone of many well-functioning societies and economies. However, care work continues to be undervalued and seen as solely a woman's job. In ending the gender norms that perpetuate such harmful stereotypes, we can begin at home by equally dividing household chores between our sons and daughters. Aside from teaching our sons the importance of care work, men also need to “...challenge traditional thinking and recognize their equal share of care and domestic work responsibilities at home” (Cabaces, 2021).

Sharing the Care Beyond the Home

“Care should not be considered only as a burden and this central activity for well-being should be redistributed between men and women, as well as between the family and the State: States’ failures to provide, regulate and fund domestic and care formal services increase the burden for communities, families and especially women.” – Gaëlle Ferrant, Luca Maria Pesando, and Keiko Nowacka (2014)

Beyond sharing the care at home, legislation and policies are also a must to further support the care economy. These institutional changes can range from maternity and paternity leaves and flexible working arrangements to better childcare and family services. These examples can help ensure a work-life balance for both parents.

Photo by Direct Media on Stock Snap

From teaching our sons to help at home to enacting laws to lessen the burden of care work on women and girls, we can turn a house into a home when we share the care.

References

Cabaces, R. (2021, July 1). When fathers care. ABS-CBN News. https://news.abs-cbn.com/blogs/opinions/07/01/21/domestic-work-oxfam-equality-home

Canadian Labour Congress. (2022, March 7). IWD 2022: Gender equality depends on a healthy care economy. https://canadianlabour.ca/iwd-2022-gender-equality-depends-on-a-healthy-care-economy/

Donner, F. (2020, February 12). The Household Work Men and Women Do, and Why. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/us/the-household-work-men-and-women-do-and-why.html

Ferrant, G., Pesando, L., & Nowacka, K. (2014, December). Unpaid Care Work: The missing link in the analysis of gender gaps in labour outcomes. OECD. https://www.oecd.org/dev/development-gender/Unpaid_care_work.pdf

International Labour Office, Addati, L., Cattaneo, U., Esquivel, V., & Valarino, I. (2018). Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work.

Miller, C. (2018, August 8). A ‘Generationally Perpetuated’ Pattern: Daughters Do More Chores. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/upshot/chores-girls-research-social-science.html

Oxfam International. (n.d.). Not all gaps are created equal: the true value of care work. https://www.oxfam.org/en/not-all-gaps-are-created-equal-true-value-care-work

Rodriguez, L. (2021, September 13). Unpaid Care Work: Everything You Need to Know. Global Citizen. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/womens-unpaid-care-work-everything-to-know/

UN Women. (2017, March 3). What is the real value of unpaid work? [Video]. Youtube. https://youtu.be/fcqt0QzgUFU

UN Women. (2019, May 15). Gender equality starts at home: Seven tips for raising feminist kids. Medium. https://medium.com/we-the-peoples/gender-equality-starts-at-home-seven-tips-for-raising-feminist-kids-75e1bf00b863

UN Women. (n.d.). Redistribute unpaid work. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/redistribute-unpaid-work

#care work #domestic work #gender equality #Share the Care PH

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sazorak · 3 years ago

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Every Game I Played in 2021, Ranked

It’s time to say goodbye to 2021 in the only way I know how: ranking the games I played this year. Let’s hop to it.

2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020

14. Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth – 2021 – Steam – ★★★

Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth set in the Lodoss War franchise. The “story” as it stands is kind of just an excuse to recycle various dead Lodoss characters into a series of boss fights in what ends up being a pretty linear Metroidvania. The story is really not what you should be here for— if you’re not familiar with Lodoss it’s pretty much nonsense, and as someone who is: still not great.

What works really well here are the controls and element system. You have the ability to swap between two active elements: fire and wind. Whichever is active, you deal that kind of elemental damage, and are absorb that element to refill your mana. You also have various other abilities as a result: wind in particular allows Deedlit to float, which is very useful, and being able to stand in lava is, while not as helpful, definitely a thing.

Of course, enemies have their own weaknesses and resistances (even beyond these, which activated magic can play into), so you’re forced to be constantly swapping between elements (including back and forth during boss fights) to move through the world and attack. Which, all-in-all, feels pretty good. There’s also an interesting puzzle system built around bow-and-arrow hitting targets and cutting ropes.

Sprite work is good, animation is fantastic, music is a bit… basic. Environments look nice but are also devoid of any variety whatsoever.

Beyond the basic-ness of it, the main reason I have this relatively low rated here is that the combat is just suuuuper just “there”. There’s nothing really to it, and it’s pretty trivial. Bosses vary from being very easy to annoying, in part because they’re VERY BAD at telegraphing the moves you’re supposed to be dodging. And you really need to dodge: a core system of the game is building up damage with particular elements so you can refill life since you can’t take many hits, the game has a very harsh fighting-game style stun system, and the knockback is almost comically mean. It’s the kind of stuff that I’d expect they’d have polished with more time and playtesting but… so it goes.

It’s very short, and the variety isn’t huge, but it’s fun enough for a few hours. Honestly, it kind of feels almost like a first pass— I’d be interested in seeing the team behind this working on something with more budget (and with more people) to make a true Metroidvania out of it. Put these people with the Bloodstained team and you’d get a really interesting game out of it.

