News

Support Your Local Libraries

I’m occasionally political on this blog. Normally it’s bringing up discussion of the politics of a particular work and how it impacts my perspective on it while I’m reviewing it or Let’s Playing it because, ultimately, all art is political. However, I don’t, you know, get into current events – partly because my audience is kind of international and partly because with exceptions Current Events discussion ages poorly. However, there’s a current political issue going on in the US that, indirectly, puts this blog under existential threat – so I need to talk about that.

Libraries are under attack.

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News

Editorial: Thoughts on Trump’s Video Game Violence Conference

Kotaku has reported that the Trump administration held a conference at the White House of industry executives and various “Think of the Children” groups like the US PTA about violence in video games in the wake of the most recent school shooting. Now, for the past 8 or so years, this had been a settled issue, since the Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. EMA ruled that video games were an artistic medium and thus could be art, and in turn the 1st Amendment applied to them. Continue reading

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film, Reviews

Movie Semi-Review – The Devil Came On Horseback.

"The Devil Came On Horseback" Movie Poster

This review is going to differ from my usual review format, mainly because in this case, the film I’m reviewing, which is a documentary about the Genocide in Darfur, asks a few questions, and I’m going to try to give some opinion based answers.

The Premise:

Brian Steidle was a captain in the US Marine Corps who, after his term of service was up, left the Corps and became an unarmed monitor for the African Union, tasked with monitoring the cease-fire between the Sudanese government and rebel groups. There he observed the Darfur genocide, documenting it with thousands of pictures and hundreds of reports sent to the AUC commanders, which were ultimately classified and ignored. Continue reading

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