Hello Universe, and welcome back to my blog. It's been a while, so dust off your propensity for ignoring the ramblings of an adolescent gay and brace yourself for some Opinions.
I have started my fourth semester at University, and I have been reading a lot more than usual the past week. Approximately a bajillion percent increase over the entirety of December, in fact. I fell off the bandwagon hard last year (the first since the creation of my Goodreads account that I failed my annual book goal.) Specifically, I've been reading late nineteenth century literature, which has contained a piercing critique of the Western University. Its mostly fair, and targeted at the incredibly narrow definition of success present in higher education, along with the accusation that university is so incredibly isolated and insular that it cannot meaningful connect with people. With the rise of the internet, however, some very high quality social and artistic critique has fled the university in a different way. Instead of standing in ready and equally inaccessible defiance, blog posts, tweets, and the "Share" button have democratized higher level thought and art by simply making it (almost) free. If you seek it, you no longer need to enroll in a university that costs thousands of dollars annually, or subscribe to an expensive journal. Many forms of knowledge are available with a quick google search, and a well curated social media presence can present a dynamic and highly discoverable intellectual landscape.
The question now becomes how to best engage with this critique, now and in the future. In this blog post, I will attempt to address possible methods of categorization and preservation in what I am increasingly convinced actually is the cyberpunk future. If you are looking for test subjects for your super strong robotic limbs or laser eyes, please contact me.
The first question is how to engage with social media critique in the now. For this to be relevant, you must (1) engage in pop culture of some form. This can be video games, television, social media itself (see below), books, music, journalism, or a myriad of smaller and more niche interests. You must then (2) discover and attach yourself to people who engage in the same culture as you. Sometimes this can come from outside sources - following the author of a particularly interesting oped, or discovering a podcast hosted by someone you know from another podcast which in turn introduces you to a new cohost who is on another podcast who recommends a book... you get the picture. This is one of the most social aspects of "social" media is that so called "content creators" (artists, writers, critics, pundits, etc.) tend to be linked by social and professional connections and will recommend new things to their audience. After securing a baseline community you can (3) disseminate the thoughts of both yourself and others to the community, through the use of composition and sharing, and (4) expand and cater your personal experience through pursuing more specific content (mechanically, removing some from your feed, and following the creators of particularly engaging shared content). This approach is time consuming, but rewarding, for the adequately equipped, economically independent, and high school or better educated audience. Those without those advantages are essentially cut off from these conversations. Despite having a lower upfront cost to engage with than a university, social media demands that you seek specifically the content you need as opposed to informing you of what will be relevant to you through some sort of set curriculum, and has very few opportunities for engaging with those without a basic set of advantages. Those without a computing device with a reliable internet connection, a certain level of privacy and autonomy, and the rhetorical ability to engage with arguments in a respectful and constructive way will struggle to access any of the benefits from social media, while others will simply never know such criticism is present on the platform.
         The Internet has also created new forms of content to critique. The presence of memes in the mass culture dates back to well before the internet, but the democratizing power of social media, and before it forums, promises that iteration is rapid and diverse, with those of many walks of life congregating on a single format, remixing and adapting it until it inevitably fades or, in rare cases, enters the popular lexicon as a new unit of culture. This transformation is almost undocumentable, and is representative of the challenge of collecting and analyzing social media as a whole.
Also pressing to those who would use social media as an outlet for intellectual exploration and expression is the process of archiving works. Who among us has not failed to share an interesting tidbit we read somewhere, or bookmark a good article, only to have it lost to the sands of time? The incredible speed and frequency of creation in a social media environment prohibits the human memory from committing every odd fact that is encountered. We form opinions on the accounts we observe and follow, and yet how often do we have a concrete idea of the events that led to that formulation? Who even is this person whom you have no memory of following? Someone with an interesting one off tweet? Maybe someone who has changed their name and icon, possibly several times? It is impractical for every person to hold a record of their social media, as it is too dynamic. This leaves those who are originating the content to be the bearers of documentation. There are more tools for this, such as timehop, and on the twitter platform tools such as storify help present threads legibly, or the official Twitter product "moments" which can be used by creators or end users. The question still remains, though, what is worth documenting. What will stand the test of time and be relevant a year from now, a decade from now, possibly generations to come? What posts will seem important only to be viewed a waste of hard drive space later on? The choice of what to document becomes equally important as to how to document. There should be no doubt, however, that documentation must be done. Social media is a platform run by corporations, and anything viewed as unprofitable will be inevitably discarded. Posts that are a decade old may be viewed as nostalgic, but as time goes on, will platforms like Facebook and Tumblr really need to maintain posts with zero interactions after almost 20 years? Will these well known platforms now even exist in the future? What if an update to the service makes it impossible to access archives due to broken links?
There are a few solutions to these problems. The first is to take up the responsibility as a creator to document, archive, and preserve all of your work, whether it be in a local digital archive or on paper. The curation is up to the originator, and maybe it will make a good book, but this is ultimately time consuming and can detract significantly from one of the primary values of social media, its ease of use and accessibility. The second solution falls in a similar line, but from the user point of view, it may be valuable to support the durable goods of critics and artists you value, both in order to sustain them but also to  permanently capture some of their thoughts and ideas. It is much easier, after all, to reference an autobiography or book of essays than a tweet circa 2012. The third is less practical, but as a society, we might pressure our institutions to attempt to document these things. If you recall I opened this essay with a brief discussion on the relative democratizing power social media can have on education. While I truly believe this, I also believe that our traditional educational structures, i.e. colleges and universities, are in a position to document, catalog, categorize, curate, and analyze social media interactions. This could include, but not be limited to, academic ethnographies, literary analysis compilations of Amazon reviews, television (which is at the moment truly worthy of academic study) reactions in real time and in the weeks following being recorded, psychological evaluations of the most popular accounts at any given time, and otherwise. There is already significant work into how the presence of the internet is changing our culture, but it is time academia recognize social media not only as a component and purveyor of culture, but an active creator, analyzer, and critic to culture itself.
For further reading on this subject I highly recommend the book SPREADABLE MEDIA by Jenkins, Ford, and Green, for a helpful view into the nature of Social Media. Otherwise, I encourage you to seek out new connections online. In troubled times like this, a lot of insight is to be gained by simply following the retweet trail to the source and seeing if maybe that weird person with a stop watch icon is actually the smartest person you've ever read. Or something.