Ori and the Blind Forest – 2019 – Steam – ★★★★

Ori is a very pretty Metroidvania game with some glaring flaws that bring down the experience. The combat is brainless, you just press an auto-attack button that does all the work for you. There’s an obsession with long, very orchestrated chase sequences that are meant to be “cinematic” but are ultimately just frustrating when you don’t know what they are expecting you to do at a given moment.

But when the mobility abilities are firing, the interconnected flow of combat-and-movement is fantastic. And the game really is very pretty. The writing is decent, though its attempts at emotional moments feel a little forced and obvious. Still, it’s good. It doesn’t compare to its sequel, but…

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption – 2007 – Wii – ★★★★

So, I’ve been slowly— very slowly, given I played through Metroid Prime 2 all the way back in 2015 — getting through the rest of the Prime series. I’ve played Prime 1 a bunch, but for whatever reason I just never got to the others. Well, here we are.

This is by far the weakest of the Metroid Prime series. They tried to make it more of a linear action game, which just… doesn’t work. There’s still exploration, but the kind of spatial reasoning and memorization of areas for backtracking just isn’t here. You barely even have reasons to go back to past areas, and when you do the giant space brain outright tells you what planets to go to instead. Weak.

The addition of the hypermode mechanic just… isn’t good. Like, the base idea of “spend life to increase damage” is perfectly fine, neat mechanical idea. Corruption letting you get more out of your hypermode for the health you spend is cute but poorly explained as well. The issue is that so many enemies require the use of hypermode against them that it kind of invalidates the other combat options?

I like the Prime series’ mobility. I like to charge a beam while dodging around fire to hit something. Shooting missiles that lock. Both of those are immeasurably worse options in this game, if they’re options at all.

Many bosses NEED you to be in hypermode to damage them, which can be tricky if you’re low on health (and thus require you to farm health off them v e r y s l o w l y). Actually, in general: the boss designs in this game are very weird in their difficulty. Things get much better in the latter half, but some fights are just absolutely miserable. Rundas and the first Leviathan Guardian in particular are just so tedious. Ridley, Ganaydra, and the final encounter were all genuinely fun, but man, some of the others.

Some quick thoughts:

The scans not containing much lore on monsters etc. sucks. I miss my science team scans.

Changing up the enemies for particular rooms at certain points in the story is cute, but replacing everything with Phazoids, the most annoying enemy, after you beat an area is miserable. What the fuck?

Playing this game now is hilarious, because there’s a lot of mechanical stuff built in tied to the Friend Voucher system. Backtracking to do a weird environmental puzzle where the only reward was a Friend Voucher… kind of broke me a bit.

The X-Ray visor + Nova Beam combat stuff is hilarious. Props to them on that. Sniping a Metroid Hatcher after the frustration of fighting it previously is very satisfying.

Speaking of funny: the admiral flying down like Patton to say GOOD JOB SAMUS, HERE’S SOME GUYS TO NOT GET KILLED and then fly back to his ship slayed me.

I think I hate motion controls now

Anyway, Prime 1 >>> Prime 2 >>>>> Prime 3

13. Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury – 2021 – Switch – ★★★★

Mario Odyssey was billed as kind of an “open world Mario 64”, but that really wasn’t the case. The game was inventive, and the way it built its levels was certainly different, but the sheer volume of collectables in Odyssey kind of weakened it overall; it was very much a quantity over quality.

Bowser’s Fury is really, really an “open world Mario 64”, in that you’re basically moving between Mario 64 levels in an open world, each with a set of self-contained goals. This is complicated by the presence of a kaiju Bowser occasionally wrecking shit, sometimes helping out on accident but often getting in the way.

The Bowser’s Fury aspect of Bowser’s Fury is, in my opinion, its weakest aspect. Yeah, there probably needed to be some environmental interactions to make the game work, but interrupting precision platforming with unavoidable horseshit is super not cool, and the number of shines that require his presence and the overall brevity of the game basically forced them to make him spawn really, really often towards the end, which is obnoxious.

But even so, I had a real blast with it. Bowser’s Fury is short, but it’s a good proof-of-concept of a direction they could go with Mario moving forward. I’d much prefer them built out a free-flowing open world Mario along these lines than sticking to the Odyssey model, but we’ll see.

Also, 3D World: that’s still a very good Mario game. Kind of wasn’t feeling it coming back to it, but then I ended up running through the whole thing again anyway. Good stuff.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon – 2020 – Steam – ★★★★

I’ve largely enjoyed the Yakuza franchise from afar. But the move to a dedicated goofy RPG system seemed weird enough that I had to check it out first hand.

The RPG system is a good first try. It functions, but it does not really shine. There’s just not a lot of systematic depth to the progression. See, it uses a job system with unlockable abilities, ala Final Fantasy 5, that progresses independent of your level. Different jobs have different skills and specializations, as well as different weapon specializations.

Problem is, there’s actually not much depth to job switching. Very few abilities are actually usable by other jobs once unlocked, and most abilities are very flat in both their usage and damage. While there are a few damage types, there’s typically only one unlockable attack type of a given elemental type available to a character, so you basically just grind to get those abilities so you have a full elemental coverage, before swapping them back to whatever class is the highest DPS for them / has the highest ability variation.

