Sundays are for trying to find and exile the giant house spider that ran under my bed yesterday. I slept with the lights on and wrote most of this round-up standing on a stool. If any part of my body touches any other part of my body I assume it’s the spider, and hit myself with a dustpan. I may have to dispose of any shoes I’m not currently wearing.
Let’s take our minds off the spiders with some writing about gooners. I’ve lobbed that word around in articles as though it’s just a synonym for lonely guys who want to jack off. I gather there’s more to gooning than that. Here’s a rich brew of thoughts from Sam Bodrojan.
In place of real sex, there is the impulse to make porn everywhere. Gooning is the eroticism of apathetic, animalistic distraction. The gooner dehumanizes themselves and their objects of affections at once. They deny themselves climax in pursuit of a greater reward – pleasure without end, alone. I think that sounds like a fun way to jerk off sometimes! But I worry about why, exactly, it is the only filth not actively antagonized at the sexual bedrock of modern America.
On the subject of delayed climax: we don’t have the scope for weekend/evening news at present, or we’d have already told you that credit giant Mastercard are trying to deflect responsibility for the recent Itch and Steam NSFW game delistings and takedowns. Here’s cheery RPS fanzine PCGamer with a rundown. GOG, meanwhile, have put together a time-limited bundle of free games with sexual themes in what they call “a statement against censorship” – there should still be a few hours left to claim it by the time you read this.
In the latest Vittles free Monday essay, Laura Goodman writes about the brutal trial and error of bringing up children with allergies.
Z is being sick fifty to sixty times a day, and over the weekend we’d become so panicked by the volume of vomit we’d taken her to A&E. The doctor is annoyed because as far as he’s concerned Z has a bit of reflux and he’s already told me that; he’s received word that I attended A&E and has taken my ‘ticket’ as a stain on his excellence.
That same afternoon, at a clinic, Z doesn’t weigh enough and a new health visitor cocks her head to the side and asks me why I think that might be.
Here’s a very long, scattergun anatomy of the disregarded lefty leanings of the “techbro” trade, from the 90s to the present, which makes the case for building alternative comms networks while trying not to engage in “techno-optimism”. I think it defaults to a “technological/social” binary that perhaps undermines the core sentiments, and there are some throwaway lines, but it brings together a lot of useful precedents, texts and arguments, and as a resentful spawn of the humanities myself, I do hear the overarching point about literary pinkos dismissing programmers out of hand. An excerpt:
The basic problem is that we’ve explored only a tiny fraction of what is possible and that the tools we have available to us kinda suck. Moreover we should not expect the vectoralists to build them for us given that activists are not a good source of revenue and require highly specific use cases that are not relevant to the majority of people (and that’s before we even get to the question of how these tools threaten their power). While tools will never remove conflict and friction within a movement, I think that some of the worst pathologies stem from the underlying structure of these tools and as such can be overcome or at least diminished through better tools and infrastructure.
After reading this short illustrated history of the camera obscura, I would like somebody to build a faithful simulation of one in a game. Perhaps it’s a job for the Outer Wilds devs.
If that’s not enough fancy literature for you, you can download a PDF of recent academic tome Historiographies of Game Studies for free from Punctum Books. 781 pages of reflections on the development of a field, from the likes of Ranged Touch podcaster Michael Lutz and former First Person Scholar editor Emma Vossen.
Today’s music is Herbie Hancock’s Chameleon – some no-nonsense jazz funk to distract me from the gentle pattering of tiny, hairy feet. Happy Sunday!