Fantastic Beasts is Not. Good.

1) The idea this is a conservation movie is kind of laughable. The main conflict is man v society, not man v nature, and the use of positive natural forces is... forced. 

2) The treatment of PEOPLE is terrible in this movie. We blow things up, we erase memories, we are just straight up elitist. But with the wave of a wand all damage is undone.

3) The lack of explaining ANYTHING is horrific. Apparition is CONSTANT, and never explained, Wands are just presumed (especially the apparent horror of the snapped wand which like ???), the interior of the briefcase is BONKERS but also we spend very little time there?
4) The political themes are clumsy and heavy handed, especially due to the fact that they're WIZARDS. Wizards. Have. Magic. They are BORN different. They are almost not human. You cannot address humanity's propensity to be terrible to each other based on how they treat aliens/humans. This is a fallacy. 

5) Newt is an obvious self insert. He's painfully smart, he causes all the plot, he's incredibly smug and *infallible*, he saves the AUROR. Jesus the treatment of Emily in this movie is diabolical. She's consistently shown not as frustrated by the system, but a servant to it.
6) Finally, they're all better main characters. Newt is an interesting and unique character, but he's hard to identify with. It'd be like if Hermione narrated the Sorceror's Stone.
Emily can follow a typical cop arch and play into the crime tropes of it. 

Kowalski is a straight man and can follow the fantasy arch of learning, SLOWLY, dear god, about all these wondrous things before he (maybe? please?) had some sort of impact on the climax.
7) This sucks. It all sucks, it's clumsy as a social metaphor, it's lazy as a fantasy film, it's confused as a visual oddment, it's boring as a crime story, and it's disappointing as a Harry Potter EU exploration.
Please don't see Fantastic Beasts. I mean, you probably will, but brace yourself for a heaping pile of garbage. 

*************Spoilers***********************

1) We just murder Creedence. No care WHATSOEVER to the fact a kid died. "oh, he was sick" is pretty weak imo. We're promised Newt or Graves (AKA Grindelwald, who is essentially Voldemort but less persistent) will save him. Two very smart, capable wizards aren't enough to save an innocent life. That's a fundamentally despairing message. 

Why You Should Play Hatoful Boyfriend

Yes, that pigeon dating game.

....

     So, you're still here? Good.
     Hatoful Boyfriend, originally developed by Hato Moa and released in English territories by Devolver Digital, is a japanese style dating sim where you romance a wide variety of pigeons. And I think you should play it.
     The first thing Hatoful Boyfriend does is introduce you to yourself through a conversation with the boy-next-door, Ryouta. You're a human girl that lives in a cave, eats a large amount or ramen, and attends an otherwise all bird academy. The birds speak, they read and do math, they have history class. It's very high school. The game introduces you to various birds, and then demands you choose one right away. The best part of forcing a decision from you early on (there is a "Game Over" screen in HB, though I had to intentionally fail in order to see it, for achievement reasons) is that there are no wrong choices. Every character is more complex than they seem on the surface, and every storyline present is emotionally satisfying. Will you fall prey to the maniacal control freak? Will your heart be broken by one whose own heart is yet mended? Will you meet a god? It's all possible within HB, and you'll soon forget that it would be strange to date a pigeon. The game makes frequent, sometimes painful, bird puns. That's part of the fun. I won't spoil any of the routes here, but there are some real tear jerkers in there, as well as a few laughs and a lot of personality digging.
     The most important part of playing HB, though, is doing it right. The game is very good from the start, but things really pick up once you reach the post game. That's right: There's a secret ending to HB, and it's the best part of the game. If you romance every possible bird (this includes the ones not unlocked until about halfway through the story), you have the option to launch into a choose your own adventure style mystery-thriller ending to the already strange visual novel. It's a strange, powerful, and compelling sci-fi story that not only hides in a dating sim, but thrives off of the fact that it is inside it. You can read more about it here <link incoming>. Or you can just play it for yourself.