There’s just not much decision making in “do I attack with Big Punch A or Big Punch B”, really; you just mash whatever attack does the most damage and isn’t resisted by the target. The fact that stat modifiers for opponents are typically kind of useless given weaker enemies die too quickly for them to matter, and bosses almost always resist them anyways.

The way summons work is pretty interesting, in that they actually use money and are available based on environmental conditions, and time last used. Them also being connected to side story progression is very good; it allows them to really build dumb emotional connections as to why Kasuga is summoning a swarm of crawfish to fight someone etc.

Story wise… it’s a Yakuza game. It’s a well-executed one of those, but ultimately, it’s just one of those. If you like the crime melodrama of Yakuza, you’ll have it here. Kasuga as a protagonist is a good replacement to Kiryu in that he’s much more… emotive and involved, but it is very funny to me that the series is obsessed with putting washed up 40+ year olds in the protagonist seat, to the point where even their new junior protagonist has to be one too.

12. Subnautica: Below Zero – 2021 – Steam – ★★★★

The last time I played Subnautica was when the original back in 2018. I rather enjoyed it at the time, and I’ve grown fonder of it since. The core formula of Subnautica— a sort of underwater survival Metroidvania, where the progress “locks” are both a tech tree and spatial knowledge— just rang quite true for me, and the way it approached an open, unfolding narrative was great.

Subnautica: Below Zero is an expandalone sequel for the original Subnautica, and it’s… well, it’s not quite as good. But: it’s still Subnautica. I do not like it nearly as much as I did the original, but I still enjoyed my time with it. I do not think there is any reason to check it out if you haven’t already played and enjoyed the base game though.

Let’s touch on some positives first before I start getting into all my nits: It runs and looks considerably better. Them making the narrative much more personal— with you as an actual named, voice-acted character looking to see what happened to her sister— is a good turn. It’s an interesting expansion to the story of base Subnautica, though I’m not entirely sure if the story it’s telling is particularly revelatory in the same way. And, again: the core gameplay loop is still the same as Subnautica, which is a fun loop overall.

Alright, let’s pick those nits:

Below Zero takes a big focus on on-land (well, on ice a lot of the time) movement and exploration, and it just doesn’t work very well. The physics system can’t quite handle animal movement on land very well, particularly when it’s aggressive, and the movement is just slowww. Heat as the oxygen of the land— while being a funny statement— just isn’t that interesting. The loss of vertical movement there is really limiting, too.

My main issue with Below Zero is its layout and progression. The game is much smaller by landmass, and as a result it has compensated by reducing vehicle movement speed, made biomes much more labyrinthine and compressed, and just made the overall flow of the exploration not as good. OG Subnautica had a kind of natural sequence to the map and the technologies you followed— born both on how it slowly gave you waypoints, the way sight-line landmarks were used to lead you in particular directions, and the way it slowly gave you access to particular mobility / depth enhancement technologies and their required resources.

Below Zero being squished makes all this instead kind of weird: you’re less gated, but there’s so many areas that don’t actually matter, and you end up getting some technology / access to certain resources in what seems like a very odd order sometimes. Subnautica just felt more deliberate in how you tended to stumble your way through the game; not so here.

This lack of structural guidance also kind of bears out in the story, weirdly. There’s two major narrative threads, one of which kind of just ends fairly abruptly (and, on my part, kind of accidentally), and then the “main” plot also sort of wraps up melodramatically, in that it… wasn’t that hard to do? Compared to the main ending challenges of base Subnautica— including the extremely fraught but fun journey to the bottom of the map that really felt like an expedition— the jaunt to what ended up being the end of Below Zero was… pretty basic and easy?

Some of this admittedly could be born of not remembering annoyances with the base game which would elevate Beyond Zero by their correction, but… overall, I think this is fun enough, but not as fun.

11. Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne HD Remaster – 2021 – Steam – ★★★★

This was actually my first time playing through Nocturne, and boy: that sure is a 20-year-old game huh! Like, the core SMT systems are still good and enjoyable, and the tone is still great, but there’s just aspects of the experience that haven’t aged well. A lot of expectation for you to either just know stuff or have a guide, and not a lot of respect for your time.

That being said: The turn press combat introduced here is still great, and adds a lot of fun to the sort of push-and-pull of critical hits and weakness exploitation. It’s fun!

This Remaster adds voice acting— which I found pretty good— cleans up the graphics, removing randomization from skill inheritance (oh thank god), and pulls in all of the variants of the Maniax dungeon stuff. Annoyingly, I had multiple softlocks in the Labyrinth of Amala around the Maniax cutscenes, which ate hours of my time. Which: cool, great, thanks.

Still need to check out SMTV despite owning it. Just need to build up the headspace energy for it.

10. Castlevania: Advance Collection – 2021 – Steam – ★★★★

This collection is complicated. I am on the record as loving the portable Castlevanias— and I do— and I all onboard for them getting a new release so that I can play them on, say, the Switch or something. Of course, they’re all super emulatable, and have been for two decades now, but that’s kind of the nature of game rereleases I suppose. This package includes all three of the GBA Castlevanias, as well as the SNES release of Dracula X. It adds some minor additional art stuff, some audio with better compression (well, in a few cases), and also some actually pretty useful on-screen pop ups tied to bestiary item / soul collections.

