#like the TWO earliest surviving operas being about them?

[ofoceansandtombsanew]

one step closer

cw. f!reader (no pronouns or specified anatomy), pre-canon, pre-relationship, childhood friends, slightly(?) obsessive behaviors, slight angst

pairing. tartaglia x reader

synopsis. your mothers always swore one of their children would marry one day, making them both officially sisters. but for now, they'll take ajax escorting you from mondstadt to sumeru to pursue your education

notes. a christmas present for my good buddy @hash-slinging-slasher-trash. an unexpected comradery was built up between us both this year, so let's have fun in the new year! they recently got into genshin this year and, unsurprisingly, they've been bagged by mr. 11th fatui harbinger himself hehehe

"You didn't have to come all the way here for this."

"And break my promise to my beloved aunt? Perish the thought!" Ajax gasps aghast, clutching his invisible pearls. "Besides, why would I miss a road trip with my future wife? The two of us. Alone." Playful blue eyes glance your way accompanied by an equally playful smile. You give him a pointed look and Ajax raises a hand defensively. The red insignia pinned to his shirt glints in the sunlight at the movement. "I kid, I kid. Just a joke. We can save that stuff later."

"Or never," you reply without missing a beat.

"I draw the line at waiting until after our wedding night."

"You're incorrigible," you groan.

Ajax can only laugh, eyes closed and grin wide. When he's like this, he's like the Ajax you remember from when you were children. The boy who unabashedly declared he'd marry you in one of your earliest memories. Your mothers were only too happy to indulge him, long since having their own jokes about how one day their children would marry and make them officially sisters.

That had been how many years ago now?

Too long ago to recall. You simply know it had been the first time Ajax's family had come to visit your own in Mondstadt. It became a yearly tradition from before either of you were born for your families to visit one another.

According to your mothers, they became friends your mother's first trip to Snezhnaya. You'd been raised on a healthy diet of your mother's travels, your mother telling them to you much like they were old folktales. She told you about the various shades of the thunder sakura of Inazuma. How she spelunked in Natlan with a few friends you can't remember the name of. Even regaled you with dramatic stories of Fontaine's Opera Epiclese where she witnessed trial and opera alike and what she swears was a love story bubbling under the surface between the Hydro Archon and her Iudex.

All of those stories paled in comparison to her most harrowing tale of surviving a month long blizzard that ended with less importantly, your father, and more importantly, your mother's now lifelong friend.

That was all took for their future families to be intertwined and for Ajax to be a present as constant in your as the bards of your homeland.

A summer in Mondstadt here, a winter in Snezhnaya there.

A Ludi Harpastum there, a Krsnik Noc here.

You distinctly remember Kaeya's first Windblume Festival after the Ragnvindr's took him in. He was more quiet and would cling to the figures he found most familiar, you included. Ajax hated it. Unfortunately his complaints and intense nature only led to your coddling Kaeya more, scolding the ginger for being insensitive. Presently, Kaeya and Ajax's relationship has improved little.

Ajax has been there for many a life event.

Now here Ajax is, your official escort on the first day of your own journey. It was the only way your mother would relax about your finally leaving the nest. You find it absurd your mother could travel the whole of Teyvat with nothing but a knapsack slung over her shoulders and a pack of cigarettes but Celestia forbid you decide to do the same. It isn't even exactly the same!

At Ajax's insistence, your things were already waiting for you in Sumeru. "My men can take it ahead," he boasted proudly, reminding you of his recent promotion. "It's no problem at all, honest. Save your money!" Your protests were promptly ignored, your mother more than happy to save on the mora she would have had to spend mailing it otherwise.

"Ajax, I'm serious," you remind him for the millionth time as the Dawn Winery slowly but surely grows more and more distant. Even with Diluc and Kaeya's strained relationship, they both insisted on having a celebratory breakfast before early in the morning before you left for Liyue. You wanted your quest to be on foot as much as possible before boarding a boat that would take you from Liyue Harbor to Port Ormos. "I don't want you guys in uniform when you move my things in. I don't want to be known as the Fatui girl at the dorms."

"Relax, relax," his words due to little to soothe you. "Seriously," his tone shifts from impish to straight-laced. "I know better than anyone how the Fatui is viewed abroad. I know you worked hard to get into the Akademiya, so I don't want to ruin that for you."

You hold each other's gaze for a moment longer before you sigh in relief. "Thank you." Another beat passes before you say it again, "seriously, thank you. You didn't have to take time off to come all the way to Mondstadt. And it means a lot to Mom too. You being here helped her calm down a lot."

His lips relax into a smile that's small, "of course I'd be here for something like this. It's a big deal! You've wanted to go to the Akademiya since we were kids. Is Erna going to be there or is she still in Fontaine researching water vein flowers or whatever?"

You nod excitedly, "yeah, she said she wants to show me around when I get there. She's gonna meet us at Port Ormos." Another piece of the puzzle in helping your mother acclimate to your studying in another country. "She's only staying for the week though."

Erna, a cousin of yours had gotten in years ago leaving little Springvale behind to see the world beyond the wind-caressed hills you grew up. Busy as she'd become after getting into the Amurta Darshan, when she was able to come home it was her turn to tell you stories about a world you couldn't imagine for yourself.

The fanciful cafes with their majestic fountains, the smell of spices of a place called Treasures street. It's hard to believe you'll finally be seeing it for yourself after so long.

"Think she'll be happy to see me?" Ajax asks suddenly, observing you carefully as you

Your cheeks hurt as your smile becomes something forced. "Well," begin.

Ajax barks out a laugh immediately, "you don't have to lie, I know she's not happy I'm in the Fatui." He sighs as the last of his laughter leaves him, nonchalant and unsurprised. You wonder, not for the first time, what would be enough to make Ajax the young man shocked or hurt. Considering how you heard his enlisting in the Fatui at the young age of 14 had gone, you doubt anyone's reaction to his being an agent can get under his skin. "Not that Auntie is thrilled either. I suppose these are the struggles of those in the pursuit of strength."

You refrain from affirming his suspicions. Your mother isn't thrilled but she refrained from expressing the opinion knowing she had little to stand on when her former husband had been a Fatui agent once upon a time. "If that boy's own father couldn't keep him from enlisting, I doubt anything I say will make him change his mind." The next time you saw your old friend after his enlisting, he surprised you for a visit when work led him to the land of freedom.

For the second time in the past ten minutes, your eyes look at his the red insignia pinned on his shirt. He's a lieutenant now.

He's moved up the ranks faster than you can blink. It's expected, you believe, with how many of his letters recounting his many assignments and achievements he'd sent.

"Staring at your beloved so shamelessly?" Cheeks warm, you push him aside. The movement does little to make him budge and he laughs when you try again. "Sorry, snookums, that's not going to work on me anymore. Don't let my acknowledgment stop you. Stare away! I'm pretty popular, y'know. Someone'll steal me off the market if you're not careful! We should have the wedding the moment we get to Sumeru! Why wait actually, we should turn back now and head to the Church!"

Your eyes roll into the depths of the Abyss, "we're not going back to the City for a wedding. We're not even dating."

"Yet."

"And I wasn't staring at you," you ignore his jest. "I was just looking at your badge. You have a new one every time I see you." A new insignia with a new scar or two or dozen to match. He has a story for each one, remembering every occasion he's earned a battle scar with crystal clear memory.

You remember how he's the same boy whose father would take the both of you ice fishing, telling you stories of heroes. Stories of his own adventures before he settled down to have a family. You never had the patience for fishing but you loved that man's tales.

The hobby has lost its magic since your friend became a soldier for the Cryo Archon. Ice fishing is simply another form in which he trains, reflecting on battles past as he endures the bitter cold. Now there are no more stories.

Ajax gestures at your the chain around your neck where your Anemo vision hangs with pride. "It's a badge of honor, much like the one you have yourself."

It's not quite the same, you want to say. "We're already almost to Liyue," you announce instead, pointing at the small bridge in the distance. "It's hard to believe it's always been so close to the Winery." You remember how it was a test of courage when you were younger. Diluc leading the charge, he dared the rest of you to see who could walk the furthest into Liyue. He'd always been the winner, you, Jean, Kaeya and Barbara unable to match Diluc's bravery.

He's a far cry from the rambunctious troublemaker he used to be.

"One step closer," Ajax notes warmly, accepting your change in topics with ease. "There's a tea shop at the Stone Gate you'll like called Pop's Teas. We should sit there a while, you can see the whole of the Dihua Marsh and the inn we'll be staying at."

That brings a genuine smile to your face, "I look forward to seeing it."

A thinly veiled comfort of silence falls over you both grass and gravel crunch underfoot. Your hands swing between you both and from the corner of your eye, you see blue peering at you. The back of your hand burns and you ignore the feeling swiftly.

It's Ajax, simply Ajax.

Soon enough after you arrive in Sumeru, you'd be going your separate paths again. You studying the stars, him on whatever harrowing assignment he is given. A far, far cry from the children you once were.

"They're going to make me a Harbinger."

The silence shatters much like ice and you blink, blood suddenly as cold as the waters of your friend's home country. "What?"

He says it as casually as one addressing the state of the weather. You halt your steps right at the edge of the bridge that connects the land between Mondstadt and Liyue, staring at Ajax's back. "This isn't ambition talking either," he halts, chuckling as he turns to face you. "It's official. Once I go back to the motherland, there'll be a ceremony and everything. You're the first I've told."

"A Harbinger," you repeat incredulously. "A Harbinger?"

The young man nods, "the youngest in the history of the Fatui." It's said with subdued pride, only a dash of satisfaction. "Of course, this was all part of the plan to conquering this world so it's not that big a deal. I'm just one step closer."

You open your mouth only to close and open it again. Your hands clasp together, fingers fidgeting as you search for the correct words to say. Congratulations? Wow, you really will be wearing another badge the next time I see you. You're really moving up the ranks!

"Not happy for me," it isn't a question as Ajax observes your furrowed brows and hunched shoulders. You lower your head, finding a nearby cryo slime bouncing on the water's edge grounding. "It's alright, you don't have to be. It doesn't change anything between us."

"When is it going to be enough, Ajax?" Your question is quiet. "What happened to you?"

'Ajax went missing for three days this month. He had the entire household in a tizzy, that boy of mine!'

You remember receiving that letter after you recently turned 15 from Ajax's mother.

Ajax has wrote you religiously since he could hold a pen. That was the one month he didn't.

The letters that followed have never quite been the same. He's never been quite the same. His eyes are duller than you remember. His lust for adventure had turned bloodthirsty.

How could someone change so much in three days?

"This has always been me," Ajax tells you without much else of a reaction. "You know me, I've always wanted to go on an adventure."

"An adventure, yes, but never this," you shoot back, fervently. Back then, Ajax happily brandished a wooden sword and would declare he'd be the world's greatest adventurer. He'd join the Adventurer's Guild and make a name for himself, fight a dragon and give you all the mora he gained. "I just," you pinch your sinuses.

The only sounds between you are ones from nature.

The croak of a frog, the gushing of a waterfall.

Ajax breaks the silence, head on as he always has been. "We're still friends, aren't we?"

You look up at the man, looking at you with eyes a mixture of familiar and unknown. You used to be able to read them as easily as breathing. Sometimes you feel as if you still can. That he's still your Ajax, face round with innocence and wonder. Now he is as mysterious as the heavens themselves.

Still you release a breath and nod, "of course we are. You're still Ajax."

A smile spreads across his face again and he looks familiar again. "Yeah," with that sorted holds his hand out for you much like a knight. He always said he'd be yours, you recall as you accept his offer like you're children again. "I'm still me."

[monotonous-minutia]

I spent like a week working on this like it was some kind of school project.

anyway here's a thing I made.

[tontonico]

The Meaning of Mariah Carey

Mariah Carey’s memoir opens with the great line: “I refuse to acknowledge time, famously so.” As if to establish the rules of the book, then add, with a toss of hair, but you knew that.

Most readers of The Meaning of Mariah Carey, which the record-smashing songstress wrote with Michaela Angela Davis, probably already did know that (and are happy to stick to Mariah’s anti-schedule), but there’s plenty in the 337-page volume that will surprise even the most devoted Lambs. Most surprising of all, though, is perhaps how elusive the chanteuse remains even when she makes herself so vulnerable.

She may not keep time, but it’s well known that Carey can keep rhythm, and that’s a more accurate measure of how she tells the story of her life. While the memoir’s four acts are chronological, the short chapters within them aren’t necessarily, and her storytelling is most effective in these distinct, vivid anecdotes rather than thoroughly contextualized narrative. Isn’t that the way we remember things, anyway?

The book’s first and best section, “Wayward Child,” relies the most on these well-chosen vignettes, each as piercing and specific as a song, altogether giving an impressionistic rendering of her fraught childhood. (She punctuates her memories, too, with her lyrics that were inspired by them, and the Audible version of the book, read by Carey, contains musical interludes.) The daughter of a Black father and Irish mother, Carey grew up with a brother and sister who were older and darker (in their energies even more than their complexions, she observes) than her, in a home — actually many homes, adding to the instability — where she never knew safety. The earliest childhood memory she shares is of cops breaking up a brutal fight between her father and brother when she was 3 years old; among the last is Mariah’s 20-year-old sister allegedly trying to pimp her out at age 12.

Her childhood is filled with danger, trauma, violence, fear — and music. A mostly informal education from her opera-singer mother and her friends comes so organically to the life of a little girl who had so little else, it reads like destiny that she and music found each other amid such turmoil. And it’s what takes her, of course, to the next phase in her life, in a sharp switch from want to abundance, neglect to suffocating control.

Carey’s account of her marriage to Tommy Mottola — who, for example, once screamed at a dinner party that Thanksgiving was canceled because Carey had expressed admiration for an artist in whom Mottola was uninterested — and their life in the mansion she called “Sing Sing” is harrowing. Mercifully, it overlaps with her emergence as an artist, and her writing about her life in music, while less shocking than many of the personal details, offers great insight and behind-the-scenes tidbits as well as displaying her sincere devotion to the art form (and to her fans, whom she shouts out repeatedly).

Carey’s voice is as distinctive to read as it is to hear: She addresses her reader as “dahling” or “baby” here and there, and her constant, flexible use of the word “festive” reveals it to be a deeply held personal ideal rather than just a vaguely pleasant adjective. Even in describing her lowest lows (and there are some bad ones), the writing is never austere; like her narrative structure, Carey’s prose has rhythm and high drama, savoring moments and details with melismatic indulgence.

The singer explains elements of her larger-than-life image — including some of her famous “diva” behaviors — by explicitly linking them to pain; for one, she often has photo shoots with voluminously blowing hair because she so desperately longed for the flowing waves she saw in shampoo commercials as a child, while her own textured tresses were constantly tangled, forsaken by the adults around her who didn’t know how to care for it.

That untamed hair is emblematic not only of the extreme neglect of her childhood, but the racial otherness that she has felt throughout her life — and that she expresses in some of the memoir’s most perceptive, affecting passages. As a child, her awareness of racism develops in cruel waves (there are three different, and differently devastating, stories of people she knows finding out her father is Black); as an adult, she has constantly had to assert her own racial identity in an industry (and with a first husband) that tried to erase her Blackness. She reacts to the word “urban” every time she brings it up.

