Let's Play 17776 Part 2: Point Of Play

If the point of play is to distract us from play being the point, what happens when our games conflict and contradict each other? Pull meaning from the void with me in Part 2 of my readthrough of 17776.

Read more about fun theory, table legs, existentialism, and what scares me most about 17776 and being immortal

Lessons learned from my miserable time with Shotcut

Hungry for more video content of me crying about fictional spacecraft? Check out the extended cut of part 2

Read more about hypercomics history and 17776's forerunners in A Horizon of Jostling Curiosities

Let's Play 17776 Part 1: Is This 'Football'?

In the future, we hang out. Hang out with me as I read Jon Bois's epic sci fi hypercomic 17776 for the first time and discover the power of duration art, the stress of immortality, and the fact that everything continues to basically be Homestuck.

Bonus Patreon Content:

Read more about 17776 and its hypercomics techniques

Go behind the scenes and learn the workflow I used both to create this video and to end my own existence

Hungry for more video content? Can't wait till next week? Check out the extended cut of part 1

Hack Monuments: The Methods of -punk

For Steampunk, Solarpunk, and Cyberpunk, aesthetic and meaning go hand in hand. In an age of extinction and resurgent fascism, -punk has a choice: hack that meaning, or become a passive monument for others to fight over.

Inside: Game Disintegrating

Inside, spiritual successor to Limbo, is a game about control, but is anyone really at the reins of the game's dystopia? And can an experimental documentary from the 80s give us insight into the game's radical pessimism?

Spoilers for Inside; no familiarity with the game necessary.

Hey, What's Going On (With Sense8 Perception)

I said I was going to write about the orgy scenes in Sense8. This is what came out instead.

You've Got To Throw Your Zombies On The Gears!

Solarpunk is broken. It's going to take some weird lateral moves to fix it, and one strange Steampunk strategy might offer a solution.

You Didn't Get Rogue One: A Monograph of Essays on Star Wars RELEASE

Despite its box office and critical success, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story faces an astounding number of misinterpretations. Rogue One is a controversial film, inspiring some with its improbably radical politics, while seeming to distress as many others with its unconventional storytelling and seeming break from the tone of Star Wars. Misreadings range from the well intentioned ("It was fun but the characters had no agency!") to the insidious ("Is the Empire really so bad?"), but they share one quality: for one reason or another, their writers just didn't get Rogue One.

Featuring revised and expanded versions of Storming the Ivory Tower's Star Wars articles alongside essays exclusive to this collection, the new monograph "You Didn't Get Rogue One" lays out not just a defense of Rogue One but a defense of the more radical potential lurking in the ostensibly thoroughly corporate Star Wars franchise. In order to do so, though, the essays have to take down decades of misreadings by everyone from Catholic pundits, Internet shoutymen, and even... George Lucas himself! The Dark Side clouds everything, but this collection takes a step towards bringing Rogue One and Star Wars into a new light.

You Didn't Get Rogue One can be read through Storming the Ivory Tower's Patreon:

• For $1 you can read the raw text of the book
• For $2 you can download the open source graphics used to illustrate the book
• For $3 you can hear the podcasts that accompany the articles
• For $5 you can download the full monograph in epub form, fully illustrated!

Sense8 and Identity

What if Sense8's production and form was as diverse as its casting? As the show's rapid dance between states of cancelled and not-cancelled continues to bewilder me, I try to parse out the show's interest in difference, and some of its current limitations or failings.

It's Basically Fucking Ridiculous That Sense8 Got Cancelled

Sense8 is dead. But all the pieces were there for it to be revolutionary. I don't even have a good summary for this article I'm just fucking pissed that we had all these pieces in place and still for some reason it didn't come together, and I'm left with this multi-part series that I wrote most of before the show was cancelled so like what the fuck. Here's some bewildered rambling about tech history I guess.

Back to the Past: Why Samurai Jack Season 5 Was Great; Why The Ending Failed

Samurai Jack finally got back to the past. But why has the ending left so many feeling let down, and what does the show's brilliant animation reveal about the narrative's fatal flaws?

Infin8 Stream: Is Sense8 The Future Of TV?

We live in an era defined by the Epic Streaming Show and Netflix. But is the Netflix hit Sense8 the precursor to an even stranger and more brilliant kind of hypermedia storytelling still to come?

Announcing: A Star Wars Collection

Rogue One is a controversial film, inspiring some with its surprising, improbable radical politics, while seeming to distress as many others with its unconventional storytelling and seeming break from the tone of Star Wars.

This upcoming (as yet unnamed) collection, featuring revised and expanded versions of Storming the Ivory Tower's Star Wars articles alongside exclusive content to tie it all together, lays out not just a defense of Rogue One but a defense of the more radical potential lurking in the apparently thoroughly corporate Star Wars franchise, and takes aim at the various misreadings of the series propagating on the Web.

The collection will be available in downloadable epub form, alongside four previous StIT collections, to $5 supporters of the Storming the Ivory Tower Patreon, and the raw, unformatted text will be available for just $1. Subscribe now as a $5 Patron to get your name in the final book as a sponsor of the project!

(Note: Twilight of the Superheroes is still happening, it's just much much more complicated than I expected, so I'm pushing out this collection while it's fresh in order to tide everyone over while I continue working on the Superhero project in the background.)

Nerd-On-Nerd Violence: Why Is Geek Star Wars Crit So Lousy?

"Star Wars fanboys don't know what they're talking about," grouses Mr Plinkett! But aren't all these bad Star Wars theories, Red Letter Media's popular garbage videos included, totally characteristic of fanboy analysis? And does geek culture encourage us to disengage from the empathetic core of the Star Wars franchise?

You'll Teach Me And I'll Teach You: Do Pokemon's Mechanics Actually Work?

Pokemon has a brilliant mechanical narrative where you're encouraged to treat your pokemon as living creatures, and use them to fashion an identity for yourself... or at least that's how it works in theory. In practice, do Pokemon's mechanics actually work... and is Ian Bogost right to suggest that maybe chasing after narrative in games is a lost cause?

Reload the Canons! is an ongoing Storming the Ivory Tower project where I play through The Canon of videogames. Except I'm not playing the original games. Instead, I'm playing only remakes, remixes, and weird fan projects. This is the canon of games as seen through the eyes of fans, and I'm going to treat fan games as what they are: legitimate works of art in their own right that deserve our analysis and respect. You can support Reload the Canons! and my other projects on the Storming the Ivory Tower Patreon.