As far as deals go, it’s a decent one, but again, kind of pointless. I’ve played all the games in this collection before, so let’s just briefly run them down:

1. Circle of the Moon

This game has aged terribly. It feels stiff, empty, and super basic. The whole card combination system for special moves is really neat actually, but the drop rates for cards is terrible, to the point that you can go a lot of the game not getting new ones. It’s a tolerable experience, but not an enjoyable one.

2. Harmony of Dissonance

This game is pretty good still! Like, the Castle design is kind of complex to the point of being genuinely confusing at times— I have gotten genuinely lost in this game before multiple times, kind of an uncommon experience really— but that’s part of the fun. This game truly captured the idea of “let’s do Symphony of the Night but on the GBA”, and did so pretty well. It’s not the best portable Castlevania by any means, but it’s pretty good.

3. Aria of Sorrow

Now we’re talking. Aria of Sorrow is very good. It’s easily the best GBA Castlevania, and in the running for one of the best Castlevanias period. I don’t know what to say about it at this point. The collection aspect is good, the abilities are fun, the game moves and just feels good in a way Circle and Harmony both kind of struggled with. It’s just a fun game to play. As a Metroidvania it’s not especially open or hard in the sense of getting lost in it (beyond chasing the abilities necessary for the “true ending”) but there’s certainly more narrow ones out there.

4. Dracula X

… Why are you here? You’re not a portable game. You’re not even the best version of the game that represent. Legitimately, why are you in this collection? Y’all couldn’t be bothered to just give us a good ass Rondo of Blood port instead? Whatever.

9. Mass Effect: Legendary Edition – 2021 – Steam – ★★★★

Hoo boy. So, Legendary Edition is a packaged rerelease / slight remastering of the Mass Effect trilogy. Way back when, I rather enjoyed the first two games, and avoided the third in-light of the drama around its original release. This rerelease was my excuse to revisit it all at once, and finally give that third game a try.

Mass Effect 1 definitely feels like an older game. There are aspects of its design that you can tell stem from it being a relatively smaller game made by a relatively smaller team— there’s a lot of asset reuse (particularly on side missions), and they hadn’t quite locked down what exactly people liked about the franchise (namely, the side characters and party members). But the world building and narrative design really did shine here. The way it presents a complete blank slate science fiction setting that’s both expansive and detailed is great. It’s a great start for the series and setting.

Mass Effect 2 is the jump into “triple A” polish and design. Combat feels better, there’s a lot more bespoke assets, and the team and your interaction with them is put at the forefront. It’s definitely the best game in the series, the most interesting and complex. Going back now, there’s still some aspects I found a bit annoying. The way it handles certain narrative points of return— basically punishing you for advancing the story in certain places not knowing that things can turn out badly for characters as a result— is stupid. Certain plot hooks are dropped outright in ME3.

My feelings about Mass Effect 3 are complicated. Obviously, I’m coming to this with all the various DLC and fixes layered on, though I was well aware of the various flaws and foibles of the game going in (spoilers aren’t the end of the world for me— I care a lot more about plot execution than plot surprises). Mass Effect 3 almost feels like it was made by two different writing staffs. The character writing is still good. The way they gave the party a real send-off with the Citadel DLC was great, and the way the general game pushed more party-member-to-party-member interaction was good. But boy, the central plot just doesn’t work well, and the resolution is tepid– even after them going back to clean it up. You can tell they put it together under a schedule gun.

I get what they’re going for with the big focus on the war in ME3, and a lot of that works well enough. The whole gathering of disparate assets and factions is neat, and the general plot being about gathering allies on the national scale etc is fine. But the actual missions, and what you’re up against is very flat, straight forward, without nuance. For a series that often had very complex narratives with interesting choices— if not necessarily that consequential when tied to those choices— everything here is hyper-focused to basically how much do you oppose genocide really. A lot of the “gray areas” from previous games are hyperfocused into black-and-white, and indoctrination becomes a catchall solution to the plot’s woes.

I wonder what the hell they’re going to do with the ostensible Mass Effect sequel we have coming. Dragon Age: Inquisition showed that BioWare can in fact make a game like this still, even if Andromeda was a big ol’ flop, but I’m not sure how one does a direct sequel now. I guess you could pull a Deus Ex and do the “combine all three endings” thing, which… would be fine, I guess.

8. Halo: Infinite – 2021 – Steam – ★★★★

It has been ages since I last played a Halo. I only play first-person shooters on PC generally, and I do so only very sporadic at that (see: the past few years rankings). But, with Halo: Infinite being F2P, I figured hey, why not dip my way back in? I had a fun time with Halo 1 on PC back in the day.

And turns out, Halo: Infinite is a good time. There’s a lot of good mechanical evolutions, fun match styles, and good weapons. The flow of kills feels pretty good. Folks complain a bunch about the “progression”, and I acknowledge that their complaints are justified, but as someone who is here to just have a good time and not necessarily chase the number dragon… ehhhh it’s fine. It doesn’t impact me really.

