Baru Cormorant
Missives and commentaries from my ever-deepening obsession with a certain intricate novel series about colonialism, lesbians, money, cancer and boats.
To really understand a book, you have to literally eat it. You can therefore presume I do not really understand any media discussed here.
Subcategories
Comics
Comments on comics, chasing comprehensive consideration.
Posts
The Radch & the Mirror Empire & the genders
How do science fiction authors portray culturally varying gender systems? An early foray into this question…
Imperial Radch, "translation”, and songs
Creating the feel of a translated text without resorting to conlanging.
Rewatching Blade Runner
A (somewhat dated) sketch of thoughts on rewatching ‘Blade Runner’, on the eve of Hollywood’s attempt to resuscitate it.
Thoughts on Blade Runner 2049
Blade Runner got a sequel, because it sure is a hot commodity. I write a looong series of words about it, though didn’t really get beyond the shallow pop-feminism I was engaging with at the time.
Hwae and the Genders (so far)
A brief followup to the original Radch gender article, looking at the variation presented in Leckies Provenance
Games, dehumanisation, and representing people
A post from 2018, introducing a tension I’ve struggled with a long time since: most genres of videogames orbit mass killing of disposable enemies, and in some way it seems an inescapable facet of the medium. What attempts have there been to break free of this paradigm, and what are their limitations?
inadequacy of indie games
Scattered thoughts on the ‘niche’ that indie games have found in capitalism, and its immense limitations.
Tacoma & Planetes
A brief compare and contrast of the space futures seen in two pieces of near-future sci-fi made a few decades apart.
On the 'realistic' violence in The Last of Us 2 trailer
An E3 trailer showed that videogame animation systems have progressed to the point where violence resembles film. Does this mean anything?
“What’s wrong is... this world!”
A rumination on consumption and the enormity of the world’s grief - inspired by Tokyo Ghoul, NieR and Mononoke-hime.
'Creation under Capitalism' - thoughts inspired by Porpentine at the V&A
What is the actual function of ‘progressive’ indie games, games writing, games academia etc.? Some ideas crystallised by a brief public Skype conversation at a games conference
scarcity games
In a computer game, we can duplicate digital objects indefinitely. But we prefer to play games which make their artificial objects scarce, and have to work for our data! What’s going on?
virtual proletarian?
I met a story about a Minecraft server in which certain players became capitalists, but more curiously, certain players were willing to be exploited by them. How to understand this enigma?
mechanisms of action games
How does an action game model the world? How do these tools bring out beautiful, expressive play? And what potential do these mechanisms offer in other stories?
idntty
What is the motivation behind playing a computer game, or appreciating art in general? Is part of it to express a particular internal narrative of what kind of person you are?
A novice visits Final Fantasy 7 Remake
A big budget remake of a ‘classic’ game that turned out to be surprisingly delightful. I wrote some immediate reactions at two different points.
Final Fantasy XIV is a game about the transition to capitalism
An attempt to draw out the themes of FFXIV: its love of hard work, the right way to rule a nation, and the anime 19th century.
Annecy 2021
I ‘visit’ Annecy for the first time and see all sorts of cool shit. Then I finally tell you about it a whole month later.
We will not come to relieve suffering
On Rachel Pollack’s incredible novel Unquenchable Fire
Poppies
I read RF Kuang’s grimdark wuxia roman à clef for the Sino-Japanese War and found myself ambivalent.
Three animated films about children in the war
A detailed comparison of three close companions: Barefoot Gen (1983), Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and In This Corner of the World (2016). Survivors and people born after the war; anger, grief as memories are lost, and earnest desire to unearth the past; three distinctive approaches to animation.