In the Year 2018, Tom Towers Stops Reading

Will Tom continue in 2019?

Yes, at least one more book, as he promised to see if Stephen Hicks would redeem himself after his book about Nietzsche and the Nazi[‘]s [iconography] in which he proved to be even more aesthetically ignorant than in his blog about modernist art. This trend would suggest he doesn’t redeem himself, but stay tuned to find out for sure!

In the meantime, feel free to answer Tom’s questions (he doesn’t pose them rhetorically): do Americans hate continental philosophy out of jealousy? Is Karen Pryor as great a romantic as Beatrix Potter is a renaissance man? Can enthusiastic narration save an otherwise pointless or even a brain-damaging book? Is aesthetic evolution arbitrary? Is the Soviet adaptation of Winnie the Pooh true to the melancholic spirit of the original?

To better understand these questions, please read the final installment of Tom Towers’ reading adventures in 2018, which you can find here, before answering. But please do answer.

One of Baetrix Potter’s beautiful botanical illustrations.

Full list of the literature covered in this last installment:

Nietszche and the Nazis by Stephen Hicks
Like a Thief in Broad Daylight by Slavoj Zizek
Survival of the Beautiful by David Rothenberg
Reaching the Animal Mind and Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor
The Art of Beatrix Potter by Emily Zach
The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Two Bad Mice, The Tale of Tom Kitten, The Story of Miss Moppet, The Tailor of Gloucester, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny by Beatrix Potter
The Moomin comic books and Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove and Lars Jansson
Whinnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth (uh, sort of)
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems as well as The Eve of St. Agnes by John Keats (I mean, maybe?)

Of course the melancholia of the Soviet Adaptation has less to do with the inevitable loss of childhood (from a father’s perspective) than with the inevitable existential crisis to which this loss leads (from a peasant’s perspective).

Bonus question: does refusing people visas on the basis of what propaganda (from anti-vaxx to anti-blacks to anti-APAC) they spread constitute a breach of free speech? If so I should probably have written something about that, too, but personally I couldn’t think of anything more Australian than this. The only way it could be handled more patriotically would be to send them to an off-shore detention centre!

Blasphemous Demo Now Available

Team 17’s upcoming grimdark 2D Souls-like Blasphemous now has a limited time demo which will be live until the 1st of September.

The demo pits players against the dark and disconsolate beginning areas of the game and finishes off with a fight with the first boss.

Blasphemous is set to release on the 10th of September.

You can download the demo on the Steam page here.

- Aaron Mullan

Game Under Podcast Episode 112

Tom Towers and Phil Fogg discuss video games and related topics on Australia's longest running video game podcast.

Tom plays That Game Company's newest release, Sky, while Phil talks about playing the rare japan-only N64 game Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Conversation also dips into Walt Williams book about his time at 2K working on Bioshock, Mafia II and Spec Ops: The Line. 

Please look forward to listening.

The celebration in honour of this episode was so wild it tore through time and space itself!

Sylvia Plath and Sadistik

Tom Towers wrote a few things about Sylvia Plath and Sadistik, or at least about Ariel and Haunted Gardens. You could read what he wrote, or instead read Ariel and listen to Haunted Gardens. Or both. Or even read what he wrote without listening to Haunted Gardens and reading Ariel. This would be the worst of the three options. Conversely, you could also not read what he wrote, nor Ariel nor even listen to Haunted Gardens. This might actually be even worse.

To avoid choosing what would, on reflection, be the worst possible option of all, read what he wrote here before it’s too late!

A not entirely unrelated crow, displaying its classical cock and balls and sculpted calves and thighs.

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 - Winds of Magic Pre-Order Now Available

Warhammer: Vermintide 2’s first expansion Winds of Magic is now available to pre-order which will also grant you instant access to the beta. The expansion will fully release in a few days on August 13th.

Winds of Magic introduces a new foe, the Beastmen, a new difficulty, higher level cap, new progression system, new weapons, new level, and, most importantly, the new game mode: Winds of Magic.

If you don’t know what Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is, well, just think Left 4 Dead 2 with a melee focus, more gibs, RPG elements all wrapped up in a Warhammer package. It’s also currently 75% off on Steam here and I highly recommend buying it if anything I said piqued your interest.

You can pre-order the Winds of Magic here.