I ended up shelling out for the campaign, and it is pretty neat. The gameplay loop is fun, particularly with the mobility added by the grapplehook. But boy that narrative is weird as shit. I’d love to hear what the hell happened production wise that led them here, because it is genuinely bizarre structurally. How late did they pivot to… this?

7. Stellaris: Nemesis – 2021 – Steam – ★★★★

It’s been a hot minute since I touched Stellaris; last time I reviewed some expansions on here, I dwelled a lot on the issues Stellaris has; a lot of those still are here. AI is dumb as shit and doesn’t play by the same rules, there’s occasionally back-breaking bugs, and the level of micro becomes absurd at times, especially in certain “builds”. War is such a goddamn hassle.

On the plus side: there’s actually been a ton of improvements since I last dipped in. The AI is genuinely better; it’s not exactly good, but it is much less pants-on-head frustrating. The additions to Stellaris via Nemesis are also neat; the whole becoming-the-Crisis gives another option for end-game for people getting bored with the game state, as-is forming the galactic imperium. The changes made to first contact and the addition of intel is good, if a bit micro heavy and inconsequential a lot of the time.

They’ve also generally just added a ton of new small events across the game. Their addition of a team whose entire job is to polish up old expansions and add small content like this is a godsend for improving the experience. I hope they continue to add more weird Origins; the divergence of experience tied to them is really good.

6. Animal Crossing: Happy Home Paradise – 2021 – Switch – ★★★★

This is quite an improvement on base Animal Crossing! It doesn’t exactly reduce the long-term tedium or anything, but it certainly gives more incentive to consistently come back. I guess this is technically a review of both the 2.0 update and that DLC.

The addition of Gyroids, out-of-season islands, the ability to visit Harv’s Island to deal with roaming stores consistently (particularly Redd, who will rotate art in as you buy), various item additions, and of course Brewster is all pretty great. Lot of fun details (as one would expect). The game as a whole feels a lot more rounded with it.

Happy Home Paradise is just a fun little excuse to make cute houses. If you aren’t “playing along” you could easily metagame it to try to speed run your way through, which… that doesn’t seem especially fun. But if you’re just having a good time customizing and taking your time, it’s a real hoot.

It is kind of weird to me that they’ve gone out of their way to say that this is the last major (free?) update to the game, given how huge AC is. AC seems ripe for them providing ongoing, almost Sims-esc support. People are very hot on AC, it’d be a waste to not, y’know, capitalize on it. Ah well.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps – 2020 – Steam – ★★★★★

OK, now we’re talking. Ori and the Will of the Wisps pretty much addresses every single issue I had with Ori and the Blind Forest.

The combat is much improved, since now it’s an actual honest-to-god combat system with manual attacking. It’s very satisfying; as someone who disliked how flat Hollow Knight’s combat system was, this is a good example of a very similar game with a similar combat still that built the system out for strong in-combat feedback.

They also doubled down on the combat-mobility mechanics, encouraging more active use of the various movement abilities that can be interlinked with combat. Them having many of the unlockable ability-modifiers be based on a limited slot system further encourages you to specialize, though some are too essential to not be “mandatory”.

Story is much better this time. It still has a lot of the similar narrative “tricks”, but they’re performed much more elegantly here. It’s also enhanced by having a lot of smaller sub-narratives and stories.

I suppose I’d be remiss not to mention how gorgeous this game is. It’s legitimately one of the prettiest damn games to date; the amount of environmental and background animation is at work is incredible. You’d think a move from 2D to 3D models would reduce the hand-crafted artistic quality, but it’s very much enhanced the experience instead.

They still kept in the obnoxious chase sequences for some reason, but they at least made them less fail-state-y and more forgiving.

5. Deathloop – 2021 – Steam – ★★★★★

Y’know, it’s weird; the interactive sim genre— as it were— hasn’t changed much in the last, what, twenty plus years? Sure, different games grant you different ability sets and what not, and the set dressing varies, but the core experiences are pretty similar. “Use ability to navigate environment in a first-person shooter, depending how you specialize you can approach this from different angles.” Different titles approach their RPG-itude differently, but overall, the general intent is that two different people’s “runs” of the same game would result in them picking different approaches through the environment based on their specialization.

Deathloop is a neat attempt at innovating on that, in that in that it is deliberately focused on the replay aspect— specialization occurs on a fairly limited level, and “runs” are more often about applying learned information and knowledge of an environment over and over again. I don’t think it does a perfect job— there’s not a lot of reason to swap “builds” between going loud or quiet, and the lack of specialization typically means you just take the optimal path each time— but it’s at least doing something different. It does encourage you to learn the environments and incorporate that into your memory between each loop, even if it doesn’t give you a ton of incentives to vary things up beyond “hey why not.”

The big complicating factor is the introduction of a Dark Souls-style PVP invader, which is quite fun from both sides of the equation. I’ve had a blast invading folks as Juliana and blasting away, and her being in a level does encourage you to take different approaches, but… not necessarily that different. A lot of folks seem to just camp out until she leaves, which is boring.

Weirdly, I’d say that this game’s strongest point is actually its writing? The targets you are killing aren’t necessarily that well-developed, but Colt, the player character, is fantastic. Incredibly funny and well-acted. The ending is kind of ehhhh fine, but Colt himself and the narrative largely around him is great.

