Flattened Ears

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The first essay included in The Return of the Primitive centers on the Berkeley "Free Speech Movement" protests of the 1960s, and it also forces me to commit a typographical crime in the form of a double end-quote due to how I format my post titles. The reason for this is because Ayn Rand is the Sargon of Akkad of the 1970s. More on that later. The more specific reason for this is because Rand wants to make it clear that she doesn't consider these students to really be rebels, she considers them to be conformists who merely appropriate the image of rebellion for the sake of branding and to feel cool, and for the first couple paragraphs and the title of the essay she'll persist in putting scare-quotes around the words "rebel" and "rebellion" to drive this point home. This is a consistent tactic of Rand when writing on movements or viewpoints she disagrees with; she modifies the aesthetic perception of the subject, usually while providing vague or...

This week Nicole is on break for Christmas, so enjoy this guest post by DC Kurtz, who can be followed here.   You can read Merry Box here A common thread among people who watch Neon Genesis Evangelion for the first time is "Why don't these people just go to therapy?" That's not a bad question, but I think there's a better one: why don't they just fuck? I mean come on: Evangelion is dripping with sexual tension, even on a surface level symbolic analysis. The imagery of penetration is present in virtually every single episode: The insertion of the entry plug requires penetrating a hole in the back of the Eva's neck and defeating an Angel relies on penetrating its AT field, which is referred to as "the light of the soul" and is intrinsically tied to the individual ego. Now let’s go a little deeper, past the levels of Freud, and we see that NGE goes above and beyond into the realm of Georges Bataille. See, Bataille posits that during penetrat...

We're in kind of an interesting place right now; VR is finally starting to look viable as gaming platform, but it hasn't hit a point where it can properly saturate the market, so at this point all we've really got are a bunch of early experiments with the format. Despite this, the directions that it pushes things in are pretty interesting. Of course there are the obvious things; I don't think anyone's going to be shocked that most of the VR porn videos out there are shot from a POV perspective with a dude sitting or laying on his back. There are subtle differences, however, in the acting and, at times, framing of the scenes. I don't want to oversell this, it's usually still very much a traditional porn video, which is to say decidedly not the best that the art form has to offer; There's a reason I haven't reviewed any live-action porn videos on this blog, and that reason is that I don't know how many ways I can say "This [is/is not] hot an...

Content warning: molestation, rape, sexual violence Last week I spoke pretty positively about one of Asanagi's VictimGirls doujins, and this week I thought it might be interesting to provide a counterpoint with an entry in the series which I find it difficult to enjoy, primarily on moral and cultural grounds. VictimGirls 21 took place in a clearly fantastical setting and involved the use of magical garments and mind control, which made it very easy to compartmentalize the morality of the scenario and simply to project onto whatever participant most appealed to your desires; VictimGirls R: Molestation Eradication Campaign , however, takes a... different approach. The book portrays a feminist movement against molestation in which young girls appoint themselves as unofficial anti-molestation activists and publicly call out molesters on trains. Said movement is almost immediately revealed to be comprise primarily of self-serving, sadistic, or suggestible girls partaking in spurious...

Content warning: References to politically- and racially-motivated violence, and quite a bit of coarse language directed toward gay and transgender people, including a slur which you can probably guess pretty easily. One of the biggest talking points online among all segments of the liberal political population, be they liberal in the modern american political sense, centrist, or conservative, is free speech. So much so in fact that it's become something of a meme among people who either don't know or don't care how terrible making fun of "freeze peach" looks to people who don't have a particular theoretical background to contextualize such statements. I say this as someone who was myself one of those centrists who would always get really conspicuously upset at anything I perceived to be a danger to freedom of speech, and get really annoyed at people who ridiculed these concerns. (It doesn't help that a lot of the arguments posted in response were infu...

I feel like writing about DOOM, to relax a bit in between bitching at Ayn Rand's work. Let's go through The Ultimate DOOM and DOOM II, and review each level along the way, shall we? In the proper order, of course; DOOM Episodes 1-3, then DOOM II, then Thy Flesh Consumed. No Final DOOM because fuck Final DOOM. Playing on UV -fast. (I feel like Ultraviolence is the best difficulty to review DOOM on because it feels like the most intended way to play, and I want to use the -fast tag because I just recently ran through all these games on Ultraviolence and don't want to get bored. It should be noted that -fast does arguably fuck up the balance in places but whatever, I like it.) Oh, and I'll be using the GZDOOM sourceport with the software renderer, running at 1080p, full mouselook, no graphical bells and whistles. TEXTURE FILTER PLAYERS PLEASE LEAVE. With that out of the way, let's tuck in to one of the greatest games ever made, starting with the shareware: Knee Deep ...