The last three decades become somewhat muddled in the telling as her career becomes richer and her adult life more complicated, making it harder to prioritize — not to mention that, once she’s famous, there are publicly known pieces to correct or gaps to fill in. She can’t disregard time in these later sections, where everything needs more context, and The Meaning loses some clarity for it. (In an error that speaks to this confusion, one paragraph appears twice, 40 pages apart; it somehow feels appropriate, however, that the passage is a reflection upon the delayed triumph of Glitter.)

So, too, does it become more conspicuous when she leaves things out, like the bipolar diagnosis she revealed two years ago (“because I don’t feel like there’s a mental-illness discussion to be had,” she told Vulture last month). She is also better at starting stories than finishing them (a habit one could attribute to her being an Aries, which she mentions repeatedly). This applies to the memoir as a whole but was most disappointing in the case of her romance with Derek Jeter, the beginning of which makes for some of the book’s dreamiest, most hopeful moments.

It’s hard to begrudge her these omissions, though, when she’s recalled such great suffering and even greater survival. She’s already explained how pieces of her persona are armor, and in which moments she forged them; let her keep some stories. They belong to her.

In an early anecdote, the police are called to little Mariah’s home after a violent scene. “One of the cops, looking down at me but speaking to another cop beside him, said, ‘If this kid makes it, it’ll be a miracle,’” Carey recalls. “And that night, I became less of a kid and more of a miracle.” By the end of the compelling if imperfect Meaning of Mariah Carey, you believe it. She’s a miracle, a memoirist, a singer, a songwriter — the girl’s got range. Famously so. 

[militant-holy-knight]

In light of President Obama’s recent remarks comparing the brutality of the Islamic State to the Crusades, it might be time to take a fresh look at those events. Were they really the one-sided Dark Ages barbarism we have been taught? Were they an early manifestation of Western imperialism and global conquest?

In his landmark book, “God’s Battalions” (HarperOne 2009), Baylor University social sciences professor Rodney Stark suggests otherwise. It is a well-researched chronicle, including 639 footnotes and a bibliography of about 300 other works, yet reads like an adventure story full of military strategy and political intrigue.

What Prompted the Crusades

He begins in the final years of Mohammed and describes how a newly united Arab people swept through (Zoroastrian) Persia and the (Orthodox Christian) Byzantine-  controlled areas of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa. (Byzantine refers to the Greek-speaking eastern remainder of the Roman Empire.) Eventually Arabs took over control of the Mediterranean islands, most of Spain, and the southern part of Italy, and even reached as far as 150 miles outside of Paris before being turned back by the Franks, or early French.

The Muslims were brutal in their conquered territories. They gave pagans a choice of converting to Islam or being killed or enslaved. Jews and Christians (other People of the Book) were usually but not always treated somewhat better, and allowed to retain their beliefs but under conditions of Sharia subjugation. But the Muslim-held territories were not monolithic. Stark writes:

‘Perhaps the single most remarkable feature of the Islamic territories was the almost ceaseless internal conflict; the intricate plots, assassinations, and betrayals form a lethal soap opera. North Africa was frequently torn by rebellions and intra-Islamic wars and conquests. Spain was a patchwork of constantly feuding Muslim regimes that often allied themselves with Christians against one another.’

Not surprisingly, there was intense Christian resistance and determination to take back lost territories. Especially effective were the Normans and the Franks in Spain and Italy.

The Golden Middle Ages Belonged to Europeans

Western scholars have often characterized this clash of cultures as an Islamic Golden Age versus a European Dark Age, but Stark demolishes this as a myth. He says the best of the Islamic culture was appropriated from the people Muslims conquered—the Greeks, Jews, Persians, Hindus, and even from heretical Christian sects such as the Copts and Nestorians. He quotes E.D. Hunt as writing, “the earliest scientific book in the language of Islam [was a] treatise on medicine by a Syrian Christian priest in Alexandria translated into Arabic by a Persian Jewish physician.” Stark writes that Muslim naval fleets were built by Egyptian shipwrights, manned by Christian crews, and often captained by Italians.  When Baghdad was built, the caliph “entrusted the design of the city to a Zoroastrian and a Jew.” Even the “Arabic” numbering system was Hindu in origin.

And, while it is true that the Arabs embraced the writings of Plato and Aristotle, Stark comments,

‘However, rather than treat these works as attempts by Greek scholars to answer various questions, Muslin intellectuals quickly read them in the same way they read the Qur’an – as settled truths to be understood without question or contradiction…. Attitudes such as these prevented Islam from taking up where the Greeks had left off in their pursuit of knowledge.’

Meanwhile, back in Europe was an explosion of technology that made ordinary people far richer than any people had ever been. It began with the development of collars and harnesses that allowed horses to pull plows and wagons rather than oxen, doubling the speed at which people could till fields. Plows were improved, iron horseshoes invented, wagons given brakes and swivel axels, and larger draft horses were bred. All this along with the new idea of crop rotation led to a massive improvement in agricultural productivity that in turn led to a much healthier, larger, and stronger population.

Technology was also improving warfare with the invention of the crossbow and chain mail. Crossbows were far more accurate and deadly than conventional archery, and could be fired with very little training. Chain mail was almost impervious to the kind of arrows in use throughout the world. Mounted knights were fitted with high-back saddles and stirrups that enabled them to use more force in charging an opponent, and much larger horses were bred as chargers, giving the knights a height advantage over enemies. Better military tactics made European armies much more lethal. Stark writes:

It is axiomatic in military science that cavalry cannot succeed against well-armed and well-disciplined infantry formations unless they greatly outnumber them…. When determined infantry hold their ranks, standing shoulder to shoulder to present a wall of shields from which they project a thicket of long spears butted in the ground, cavalry charges are easily turned away; the horses often rear out of control and refuse to meet the spears.

In contrast, Muslim warriors were almost exclusively light cavalry, riding faster but lighter horses bareback with little armor, few shields, and using swords and axes. Their biggest advantage was their use of camels, which made them much more mobile than foot soldiers and gave them the ability to swoop in and out of the desert areas to attack poorly defended cities.

Muslims Slaughter, Rape, and Pillage

These differences provided Crusader armies with huge advantages, but what would prompt hundreds of thousand Europeans to leave their homes and travel 2,500 miles to engage an enemy is a desert kingdom—especially after the Muslim conquest of Europe had been turned back?

In 638 Jerusalem surrendered to Muslim invaders, and mass murders of Christian pilgrims and monks became commonplace.

There had been long-festering concern about the fate of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. After his conversion to Christianity in the early 300s, the Roman Emperor Constantine built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the site of what was believed to be Jesus’ tomb, and other churches in Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives. These sites prompted a growing number of European pilgrims to visit the Holy Land, including Saint Jerome, who lived in Bethlehem for the last 32 years of his life as he translated the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into Latin. By the late fifth century, Stark reports, more than 300 hostels and monasteries offered lodging to pilgrims in Jerusalem alone.

But in 638 Jerusalem surrendered to Muslim invaders, and mass murders of Christian pilgrims and monks became commonplace. Stark includes a list of select atrocities in the eight and ninth centuries, but none worse than the some 5,000 German Christians slaughtered by Bedouin robbers in the tenth century.

Throughout this period, control of Palestine was contested by several conflicting Muslim groups. Stark writes, “In 878 a new dynasty was established in Egypt and seized control of the Holy Land from the caliph in Baghdad.” One hundred years later, Tariqu al-Hakim became the sixth caliph of Egypt and initiated an unprecedented reign of terror, not just against Christians but against his own people as well. He burned or pillaged some 30,000 churches, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the tomb beneath it.

Soon enough, newly converted Turkish tribes came out of the north to seize Persia and Baghdad (by 1045) and press on to Armenia, overrunning the city of Ardzen in 1048, where they murdered all the men, raped the women, and enslaved the children. Next they attacked the Egyptians, in part because the Turks were Orthodox Sunnis and the Egyptians were heretical Shiites. While the Turks did not succeed in overthrowing the Egyptians, they did conquer Palestine, entering Jerusalem in 1071. The Turks promised safety to the residents of Jerusalem if they surrendered the city, but broke this promise and slaughtered the population. They did the same in Ramla, Gaza, Tyre, and Jaffa.

Emperor Alexius Pleads for Help

Finally, they threatened Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Emperor Alexius Comnenus wrote to Pope Urban II in 1095, begging for help to turn back the Turks. This was remarkable given the intense hostility between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Perhaps the pope saw an opportunity to unite or at least reduce tensions between the two Christian churches, but he responded with a call to create an army that would go to the Middle East.

Without ongoing support from Europe, the Crusaders could not survive constant attacks from the Muslims.

I am not going to regurgitate all the battles of the Crusades themselves. It is a fascinating history well worth studying in part for its parallels and lessons for today. Let’s just say that the Crusaders were extremely effective militarily, often defeating far larger Muslim armies, despite having traveled some 2,500 miles into an alien desert climate. Their biggest enemies were disease, starvation, and political betrayal. Plus, the Crusades were expensive and home countries grew weary of paying the taxes needed to support them (sound familiar?)

The Crusaders ended up establishing their own kingdoms in the Holy Land, which lasted for about 200 years or, as Stark notes, almost as long as the United States has existed; but without ongoing support from Europe they could not survive constant attacks from the Muslims.

How the Crusades Were Different from Military Action of the Day

So, what to make of all this?

The Crusaders were unique in that they did not seek to plunder or enslave.

Actually, the Crusaders were unique in that they did not seek to plunder or enslave. They didn’t even try to forcibly convert anyone to Christianity. Their sole interest was to protect the pilgrims and Christian holy sites. They sometimes sacked cities that refused to provide food to a hungry army, but they didn’t take riches back to Europe. There were few riches to be found. Rather than exploiting indigenous resources to benefit Europe, Europe sent money and resources to the Middle East. Pilgrims were quite lucrative for host countries, just as tourism is today.

War was a nasty and brutal business at the time, and had been for all of recorded history. Cities fortified themselves as protection against invading armies. A siege of a city meant surrounding the area and cutting off supplies until the population surrendered, often by starving. In the Bible, II Kings 6:24-33 relates the story of the siege of Samaria, in which two starving women agree to kill and eat their sons.

The rule of war at the time was that, if a city surrendered, the population would be spared, but if it resisted and the invading army had to take it by force all the inhabitants would be killed or enslaved. But Stark notes that Muslim armies often violated even this rule—promising sanctuary, then slaughtering the population that surrendered. (Before we get too smug and condescending about the savagery of these ancients, let’s not forget the rocket bombing of London, the firebombing of Dresden, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a mere 70 years ago.)

Muslim armies often promised sanctuary, then slaughtered the population that surrendered.

One way in which Muslim fighters today have advanced over their forebears is that during the Crusades they did not adopt new tactics to counter the technological advantage of the Europeans. They never used crossbows or shielded infantry, even after several hundred years of fighting. Today, Muslim warriors quickly evolve to make the most of Western technology, although they still never seem to develop anything of their own.

An Enduring Clash Between Inquiry and Submission

One final thought on this. As Stark indicates above, there is in too many Muslim countries a sense of obedience that precludes robust debate or new ideas, let alone technological innovation. In his classic, “The World is Flat,” Thomas Friedman quotes Osama bin Laden as saying,

‘It is enough to know that the economy of all Arab countries is weaker than the economy of one country that had been part of our (Islamic) world when we used to truly adhere to Islam. That country is the lost Andalusia. Spain is an infidel country, but its economy is stronger that our economy because the ruler there is accountable. In our countries, there is no accountability or punishment, but there is only obedience to the rulers and prayers of long life for them. (pp. 400-401)’

Friedman confirms that this is based on a 2002 report, the first Arab Human Development Report. This report, written by Arabs, found that Spain had a larger gross domestic product than all 22 Arab states combined!

I think Stark is closer to the mark than bin Laden. The problem is a cultural way of thinking that starts with the Qur’an and the Prophet and emphasizes unquestioning obedience. The very name of the religion, Islam, means “submission.” The thinking of bin Laden that emphasizes punishing poor rulers is a complete misunderstanding how progress is made. European cultures place a high value on questioning everything, even the divinity of Jesus Christ. Certainly there have been exceptions to this, but in the sweep of history it is an unmistakable trait.

So we have perhaps the starkest conflict of worldviews imaginable: on one hand, a robust and virtually unlimited spirit of inquiry, and on the other a fervent dedication to universal obedience and submission. How this plays out is the story of our times.

[loopy777]

Republic city ended up being one of the blandest settlements in avatar, a town withouth a personality, and with a people withouth a culture. If you were rewriting season 1 of korra, what sort of culture would you have given its people, and what changes would you have made to make the city itself feel alive(compared to how ba sing sei, or the northern water captital very much feel like they have their own personalites).

I like what was implied by Republic City in its earliest promotional material, so I’d go with something like a mix of 1930′s Shanghai and Chicago and New York.

As opposed to the fairly clean, modern look of the thing, I’d like a wild, disorganized mix of cultures and buildings and materials in play. It shouldn’t look like a planned city; it should be something that sprang up haphazardly and only over the last decade or two has even really started to really think of itself as a unified city. Roads vary wildly in width and construction material, and aren’t laid out in a grid. A brand new skyscraper is right next to a 50-year-old graffiti-covered Water Tribe pub. The people have been there for enough generations to intermarry and forget their old cultures, but they’re also just arrived after fleeing jailtime back in the old country and need to find a job right now.

There’s also kinds of “Little” neighborhoods that not only evoke the various three nations, but individual areas within them (Little Omashu, Little Whatever That Island Where Aang Had The Dance Party, etc). There should also be a ‘downtown’ section where everybody mixes. That’s where the Probending arena should be. There should be casinos and dance clubs and underground boxing arenas and streets where kids race cars while the cops try to stop them and gilded opera houses and lots of other stuff.

See, the main thing that I think should define Republic City is that it’s the city of the world- it has a little bit of everything in it. I don’t want it to be the shining utopia that Aang and Zuko built; I want it to be the experiment that wound up mutating and growing beyond their wildest hopes and it was all they could do to keep it from collapsing in on itself. It should be More. More decadent, more corrupt, more crime-ridden, more colorful, more compassionate, more enthusiastic, more fun, more dangerous. You think you’re tough because you survived in Ba Sing Se’s lower ring? Ha! They just have poverty and dark alleyways where you’ll be robbed at knifepoint; the Dai Li keep things quiet, there. In Republic City, you could be beaten to death for walking into the wrong neighborhood and the poor people eat the candle nubs they steal from their millionaire employers. But in Republic City, you could be begging in the street one morning and an eccentric wealthy banker will buy you a house because he remembers begging when he was a kid and worked his way up so that he can help people.