4. The Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye – 2021 – Steam – ★★★★★

I was of mixed emotions about Outer Wilds getting DLC. I am on the record as having really, really liked that game. But it was so self-contained and well-made that, well, what could a DLC really add to the game? Wouldn’t it just bloat it, or just be the game in miniature?

Echoes of the Eye is kind of just that, yea. It’s a self-contained little journey that is wrapped in the burrito that is the rest of Outer Wilds. But it is also, like Outer Wilds, pretty dang good, so hey.

I’m not sure there’s much to say about this that isn’t a ditto from the Outer Wilds in terms of what I liked about it. There are aspects of it that I don’t care much for in terms of the overall flow, and how little it takes advantage of mechanics established elsewhere in the game (it is, again, pretty much self-contained, and that includes mechanically), but that honestly borders on quibbles compared to the enjoyment I got out of it.

It’s a nice little addition to Outer Wilds that, overall, does add some more context to the events you are uncovering elsewhere in the base game. It also adds a nice little to bonus to the ending of the base game, so hey.

3. Super Robot Wars 30 – 2021 – Steam – ★★★★★

It’s unbelievable that this happened. An official release of a main-line, non-OG SRW title in the West, on Steam. Absolutely unbelievable. And yet, here it is.

After a few years away— presumably from a mix of pandemic and just a general need to rework the systems after years of pretty same-y titles— SRW30 is actually fairly different mechanically. It removes the route system in favor of dynamic mission selection, allowing for more dynamic plot events where dialog shifts based on who you’ve recruited and the order of missions. The changes aren’t large, but they are interesting, and it does let them just pack tons of missions into the game. The game is big, even as Super Robot Wars titles go.

The cast list is also pretty different, if weird. I’m glad SSSS.Gridman has made an appearance, and the way it brings CCA/Zeta Gundam in this time around is certainly different. No real objections there, even if the Victory Gundam inclusion seems kind of funny overall.

I do have considerable issues with SRW30. The big one is the same issue I’ve brought up every time I talk about a SRW in these write-ups: the game is too goddamn easy. Like, yes, a lot of that is born from being familiar with the mechanics, and thus being able to take advantage of them. But the game also loves going out of its way making it very unchallenging to just absolutely break the systems. It’s not that there aren’t any stakes or challenge at all during missions, it’s just that any amount of understanding of the systems makes it not a challenge.

These games keep adding more and more ways for you to put yourself ahead of the curve. Upgrade your units? Upgrade their skills? Use spirits? Use power parts? Upgrade the AOS system? Use attacks in an optimal fashion? Use a small team? Perform any one of these, and even at the highest difficulty the game won’t be hard. Engage with multiple of them— or, God forbid, optimize based on your understanding of those systems— and the game become INCREDIBLY easy. It’s the thing where there’s whole systems that just don’t really come up because you never have to engage with them anymore. Enemies basically never use spirits except when triggered by cutscenes, tile-effects almost never come up— many stages don’t even use them— and the fact that the morale system can be broken in like 20 different ways makes the idea of Morale Downs completely pointless.

Some of this also comes down to mission structure; there’s not many missions that are just “ok, we’re forcing you to use some odd ball units, good luck”, or “we’re constraining how many units you have; you’ll have to play it smart”. You almost always just have to outlast the timer for 2 turns before reinforcements arrive, and the loss of a dedicated route system has introduced the unfortunate effect that you are never forced to “scrounge” lesser-played units. Who the hell is going to be sticking Tomache on the field when you have 80 more interesting protagonists that you can field at a given time?

That all being said: this is still a good time, just not necessarily the most intellectually stimulating time. Seeing the weird mash-ups and plays on lore is fun, and the systems are, at their heart, pretty relaxing. I want it to be better because I enjoy it. SRW30 came out at the right time, and it’s a deeply satisfying experience to me— I just wish it was more stimulating.

2. Metroid Dread – 2021 – Switch – ★★★★★

After nearly two decades of waiting, we’ve finally gotten a proper new 2D Metroid. And even better… it’s good.

There was a lot of reason to be skeptical, honestly. Other M was Metroid at its lowest, with Sakamoto going as far away as possible from what people like about Metroid in terms of both mechanics and narrative. None of the good Metroidvania exploration, and the plot was just awful.

I understand that most people don’t come to Metroid for ““the lore”” but it is something I genuinely enjoy and am somewhat invested in. In part because it’s so vague and weird and stupid (SCIENCE TEAM RULES), but also because Samus is genuinely cool. She’s a bounty hunter who was injected with birdman DNA by her bird dads after a space dragon ate her parents, and she proceeds to repeatedly cause planets to explode over the course of her job. She later gets Metroid DNA injected in her body, making her a bird-human-metroid hybrid. She twice got evil space gooed but she got better.

Starting with Fusion, Sakamoto started losing the thread of what people liked about Samus— the idea of this stoic space amazon, facing down monsters and repeatedly manifesting as different civilizations’ prophesized space messiah as part of just doing The Mission. Instead, she got internal monologues, she got bossed around. It sucked. But the criticism of all this seems to have finally got through— a lesson that carried through Samus Returns, and culminated finally in this.

