Just wanted to share a great resource for beginning to listen to classical music. Get Into Classical offers an easy start for the non-initiate. There are some some gentle introductions to the genre, recommendations for pieces to start with and then profiles of classical eras and composers. The text is fun and light without pandering to the reader. I worked my way through the whole site and found a lot of music I enjoyed (and some I didn’t—sorry Shostakovich!).
All posts by James
Beginnings and Endings
George Saunders has an excellent short story in the October 31 New Yorker. At its root, “Tenth of December” has two lives come together in frozen woods. There’s plenty of humor and heartbreak, with good laugh lines and a wonderful ending that speaks of something grand in the simplest terms.
Game Review: Skinny
For a relatively short browser-based pack, Skinny packs in plenty of atmosphere. Created by Thomas Brush of Atmos Games, this platformer had you lead a robot through five levels of a battered post-apocalyptic landscape. Your goal is to collect batteries to repower stranded fellow bots. To do you, you leap across gaps, launch from spring-loaded platforms and crush obstacles with an extendo-arm.
The physics of movement are satisfying. Your robot’s arms and legs pinwheel through the air as it flies, adding some cheerful animation to the repeated jumps. Your character can’t die, but it can fail repeatedly, leading to backtracking and even some frustration as you try to leap through an opening before an electronic gate closes again. In the end, the mechanics are a little gidgy, but still fair, although a small playing window can make it difficult to deploy your hook without clicking on a bordering ad from time to time.
The story feels a little emo. The dialogue of your stranded peers indicates they’ve survived a nuclear winter, or perhaps perished in it. Giving them their batteries restores them back to being clichéd little consumers. Some supporting characters fixed in each level question whether your surroundings are real or just engineered by a world-creating “Mother.” With all this build-up, there’s no real ending.
But the story is just window dressing anyway. The fun lies in exploring the levels, making your way from one end to another. The puzzles along the way are intuitive, but challenging, making this a game worth exploring.
AV Club Trivializes Sexual Assault
Heads need to roll after this one: “Former Real World cast member sues MTV after being allegedly raped with a toothbrush”
The story contains “gems” like this:
the suit alleges that fellow cast members Kenneth Santucci and Evan Starkman “took another male participant’s toothbrush and rubbed the toothbrush around plaintiff’s genitals, including rubbing her labia and inserting the toothbrush into plaintiff’s vagina” while Cooley was “passed out cold.” (Probably from being really tired, from all the challenges).
and
Cooley says that not only were producers aware of the incident—she believes they got it all on camera, and even replaced the other participant’s toothbrush, never telling her what happened. How Cooley knows about any of this is, unfortunately, not addressed in the suit.
My response:
I’m a big fan of the AV Club, but I’m extremely disturbed to see a Newswire posting from Sean O’Neal making light of rape.
Sexual assault is sexual assault, even if it happens to a member of a reality tv show, even if that person happens to have been drinking too much.
Incidents like this happen to heartbreaking numbers of women every year. “Blame the victim” nonsense gets enough traction without being trumpeted by the AV Club.
For shame. You’ve given commenters the ability to flag other comments for being inappropriate. Perhaps that needs to extend to frontpage posts as well. I think Sean O’Neal needs some time away from the job–perhaps permanently–to reassess what’s funny and what isn’t.
Follow-up: AV Club editor Keith Phipps sent a sincere “not our intent” email in response, saying that several people took offense. He indicated it was a good case study for being more sensitive with these topics in the future. I appreciate his response.
Worth Watching
Just read Callan Wink’s short story, “Dog Run Moon,” in the New Yorker, and I was really impressed by the way he creates his setting, using tangible details to make the fantastic physical. The contributors section says he’s an M.F.A. student at the University of Wyoming. I look forward to seeing what he does in the future.