LoK went with the idea that RC had lost some of its spirituality, but dropped that subplot pretty quickly, and I don’t think it’s really worth trying to recover if we get to do what we want with the city. (It’s more relevant to Book Spirit, anyway, and that really only exists because canon Republic City is boring.) Republic City should need Korra because even its elected officials can’t keep control of it, and Korra’s unexpected strength should be that she’s more than willing to jump into whatever culture or trouble is in front of her- while her challenge is that she needs to balance those instincts against her duty as the Avatar and the need to keep things from getting too out of control. In that way, the city is a mirror for her; fully pacifying it would ruin what’s great about it, but complete chaos is just going to lead to pain and suffering.

Individual adventures should focus on individual aspects of the city. The organized crime stuff should have gotten a focus, perhaps with Korra cleaning it out of the Probending industry. I like the idea of using street racing to involve Asami and give her a chance to work with Korra. Korra trying to operate in the gilded upper class of the city should have been a recurring subplot with ups and downs. The council should have been shown to be blatantly corrupt, to Tenzin and Korra’s combined frustration, and they need Chief Lin Beifong’s help to strongarm a judge into doing something about it. I also like seeing riots growing in the city over the Equalist movement, with some neighborhoods coming out to meet Equalist protesters with sticks and violence. Ooh, and maybe Korra can get caught up in union drama, with the lightningbenders wanting to unionize and the electric company hiring Fantasy-Asian-Pinkertons to rough the ‘zappers’ up!

In this way, Republic City can be a bit of a metaphor for the increasingly connected world as technology advances, and a kind of proving ground for Korra. If she can step in and help when Little South Pole and Little Caldera are having a race war, she can bring her Avatar Wisdom (TM) to diplomatic negotiations between the Water Tribes and the Fire Nation.

Obviously, though, I’m not describing something that would quietly sit in the background while Korra deals with the Equalists. Frankly, I think too much time was spent on that plot for the anti-climactic way it resolved, so the Book Air I’m envisioning is lots of little Republic City adventures, with the Equalists as a running subplot, before it explodes into citywide riots (rather than the Equalists bombing the city and a majority of the citizens howling for the genocide of the Air Nomads, yeesh) that Korra needs to bring balance to using her knowledge of the people. I don’t care about Amon’s backstory, but I care about how the Bricklayers’ Union is reacting to the Equalist movement.

Oh, and Mako and Bolin are our window into all of this. They know every single street, building, neighborhood, and major figure by heart. They’re friends with criminals and cops. They’re Probenders and bet their winnings on illegal boxing matches. Bolin has an ex-gilfriend on every block of the city. Mako has been banned from every dance hall in the city.

They’re full-blooded Republic City boys.

[fallenloverecords]

Interview:  Gentle Brontosaurus

Hi lovers! Here at Fallen Love headquarters we periodically interview people that we adore in order to shine a spotlight on our wonderful pop planet. We post all those interviews right here for your education and enjoyment.

Gentle Brontosaurus are an indiepop band from Madison, Wisconsin, USA. They are Huan-Hua Chye (ukulele & keyboard), Nick Davies (keyboard & trumpet), Cal Lamore (guitar), Paul Marcou (drums), and Anneliese Valdes (bass). Fallen Love head Harley interviewed the band through a computer. Fallen Love Records: How did Gentle Brontosaurus begin? Huan-Hua: Get ready for some band lineage in excruciating detail:

Nick and I used to be in a band called TL;DR that broke up after a couple of band members moved away, so we decided to start a new band.

We knew Paul and Jon from having played with their old band, Baristacide, and we recruited Michael to play bass for us through Craigslist.

Eventually Jon decided it was time to part ways with us and we asked Cal to play guitar. Nick and I had met Cal through a songwriting website called FAWM, February Album Writing Month.

Last year Michael moved to Milwaukee and decided to leave the band so we recruited Anneliese, whom I had met via a community ukulele club called MAUI and who had filled in on bass for us a while back for a Buffy The Vampire Slayer Musical Episode cover show we did with our friends Croaker.

And here is a curated selection of a few of our other related current or recent projects you might want to check out - we are busy individuals: Square Bombs (Paul & Jon) The Werewolverine (Anneliese) The Ferns or C. H. Lamore solo (Cal) Vowl Sounds, Red Tape Diaries (Huan-Hua) Spiral Island (Nick)

FLR: All five of you sing. Was that something planned on from the early stages or did it just discover itself? HH: We used to only have three vocalists (max one lead and one backing at any given time) but decided that seven instruments and three vocals between five people wasn't making the sound guys' lives hard enough (not to mention ours) so we added some more. It has definitely been a voyage of self-discovery. I think we'll try to streamline a bit more in the future, though, since venues almost never have enough mics. FLR: Based on your social media some people might expect you to be a comedy or novelty band. Are new listeners ever caught off-guard? Nick: Is this regarding the Facebook account where we share dinosaur memes or the Twitter account where we post things like Baha Men trivia? Early on I had our genre listed as "brony rock" on Facebook just as a joke and it’s come back up occasionally. Like the time Jimmy K, a local radio personality, had both us and The Ferns (Cal's previous band) on an episode of his show and he got his intro cards mixed up and called The Ferns "brawny rock." HH: Also we got invited to put a song on an actual brony rock compilation, which was unfortunately vetoed by other band members. Anyway I aim to keep expectations at rock bottom so that new listeners can only be pleasantly surprised when we turn out to be (hopefully) honest and charming and good. I don't usually aim for funny when I'm writing songs (although sometimes it ends up there) but I usually aim to be entertaining on social media. (I usually man the Facebook account and Nick the Twitter account). I feel it's the least I can do. FLR: Who writes the lyrics? Each song carries a real depth, like a full short story condensed into four minutes. HH: Nick and I are about 50/50 on songwriting. On the first album our old guitarist wrote one and our old bassist wrote one but I think on the new album it's more or less evenly divided between me and Nick as far as lyrics go. I think the two of us share a love for possibly ill-advised wordiness and allusions so sometimes people have been surprised to find out who wrote which songs. I wrote poetry for years before ever turning to lyrics and a few songs, like "Rabbit Test", are remnants of poems or stories or concepts I could never quite make work on the written page. N: I don't intend to give every song a narrative but in addition to FAWM in February I participate in NaNoWriMo in November. Maybe some of that bleeds over into songwriting. Storytelling does provide a way to address topics without being tied to your own perspective. I'd be kind of uncomfortable writing songs all about Nick and how Nick feels right now, especially if we might decide to have someone else in the band sing it. HH: I, on the other hand, love writing songs all about HH and how HH feels right now. Maybe this is why we have so many songs about food.

FLR: Your debut album, Names Of Things And What They Do, came out in November 2015. What was the process to get there and how has the path shifted since then? HH: That album was very DIY like our new one will be. We recorded it over a period of months in our old practice space and our old guitarist Jon mixed it. Similar approach this time around, all home recordings. It's going to be an interesting mix as some of these songs, like "Kevin Bacon", we've played for years (it almost made it onto the first album) and others, like "A Shot" or "For Emma, Forever Ago", we'd only been playing for a few weeks and had never played live before starting to record. So for those newer songs we're kind of figuring out arrangements and parts as part of the recording process. We recorded all the drums and scratch tracks live, the way we're used to playing, and are now going along and re-recording individual parts to replace the scratch versions. One of the things that's pretty interesting about our piecemeal recording process is that we often can't hear/process the cool things everyone else is doing since we are distracted at the time with our own performances. Sound balance is also difficult to get right live with five people,so there have been a lot of moments where, once you're listening to a clear recording, you go "Oh, I had no idea you had this awesome part happening here." It makes you appreciate everyone and their contributions and musicianship just that much more. FLR: Do you think dinosaurs had feathers or scales? Anneliese: Yes, and some had neither. FLR: Why hasn't Netflix rebooted popular '90s sitcom Dinosaurs yet? A: This might be a question for the Jim Henson Workshop. Fun fact: Kevin Clash, who's the voice of Elmo, was also the voice of Baby Sinclair. And Jessica Walter (of Arrested Development) was the voice of the mother. HH: I'm sure it's on the horizon since we are apparently officially in the midst of a serious worldwide franchise shortage. I will officially volunteer us to provide the soundtrack for the inevitable gritty, sexy reboot. (I mean have you seen Riverdale, the gritty, sexy Archie reboot? Anything is possible.) The theme song will be called "Nobody's Baby" and will be in the style of Julee Cruise and everyone will wear black leather jackets and white undershirts in a very sexy James Dean kind of way. Also, if you don't have a physical copy of our album, Baby Sinclair fans should check out the art on the inner sleeve. FLR: Do you ever get tired of answering dinosaur questions? Will your choice of band name haunt you for the rest of time? HH: No and no. Since we are from the Land Before Time I'm not totally sure yet what this "time" thing is but I'm sure I'll figure it out one of these days. (Sorry to the random person on Tumblr I stole that joke from.)

FLR: What's your earliest musical memory? N: The first songs I wrote were entirely MIDI, written in a sheet music editor. Sadly they were lost forever in the mp3.com buyout of 2001. I thought I had a cassette copy but I went back to my parents' house in D.C. this past summer and the cassette is gone too. After that era I started recording angsty stuff with a beat-up acoustic guitar and some ill-conceived "rapping." Unfortunately there are surviving copies of that. A: Dancing around the living room to my dad's old boogie-woogie records when I was three or four. HH: They gave us recorders in grade school because the only thing better than one five year-old playing the recorder is fifteen of them all at once so I clearly recall making some really avant-garde noise rock as part of my early musical education. Also one of our music teachers was a grad student at the UC Berkeley School of Music and wrote an opera called The Nightingale that he made us learn, like a troupe of performing opera monkeys. FLR: What song have you listened to the most this year? HH: I went to look at my Spotify stats and some of my top tracks in recent months have been: Frankie Cosmos- "Fool", Big Thief - "Masterpiece", X - "The World's A Mess, It's In My Kiss", Eux Autres - "Other Girls", and Jens Lekman - "To Know Your Mission." N: I'm also enjoying the new Jens Lekman album! Crying's Beyond The Fleeting Gales has been the album that has hardly left my car stereo this year. FLR: What's one question you've never been asked in an interview that you would love to be asked someday? HH: You are standing in front of two doors. Behind one lies immeasurable riches, behind the other lies certain death. There are two guards guarding the doors, one sworn to always lie and one sworn to always tell the truth, but you don't know which is which. What is the best song ever written, and why is it "Africa" by Toto? N: If we're ever interviewed by Nardwuar [The Human Serviette] I hope he knows that I dressed as him for Halloween once. HH: Also I think Paul and Anneliese were hoping to do a Jerry Springer-style interview someday with paternity tests and chair fights in front of a studio audience. FLR: What does 2018 look like for Gentle Brontosaurus? I know you're working on your sophomore album. N: We've started recording out at Cal's parents' barn in Cambridge, WI. You must have seen the big chart on Facebook. Once we get that released I think we're hoping to go out on tour again. Maybe reconnect with some of the folks we met on the road in 2016 or maybe play some shows around the upper midwest where we actually haven't been yet. FLR: The first album came on CD with a piece of toast. Will the new album come as a download code in a jar of jam? N: If someone bought our toast in 2015 and is still hanging onto it in 2018, I don't think jam is going to make it edible. HH: I'm not really into jam bands. Gentle Brontosaurus on Bandcamp Gentle Brontosaurus on Facebook

[gigsoupmusic]

Exclusive interview with Rome based artist Dolche

Christine Herin, known professionally as Dolche, is an Italian-French singer, songwriter, composer and record producer already boasts a 20-year music career, more than 500 concerts in Europe with and key collaborations with Grammy Award winning professionals. She was born in Valle d'Aosta, a French-speaking autonomous region in the north of Italy. The first single off her forthcoming album Exotic Diorama (out Oct 2020 ) is the cinematic Roma - available now, and which has a very DIY inspired lockdown concept for its video. We had a chat with the artist herself to find out more about her life, creativity in lockdown conditions and the ideas behind her forthcoming album... How did you become a musician? Who or what inspired you? I began to sing when I was around 3 or 4 years old. My dad used to bring me to the small church of my 40-inhabitant village and he tells me I harmonized the hymns sung by the choir. Since my earliest memory music has always been there even if in my family and village nobody knew anything about music. My mother still asks me when I will find a real job! I am completely self-taught. I remember the day I found out that the public library in the city had vinyl. I was 12 and went there every day I could to listen to these amazing sounds that I never heard before. I was listening to Aretha Franklin’s records. I also had a great love for classical music…Bach, Puccini, the opera. I probably got so stubborn and sacrificed so much to be a musician (I can’t even remember how many side jobs I did) because it was the only way to do it. It was like survival for me. Music was in me and I had to do it to be myself. What do you enjoy most about being a musician? What do you hate most?’ I enjoy the live performance, the stage. Most people are afraid before concerts. I never have been. It’s the most natural thing for me. Sharing the emotions with the public, throwing myself in the instruments and in the performance. I just can’t get enough. I don’t hate anything about music. I hate that most things I am required to do today as a musician have nothing to do with writing or playing music. If you could change anything about the music industry, what would it be? No hesitation on that: I would give women an equal space. The music industry is still so anachronistically a man’s world. If you were on a desert island and could only take one album with you to listen to, what album would you choose? What a disaster, just one?! Ok it would be “Greatest Hits” of 1981 by Queen. I would already have all the sound of nature to listen to and I would definitely need some music to get the energy to face the tough wild life and to feel the power of pure art. Tell us about the new single ‘Roma’ and the video that goes with it. Ah, that is a story! Because I had to figure out a way to make a professional video from home in complete isolation. Out of curiosity, before everyone begun to do it, I was spying the unique, amazing show that the city of Rome – ‘Roma’- had to offer in these sad lockdown days. There is a website where you can connect to all the main webcams in town and watch a show that nobody has ever seen before. The city, my city, bare, silent, empty, beautiful and melancholic with its fountains pouring water and the sun changing the shades on the statues. I wanted everybody to be able to take a look into this secret jewel box. I purchased all the videos of one entire day, the day when our Prime Minister declared complete lockdown also for factories. And I used the time-lapse images to show the magnificence of the sun and clouds and water moving in an otherwise still postcard. I wanted to put my body into this narration and I covered myself with a bed sheet miming the pose of La Pietà, by Michelangelo Buonarroti. I moved all the furniture to get a white empty wall, embraced my guitar and projected the images upon me while singing. There are of course a lot of technical issues that I solved but that’s my geek side and I will not bore you with that! This was the perfect way to present to my fans my love song for Roma, a city that welcomed me ten years ago and gave me a home, a wife and a dog. I will be forever thankful to this ‘old lady’. https://youtu.be/kHe7hqRhGFc How has Covid-19 affected your music/ musical plans for this year? As all my fellow musicians we have all been hit hard by this epidemic, both in personal life and in our jobs. I planned the release of my album for 2020. And this included touring in Italy and in the USA and, hopefully, in some other countries where my music is very much loved (Turkey, Brazil, Mexico). Plus, I usually spend part of the year in New York City to write music and film music videos. All this is gone for the moment. I will soon be on Patreon with live online concerts and more. Musicians are too often afraid and ashamed to say that we do it because we love it but we need money to keep doing it. And concerts, together with merch sales, are the only income source if you are a small/medium size independent artist. People are unaware that we get absolutely zero from all the platforms they pay to listen to music. I hope this will be an occasion to let people learn more about this and support their favourite artists trough different circuits to help them keep making the music they love. Can you tell us anything about the follow up single to Roma? I can tell you that it is a completely different song and mood. It will be a song, in English this time, with a super well-produced video that we shot in New York City last November with very exciting special effects! I am very proud of it especially because of the message of the song. But I don’t want to spoil it for you! Your forthcoming album will be called ‘Exotic Diorama’ and will be released in October this year – can you give us an idea what inspired the songs on it? My wife Chiara found the name for the album and I think it perfectly expresses its deepest nature. The first time that I was in New York was with her and she brought me to the Natural History Museum, near Central Park. Quite a show. I stayed still for a time that I cannot measure in front of the dioramas of many wild habitats. A sad yet mesmerizing spectacle. An entire world in a few squared metres enclosed by glass but still so alive that I could imagine sounds and movements. Exotic Diorama is like a key hole through which you can spy an entire universe. Mine. My music is inspired by dreams and food and sounds of nature and smells. For this reason, it is varied and nearly unclassifiable. No kidding. We face a great problem each time we need to select a music category when we release a single! Each song is unique and has a different style from the others. But all together they make sense. Like an impressionist painting that you can only understand if you look to its entirety. Lastly, the word exotic fit my nature: in my home village, in my same family they look at me as if they saw a hummingbird flying in the Alps! If you had to describe the album in a few lines – what would you say? I will do it in three words. A big trip! You have fans all over the world – how do they differ? Oh, they couldn't be more heterogenous! I have this lovely and fun old guy from Punjabi all dressed in red and orange sending me pics of his hens and a young 16 year old lesbian girl from Turkey who tells me how much she feels alone and finds comfort in my music and in the fact that I am openly Lesbian. I have a lot of amazing people from South America fighting for the amazons and for the rights of our environment and a Brazilian woman who always plays my songs and sends me video might it be in the backyard during her kid's birthday party or driving to work. One thing though they all have in common. A profound respect for human rights and human freedom. Have you had a chance to meet any fans on tour (prior to lockdown)? Yes, I met some of them after my New York gigs and they joined my team for dinner right after. It was a blast! Do you have a message for your fans - old and new? Be nice. Be open. And have a Dolche day! What are your personal hopes and wishes for the rest of the year and beyond? Well, I am pregnant. After many tries Chiara and I finally made the right one just the day before lockdown was declared...perfect timing, ah! I am not kidding. I am always working and traveling and touring and rehearsing and this forced pause in the first three months (ending in two weeks) has been the only way I could stay still in one place. So, my hope is an easy one: That this kid will get into a world made better by all the hard times that we are going through. And that my wife lets me buy one more guitar! Read the full article