Samus is so fucking cool in this game. She speaks exactly one line of dialog in the entire game, and it fucking rules. The silent characterization conveyed through the muted language of “eyes seen through power armor, and also a gun” works so much better than a constant monologue about ~THE BABY~.

The plot is also good. It’s a good follow up to story set up in previous titles (hey, maybe the Chozo weren’t all that great!!), and it really does put a bow on several plotlines while setting some stuff up for the future. The environmental storytelling could be somewhat better— I’d love a slightly more Prime-like touch— but overall, it works.

Speaking of environments: damn this game is pretty. Just really good animations and background, looks nice even on the Switch. The music works for it but is unremarkable. The gameplay feel is super smooth and good. Samus controls like a dream.

I’m somewhat torn about certain aspects of the gameplay, though. It’s a great game even with these qualms, but still: boy huh they really encourage linearity and discourage some kinds of backtracking. Like, the game isn’t quite Fusion level where you have Adam saying GO HERE TO GET THIS SAMUS HOW DARE YOU DIVERGE, but that’s mostly because it’s trying to be subtle about it instead. “Ooops you got this ability and we one-way doored you into this area so you can’t go back yet weird huh” “Huh you got this ability and there’s a teleporter nearby that immediately pops you to where we’d want you to backtrack to get your next ability weird huh.” “Oh, you got the thing over there now? Cool, we’re going to block off exploring around this area also and force you to go along this arbitrary path.”

None of this is bad perse, but it isn’t exactly as free form as some Metroids have been in the past. There are certainly some opportunities for sequence breaking in the game (much of it intended by the staff), but I think it could have done with a freer hand. The item collection aspects were fun, and they do tone it down as you get deeper, but still.

The boss designs are… fine. I think some of them hit too hard, or are somewhat overdesigned in that they do too many damn unique things. Whereas in the past you usually had enough life to tank a boss long enough for you to figure out what to do, bosses will kill you here in like 4 hits, pretty much no matter what, forcing you to learn patterns for dodging much more like a Souls-like. Which is fine I guess, particularly given the checkpointing before boss doors, but I found some fights generally just kind of long and annoying. I’m sure mileage will vary there, as both me and Red had pretty different picks of what bosses we liked and hated.

The EMMI encounters seem controversial but overall, I really liked them as a change of pace. You generally have enough mobility to get around them and avoid needing to “stealth”, and the checkpoints before reach EMMI area makes failure not too bad. They did become a little rote after a while, but so it goes.

But yeah, overall: pretty happy with the game. It’s probably my 4th or 5th favorite Metroid? Which, pretty good place to be.

1. Guilty Gear Strive – 2021 – Steam – ★★★★★

Totsugeki.

#metroid #metroid dread #guilty gear strive #super robot wars 30 #outer wilds #ori #animal crossing #halo infinite

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endcant · 3 years ago

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aimless musings on subgenre, citypop, and internet subcultures

theres something very interesting about watching citypop become very mainstream in korea and watching that feed back into both western listeners’ opinions and also into the sometimes-cynical efforts of a variety of kpop producers

a lot of people in the youtube/kpop sphere talk about the growth of citypop as if it were a spontaneous wave that appeared out of nowhere with mariya takeuchi’s plastic love getting picked up by the youtube algorithm in like 2018 or whatever, but thats a very like online-ignorant view of the interaction between vintage japanese music and worldwide online EDM production. citypop has been used in future funk and vaporwave for almost a decade by now, and, as a result, a number of citypop songs took off on social media here and there before plastic love’s acceleration— dress down by kaworu akimoto is one of the big examples off the top of my head, but there’s likely many many more.

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“Plastic Love” by Mariya Takeuchi (1984). if you haven’t heard this yet, you’d better listen to it now. The video that first went viral was uploaded in 2017

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“Selfish High Heels” by Yung Bae, Macross 82-99, and Harrison (2014) is a popular Future Funk remixes of Dress Down by Kaoru Akimoto (1986)

people who haven’t been very aesthetically literate online over the years— musically or visually, since those things are tied in subcultures— treat things like they come from nowhere. there are ongoing subcultural conversations that lead to certain aesthetic choices, and when someone tries to cash in on a trend without understanding what the trend is, that leads people to call bullshit. calling bullshit is not meanspirited, in my opinion, because it very much is like somebody who can’t speak a language getting up in front of everybody and saying “hey, i’m fluent!” and then speaking some vaguely that-language-sounding nonsense. of course people who genuinely speak that language will be outraged instinctively. it feels like being mocked.

that’s why the difference between music producers picking up on a trend cynically and music producers picking up on a trend with earnest interest in that trend’s origins feels different, even if the producers are similarly distant from the original subculture that produced that trend.

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“Lady” by Yubin (2018) committed hard to the 80s JP citypop aesthetic, musically and visually, down to the sets, all fairly early in the major resurgence.

i’m sure that anyone with a passing familiarity with citypop and kpop can ascertain that not all kpop producers know what citypop is and what makes it citypop. all they know is that it is on-trend and they have to make it. not all kpop listeners know what citypop is and what makes it citypop. all they know is their idol said citypop as a buzzword in their little prepared statement. all this results in some interesting moments for me as a Music Fan, Online.

here is where i get to the thing that spurred this post: loona “did a citypop” for their japanese comeback. it doesnt sound like citypop.