On Within the Ruins "Gods Amongst Men"

This is a metal song. It's very heavy/screamy. But it's supposedly about Magneto. The chorus proclaims "Free your mind/trust in me/ i'll show you what it means to feel complete" which is technically addressed to mutants. Could it also be a call to satanism? No, I'm just crazy. I'm no PMRC nut. But also you should think about how similar those two characters are. Give up your humanity/soul and become something more. Align with my power and I will free you of petty morality. Etc.

Basically, Magneto is Satan. Thanks for clarifying that Within the Ruins. I appreciate it.

Tomorrowland Critique

As with all of my critique, this post contains SPOILERS for Tomorrowland. Possibly also 1984 and The Lord of the Flies.
Where to start? This movie has so much going on. Let’s start by saying that Casey (Robertson) has been recruited by mysterious forces to save the future. She’s challenged by the disenchanted, the greedy, and the inflexible, but aided by her robotic companion Athena and the disgruntled Mr. Walker (Clooney). The trio ventures into an alternate dimension, a futuristic utopia, to save our world, but when things aren't as wonderful as they seemed, they turn to violence to change their fates. That brings me to my first issue with the film: a lot of stuff explodes. Basically every time we would have a down tempo moment, where emotional revelations aren't being made or fantastic jet-pack battles aren't being had, something randomly explodes. Casey blows up crane controls, Walker blows up the wall between worlds, and Athena blows up just about everything she comes in contact with. In a high octane movie, these explosions wouldn't feel out of place. The real issue is that between explosions, everything isn't car/jet-pack chases and shooting - it’s weird theoretical physics, Sherlock levels of deduction, and mystique. The two clash, making the pacing closer to that of a typical novel - chapter end highs - than a movie. The plot sags at several points- Casey literally takes a nap, when a simple cut would've sufficed. This is generally in service of both the bizarre framing mechanic of two people (Casey and Walker) telling the overarching story, and filling the audience in on an overwhelming amount of exhibition. This may sound contrary to the mystique the film strives towards, but this is evaded because all of the exposition reveals that you actually know very little about the rules of this film’s universe. What are the rules governing interdimensional travel, robotic intelligence, and the altering of the future? There don’t appear to be any consistent ones, making the suspension of disbelief highly difficult, especially during the film’s ultimate scenes, which tend toward the absurd. This is compounded by the amount the film is trying to achieve - it’s a story of hope, redemption, coming of age, love, and the corruption of society, but not told from two or more points of view over 500 pages, but by a camera, in a little over two hours. Casey, Walker, and Athena are an awkward trio, two experts and an ingenious amateur, who do not function as a group of three on any level. it’s awkward, and makes for underwhelming off moments.
So, if the plot is unfulfilling, maybe the writers room managed to fit a meaningful message into the film. I certainly believe they tried, but I don’t believe they succeeded. Firstly, I had begun trying to decipher the film’s motives by about an hour in, and half an hour later was still undecided. There was an obvious frustration with society’s fatalism and apathy, an admiration of idealism, and a thought that optimism and freedom will ultimately prevail. This is contrasted, however, by an awkward elitism and determinism that muddies the message from something of a “Disney does Interstellar” to more of a “Disney likes Engineers.” Apathy is the villain of Tomorrowland, and that’s an interesting, high level concept that is handled fairly impressively. It infects our heroes and enemies alike, and mirrors our reality nicely. The fact that it had to be artificiated is awkward- one would imagine that modern society does not need a giant brainwashing machine to resign itself to inevitable destruction. The destruction of Tomorrowland is credited to the special people that populate it giving up - much like Irrational Rapture, Tomorrowland is in ruins when our hero arrives - but it could have just as easily collapsed under the weight of a world that didn't believe in it. It is times like these that I miss the fairy plot device. Those special people are another issue with Tomorrowland’s theme. Instead of being a land of idealism and broad appeal, or even the happiest place on Earth, this Tomorrowland is an exclusive club, a secret dimension that only the best and brightest are invited to. This is maintained throughout the movie, and never challenged. Of course the special people get privileges. It’s only fair, right? I imagine the hands on this script were those that had been told from a young age they were destined for greatness, naturally intelligent, creative, talented. They work at Disney, after all. There isn't a hope of integrating the world with Tomorrowland, of making the future a reality - only of making sure that all the special people get access, instead of the more select few that were already there. This couples with determinism. The first evidence of determinism is the idea that recruits are children - the most frequent age appears to be late high school / early college, though a few older and few much younger people are invited. This, along with the utter lack of redemption for the films hastily introduced and disposed of villains, make for a very rigid view of people’s personalities. The characters are flat, with our perception of Walker changing, but his internal feelings are never truly challenged. (There might be an argument that Athena’s last acts are signs of development, but I believe they are consistent with her prior actions.) This is coupled with the dealings of the future - although variance is permitted, the future, especially short term, has almost no degree of change. This is broken in three key moments, one of which allows for a very cliche sacrifice to occur. The determinism debases the fundamental message of “be hopeful, and work hard, and the future is open to you” to something akin to “the smart will prevail, and save the masses out of the kindness of their hearts.” The underlying theme of the movie, then, is to have faith in the future - someone smarter than you has already seen it, and they can make it real. This implies that one must try their hardest, fulfill their part, and avoid fatalism and apathy. The line specifically that “the future of destruction asks nothing of us today” reveals that we should be helping, although the film never explains exactly how. The opening image of the disassembly of the NASA platform gives us some indication that we will need to pursue science more focusedly in order to save ourselves, while conserving our resources and maintaining peace are also shown as desirable traits from the masses. Society’s “race” toward the apocalypse, the modern fascination with desolation, is scorned, revealing a failure to appreciate that the apocalypse is a highly convenient setting to deal with extremely heightened personal drama. The Walking Dead, Borderlands, Y: The Last Man all use intense and insane post-apocalyptic settings to amplify already relevant themes of trust, humor, and sexism. Ultimately, I believe Tomorrowland fails to deliver its theme of optimism in favor of one of elitism, though being heavy handed enough to display both openly.