[topworldhistory]

Around the globe, the serpent carries potent symbolism.

Ever since Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden, snakes in Christian tradition have been associated with lies, evil and temptation. But in other cultures, as far-flung as ancient Greece and Egypt and indigenous North America, snakes symbolize fertility, rebirth, renewal and even immortality. The ouroboros, the ancient symbol of eternity that was famously depicted on King Tut’s tomb in the 14th century B.C., is a serpent devouring its own tail.

From the Aztec god of wind, rain and creation to the semi-divine human-snake creatures that guarded the Buddha, here are nine snakes or serpents that have emerged, through history or myth, to play important roles in the cultures they represent.

Snake in the Garden of Eden

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

A man. A woman. A snake. And a fateful apple. In the Old Testament Book of Genesis, a serpent memorably appears in the Garden of Eden, the earthly paradise God created for the first man and woman, Adam and Eve. The cunning snake convinced Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the “tree of knowledge,” telling her that “when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” When God learned of Adam and Eve’s transgression, he banished both of them from Eden and cursed the snake for its role, saying “You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.” Debate has long raged over whether the serpent in Genesis was a literal reptile, an allegory for sexual desire or temptation or even Satan himself.

Snakes that St. Patrick drove out of Ireland

St. Patrick depicted with a snake under his foot.

Irish culture is brimming with myths and legends, perhaps none so prevalent as that of St. Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint, banishing every last snake from the Emerald Isle. As the story goes, St. Patrick, a fifth-century Christian missionary, was fasting for 40 days atop a hill when he was attacked by snakes. He waved his staff, driving all Ireland’s snakes into the sea. Though Ireland—like New Zealand, Hawaii, Greenland, Iceland and Antarctica—is in fact devoid of snakes, that has less to do with St. Patrick than with the fact that since the post-glacial age it’s been surrounded by water, and before that its climate was too cold for any snakes to survive. The story makes more sense as an allegory: Snakes were a symbol of paganism, and Patrick was given credit for driving the pagans out and bringing Christianity to the Emerald Isle.

READ MORE: Who Was St. Patrick?

Jormungand, the Viking sea serpent

Thor battling the Midgard Serpent.

In Norse mythology, few stories are as dramatic as that of Jormungand, the powerful sea serpent. Jormungand, one of three children of the shape-shifting god Loki and the giantess Angrboda, was thrown into the sea by Odin, father of the powerful thunder god Thor. The serpent grew until his body encircled all of Midgard (or Earth), and he was able to grasp his own tail in his mouth. At the start of Ragnarok, the final battle that would end in the earth’s destruction, Jormungand left the sea and rolled across the land wreaking havoc. In their climactic confrontation, Thor slew the serpent with his mighty hammer, Mjolnir, but only made it nine paces before falling dead himself, poisoned by the serpent’s deadly venom.

Leviathan from the Book of Job

Behemoth and Leviathan, by William Blake.

There’s debate over whether the passages in Job about Leviathan and another giant Biblical creature, Behemoth, describe mythological beasts—or actual animals that existed at the time but later may have gone extinct. It’s been suggested that Behemoth could have been a hippopotamus, an elephant or even a dinosaur, while Leviathan may have been an ancient species of crocodile. Either way, the Book of Job employed both Leviathan and Behemoth to demonstrate to Job God’s power of creation, and the futility of questioning Him. Later, the word “leviathan” would be applied more generally to mean a giant whale (most memorably the great white whale in Moby Dick) or other massive sea creature.

Medusa and the Gorgons

The Head of Medusa, painted by Peter Paul Rubens.

In Greek mythology, the Gorgons were snake-women whose gazes would turn people to stone; they had serpents for hair, long claws, sharp teeth and scales covering their bodies. According to some myths, Medusa, the most famous of the Gorgons, was originally a beautiful woman. Her tryst with the god Poseidon in one of Athena’s temples infuriated the virgin goddess, who turned Medusa into a Gorgon as punishment. Athena later helped the hero Perseus slay Medusa, giving him a shiny bronze shield that he used to watch the Gorgon’s reflection rather than looking directly at her. After cutting off Medusa’s fearsome head (from which her two children with Poseidon, Chrysaor and Pegasus, emerged) Perseus mounted it on his shield, and used it to paralyze his enemies in battle.

Quetzalcoatl

A detailed view of Aztec art depicting the god Tez-Calipoca and Quetzalcoatl (right) devouring a human being.

Among the most prominent deities in Mesoamerican cultures, Quetzalcoatl, or “Feathered Serpent,” was a mix of bird and rattlesnake (coatl is the Nahuatl word for serpent). The Aztec god of wind and rain, as well as learning, agriculture and science, Quetzalcoatl was said to have played a key role in the world’s creation. In one version of the creation story, he and another god, Tezcatlipoca, transformed themselves into snakes and ripped a giant sea monster named Cipactli in half; one part of her became the earth, the other the sky. Though the earliest depictions of Quetzalcoatl show him clearly as a snake with a plume of feathers, later cultures represented him in human form.

Naga

The Chariot Hall or Royal Funerary Chariot Hall at the Wat Xieng Thong in the UNESCO world heritage town of Luang Prabang in Central Laos contains King Sisavang Vong's gilded, carved wooden funeral carriage, decorated with large Naga snakes at the front. 

In the eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, a mythological semi-divine race known as the naga (Sanskrit for “serpent”) took half-human, half-cobra form—although they could shift shapes to fully take on one or the other. The Hindhu god Brahma was said to have banished the naga to their underground kingdom when they became too populous on Earth. In Buddhism, naga were often depicted as protectors of Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha, and the dharma (Buddhist teachings), but they were also seen as powerful, and potentially dangerous when angered. Of the many naga mentioned in the Buddhist scriptures, one particularly famous one was Mucalinda, a naga king who spread his great cobra hood to shelter the Buddha from a storm that arrived while the prophet was deep in meditation.

Hopi Snake Dance

Men handling poisonous rattlesnakes, one even holding a snake between his teeth, for the snake dance of the Native American Hopi tribe.

For thousands of years, members of the Hopi Native American tribe of northern Arizona have performed the ritual known as the Snake Dance. During the multi-day ritual, which is aimed at encouraging rainfall and fertility for the land, male dancers from the Snake Clan put live snakes—ranging from small garter snakes to rattlesnakes��in their mouths and around their necks. The snakes are painstakingly gathered and washed before the ceremony, which also involves members of the Antelope Clan. Though outsiders (notably Theodore Roosevelt) have been able to witness some aspects of the Snake Dance, much of the lengthy ceremony takes place in underground chambers called kivas, allowing its most sacred aspects to remain mysterious.

The Legend of the White Snake

An actress plays the role of the White Snake in Baisha Zhuan (The Legend of White Snake) in a Chinese opera, 2000.

This ancient Chinese myth tells the story of a powerful female white snake demon who lives underwater but takes human form as Madame White, or Bai Suzhen. After Bai falls in love with and marries a mortal man, Xu Xian, a Buddhist monk, Fahai, reveals her true identity to her husband. Fahai later kidnaps Xu, and traps Bai under his lakeside pagoda—but not before she gives birth to her son with Xu, who will eventually free his mother. There are various versions of the Legend of the White Snake, which has evolved over the centuries from a horror story, in which Fahai heroically battles the evil snake demon, to a romance, focusing on the thwarted but genuine love between Xu and Bai.

from Stories - HISTORY https://ift.tt/328XE7u February 19, 2020 at 05:29AM

[jamesdazell]