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“Hula Hoop (Citypop Version)” by Loona (2021). It has very odd percussion rhythms and mixing for citypop, no real attempt at a citypop verse, and strangely sparse gestures towards citypop in the form of a few seconds of bass and some synthesized orchestral embellishments that were taken from the original mix …all in spite of a very disco-inspired melody that should have worked perfectly for citypop

this is not a very big deal, and im not mad about it or anything. when a kpop act i like gets saddled with an unfortunate B-Side track i dont tend to take it very hard. however, it did raise a little bit of musical discourse in the loona fandom— in the form of remixes.

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“hula hoop if it was actually a citypop song” by loonahatetwinks and Olivia Soul on youtube. this one has an original instrumental that is spot-on for contemporary k-citypop

My most favorite one of these remixes is a futurefunk remix by ZSunder, one of the very best LOONA fan producers. The fact that ZSunder thought to make a future funk remix at all speaks more to an understanding of the mutually supportive relationship between citypop and EDM genres than most kpop citypop producers or fanmixers seem to care to know about.

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“Hula Hoop (Future Funk Mix)” by ZSunder is futurefunk made and mixed with such love that it has the infectious summery energy of a polished, big-name future funk hit

in the comments of this video, some people seemed to get the citypop-future funk connection and some didnt. many did get it, don’t get me wrong! but also, its not all that surprising for some kpop-focused listeners to not know much about EDM subcultures and the reasons behind various trends among producers, since kpop as an institution tends to take influences from any genre and culture it likes and then decontextualize those influences by just having their names used as buzzwords in the blurbs the idols have to recite when variety show hosts ask them about their latest single. this isn’t a criticism of the genre or the fans really, it’s just a part of the kpop industry that is used to add shine to an endless firehose-like stream of polished pop tracks. there are some issues with using whole genres and subcultures with complex histories as buzzwords, but god help us if we ever want a pop industry to give its influences their dues.

anyway, the intention behind ZSunder’s future funk Hula Hoop remix happened to remind me me of why i love Yukika’s discography so much, especially the Soul Lady album. I’ve seen some reviews online baffled by parts of Soul Lady, because the album in general is an exploration of that relationship between citypop and modern/internet EDM. i’ve seen plenty of Soul Lady reviews especially baffled by pit-a-pet, saying something along the lines of “what’s with the modern-sounding dance track in the middle of a retro album?”, but i think that pit-a-pet is a futurefunk-inspired track, at least in the chorus. considering both that and the Chill Lo-Fi Interludes, it seems like estimate’s team put together Soul Lady for Yukika in a way that shows that they love citypop and understand the online-specific electronic music subcultures that led to citypop’s resurgence.

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“pit-a-pet” by Yukika (2020). the stacatto, bass heavy chorus is futurefunk enough, but the soaring orchestral part in the final chorus seals the deal for my interpretation.

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“All Flights Are Delayed (1 hour version)” by Yukika (2020). Estimate literally released an hour-long youtube mix of one of the Lo-Fi interludes on Soul Lady as part of their promotion, clearly inspired by “Lo-Fi anime beats to chill out to,” which is another example of online producers from around the world using Japanese samples as a focal point of their music

Estimate, in the end, is still a Kpop production company, just the same as BBC, so they have no inherent claim over citypop, but the way that their exploration of subgenres clearly comes from passion and interest on the part of their production staff makes it so that their work with Yukika rings true. on the other hand, i really appreciate Ryan S. Jhun’s work on LOONA’s JP comeback, as well as on Not Friends, but the citypop mix thing was so clearly an afterthought to the point where fans of Loona who like citypop seem mostly just irritated by the cynical-seeming attempt.

heres one last good modern kpop citypop MV that has nods to the internet culture that led to its revival in the form of the videography— vaporwave, future funk, lofi, and other internet genres along those lines tend to have videos consisting of looping anime and vhs clips. future funk in particular is known for this, especially since a lot of future funk music, esp early future funk, is just loops of very short, catchy segments of citypop and disco songs. it’s all about the loops

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“My Type” by Yoon JongShin ft. Miyu Takeuchi (2019). This song is so dedicated to the retro JP citypop sound that it’s almost beyond my personal taste. The singer, Miyu, was a headlining act at a seoul citypop festival and sang this song as part of her act (:

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this video of “Only One” by Conscious Thoughts (2015) has a looped clip as an example for comparison with My Type. it also has a pulsing sidechain compressor working in time with its drum beat in a way that is common for future funk and that i think is a good example for my pit-a-pet yukika comparison to future funk

i guess the takeaway here is that media is more and more online, and the creation and propagation of digital audio and video content has been in the hands of literally almost anybody who wants to do it for the past two decades thanks to garage band and fruityloops and audacity and tiktok and youtube and bandcamp and soundcloud and myspace and newgrounds and p2p file sharing and so on and so forth. and therefore like… as with all things, the consumer class more and more is also the creator class, and therefore every member of an audio-visual subculture will have the ability to discern what is and isnt made with knowledge of the audio-visual language of that subculture

#me using elder millennial phrasing for Loona Did A City Pop to imply how out-of -touch it is kfhajfhs #mine #music #long post #Youtube

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