The spectacle of Tomorrowland is something to behold. Fast cuts between dimensions, spectacular modes of transportation, rocket ships, and cosmic energy are depicted in stunning quality. Explosions and robots alike feel real, and the vision of the future offered, though depressing, is realized gorgeously. I wish the movie had spent more time against the backdrop of an altered skyline, because these shots were gorgeous, and easily the best reason to go and see Tomorrowland. Especially notable was anything falling from the sky - the film understands inertia very well, and while not especially realistic, jet-pack sequences are full of tense fun. The more disturbing imagery here is centered around delivering the villain’s just desserts that I do not believe he deserved, and that the film does very little to justify, but it never becomes gorey. There is even a rocket launched from the Eiffel Tower, and it’s spectacular (if generally irrelevant to the plot, since apparently it’s fairly simple for the man in charge, whomever that is, to open portals between dimensions). Things glow blue, red, and white, are shaped wholly impractically, and most rooms are at least 90% dead space. The future is captivating, while the present is also gorgeously shot. Dirt is kicked up “behind” us, Casey’s assumptions are not nearly as mystifying as most of Sherlock’s (though still utterly remarkable), and the flow from scene to scene, if a little slow, feels highly natural.
So, did I like Tomorrowland? I thoroughly enjoyed watching it, and it’s message, while muddled, was satisfying to unravel and understand. I’d recommend it as a bad movie worth watching if you want to see a mediocre exploration of Interstellar’s optimist themes, or if you want to see thoroughly inferior Tron style images of the future. (The opening Disney logo is quite spectacular, though).

Thanks for reading! Did you / do you plan on seeing Tomorrowland? What did you think? Do you agree that it’s elitist, but optimistic? Or is it actually a parody of itself, the ultimate apocalypse movie (think 2012)? Maybe it’s something else entirely, a childish jaunt? Share below!

Hi!

So, I'm new here. I'm Hunter, and this is a critiques blog. I assume there are comments, so here is my comments policy: Disagree with people if you like, but always be respectful. Do not link irrelevant materials, especially those designed to generate revenue. Maintain intelligent discussion at all times, and focus on building your own arguments, not tearing others' apart.
So what will this blog be? Basically any time I have something to say about a work, I'll write about it. Movies, books, video games, TV seasons... anything that I think is trying to say something, I'll decipher. I don't take requests.

And some quality noncontent: Favorites!

Color: Orange
TV Show: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Movie: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Book: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (especially paired with Lev Grossman's The Magicians)
Classic Novel: Orwell's 1984
Play: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Musical: The Drowsy Chaperone
Videogame: Bioshock
Album: Tie between This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing to Think About (Modest Mouse) and Whatever and Ever Amen (Ben Folds Five)

Ok, so that's me. I'm writing something new soon, so check back!