The Aces and Demis; About Asexuals, Aromantics and Demisexuals

Recently a friend of mine and I got into a conversation about asexuality and whether or not aces can be included within the LGBTQ "circle" (although the short answer I suppose is yes if we expand it to LGBTQA+ but I don't like short answers). While going through my thought process I think I realised that I don't know if I feel like I have any real knowledge or preparedness about the topic and well... It's hard to make an informed opinion on anything without... You know. Being informed. So that's what I'm going to do today and hopefully it's as fun for you as it is for me, let's get to discovering!

Asexuality is defined by the lack of explicitly sexual attractions to a person of any gender but does is not limited to a lack of sexual drive or a lack of romantic feelings towards any gender. For example a person might be asexual but may categorise themselves as hetero-, homo- or biromantic. One can also be aromantic, which just means romantic feelings aren't the primary drive for attractions, and I think this is something that's either less common or just less spoken of. Aromantics can be hetero-, homo-, bi-, pan- or asexual, Aromantics just don't have romantic feelings towards any gender. While these distinctions are helpful, one can dumb asexuality down to two categories, those being aromantic asexuality and romantic asexuality.

There's a misconception that asexuals can't engage in any sexual activity, such as masturbation or kissing. In such cases, it's usually asexuals who are aroused by the physical stimulus, and not by sexual attraction to any person. Kissing feels good, masturbation feels good, and I think it's important to remember that one can be aroused by physical stimulation alone. Which, I know, is probably weird to anyone who's never tried jerking off without pornography or a mental highlight reel but yeah. Physical sensation is sometimes all you need. Some asexuals even engage in sex if needs be, although there's usually no sexual attraction to the person they're sleeping with. And I mean, straight people often sleep with people they have no attraction to just to get off so like, I don't get why that's so hard. Anyway, not all aces do engage in sexual activities, and not all aces don't. But yeah.

That's a thing. That some people do. You gon' hafta remember dat.

This is also not to be confused with demisexuality, which is the lack of explicitly sexual attraction to either gender without an explicit emotional or romantic connection. Demisexuals can also be hetero-, homo- or biromantic, but sexual attraction is just not the primary drive, sometimes there's simply no sexual attraction to anyone except the person the demisexual has that emotional connection with. I think by definition a demisexual cannot be aromantic or asexual, but people often confuse the two. The same can be said about demisexuals and masturbating or any other physically stimulating activity.

It's a lot to take in. It's probably confusing to anyone who isn't really all that present in LGBTQ+ circles. But if you need to think about it a little more, here's a fun activity you can do right now! It's called the purple-red scale. Try find out where you lie! I'm a proud E2 myself, although somedays I'm a little more E3. E2.5? Hahahaha.

As for whether or not aces or demis should are included in LGBTQ+ and our spaces are also their spaces, I had mixed opinions on it at first. My initial reaction was, maybe not. But upon further reflection, I think they're unequivocally part of the LGBTQ+ family. Aces and Demis are, like us, othered. They face erasure too. Look at Riverdale, that had no qualms erasing Jughead's asexuality, an almost inseparable part of Jughead's character which was recently canonised in the 2015 reboot (although, let's face it, Juggie always acted like an ace and we all pretty much assumed it even before it was "canonised"). Aces are also affected by issues of same sex marriage, as homo- or biromantics may want to marry for the insurance benefits, or because they're in love and want to spend the rest of their lives with someone. They're also stigmatised. They're also suffer from heteronormativity.

I think the day the LGBTQ+ stops adding the othered to the family is the day we lose what's so special about us, All the little us-es. Plenty of aces and demis, if not all of them, fought for us, and we should be fighting for them. Our rights are their rights, and their rights are ours. Our stigma is theirs, and their stigma is ours. They suffer as we suffer. And ignoring that isn't what being LGBTQ+ is about.

Trust me, I know. I'd kill for sexuality to be simpler. It's unfortunately just human to be uber complex. We aren't simple. Our sexuality isn't simple. And why would you want it to be? It's kind of what's great about us.

But otherwise, just remember, it's only as complicated as you make it. And even if you don't "get it", acceptance and love is what's going to make it easier. That's a universal truth in life.

We're all better off if we treat each other excellently.

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Iron Fist; What works, and what doesn't

Stop me if you've heard this one before; A rich white guy gets stuck somewhere remote and comes back with scruff on his face and martial arts expertise.

I remember watching Arrow for the first time. It was a breathe of fresh air, this new grittiness. It was grounded. From the first episode, I was in love. Episode after episode, this felt mature. It felt like something unmissable.