Tragedy as the Joyful Art; or, The Ironic Art of Tragedy

I took this photograph in April of last year. This is the first permanent theatre ever built in the world, where some of my favourite plays were performed for the very first time. The original site where all the formality of what we know as theatre had its origins. It was also a civic art, created simultaneously with democracy, where public speaking and talking about their lives was so important. And the most important site during the festival of Dionysia. I went to Athens to read the plays sitting in the theatre seats that someone sat in watching these very plays 2,500 years ago.I think Greek tragedy is the greatest artform and the greatest approach to art there ever was. I’ve been studying and writing about it for ten years. Meeting with scholars and practitioners of theatre. Learning from so many books, talks, and documentaries. And testing out my understanding in writing my own work across stage, books, and poetry. As well as hiring art spaces out to staging some of my own performances.This is an artform that demonstrates the power of art. It’s an artform of immense passion for life, and demands its artist a great capacity for comprehending reality with all its good and bad qualities. Tragedy was no art of optimism, nor was it mere melodrama, and certainly it wasn’t grave liturgical passion plays. Tragedy is more than a genre, it's a world view. And so its technique has to be in-keeping with that world view.Over the centuries we have corroded the original meaning of tragedy. We associate tragedy with death, but not a single tragic hero dies in any of Aeschylus' best plays. And, with the exception of Ajax’s suicide, not one tragic figure dies on stage. There was no pleasure taken from death in this theatre. Its about a dilemma of existence. Its an art that's been misunderstood and has been misunderstood since Aristotle. Aristotle thought the objective was to arouse pity and fear, and produce a cathartic effect from being overwhelmed by them. This is a complete misunderstanding, of both its effect and how the work would arrive on the page at all.It’s evident that original subject matter wasn’t of much importance, since all the tragedians wrote plays on the same subject and characters. What the theatre-maker did with it was what was of importance; what they invested into it; what the play was doing not what it was about. And given these plays were written in the context of a festival competition, it would be befitting that they should write on the same subject, so that their works could go head to head, as competition was everything to the Ancient Greeks. ��potter strives against potter, craftsman strives against craftsman, singer strives against singer” writes Hesiod in the Works and Days. “Strife is justice” writes Heraclitus.But even the Greeks lost their way. Euripides turned tragedy into mere melodrama, Aristotle misunderstood it and ruined an understanding for centuries. The Romans didn’t know how to handle it correctly. When the Christians revived theatre as instruction of the Bible to the illiterate they turned tragedy into its present meaning. Even Nietzsche blundered aspects of it with his loony Dionysian-Apollonian dichotomy. Shakespeare borrowed from conventions unGreek, such as the Christian medieval passion plays of Christ’s crucifixion which featured enduring suffering and death on stage. Roman tragedies of Seneca that were pathos of suffering and revenge. And the comedies of antiquity which he borrowed their oscillation between protagonist and antagonist. Even the idea of the fall of heights comes from a medieval concept of the wheel of fortune. And if you combine these with Aristotle’s misinterpretations and Euripides’ melodrama, given his work survives more than any other tragedian, then our general understanding is naturally inaccurate. All in all, we’re just missing the point, and our understanding doesn’t do justice or describe any of the examples of what is going on in any of the earliest extant works of tragedy by Aeschylus, whom even in his own time was considered the greatest of the three surviving tragedians. The comic playwright Aristophanes, just after the death of Euripides, wrote a play called The Frogs wherein the patron god of theatre, Dionysus, goes to the underworld to bring back one of the three playwrights because tragedy has fallen to a terrible standard since they’ve died. Sophocles umpires whilst Aeschylus and Euripides have a kind of literary criticism competition, lampooning each others works, and in the end Aeschylus wins.When we think of this art being created, the rules for this aren't coming from literary criticism. So the rules for these works were born from their culture. Real Tragedy rose and fell in its richest form, much like what happens with our popular culture. It doesn’t seem to have been based around hard and fast rules, as with Japanese Noh Drama that keeps to its tradition. These were not professional playwrights. Theatre had only just been invented merely decades earlier (albeit in the previous century). But it had reached a refined and sophisticated brilliance, much like cinema in the sixties and seventies had done merely decades from the birth of cinema. For the same reason that we have culture of the eighties, nineties, twenty-tens, etc, the meaning of art changes. This is little or nothing to do with progress, politics, or technology, except as being part and parcel of that same consequence. As the prevailing condition of human character changes, the disposition to the world by the artist changes, both artists and in audience. The change in tragedy came with Socrates. With Socrates came rationalism, and with rationalism came optimism, and with optimism came cheerfulness, with cheerfulness comes attitudes to life of consolation, with consolation comes defensive doctrine of morality. It was this new scientific attitude that took hold of Athenian culture that was the prime symptom of the demise of real Greek tragedy. An attitude that stands in opposition to the embryonic pregnancy of how tragedy can be conceived. Not only Socratic influence in the case of Euripides’ work, but this was the age of Plato, which it is agreed upon, is a philosophy that is wholly proto-Christian, and significant to the development of Christianity by Neo-Plantonist Jews who studied his works in the Library of Alexandria. This is not all too dissimilar from the Puritanical, rationalistic and scientific age of Enlightenment that followed the period of Shakespearean tragedy.The art of tragedy differs also from our very familiarity with the presentation of theatre itself. Not only was this not a naturalistic theatre, but more stylised than even the mannerisms of opera, more in fact like the movements of a puppet theatre, the dancing of African and Indian dances, and the music of medieval secular music and our popular music, to the degree that our Modern theatre cannot be used as a frame of reference at all. If an ancient Athenian were to sit in our theatres of tragedy they would either be wholly confused or roll about laughing. It’s important to remember that Ancient Greece was a culture that looked East, and were influenced by world views and religions of the East. How sterile and cold a Modern Western European culture feels when held next to Ancient Greece, with its almost colourfully Brahmic culture. Two-thousand years of Christian Europe has lead to a lot of misunderstandings.Pageant wagons depicting scenes from the Bible were the first cinema or TV screens. They would roll through the town like a float parade representing the whole universe of the Bible. They were literally a window to the world, which incorporated all the people of the world and beyond it, whilst the audience watched, removed from its settings.This was not what tragedy was doing. Tragedy was a superimposed performance into a very real world, which didn’t have a metaphysical beyond. Olympus and the Underworld are in this one and the same world. The performances themselves were of, not Athens, but of real cities. Their plays consisted of characters absent, conjured by theatre, but the rest of the world consisted of those in the audience watching and this very same real world. The characters were not rolled out, being born from trying to re-present the world realistically, but born from a realm of poetry, with only three characters on stage at one time. The necessity of characters merely to move plot forward by bringing in new information, not because that’s how the world looks. It’s believed the first tragedies would have been only one actor and a chorus of fifty singers. Although limited, this must have a powerful kind of poetry-performance-art-music-dance-drama. The speech is stylised and poetic. compared to our modern theatre, since we see the stage as a re-presentation of a window to the world, writers naturally concluded why don’t people in the play talk like they do outside our windows, and ordinary realistic speech was pushed onto the stage. But again, we’re just missing the point. This was not a projected window to the universe, nor was it to be held up like a mirror to ordinary life. This was a drama of poetry-music performance art. The poet was by nature also a musician in these dramas, and in the case of Choral poetry, which was so integral to tragedy, a poet-musician-dancer. But the Greeks were not pessimistic. The Greeks didn’t underestimate the power of poetry and music. The tragic heroes were not poets but they were endowed with poetic abilities. The model for a poet was Orpheus who could transform the world around him with song and music, could make birds sing, and fish leap out of water. Just as the poet suffered in life they were also considered to posses divine abilities by the effect of poetry on others, and subsequently were mythologised. This was not a re-presentation of the world. This was an art. The very drama of tragedy is born from the intoxicating rapture of music and poetry, not only in to a vision of scenes, but the drama and all it contains that unfolds. The choral separations between “acts” are to reenergise the drama with its original intoxication for the drama to then spring from. The drama springs from the music, the character embodied by the poetry. Breaking up apart from out civilised cultural self into our primal nature and rebuilding into a character who cab stand in a world of such a reality, in a cycle of creative destruction. Think of that two minutes as Friends begins followed by the theme song, narrating the themes of the show, and then the acting resumes. It’s not all together different from what happens there. A pop rock quiet verse, loud chorus, quiet verse, loud chorus. Or the use of the music of Morricone in Leone's movies, in a Tarantino or Scorsese picture. The moments of talk by a singer between songs. All this is closer to tragedy than opera which literally dramatises action, feeling, words into the music itself. Opera, which is truthfully merely poetry as music, and considered a high art because it was associated with high society, the vogue of intellectual rationalism, and church music - in short, all things which modernity considered to be of refined and sophisticated high class. Modernity is Socratic art par excellence.To understand an art you have to understand the condition of its pregnancy not by its affected reception. You have to view it in embryo and look for under what conditions this would be conceived. If you study it as an afterword there are all sorts of interpretations possible. But if you study it in conception then every interpretation must end with the work. Not how do we analyse the written text as an afterword, but how you go from a blank page to this written text. We need to analyse it as the author not the audience. It's not enough to analyse effects because often the process of creation is inverse to the desired effect they produce. You can have a innumerable interpretations as an audience, but whatever interpretations you have here, all end with this. And if you apply those rules to a blank page you should end with the work too. Until I can fake a Greek play, I haven’t understood it.Challenges are what make us grow, are what make us demonstrate our outstanding qualities, and create goals which give our lives meaning. How do you give life meaning when it's full of horrible things that are hard to comprehend? It's normal that we prefer to want to live in a world of a limited amount of perception about the nature of ourselves and the world we live in. Or live optimistically and pretend that negative consequences are not likely to happen, that in the end everything works out. We prefer, not to live in a world of those difficult realities, but a world that consoles us for those things. And we put blinkers on and black-out just enough of reality so we can enjoy living in it. That can't happen in tragedy. It demands you to take in all the difficult things to comprehend about the world as a reality of lifeIn a similar way to how a pop or rock singer will sing a lyric contrary to its written expression, joyfully singing a sad lyric. And how an actor playing a villain doesn’t play the role as the audience feels about the character, but how the character feels about themselves, so to play the role convincingly they have to play the bad guy as a good guy. Tragedy is an art of irony. And irony is the essence of all great art. It sets up its pessimism and overcomes it with art. Pain shuts down language. It is such an intransitive experience that it is near impossible to express in language. Pain is the flip-side to imagination, and as such then is pain overcome by pure creative force. Pessimism is overcome by the creative act of poetry, that has a diction too strong to succumb to the very subject of their expression, overcome by their musicality and metaphorical beauty. What was pain is overcome by the power of art. Art, which stands beyond the reach of intransitive pain and suffering. And yet has by the very nature of art sprung from them, affirmed that very aspect of life which contains pain and suffering. Pessimism in the audience is overcome by the experience of the plays, of beautiful lyrical speech, the ecstasy music and dancing, performing to a collected public audience not in the dark but in the midday spring sun when everything was undergoing regeneration, in the context of a festival of wine and sex, devoted to the god Dionysus who embodied ecstasy and liberation from gloomy cares and worry. By allowing an audience to revel and feel exhilaration in a scenario of this scope of reality and spectrum of being a human being. When pain and suffering is universalised in to a collective experience being human, and again overcome by a collective experience of art. Similar to a crowd listening to an anthemic rock song all singing at the same time, liberated and reunited with that primal human being that lurks behind the overbearing cultural citizen who exists in daily civilization.Unnaturalness is the essence of archaic art because it shows the defiance of art in the face of aspects of life that would ordinarily make us gloomy. Tragedy was life affirming because it did not turn away from life. Some of the most similar examples of its technique are not from the renaissance, neo-classicalism, the opera, the Romans, but from the twentieth century. This was the pop culture of the American 1990s. This whole approach of popular culture from the 60s to the 90s. This was the art of Spain in the early twentieth century. This was some of the work of Italy and Japan. The rock music of England. The atmosphere of the Olympics, the superbowl, Glastonbury festival. Although tragedy and comedy were not mixed genres, there was no differentiation between high and popular art in Ancient Greece. Tragedy contained the popular arts we're familiar with today, and all the wisdom of Aristophanes' comedy was punctuated with fart jokes. Greek tragedy is high art popular culture.All great periods of art were during undesirable political times. The antagonism is a positive one. It shows the defiance in the power of art over aspects of life that make us gloomy. The whole objective was that pain and suffering, where a stimulant for overcoming, and therefore affirmed into the whole theatre of life, the whole horror of existence was overcome by art. This was an exhilarating joyful art. It was life affirming because it did not turn away from life. Not to use art to talk about the terribleness of the world but to use it as weights that test our strength for loving life even in that reality of the world. Like a weight lifter's strong arm that needs heavier things to test their strength. The Greeks used art to lift the heaviness of life. This was done in competition. This was the stage where the Greeks competed to demonstrate who loves life the most. That’s what I feel art is, the myth over the reality, an illusion we place over the world in order to love it more.

[disndatradio]

Danny Elfman Talks The Nightmare Before Christmas, Released 25 Years Ago Today

It’s late Wednesday evening in London and Danny Elfman is admittedly jet-lagged. “We’re right in the middle of scoring Dumbo,” says the iconic composer of the upcoming live-action adaptation of the classic story starring Danny DeVito and directed by his frequent collaborator Tim Burton. “All I can say right now about it is that the elephant is pretty goddamn cute,” laughs Elfman. “I never know, ever what (my films) are going to be, so what I do is the best I can.”

It’s that attitude that has guided Elfman in his career as one of today’s most well-known composers, working on a litany of iconic projects, from the instantly recognizable themes for shows such as The Simpsons and Desperate Housewives to scores for smashes ranging from Men In Black to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, Fifty Shades Of Grey, Avengers: Age Of Ultron, and countless more.

Watch Trent Reznor, Danny Elfman, & Hans Zimmer discuss their work.

However, it’s Elfman’s creative partnership with Burton on the majority of the director’s filmography that has defined his career, starting with Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure in 1985 and stretching through Batman, Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, Big Fish, Corpse Bride, and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. “What made us get along for decades, I couldn’t answer,” muses Elfman of Burton. “He’s a weird guy but he doesn’t seem weird next to me. Tim and I grew up in similar ways, which probably had something to do with it. We were both ‘monster kids,’ an odd subculture of children of the ’60s who grew up on these great low-budget horror films. When I first met him, his idol was Vincent Price and mine was Peter Lorre.”

Throughout their vast and uniquely strange partnership, one film stands among them as one whose fandom has taken on a life of its own. Twenty-five years ago today, their stop-motion animated The Nightmare Before Christmas hit theaters and helped define a new era of “monster kids,” serving as a respite to the saccharine animated children’s films of the time. A twisted musical tale focused on kidnapping Santa Claus that combined elements of the whimsical nature of Christmas and the dark fun of Halloween and whose lead character was a skeleton (aptly dubbed Jack Skellington), the film quickly turned into a labor of love for the duo. “I remember Tim sent me an outline, but then I didn’t hear anything about it for a while,” says Elfman of his earliest memories of the process. “Finally we got together and he said he needed to start doing something, but there was no script and neither of us knew how to start a musical.”

Burton had a vivid vision for the film but was simultaneously working on Batman Returns, the highly anticipated sequel to his hit 1989 film, and relegated Nightmare directing duties to Henry Selick. “I remember Henry was in Oakland ready to start shooting, but all we had was an outline for the story,” says Elfman. “So we just started working on the songs (as a starting point). It turned out to be the simplest writing I’d ever done.”

Burton would visit Elfman and explain the story of the movie, chapter by chapter. “He had all of these great pictures and drawings, as well as lines and poems; fragments of stuff. I remember a number of times I pushed him out the door because I started hearing the songs in my head. I’d start right on that, and three days later I’d have a demo which I’d come back and play for him. Then we’d start the next part of the story.”

Elfman’s goal was to achieve a musical timelessness and called on a bevy of inspirations when penning songs ranging from the anthemic “This Is Halloween” to the mischievous “Kidnap The Sandy Claws.” “I wanted it to sound like it was written 50 or 100 years ago, so I turned my own influences for that stuff. Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, which was a major thing in my life, was a source, as well musicals from Cole Porter and Gershwin, and to a certain extent, Rodgers and Hammerstein.” For “What’s This?,” during which Skellington discovers the vibrant Christmas Town, Elfman turned his attention to the Victorian era. “The lyrics are very fast and constant, like some of my favorite Gilbert and Sullivan songs.”

Once a full script was concocted by Elfman’s then-girlfriend Caroline Thompson (the three previously collaborated on Beetlejuice), the movie went into production. The outcome seemed promising, until an ominous preview screening. “I remember a producer saying afterwards, ‘Well, kids hate it.’ Then I did a junket, and every person would ask me, ‘So if this isn’t for kids, who is this for?’ I’d say, ‘If your kids aren’t afraid of Halloween, they won’t be afraid of Nightmare.’”

Despite being the first animated movie nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and the film nabbing a Golden Globe nod for Best Score, Elfman remembers an underwhelming reception. “It came and went pretty quickly and didn’t do very well. Nobody understood what it was or how to market it. I put so much into this project, including so much of my own personality, that it really hurt. At the time I was really depressed after it came out. I put so much into it and it was gone.”

Perhaps appropriate to the movie’s theme, Nightmare was brought back from the proverbial dead as time went on. After becoming a hit on VHS, the movie began generating a cult fanbase in the ensuing years, something Disney was quick to seize on. “A lot of studios would ignore their (back catalog), but Disney to their credit understood what it was and started getting behind it again,” says Elfman, whose idea of its fandom was crystallized just over a decade after its release. “I remember being with Tim in Tokyo, and we were seeing Nightmare merchandise all over. There was even a club in Tokyo dedicated to Nightmare. We thought it was amazing and it was a good sense of this thing still surviving.”

In recent years Rotten Tomatoes named it one of the best Christmas movies of all time, with Disney re-releasing it multiple times, including making it the first stop motion animated film converted into 3D. In addition, an album of covers were released in both 2006 and 2008 with Fall Out Boy taking the reigns of “What’s This?” and two versions of opening track “This Is Halloween” courtesy Marilyn Manson and Panic! At the Disco. Meanwhile, on both Spotify and Apple Music, the vast majority of Elfman’s top-streaming tracks are from Nightmare.

As a result of the interest, Elfman has brought the movie’s music to life with a concert experience of the film, complete with a live orchestra and Elfman performing the character of Jack Skellington in a successful run that stretched into three shows this year at Los Angeles’ famed Hollywood Bowl. This year’s trio of concerts, which went down last weekend, also featured cast members Catherine O’Hara (Sally) and Ken Page (Oogie Boogie). “When we first talked about it, I thought it was insane,” says Elfman of the live shows. “I thought I’d be singing to empty seats. I could have never imagined that that this year we’ll be doing our sixth, seventh and eighth shows at the Hollywood Bowl, all of which bring out kids, teenagers, and both younger and older people.”

Elfman calls the concerts, and the movie’s lasting impact in general, a dream (or perhaps more appropriately, a nightmare) come true. “Of all the things I’ve worked on that I would have wished to find a second life, and I’ve worked on a million movies that died early deaths, it would have been Nightmare. I got that wish and that’s why I’m doing these shows. And the fact that kids come see it is the ultimate revenge. It just makes me say, ‘You were wrong… Kids like it!’”

This article was originally published at Billboard.

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[neverwasmag]

Star Wars is the quintessential space opera with fans around the world. Rather than write the nth article about what makes Star Wars such a phenomenon, I am going to talk about how the movies have had an impact on mostly dieselpunk.

Stick around til the end, because your intrepid reporter managed to ask Anthony Daniels, the actor who has portrayed C3P0 since the beginning of the franchise forty years ago, some questions while he was a guest at Comic Con Brussels.

‘Punk influences

These are by no means dieselpunk films, with the exception of the two Ewok movies from the 1980s, which are ultralight family-friendly movies in the style of Mad Max and The Blood of Heroes. Pretty much the same kind of setting, none of the gore or brutality and a prime example of post-apocalyptic dystopian dieselpunk (probably why they’re not mentioned anymore now, they have a hard time fitting into the rest of the universe).

