A quick roundup of things I’ve liked recently, before I head to Melbourne and Hobart this week!
Asura (2025)
This seven-part Netflix series set in 1979 Japan is ostensibly about four sisters discovering their father’s infidelity, but it’s really more about family and life itself. Hirokazu Kore-eda is best known for his family drama movies like Shoplifters and Monster, and in this series he shows off his knack for beautifully depicting everyday life in motion – people talking while cooking, cleaning, knitting, and moving house.
It’s probably the best thing I’ve seen this year, and that’s including the excellent Severance S2. Don’t believe me? Believe The Guardian, New York Times, and AV Club!
The Roottrees are Dead (2025)
This PC/Mac game puts you in the shoes of a genealogical researcher tasked with reconstructing a sprawling family tree containing the owners of a billion-dollar candy corporation. It’s set in 1999, so in addition to printed materials, you also have a very basic search engine to rely on; essentially it’s Return of the Obra Dinn crossed with Her Story and an ARG.
The game does an ingenious thing that makes it so much easier to play: instead of creating entire fake webpages with tons of text and graphics, the game provides a synopsis of what you find there, written in the second person like a text adventure. At first it’s jarring, then it feels perfectly natural – you don’t waste time wondering if this or that detail is a clue.
This is great design because it also saves huge amounts of developer time. As an erstwhile ARG designer, you can’t imagine how much energy we spent making fake web pages. I won’t say that time was wasted, but it would be inappropriate for this kind of game. I would go so far to say that it is one of the most interesting advances in ARG design I’ve seen in years, and it’s precisely because it is stepping away from the pernicious “this is not a game” mindset that prioritises illusionism and realism above all else.
It’s all fun stuff, though the “Roottreemania” add-on strained the bounds of the game engine – and my patience…
An Urban Allegory (2024)
Alice Rohrwacher is one of my favourite filmmakers, if only because of her luminous La Chimera. This new short film is about the fable of Plato’s cave and is set to the fantastic music of Thomas Bangalter (one half of Daft Punk).
Here’s the music used for a different artwork in 2023:
There’s even a six hour version of the track!
In the Land of the Unreal (2024)
Lisa Messeri undertakes an ethnographic exploration of Los Angeles’ virtual reality development community and in the process examines VR’s claim to be an “empathy machine”. I had to read this twice because Google Books ate my highlights, and I enjoyed it even more the second time around.
What’s Up, Doc? (1974)
The funniest screwball comedy I’ve seen in a very long time. How far we have fallen!
Faith in Fakes
I bought this collection of essays by Umberto Eco for his 1975 Travels in Hyperreality, on America’s obsession with “realistic fakes” like wax museums, replicas of ancient buildings and fine art, and of course, Disneyland. Here’s what he has to say on Pirates of the Caribbean:
The pirate show lasts a quarter of an hour (but you lose any sense of time, it could be ten minutes or thirty); you enter a series of caves, carried in boats over the surface of the water, you see first abandoned treasures, a captain’s skeleton in a sumptuous bed of moldy brocade, pendent cobwebs, bodies of executed men devoured by ravens, while the skeleton addresses menacing admonitions to you. Then you navigate an inlet, passing through the crossfire of a galleon and the cannon of a fort, while the chief corsair shouts taunting challenges at the beleaguered garrison; then, as if along a river, you go by an invaded city which is being sacked, with the rape of the women, theft of jewels, torture of the may-or; the city burns like a match, drunken pirates sprawled on piles of kegs sing obscene songs; some, completely out of their heads, shoot at the visitors; the scene degenerates, everything collapses in flames, slowly the last songs die away, you emerge into the sunlight.
Everything you have seen was on human scale, the vault of the caves became confused with that of the sky, the boundary of this underground world was that of the universe and it was impossible to glimpse its limits.
There are also some excellent essays on the modern interest in the Middle Ages, and on why people like going to real world lectures when they could just as well watch them on TV. But what I found most powerful was the preface to the collection, in which he explains why he writes newspaper columns alongside his work as a professor:
I am anxious, insecure, and always afraid of being wrong. What is worse, I am always afraid that the person who says I am wrong is better than I am. I need to check quickly the ideas that come into my head. It takes years to write an “academic” book, and then you have to wait for the reviews, and then correct your own thinking in the later editions. It is work that demands time, peace of mind, patience. I am capable of doing it, I believe, but in the meanwhile I have to allay my anxiety. Insecure persons often cannot delay for years, and it is hard for them to develop their ideas in silence, waiting for the “truth” to be suddenly revealed to them.
That is why I like to teach, to expound still-imperfect ideas and hear the students’ reaction. That is why I like to write for the newspapers, to reread myself the next day, and to read the reactions of others. A difficult game, because it does not always consist of being reassured when you meet with agreement and having doubts when you are faced with dissent. Sometimes you have to follow the opposite course: Distrust agreement and find in dissent the confirmation of your own intuitions. There is no rule; there is only the risk of contradiction. But sometimes you have to speak because you feel the moral obligation to say something, not because you have the “scientific” certainty that you are saying it in an unassailable way.
There’s a certain type of newsletter writing that’s become popular: endlessly researched and jam-packed with statistics, quotations, sources, slides, all to provide “scientific” certainty. I like many of them, and I can’t deny it’s affected my own writing. Perhaps I should be more like Eco and write “at white heat, in the rush of an emotion, stimulated by an event … hoping that someone will read them and then forget them.”
One final thing on Eco. I knew about the famous old “Macs are Catholic and PCs are Protestant” analogy, but I didn’t know he was the author! Here’s what he wrote in 1994:
The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach – if not the kingdom of Heaven – the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.
DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.
Eco himself owned eight computers as of 1997 – what a guy! In 2000 he added this:
The various releases have led Windows 95 and 98 to become decidedly Catholic-Tridentine, along with Mac. The torch of Protestantism has passed into the hands of Linux. But the opposition remains valid.
mssv 