- Aaron Mullan

Tom Towers Tries Reading, Yet Again

Books covered in this installment are:

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
The Trial and Metamorphoses by Franz Kafka,

Which might not sound like much, but Tom manages to wring out of them all the blood that history has to offer. Luckily he self-censored much of this, so he could rant about censorship instead; brazenly suggesting that the FDA and school boards in America were/are motivated by the same prudery that inspired the Goskomizdat.

But to be fair to him, he’s got the foreword by a genuine Soviet citizen for a genuine Soviet book to back him up on this!

This installment of Tom Towers Reads will probably go down in history as the 21st Century’s Gulag Archipelago. Read it here.

Filonov was too proletarian for the proles, too individualistic for the committees, too emaciated to survive the siege.

Speaking of censorship, Tom failed to mention Neo-Brownie Blair Cottrell’s failure to win his hate speech appeal in 21st Century Free Speech because he forgot. He’s mentioning it now at least.

I assume people who worship Hitler (not like David Bowie for his performative genius, but for his politics) yet get offended by being called Neo-Nazis must be Neo-Brownies?

I think there’s a poem about what happened to the Sturmabteilung when the Nazis came to power…

First they came for the brown shirts,
And I said nothing, for I was not a brown shirt,
Etc. etc.

Let’s just pretend this is Justice, not Hope. Or is she blindfolded because out of frame there is a firing squad?

Game Under Podcast Episode 111

Tom Towers and Phil Fogg talk about their Best Game of All Time (spoiler alert it’s neither Yakuza or Killzone). Tom also gives his final thoughts on Minerva’s Den and The Protector Files, which at least one of which was ground-breaking DLC at the time of release, and the work of many creators who went on to form Fullbright, makers of Gone Home and Tacoma. Tom then reviews Metal Gear Solid !

We also go over Dr. Mario World, Shakedown Hawaii, the Nintendo Switch Lite, the C-64 Mini and Red Dead Redemption 2 before getting to what has become our ghost ship, a full review of Ueda’s The Last Guardian.

Please enjoy Episode 111 of the Game Under Podcast.

Fogg used to have a lot of time on his hands. This is a mock cover containing an anagram he made year’s ago. Today he not only forgets how to do such things but also, according to this episode, forgets what a website is called (Editorial Note: It’s called a “website”)

Rocksmith 2014 - Back to Basics

In an attempt to strengthen my guitar playing I’ve picked up Rocksmith 2014, and have decided to document my journey to show gamers and aspiring guitar players if it actually works or not.

You can read the first article here.

- Aaron Mullan

21st Century Free Speech, Part Two: Uncharted Waters

I wrote some more things about free speech. They’re probably not as interesting as the other things I wrote, but one of them is a foolproof solution to the anxieties of digital discourse that simultaneously allows for violent rhetoric while minimising its influence. Unfortunately, it also makes creating marketing funnels very difficult, if not impossible, so you’ll just have to put up with social media corporations exercising editorial control instead.

Read it, or don’t, here.

Incidentally, the recent YouTube reforms seem relatively successful. Both revolutionary and completely inoffensive left wing and right wing videos (if you think only right wing stuff is being excised, you’re living in a filter bubble), and apolitical content continues to be arbitrarily demonitised or removed, so nothing has changed there—but I have noticed fewer mask-off, power-level revealing videos being recommended.

Still plenty of trojan horses and useful idiots, which are far more likely to be able to alter public discourse and influence real world politics anyway, so everybody wins! :)

Personally, I’m all for the automisation both of women and shitposting at work. Other than driving the final nail into Protestantism’s coffin (or cross?), it will allow corporate propaganda to not only be soulless but faceless, as well!

Game Under Podcast Episode 110

In Episode 110 of the Game Under podcast, Tom Towers finally finishes up Yakuza 4 and gives it the full Game Under in-depth Treatment, Phil Fogg flies around in his first impressions of the Spyro Trilogy (remake), and describes Red Dead Redemption II as the funniest Rock Star game since San Andreas.

Please enjoy our first show without technically difficulties since who knows when!

And, as you can tell by the gallery below, Tom’s graphics card remastered Tacoma to great effect (in the first image you can see normal lighting on the left, psychedelic lighting on the right; click through the images for a nipple-tickling rubber monkey, a top hat on a pumpkin, and a shower scene):