It just made it all the more disappointing when after watching the first episode of Iron Fist, I knew I'd just seen all this before, and I've seen it done much better.

This isn't some juvenile Marvel versus DC debate, and while I revel in drunken arguments about which of the two is better, the issue isn't about the respective houses that owns the titans being spoken of here. The issue is simply that Iron Fist has a lot to work with, but somehow comes off as entirely derivative.

In fact, you aren't just getting a shitty version of Arrow here. Episode 2 delivers a scene in a mental hospital that Legion's first episode knocked out of the park.

And after that, a fight with some hatchet wielding henchmen tries to bring the show back to its martial arts roots, but all I could think was that at this point in its runtime, Daredevil had done a continuous take fight scene down a hallway choreographed to perfection that was a feat of cinematographic excellence that comes so rarely it'd be a crime to miss out on it. It was unmissable. Daredevil had already done Rabbit In A Snowstorm, which is probably the best episode of anything ever made, dwarfed perhaps only by Jon Snow's siege upon Ramsay Bolton.

There's another moment where Danny breaks into Joy's apartment and I wanted to be impressed by the clearly CG'd feat of jumping off the tip of a pole onto a second story balcony, but then I remember in Arrow's first season, episode 3, there's a segment where Oli climbs up a wall to dig out a bullet. Stephen Amell doing that physical stuntwork was a beyond entertaining to watch. Danny's balcony scene is... Meh.

And I think that's what Iron Fist comes down to. You've seen it all before, hell, you've seen better in other Netflix series. There's more corporate restructuring and legal banter than any Iron Fisting. As comically laughable as the hatchet henchmen were, at least there was finally some fighting. Iron Fist isn't innovative, or new, but that could have been overlooked if it weren't so damn boring.

The score of Iron Fist isn't anything worth writing home about either. I can't say much about it other than that these cheesy hip hop songs almost make me believe I'm watching something way more interesting than I actually am. There's a bit where a guy murders a whole bunch of people to A-ha's Take On Me and he stops singing just before that falsetto part and I couldn't help but think to myself how if I was a mass murderer singing Take On Me, I'd delay my killing to hit the high notes. At this point I was skim watching, trying to find something to care about.

Finn Jones also has some rather unflattering deliveries. His performance as Loras Tyrell was perfectly passable, hell it was some of my favourite parts of Game Of Thrones, so I'm struggling to understand why his lines come off so awkward. Perhaps it's the accent his forcing, or some bad direction but it just starts to grate after a while.

The thing that works the most against Finn as Danny I think the show makes is just how goddamn interesting Colleen Wing is. She's awesome. I mean, she's stupidly awesome. Every time she's on screen I change my opinion of the entire show. She outshines Danny in every way, despite not having a magic hand that can blow up steel doors and stuff. And when we cut form her scenes, I feel genuine sadness knowing I'm going to have to watch either more corporate dicking about, or Danny trying and failing to woo Joy. Jessica Henwick just gives a stellar performance, and a part of me says fucking fire Iron Fist from the Defenders and add Colleen Wing. If Daredevil can join, so can she, and let's be honest here, this version of Danny's a bit of a wet blanket.

As for the "whitewashing" controversy that followed Iron Fist... Well, that takes a bit of dissecting. Iron Fist isn't as guilty of white-washing as it is of the white savior trope. Danny Reed has always been  a white man. And if you need a strong case for why diversifying white roles can work well and add much needed subtext, remember that The Martian Manhunter's alter ego, John Jones, was white in the silver age, but the now definitive version of his alter ego is a black man.


 And while an Asian American actor could have brought a fresh perspective on the role. I doubt Iron Fist would have much benefited from it, knowing what a snorefest the series is.

Netflix also needs to figure out how to do crossovers. As of yet, Luke Cage and Jessica Jones are the only two Defenders to have even met. Hell, CW has three ex-Glee stars in Vancouver at the same time and they'll use that paperthin excuse to have a musical crossover! As interesting and fun as Claire and Jeri are, neither are half as interesting or as fun as seeing main characters interact. Okay, well Claire has some awesome lines. And so does Jeri. They're background characters of other shows and they're both still more interesting than Danny, how?!

Tom Pelphrey does his very best Michael Shannon impression as Ward Meachum, and I don't hate it, but it does make me wish Michael Shannon was actually in the show. Overall, I actually like Tom as Ward a lot. His performance is at least pretty captivating, and if he ever wants to audition for Mad Men or Boardwalk Empire, he most certainly could.