And yet, with only two dieselpunk movies in a very long list, Star Wars has had a surprisingly big impact on dieselpunk.

Although, considering all the dieselpunk elements there are in the movies, including the cartoons, it is perhaps not that surprising that ‘punks are drawn to the franchise like moths to a flame.

Tatooine in Star Wars (1977)

Star Wars concept art of Coruscant (Erik Tiemens)

From the steampunk-looking, half-built C-3PO in The Phantom Menace to the post-apocalyptic feel of Tatooine and Jakku to the atomicpunk look of the planet-wide city Coruscant.

SS soldiers rally in Nuremberg, Germany in the late 1930s

First Order stormtroopers in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

From the militaristic Empire and First Order, whose uniforms and hierarchy are strongly reminiscent of Nazi Germany, to the dieselpunky underdogs of the Rebellion.

It’s the characters, the droids, the speeders, the dirt and grit and the story which inspire fans of the ‘punk genres and draw them in.

Examples of steam- and dieselpunk-inspired fan art abound, including the work of Björn Hurri, Jesse Toves, “Cylonka” and “Rodolforever“.

Art by Björn Hurri

Art by Björn Hurri

Art by Jesse Toves

Art by Rodolforever

Art by Cylonka

The Star Wars galaxy, while far, far away from our own, is populated by our own visions of the future, including those from the past.

Star Wars timeline

Star Wars theatrical release poster

In chronological order, not in order of release:

Episode I: The Phantom Menance (1999)

Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)

Clone Wars (animated series, 2003-04)

Clone Wars (GCI animated series, 2008-14)

Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Rebels (CGI animated series, 2014-18)

Droids: The Adventures of R2D2 and C3P0 (animated series, 1985-86)

Rogue One (2016)

Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)

Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)

Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Ewoks (animated series, 1985-86)

Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure (1984)

Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985)

Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)

Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)

Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)

Seeing Solo hasn’t been released yet, I haven’t added it to the list, as I am unsure where exactly it fits. I’m guessing around the same time as Rebels, but at this point it’s guesswork.

Q&A with Anthony Daniels

Anthony Daniels is interviewed, March 31, 2011 (Major Nelson)

And now, as promised, quick questions with Anthony Daniels, who has been portraying C-3P0 since the beginning.

R2D2 is quite infamous for getting Treepio in all sorts of trouble. But what has been the nicest thing he’s ever done for C-3P0?

Absolutely. The nicest thing is that he has been Treepio’s friend for many, many years. And like all friends, they tease each other. They have moments where they don’t get on. But then they get on even better the next time.

C-3P0 is an iconic part of not just the Star Wars universe, but sci-fi and robotics full stop. What makes you most proud of him being such a phenomenon?

Because one of the earliest examples of human cyborg interaction. And he has survived so much that he must have been made very well made from the beginning. He has become a little more quirky since the beginning. Like an old automobile he gets idiosyncrasies that you get used to. But he particularly likes the fact that humans relate to him, even though they don’t always listen to what he says.

Exhibition in Brussels

Star Wars Identities

If all of this isn’t enough for you, currently Star Wars Identities is at its very last European stop in Brussels, Belgium until September 2.

The exhibition not only shows you a wide array of movie props, concept art and costumes, but also immerses the visitor into the Star Wars universe via unique RFDI-powered bracelets allowing you to create your own Star Wars character.

Well worth the visit to see these items in real life. They’ve done a marvelous job both presenting all the items and integrating the interactive technology in one fluent and comprehensive expo.

Make sure to also pick up the exhibition guide, because it’s a beautiful book that would not look amiss on the shelf of anyone into the franchise.

C-3PO costume at the Star Wars Identities exhibition in Brussels, Belgium, April 2, 2018 (Hilde Heyvaert)

Boba Fett costume at the Star Wars Identities exhibition in Brussels, Belgium, April 2, 2018 (Hilde Heyvaert)

More info here.

The #steampunk and #dieselpunk in Star Wars Star Wars is the quintessential space opera with fans around the world. Rather than write the nth article about what makes…

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include behind-the-scenes on Hidden Folks, an interview about the Coin-Operated Americans book, interviews from E3, and much more.

Well, am back from Los Angeles, attending E3, which was - well - not that different that anyone might expect. Lots of hype and excitement for large AAA games, most of which do have guns all over them (looking forward to more Tim Rogers dispatches like this from Kotaku!), a somewhat overcrowded E3 itself thanks to the consumer influx, and enough games for everyone to be excited about at least one.

For me, that Super Mario Odyssey trailer was enough for me to pre-order the game to play with my son - and finally work out how to get a Switch, which is coming in a couple of weeks. [Sidebar: it's actually a bit crazy how much Nintendo was being counted out by many - including perhaps me. Then, whomp, two games later (new Zelda, new Mario) they're the belle of the ball again.]

But that's why E3 works as high drama, soap opera, and metacommentary hub of the year for video games - we've all got a hot take, and hot takes are king. (Also why there's not a GREAT deal of E3 coverage in this week's VGDC, heh. Not that we're 'hot take allergic', but you can get that on YouTube & Twitch right now in real-time if you'd like.) Anyway, 'til next time...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Developer Q&A: Balancing storytelling and player choice in Prey (Alex Wiltshire / Gamasutra) "Talos-1 runs on eels. This large space station, setting to Arkane Studios’ recently released emergent sim Prey, deals with its residents’ effluent by sending it to large vats where it’s consumed by the things."

Nintendo of America Boss Fils-Aimé On Comebacks, the Future of the DS and Surviving the Wii U (John Davison / Simon Cox / Glixel) "It's almost exactly a year since we last spoke with Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé at E3 2016. On that occasion he was standing fifteen feet above that Disney-like Nintendo E3 booth, which was dedicated solely to the forthcoming The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild."

Why 'Super Mario Maker' Didn’t Kill the Mario Hacking Community (Jess Joho / Motherboard) "Yet, playing hyper-polished feats of design like Super Mario Maker leave some longtime fans of the franchise nostalgic for the days of janky programming, kill screens, and brutal challenge. That's why the heroes of the Super Mario World (SMW) ROM hacking community remain stubbornly alive, even long after the release of an official Nintendo Mario level creator."

Coin-Operated Boys: An Interview with Carly Kocurek (Dan Royles / Nursing Clio) "Carly Kocurek’s Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (Minnesota, 2015) examines the origins of modern video game culture in the “classic” arcade era, spanning the release of Pong in 1972 and the industry’s first major collapse in 1983. She traces the formation of the “technomasculine” during that period, as the arcade became increasingly defined as the province of young men."

How we make a game called Hidden Folks (Adriaan de Jongh / Imgur) "Hey there! I'm Adriaan, one of the two developers behind Hidden Folks, a game for smartphones and computers in which you search for hidden folks in hand-drawn, interactive, miniature landscapes by unfurling tent flaps, cutting through bushes, slamming doors, and poking crocodiles!"

Offworld Trading Company: An RTS Without Guns (Soren Johnson / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 Game Developers Conference talk, Mohawk Games' Soren Johnson dives into strategy game history to explain how he and his team developed Offworld Trading Company, a strategy game with little combat."

These Maps Reveal the Hidden Structures of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Books (Sarah Laskow / Atlas Obscura) "Reading a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book can feel like being lost in a maze and running through twists and turns only to find dead ends, switchbacks, and disappointment. In the books—for those not familiar with them—you read until you come to a decision point, which prompts you to flip to another page, backward or forward."

A Falconer Enters the World of Video Games (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The story of how Nricco Iseppi, a master falconer, came to Riot Games has, among the company’s staff, acquired the malleability of myth. According to one scriptwriter, it began when Riot had an orange grove planted on its multimillion-dollar campus, in Los Angeles, a place already bristling with perks and mod cons."

Interview: “Rez” creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s unusual life evolves humanity (Staff / Denfaminicogamer) "One midnight, during an internal office chat at the Denfaminicogamer editorial department were the words “They’re crazy.” This was right at the end of 2016 after PS VR was released. As it were, the editorial departments odd excitement resulted in an impulsive interview about VR Contents “Rez Infinite” at the end of last year. This article is a written version of that insane seven hours interview. [SIMON'S NOTE: the translation isn't perfect, but this interview is AMAZING - you rarely see Japanese creators asked historical questions in this kind of depth.]"

The Garden Ages | Myst series (Sam Zucchi / Heterotopias) "How do the linking books in Myst read? These books are, in-universe, written out in the alphabet and language of a dead civilization. The text details the world that the writer wishes to visit: an island is described, its qualities delineated in some detail, and a linking pane appears on the first page, ready to literally transport the reader to the object described."

The RPG Scrollbars: In search of urban fantasy (Richard Cobbett / RockPaperShotgun) "There’s a real urban fantasy gap in the gaming industry, and it’s never made much sense. We see a thousand Tolkienesque fantasy games a minute (rough napkin calculation) and the future’s typically so bright, even the lens flares need shades. Yet when it comes to that line where the mundane meets the magical, mostly what we’ve had for the last few years is false hope."

E3 Was Different This Year, And It Wasn’t Just The Crowds (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "It’s the first day of E3. I’m walking the show floor—or more accurately, oozing across it, slug-like, followed by a trail of my own sweat. I’m shoulder-to-shoulder with swathes of people. Across the way, crowds of people whoop and holler, each of them hoping to win swag they can stuff in their floor-length swag bags. 15,000 new people are in attendance this year. [SIMON'S NOTE: one of the most considered of the 'what's up with E3 this year?' articles.]"

7 examples of accessibility design that developers should study (Richard Moss / Gamasutra) "Games are for everyone. And in recognizing this, ever-increasing numbers of developers are making a point to incorporate more accessibility features and options like remappable controls, configurable subtitles, resizable HUDs, and more."

The big interview: Xbox boss Phil Spencer (Wesley Yin-Poole / Eurogamer) "It was with all this in mind that I sat down with Xbox boss Phil Spencer at the Galen Center in Los Angeles to talk Xbox One X. At £449, I'm not sure who the console is for ("there is a customer out there who's looking for the premium experience"). I fear for Microsoft's first-party studio setup ("I do think we have an opportunity to get better in first-party")."

The State Of Virtual Reality (Brian Crecente / Polygon) "One could argue that the age of virtual reality kicked-off during last year's Game Developers Conference, an event that nearly coincided with the launch of two of the technology's most important head-mounted displays in recent history: the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive."

EA Boss Andrew Wilson's Vision of Gaming's Future Will Blow Your Mind (John Davison / Glixel) "The intervening years were tumultuous and challenging. Changing the company to deliver on that vision was a bumpy ride, but now 10 years later, Wilson is eager to convey what the new Electronic Arts stands for, and its vision for the future of games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Much snark online for some of the 'vision' in this interview, particularly the Emily Dickinson bit.]"

Ex-Puyo Puyo producer reveals some of the classic puzzler’s earliest prototypes (Kishi / Retronauts) "Last week, Compile founder Moo Niitani announced two previously unreleased works from the defunct developer’s glory days on MSX2 computers. Later this month, Dominon and Dominon X are both coming to Project EGG, D4 Enterprise’s prolific download service for old Japanese computer games."

Don't Change a Thing! The Challenges of Evolving Solitaire (Russell Carroll / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, MobilityWare's Russell Carroll shares the experience of updating Solitaire for a modern mobile audience, and what features they were able to update while grappling with intense resistance to any changes made to the core game.  [SIMON'S NOTE: I've known Russell - who used to run indie site GameTunnel - for a LONG time, and this talk is as much about management philosophy as it is solitaire - it's super well-considered.]"

Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs. That's OK. (For Now.) (Peter Suderman / Reason) "Video games, like work, are basically a series of quests comprised of mundane and repetitive tasks: Receive an assignment, travel to a location, overcome some obstacles, perform some sort of search, pick up an item, and then deliver it in exchange for a reward—and, usually, another quest, which starts the cycle all over again. You are not playing the game so much as following its orders. The game is your boss; to succeed, you have to do what it says."

7 roguelikes that every developer should study (Stefanie Fogel / Gamasutra) "With that in mind, we asked developers to name some of their favorite roguelikes - or games in other genres influenced by roguelike mechanics - and the lessons they can teach people today. And, many of these games are free and/or open source, which makes them easy to download, play, and study!"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include behind-the-scenes on Hidden Folks, an interview about the Coin-Operated Americans book, interviews from E3, and much more.

Well, am back from Los Angeles, attending E3, which was - well - not that different that anyone might expect. Lots of hype and excitement for large AAA games, most of which do have guns all over them (looking forward to more Tim Rogers dispatches like this from Kotaku!), a somewhat overcrowded E3 itself thanks to the consumer influx, and enough games for everyone to be excited about at least one.

For me, that Super Mario Odyssey trailer was enough for me to pre-order the game to play with my son - and finally work out how to get a Switch, which is coming in a couple of weeks. [Sidebar: it's actually a bit crazy how much Nintendo was being counted out by many - including perhaps me. Then, whomp, two games later (new Zelda, new Mario) they're the belle of the ball again.]

But that's why E3 works as high drama, soap opera, and metacommentary hub of the year for video games - we've all got a hot take, and hot takes are king. (Also why there's not a GREAT deal of E3 coverage in this week's VGDC, heh. Not that we're 'hot take allergic', but you can get that on YouTube & Twitch right now in real-time if you'd like.) Anyway, 'til next time...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Developer Q&A: Balancing storytelling and player choice in Prey (Alex Wiltshire / Gamasutra) "Talos-1 runs on eels. This large space station, setting to Arkane Studios’ recently released emergent sim Prey, deals with its residents’ effluent by sending it to large vats where it’s consumed by the things."

Nintendo of America Boss Fils-Aimé On Comebacks, the Future of the DS and Surviving the Wii U (John Davison / Simon Cox / Glixel) "It's almost exactly a year since we last spoke with Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé at E3 2016. On that occasion he was standing fifteen feet above that Disney-like Nintendo E3 booth, which was dedicated solely to the forthcoming The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild."

Why 'Super Mario Maker' Didn’t Kill the Mario Hacking Community (Jess Joho / Motherboard) "Yet, playing hyper-polished feats of design like Super Mario Maker leave some longtime fans of the franchise nostalgic for the days of janky programming, kill screens, and brutal challenge. That's why the heroes of the Super Mario World (SMW) ROM hacking community remain stubbornly alive, even long after the release of an official Nintendo Mario level creator."

Coin-Operated Boys: An Interview with Carly Kocurek (Dan Royles / Nursing Clio) "Carly Kocurek’s Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (Minnesota, 2015) examines the origins of modern video game culture in the “classic” arcade era, spanning the release of Pong in 1972 and the industry’s first major collapse in 1983. She traces the formation of the “technomasculine” during that period, as the arcade became increasingly defined as the province of young men."

How we make a game called Hidden Folks (Adriaan de Jongh / Imgur) "Hey there! I'm Adriaan, one of the two developers behind Hidden Folks, a game for smartphones and computers in which you search for hidden folks in hand-drawn, interactive, miniature landscapes by unfurling tent flaps, cutting through bushes, slamming doors, and poking crocodiles!"

Offworld Trading Company: An RTS Without Guns (Soren Johnson / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 Game Developers Conference talk, Mohawk Games' Soren Johnson dives into strategy game history to explain how he and his team developed Offworld Trading Company, a strategy game with little combat."

These Maps Reveal the Hidden Structures of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Books (Sarah Laskow / Atlas Obscura) "Reading a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book can feel like being lost in a maze and running through twists and turns only to find dead ends, switchbacks, and disappointment. In the books—for those not familiar with them—you read until you come to a decision point, which prompts you to flip to another page, backward or forward."

A Falconer Enters the World of Video Games (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The story of how Nricco Iseppi, a master falconer, came to Riot Games has, among the company’s staff, acquired the malleability of myth. According to one scriptwriter, it began when Riot had an orange grove planted on its multimillion-dollar campus, in Los Angeles, a place already bristling with perks and mod cons."

Interview: “Rez” creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s unusual life evolves humanity (Staff / Denfaminicogamer) "One midnight, during an internal office chat at the Denfaminicogamer editorial department were the words “They’re crazy.” This was right at the end of 2016 after PS VR was released. As it were, the editorial departments odd excitement resulted in an impulsive interview about VR Contents “Rez Infinite” at the end of last year. This article is a written version of that insane seven hours interview. [SIMON'S NOTE: the translation isn't perfect, but this interview is AMAZING - you rarely see Japanese creators asked historical questions in this kind of depth.]"

The Garden Ages | Myst series (Sam Zucchi / Heterotopias) "How do the linking books in Myst read? These books are, in-universe, written out in the alphabet and language of a dead civilization. The text details the world that the writer wishes to visit: an island is described, its qualities delineated in some detail, and a linking pane appears on the first page, ready to literally transport the reader to the object described."

The RPG Scrollbars: In search of urban fantasy (Richard Cobbett / RockPaperShotgun) "There’s a real urban fantasy gap in the gaming industry, and it’s never made much sense. We see a thousand Tolkienesque fantasy games a minute (rough napkin calculation) and the future’s typically so bright, even the lens flares need shades. Yet when it comes to that line where the mundane meets the magical, mostly what we’ve had for the last few years is false hope."

E3 Was Different This Year, And It Wasn’t Just The Crowds (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "It’s the first day of E3. I’m walking the show floor—or more accurately, oozing across it, slug-like, followed by a trail of my own sweat. I’m shoulder-to-shoulder with swathes of people. Across the way, crowds of people whoop and holler, each of them hoping to win swag they can stuff in their floor-length swag bags. 15,000 new people are in attendance this year. [SIMON'S NOTE: one of the most considered of the 'what's up with E3 this year?' articles.]"

7 examples of accessibility design that developers should study (Richard Moss / Gamasutra) "Games are for everyone. And in recognizing this, ever-increasing numbers of developers are making a point to incorporate more accessibility features and options like remappable controls, configurable subtitles, resizable HUDs, and more."

The big interview: Xbox boss Phil Spencer (Wesley Yin-Poole / Eurogamer) "It was with all this in mind that I sat down with Xbox boss Phil Spencer at the Galen Center in Los Angeles to talk Xbox One X. At £449, I'm not sure who the console is for ("there is a customer out there who's looking for the premium experience"). I fear for Microsoft's first-party studio setup ("I do think we have an opportunity to get better in first-party")."

The State Of Virtual Reality (Brian Crecente / Polygon) "One could argue that the age of virtual reality kicked-off during last year's Game Developers Conference, an event that nearly coincided with the launch of two of the technology's most important head-mounted displays in recent history: the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive."

EA Boss Andrew Wilson's Vision of Gaming's Future Will Blow Your Mind (John Davison / Glixel) "The intervening years were tumultuous and challenging. Changing the company to deliver on that vision was a bumpy ride, but now 10 years later, Wilson is eager to convey what the new Electronic Arts stands for, and its vision for the future of games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Much snark online for some of the 'vision' in this interview, particularly the Emily Dickinson bit.]"

Ex-Puyo Puyo producer reveals some of the classic puzzler’s earliest prototypes (Kishi / Retronauts) "Last week, Compile founder Moo Niitani announced two previously unreleased works from the defunct developer’s glory days on MSX2 computers. Later this month, Dominon and Dominon X are both coming to Project EGG, D4 Enterprise’s prolific download service for old Japanese computer games."

Don't Change a Thing! The Challenges of Evolving Solitaire (Russell Carroll / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, MobilityWare's Russell Carroll shares the experience of updating Solitaire for a modern mobile audience, and what features they were able to update while grappling with intense resistance to any changes made to the core game.  [SIMON'S NOTE: I've known Russell - who used to run indie site GameTunnel - for a LONG time, and this talk is as much about management philosophy as it is solitaire - it's super well-considered.]"

Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs. That's OK. (For Now.) (Peter Suderman / Reason) "Video games, like work, are basically a series of quests comprised of mundane and repetitive tasks: Receive an assignment, travel to a location, overcome some obstacles, perform some sort of search, pick up an item, and then deliver it in exchange for a reward—and, usually, another quest, which starts the cycle all over again. You are not playing the game so much as following its orders. The game is your boss; to succeed, you have to do what it says."

7 roguelikes that every developer should study (Stefanie Fogel / Gamasutra) "With that in mind, we asked developers to name some of their favorite roguelikes - or games in other genres influenced by roguelike mechanics - and the lessons they can teach people today. And, many of these games are free and/or open source, which makes them easy to download, play, and study!"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include behind-the-scenes on Hidden Folks, an interview about the Coin-Operated Americans book, interviews from E3, and much more.

Well, am back from Los Angeles, attending E3, which was - well - not that different that anyone might expect. Lots of hype and excitement for large AAA games, most of which do have guns all over them (looking forward to more Tim Rogers dispatches like this from Kotaku!), a somewhat overcrowded E3 itself thanks to the consumer influx, and enough games for everyone to be excited about at least one.

For me, that Super Mario Odyssey trailer was enough for me to pre-order the game to play with my son - and finally work out how to get a Switch, which is coming in a couple of weeks. [Sidebar: it's actually a bit crazy how much Nintendo was being counted out by many - including perhaps me. Then, whomp, two games later (new Zelda, new Mario) they're the belle of the ball again.]

But that's why E3 works as high drama, soap opera, and metacommentary hub of the year for video games - we've all got a hot take, and hot takes are king. (Also why there's not a GREAT deal of E3 coverage in this week's VGDC, heh. Not that we're 'hot take allergic', but you can get that on YouTube & Twitch right now in real-time if you'd like.) Anyway, 'til next time...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Developer Q&A: Balancing storytelling and player choice in Prey (Alex Wiltshire / Gamasutra) "Talos-1 runs on eels. This large space station, setting to Arkane Studios’ recently released emergent sim Prey, deals with its residents’ effluent by sending it to large vats where it’s consumed by the things."

Nintendo of America Boss Fils-Aimé On Comebacks, the Future of the DS and Surviving the Wii U (John Davison / Simon Cox / Glixel) "It's almost exactly a year since we last spoke with Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé at E3 2016. On that occasion he was standing fifteen feet above that Disney-like Nintendo E3 booth, which was dedicated solely to the forthcoming The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild."

Why 'Super Mario Maker' Didn’t Kill the Mario Hacking Community (Jess Joho / Motherboard) "Yet, playing hyper-polished feats of design like Super Mario Maker leave some longtime fans of the franchise nostalgic for the days of janky programming, kill screens, and brutal challenge. That's why the heroes of the Super Mario World (SMW) ROM hacking community remain stubbornly alive, even long after the release of an official Nintendo Mario level creator."

Coin-Operated Boys: An Interview with Carly Kocurek (Dan Royles / Nursing Clio) "Carly Kocurek’s Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (Minnesota, 2015) examines the origins of modern video game culture in the “classic” arcade era, spanning the release of Pong in 1972 and the industry’s first major collapse in 1983. She traces the formation of the “technomasculine” during that period, as the arcade became increasingly defined as the province of young men."

How we make a game called Hidden Folks (Adriaan de Jongh / Imgur) "Hey there! I'm Adriaan, one of the two developers behind Hidden Folks, a game for smartphones and computers in which you search for hidden folks in hand-drawn, interactive, miniature landscapes by unfurling tent flaps, cutting through bushes, slamming doors, and poking crocodiles!"

Offworld Trading Company: An RTS Without Guns (Soren Johnson / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 Game Developers Conference talk, Mohawk Games' Soren Johnson dives into strategy game history to explain how he and his team developed Offworld Trading Company, a strategy game with little combat."

These Maps Reveal the Hidden Structures of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Books (Sarah Laskow / Atlas Obscura) "Reading a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book can feel like being lost in a maze and running through twists and turns only to find dead ends, switchbacks, and disappointment. In the books—for those not familiar with them—you read until you come to a decision point, which prompts you to flip to another page, backward or forward."

A Falconer Enters the World of Video Games (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The story of how Nricco Iseppi, a master falconer, came to Riot Games has, among the company’s staff, acquired the malleability of myth. According to one scriptwriter, it began when Riot had an orange grove planted on its multimillion-dollar campus, in Los Angeles, a place already bristling with perks and mod cons."

Interview: “Rez” creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s unusual life evolves humanity (Staff / Denfaminicogamer) "One midnight, during an internal office chat at the Denfaminicogamer editorial department were the words “They’re crazy.” This was right at the end of 2016 after PS VR was released. As it were, the editorial departments odd excitement resulted in an impulsive interview about VR Contents “Rez Infinite” at the end of last year. This article is a written version of that insane seven hours interview. [SIMON'S NOTE: the translation isn't perfect, but this interview is AMAZING - you rarely see Japanese creators asked historical questions in this kind of depth.]"

The Garden Ages | Myst series (Sam Zucchi / Heterotopias) "How do the linking books in Myst read? These books are, in-universe, written out in the alphabet and language of a dead civilization. The text details the world that the writer wishes to visit: an island is described, its qualities delineated in some detail, and a linking pane appears on the first page, ready to literally transport the reader to the object described."

The RPG Scrollbars: In search of urban fantasy (Richard Cobbett / RockPaperShotgun) "There’s a real urban fantasy gap in the gaming industry, and it’s never made much sense. We see a thousand Tolkienesque fantasy games a minute (rough napkin calculation) and the future’s typically so bright, even the lens flares need shades. Yet when it comes to that line where the mundane meets the magical, mostly what we’ve had for the last few years is false hope."

E3 Was Different This Year, And It Wasn’t Just The Crowds (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "It’s the first day of E3. I’m walking the show floor—or more accurately, oozing across it, slug-like, followed by a trail of my own sweat. I’m shoulder-to-shoulder with swathes of people. Across the way, crowds of people whoop and holler, each of them hoping to win swag they can stuff in their floor-length swag bags. 15,000 new people are in attendance this year. [SIMON'S NOTE: one of the most considered of the 'what's up with E3 this year?' articles.]"

7 examples of accessibility design that developers should study (Richard Moss / Gamasutra) "Games are for everyone. And in recognizing this, ever-increasing numbers of developers are making a point to incorporate more accessibility features and options like remappable controls, configurable subtitles, resizable HUDs, and more."

The big interview: Xbox boss Phil Spencer (Wesley Yin-Poole / Eurogamer) "It was with all this in mind that I sat down with Xbox boss Phil Spencer at the Galen Center in Los Angeles to talk Xbox One X. At £449, I'm not sure who the console is for ("there is a customer out there who's looking for the premium experience"). I fear for Microsoft's first-party studio setup ("I do think we have an opportunity to get better in first-party")."

The State Of Virtual Reality (Brian Crecente / Polygon) "One could argue that the age of virtual reality kicked-off during last year's Game Developers Conference, an event that nearly coincided with the launch of two of the technology's most important head-mounted displays in recent history: the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive."

EA Boss Andrew Wilson's Vision of Gaming's Future Will Blow Your Mind (John Davison / Glixel) "The intervening years were tumultuous and challenging. Changing the company to deliver on that vision was a bumpy ride, but now 10 years later, Wilson is eager to convey what the new Electronic Arts stands for, and its vision for the future of games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Much snark online for some of the 'vision' in this interview, particularly the Emily Dickinson bit.]"

Ex-Puyo Puyo producer reveals some of the classic puzzler’s earliest prototypes (Kishi / Retronauts) "Last week, Compile founder Moo Niitani announced two previously unreleased works from the defunct developer’s glory days on MSX2 computers. Later this month, Dominon and Dominon X are both coming to Project EGG, D4 Enterprise’s prolific download service for old Japanese computer games."

Don't Change a Thing! The Challenges of Evolving Solitaire (Russell Carroll / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, MobilityWare's Russell Carroll shares the experience of updating Solitaire for a modern mobile audience, and what features they were able to update while grappling with intense resistance to any changes made to the core game.  [SIMON'S NOTE: I've known Russell - who used to run indie site GameTunnel - for a LONG time, and this talk is as much about management philosophy as it is solitaire - it's super well-considered.]"

Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs. That's OK. (For Now.) (Peter Suderman / Reason) "Video games, like work, are basically a series of quests comprised of mundane and repetitive tasks: Receive an assignment, travel to a location, overcome some obstacles, perform some sort of search, pick up an item, and then deliver it in exchange for a reward—and, usually, another quest, which starts the cycle all over again. You are not playing the game so much as following its orders. The game is your boss; to succeed, you have to do what it says."

7 roguelikes that every developer should study (Stefanie Fogel / Gamasutra) "With that in mind, we asked developers to name some of their favorite roguelikes - or games in other genres influenced by roguelike mechanics - and the lessons they can teach people today. And, many of these games are free and/or open source, which makes them easy to download, play, and study!"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include behind-the-scenes on Hidden Folks, an interview about the Coin-Operated Americans book, interviews from E3, and much more.

Well, am back from Los Angeles, attending E3, which was - well - not that different that anyone might expect. Lots of hype and excitement for large AAA games, most of which do have guns all over them (looking forward to more Tim Rogers dispatches like this from Kotaku!), a somewhat overcrowded E3 itself thanks to the consumer influx, and enough games for everyone to be excited about at least one.

For me, that Super Mario Odyssey trailer was enough for me to pre-order the game to play with my son - and finally work out how to get a Switch, which is coming in a couple of weeks. [Sidebar: it's actually a bit crazy how much Nintendo was being counted out by many - including perhaps me. Then, whomp, two games later (new Zelda, new Mario) they're the belle of the ball again.]

But that's why E3 works as high drama, soap opera, and metacommentary hub of the year for video games - we've all got a hot take, and hot takes are king. (Also why there's not a GREAT deal of E3 coverage in this week's VGDC, heh. Not that we're 'hot take allergic', but you can get that on YouTube & Twitch right now in real-time if you'd like.) Anyway, 'til next time...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Developer Q&A: Balancing storytelling and player choice in Prey (Alex Wiltshire / Gamasutra) "Talos-1 runs on eels. This large space station, setting to Arkane Studios’ recently released emergent sim Prey, deals with its residents’ effluent by sending it to large vats where it’s consumed by the things."

Nintendo of America Boss Fils-Aimé On Comebacks, the Future of the DS and Surviving the Wii U (John Davison / Simon Cox / Glixel) "It's almost exactly a year since we last spoke with Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé at E3 2016. On that occasion he was standing fifteen feet above that Disney-like Nintendo E3 booth, which was dedicated solely to the forthcoming The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild."

Why 'Super Mario Maker' Didn’t Kill the Mario Hacking Community (Jess Joho / Motherboard) "Yet, playing hyper-polished feats of design like Super Mario Maker leave some longtime fans of the franchise nostalgic for the days of janky programming, kill screens, and brutal challenge. That's why the heroes of the Super Mario World (SMW) ROM hacking community remain stubbornly alive, even long after the release of an official Nintendo Mario level creator."

Coin-Operated Boys: An Interview with Carly Kocurek (Dan Royles / Nursing Clio) "Carly Kocurek’s Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (Minnesota, 2015) examines the origins of modern video game culture in the “classic” arcade era, spanning the release of Pong in 1972 and the industry’s first major collapse in 1983. She traces the formation of the “technomasculine” during that period, as the arcade became increasingly defined as the province of young men."

How we make a game called Hidden Folks (Adriaan de Jongh / Imgur) "Hey there! I'm Adriaan, one of the two developers behind Hidden Folks, a game for smartphones and computers in which you search for hidden folks in hand-drawn, interactive, miniature landscapes by unfurling tent flaps, cutting through bushes, slamming doors, and poking crocodiles!"

Offworld Trading Company: An RTS Without Guns (Soren Johnson / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 Game Developers Conference talk, Mohawk Games' Soren Johnson dives into strategy game history to explain how he and his team developed Offworld Trading Company, a strategy game with little combat."

These Maps Reveal the Hidden Structures of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Books (Sarah Laskow / Atlas Obscura) "Reading a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book can feel like being lost in a maze and running through twists and turns only to find dead ends, switchbacks, and disappointment. In the books—for those not familiar with them—you read until you come to a decision point, which prompts you to flip to another page, backward or forward."

A Falconer Enters the World of Video Games (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The story of how Nricco Iseppi, a master falconer, came to Riot Games has, among the company’s staff, acquired the malleability of myth. According to one scriptwriter, it began when Riot had an orange grove planted on its multimillion-dollar campus, in Los Angeles, a place already bristling with perks and mod cons."

Interview: “Rez” creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s unusual life evolves humanity (Staff / Denfaminicogamer) "One midnight, during an internal office chat at the Denfaminicogamer editorial department were the words “They’re crazy.” This was right at the end of 2016 after PS VR was released. As it were, the editorial departments odd excitement resulted in an impulsive interview about VR Contents “Rez Infinite” at the end of last year. This article is a written version of that insane seven hours interview. [SIMON'S NOTE: the translation isn't perfect, but this interview is AMAZING - you rarely see Japanese creators asked historical questions in this kind of depth.]"

The Garden Ages | Myst series (Sam Zucchi / Heterotopias) "How do the linking books in Myst read? These books are, in-universe, written out in the alphabet and language of a dead civilization. The text details the world that the writer wishes to visit: an island is described, its qualities delineated in some detail, and a linking pane appears on the first page, ready to literally transport the reader to the object described."

The RPG Scrollbars: In search of urban fantasy (Richard Cobbett / RockPaperShotgun) "There’s a real urban fantasy gap in the gaming industry, and it’s never made much sense. We see a thousand Tolkienesque fantasy games a minute (rough napkin calculation) and the future’s typically so bright, even the lens flares need shades. Yet when it comes to that line where the mundane meets the magical, mostly what we’ve had for the last few years is false hope."

E3 Was Different This Year, And It Wasn’t Just The Crowds (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "It’s the first day of E3. I’m walking the show floor—or more accurately, oozing across it, slug-like, followed by a trail of my own sweat. I’m shoulder-to-shoulder with swathes of people. Across the way, crowds of people whoop and holler, each of them hoping to win swag they can stuff in their floor-length swag bags. 15,000 new people are in attendance this year. [SIMON'S NOTE: one of the most considered of the 'what's up with E3 this year?' articles.]"

7 examples of accessibility design that developers should study (Richard Moss / Gamasutra) "Games are for everyone. And in recognizing this, ever-increasing numbers of developers are making a point to incorporate more accessibility features and options like remappable controls, configurable subtitles, resizable HUDs, and more."

The big interview: Xbox boss Phil Spencer (Wesley Yin-Poole / Eurogamer) "It was with all this in mind that I sat down with Xbox boss Phil Spencer at the Galen Center in Los Angeles to talk Xbox One X. At £449, I'm not sure who the console is for ("there is a customer out there who's looking for the premium experience"). I fear for Microsoft's first-party studio setup ("I do think we have an opportunity to get better in first-party")."

The State Of Virtual Reality (Brian Crecente / Polygon) "One could argue that the age of virtual reality kicked-off during last year's Game Developers Conference, an event that nearly coincided with the launch of two of the technology's most important head-mounted displays in recent history: the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive."

EA Boss Andrew Wilson's Vision of Gaming's Future Will Blow Your Mind (John Davison / Glixel) "The intervening years were tumultuous and challenging. Changing the company to deliver on that vision was a bumpy ride, but now 10 years later, Wilson is eager to convey what the new Electronic Arts stands for, and its vision for the future of games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Much snark online for some of the 'vision' in this interview, particularly the Emily Dickinson bit.]"

Ex-Puyo Puyo producer reveals some of the classic puzzler’s earliest prototypes (Kishi / Retronauts) "Last week, Compile founder Moo Niitani announced two previously unreleased works from the defunct developer’s glory days on MSX2 computers. Later this month, Dominon and Dominon X are both coming to Project EGG, D4 Enterprise’s prolific download service for old Japanese computer games."

Don't Change a Thing! The Challenges of Evolving Solitaire (Russell Carroll / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, MobilityWare's Russell Carroll shares the experience of updating Solitaire for a modern mobile audience, and what features they were able to update while grappling with intense resistance to any changes made to the core game.  [SIMON'S NOTE: I've known Russell - who used to run indie site GameTunnel - for a LONG time, and this talk is as much about management philosophy as it is solitaire - it's super well-considered.]"

Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs. That's OK. (For Now.) (Peter Suderman / Reason) "Video games, like work, are basically a series of quests comprised of mundane and repetitive tasks: Receive an assignment, travel to a location, overcome some obstacles, perform some sort of search, pick up an item, and then deliver it in exchange for a reward—and, usually, another quest, which starts the cycle all over again. You are not playing the game so much as following its orders. The game is your boss; to succeed, you have to do what it says."

7 roguelikes that every developer should study (Stefanie Fogel / Gamasutra) "With that in mind, we asked developers to name some of their favorite roguelikes - or games in other genres influenced by roguelike mechanics - and the lessons they can teach people today. And, many of these games are free and/or open source, which makes them easy to download, play, and study!"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include behind-the-scenes on Hidden Folks, an interview about the Coin-Operated Americans book, interviews from E3, and much more.

Well, am back from Los Angeles, attending E3, which was - well - not that different that anyone might expect. Lots of hype and excitement for large AAA games, most of which do have guns all over them (looking forward to more Tim Rogers dispatches like this from Kotaku!), a somewhat overcrowded E3 itself thanks to the consumer influx, and enough games for everyone to be excited about at least one.

For me, that Super Mario Odyssey trailer was enough for me to pre-order the game to play with my son - and finally work out how to get a Switch, which is coming in a couple of weeks. [Sidebar: it's actually a bit crazy how much Nintendo was being counted out by many - including perhaps me. Then, whomp, two games later (new Zelda, new Mario) they're the belle of the ball again.]

But that's why E3 works as high drama, soap opera, and metacommentary hub of the year for video games - we've all got a hot take, and hot takes are king. (Also why there's not a GREAT deal of E3 coverage in this week's VGDC, heh. Not that we're 'hot take allergic', but you can get that on YouTube & Twitch right now in real-time if you'd like.) Anyway, 'til next time...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Developer Q&A: Balancing storytelling and player choice in Prey (Alex Wiltshire / Gamasutra) "Talos-1 runs on eels. This large space station, setting to Arkane Studios’ recently released emergent sim Prey, deals with its residents’ effluent by sending it to large vats where it’s consumed by the things."

Nintendo of America Boss Fils-Aimé On Comebacks, the Future of the DS and Surviving the Wii U (John Davison / Simon Cox / Glixel) "It's almost exactly a year since we last spoke with Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé at E3 2016. On that occasion he was standing fifteen feet above that Disney-like Nintendo E3 booth, which was dedicated solely to the forthcoming The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild."

Why 'Super Mario Maker' Didn’t Kill the Mario Hacking Community (Jess Joho / Motherboard) "Yet, playing hyper-polished feats of design like Super Mario Maker leave some longtime fans of the franchise nostalgic for the days of janky programming, kill screens, and brutal challenge. That's why the heroes of the Super Mario World (SMW) ROM hacking community remain stubbornly alive, even long after the release of an official Nintendo Mario level creator."

Coin-Operated Boys: An Interview with Carly Kocurek (Dan Royles / Nursing Clio) "Carly Kocurek’s Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (Minnesota, 2015) examines the origins of modern video game culture in the “classic” arcade era, spanning the release of Pong in 1972 and the industry’s first major collapse in 1983. She traces the formation of the “technomasculine” during that period, as the arcade became increasingly defined as the province of young men."

How we make a game called Hidden Folks (Adriaan de Jongh / Imgur) "Hey there! I'm Adriaan, one of the two developers behind Hidden Folks, a game for smartphones and computers in which you search for hidden folks in hand-drawn, interactive, miniature landscapes by unfurling tent flaps, cutting through bushes, slamming doors, and poking crocodiles!"

Offworld Trading Company: An RTS Without Guns (Soren Johnson / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 Game Developers Conference talk, Mohawk Games' Soren Johnson dives into strategy game history to explain how he and his team developed Offworld Trading Company, a strategy game with little combat."

These Maps Reveal the Hidden Structures of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Books (Sarah Laskow / Atlas Obscura) "Reading a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book can feel like being lost in a maze and running through twists and turns only to find dead ends, switchbacks, and disappointment. In the books—for those not familiar with them—you read until you come to a decision point, which prompts you to flip to another page, backward or forward."

A Falconer Enters the World of Video Games (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The story of how Nricco Iseppi, a master falconer, came to Riot Games has, among the company’s staff, acquired the malleability of myth. According to one scriptwriter, it began when Riot had an orange grove planted on its multimillion-dollar campus, in Los Angeles, a place already bristling with perks and mod cons."

Interview: “Rez” creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s unusual life evolves humanity (Staff / Denfaminicogamer) "One midnight, during an internal office chat at the Denfaminicogamer editorial department were the words “They’re crazy.” This was right at the end of 2016 after PS VR was released. As it were, the editorial departments odd excitement resulted in an impulsive interview about VR Contents “Rez Infinite” at the end of last year. This article is a written version of that insane seven hours interview. [SIMON'S NOTE: the translation isn't perfect, but this interview is AMAZING - you rarely see Japanese creators asked historical questions in this kind of depth.]"

The Garden Ages | Myst series (Sam Zucchi / Heterotopias) "How do the linking books in Myst read? These books are, in-universe, written out in the alphabet and language of a dead civilization. The text details the world that the writer wishes to visit: an island is described, its qualities delineated in some detail, and a linking pane appears on the first page, ready to literally transport the reader to the object described."

The RPG Scrollbars: In search of urban fantasy (Richard Cobbett / RockPaperShotgun) "There’s a real urban fantasy gap in the gaming industry, and it’s never made much sense. We see a thousand Tolkienesque fantasy games a minute (rough napkin calculation) and the future’s typically so bright, even the lens flares need shades. Yet when it comes to that line where the mundane meets the magical, mostly what we’ve had for the last few years is false hope."

E3 Was Different This Year, And It Wasn’t Just The Crowds (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "It’s the first day of E3. I’m walking the show floor—or more accurately, oozing across it, slug-like, followed by a trail of my own sweat. I’m shoulder-to-shoulder with swathes of people. Across the way, crowds of people whoop and holler, each of them hoping to win swag they can stuff in their floor-length swag bags. 15,000 new people are in attendance this year. [SIMON'S NOTE: one of the most considered of the 'what's up with E3 this year?' articles.]"

7 examples of accessibility design that developers should study (Richard Moss / Gamasutra) "Games are for everyone. And in recognizing this, ever-increasing numbers of developers are making a point to incorporate more accessibility features and options like remappable controls, configurable subtitles, resizable HUDs, and more."

The big interview: Xbox boss Phil Spencer (Wesley Yin-Poole / Eurogamer) "It was with all this in mind that I sat down with Xbox boss Phil Spencer at the Galen Center in Los Angeles to talk Xbox One X. At £449, I'm not sure who the console is for ("there is a customer out there who's looking for the premium experience"). I fear for Microsoft's first-party studio setup ("I do think we have an opportunity to get better in first-party")."

The State Of Virtual Reality (Brian Crecente / Polygon) "One could argue that the age of virtual reality kicked-off during last year's Game Developers Conference, an event that nearly coincided with the launch of two of the technology's most important head-mounted displays in recent history: the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive."

EA Boss Andrew Wilson's Vision of Gaming's Future Will Blow Your Mind (John Davison / Glixel) "The intervening years were tumultuous and challenging. Changing the company to deliver on that vision was a bumpy ride, but now 10 years later, Wilson is eager to convey what the new Electronic Arts stands for, and its vision for the future of games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Much snark online for some of the 'vision' in this interview, particularly the Emily Dickinson bit.]"

Ex-Puyo Puyo producer reveals some of the classic puzzler’s earliest prototypes (Kishi / Retronauts) "Last week, Compile founder Moo Niitani announced two previously unreleased works from the defunct developer’s glory days on MSX2 computers. Later this month, Dominon and Dominon X are both coming to Project EGG, D4 Enterprise’s prolific download service for old Japanese computer games."

Don't Change a Thing! The Challenges of Evolving Solitaire (Russell Carroll / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, MobilityWare's Russell Carroll shares the experience of updating Solitaire for a modern mobile audience, and what features they were able to update while grappling with intense resistance to any changes made to the core game.  [SIMON'S NOTE: I've known Russell - who used to run indie site GameTunnel - for a LONG time, and this talk is as much about management philosophy as it is solitaire - it's super well-considered.]"

Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs. That's OK. (For Now.) (Peter Suderman / Reason) "Video games, like work, are basically a series of quests comprised of mundane and repetitive tasks: Receive an assignment, travel to a location, overcome some obstacles, perform some sort of search, pick up an item, and then deliver it in exchange for a reward—and, usually, another quest, which starts the cycle all over again. You are not playing the game so much as following its orders. The game is your boss; to succeed, you have to do what it says."

7 roguelikes that every developer should study (Stefanie Fogel / Gamasutra) "With that in mind, we asked developers to name some of their favorite roguelikes - or games in other genres influenced by roguelike mechanics - and the lessons they can teach people today. And, many of these games are free and/or open source, which makes them easy to download, play, and study!"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]