Joy is love interest. I couldn't really find anything interesting to say about her other than that she mostly reacts the appropriate way to a strange homeless man coming into her life and claiming to be her dead childhood friend.

Even the opening sequence is uninspired, and unlike Jessica Jones' cool 1920s detective theme song, or Daredevil's operatic theme over a bust forming from blood, you could swop out the intro sequence of The Last Airbender (I have to much respect for the original Nicktoons show do drag it into this) and nothing would change, it's just a dude waving limbs about for a minute or so!

Overall, there isn't nearly enough martial arts, mystical fisticuffs or even old fashion street brawls to warrant this show a watch. It's derivative and somehow a fresh flavour of crap at the same time. If you ask me, you can give Iron Fist and Iron Miss.

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Riverdale; The State Of Things Midseason

I have mixed opinions about this show. I don't want to outright admit it's bad, because it's really not, but it's hard to call it good.

I'm not some Archie Comics uberfan, but as a kid I remember buying the digests from CNA for about R30, which was usually the change I had left over after I bought my Asterix and Obelix comics. I still have a bunch of Archies laying around the house with torn pages from how much I read them. They made me laugh as a kid, and still do. Maybe they weren't deep, or extensive by any means, but they were mine and helped make me the person I am today. And I think that anything that can make a kid who moved around a lot and generally was too shy or didn't stay long enough in one place to make friends laugh is a pretty decent thing and needs no justification of its existence.

I was kind of psyched that CW would be on the show. And when I heard it was being produced by Greg Berlanti, I think I genuinely shed a tear. I love his Arrowverse shows. So when Riverdale caught onto my screen and I finally started watching it, oh boy, were there problems.

Let's talk about them.


While CW does a great job in diversifying the cast, they butcher a lot of characters in the process. I like the the main cast isn't just all white anymore, I think the Archie comics did have an issue there. But I think the Archie comics never had any problem with characterization. You knew from the moment you looked at Archie he was your all-American heart-throb who could be a total klutz and kind of a lady killer, but he had a heart of gold. Betty was the archetypal girl next door, and Veronica was the new stuck up rich kid on the block that you eventually found yourself liking. Reggie was the jerk and competition for Veronica's affections but he was always good for a laugh, Jughead was the unwilling sidekick who would relunctantly offer moral support Weatherbee was the goofy old principle who found himself at the mercy of his student's antics, and Ms Grundy was Professor Mcgonagall.

If you see bare watermarks of those strong characters in the show, you might understand the frustration at the way CW and Berlanti have modernised the show. Furthermore, they removed Grundy entirely. Well, they did and they didn't. They backtracked on Grundy later, because bad ideas are bad. Spoiler alert, Grundy is actually not actual Grundy but someone with the name Ms Grundy who actually has a different name and is someone else. I still wasn't happy, because imagine Harry Potter without Minerva Mcgonagall.
I started liking Riverdale a lot more as soon as not-Grundy left. I think there's a lot more draw in the relationship between Jughead and his dad and between the kids and their parents' drama. When I look back and think about the shows I liked when I was sixteen, Glee comes to mind, and that hyperactive pacing, bright colours, memorable cast are missing from Riverdale.Swap out Finn for Archie, Rachael for Betty and Quinn for Veronica and Glee would have made a better Archie adaptation than Riverdale.
Chuck is turned into a genuine evil person. Sure, chuck wasn't much to write home about, but he was one of the few black characters in the Archie comics and it made me feel a little mad. Betty is also sociopathic, Jughead is broody and 3edgy5me with a constant grimace and the disposition of the type of teenager who enjoyed Edgar Allen Poe a little too much, spouting nihilism and bleak one liners ad-nauseam. Jughead's crown was also changed, and this is for me one of the more heartbreaking ones. I own the double digest that shows how Jughead's crown is actually a cut up fedora with buttons pinning the brim to the top, and it was a unique and interest piece of backstory. The cut up beanie might look a little more relatable, but it's a lot less timeless, I'll say that.

Jughead was also made asexual in recent canon, and well... For all the diversity issues CW fixed, they broke one by making an ace no longer ace. Asexuals are underrepresented in media as is, and as a bisexual who constantly has to deal with bi-erasure, that sucked hard find out.

I personally never much cared for Archie being a klutz, from YA novels to teen dramas, there's enough protagonists who trip over flat ground to get me to roll my eyes for most of it. I'll admit that, at least in Archie's case, it did make him more endearing as a kid, my favourite being how he kept walking into things as he tried to catch snowflakes on his tongue. He later tries to solve this by taping a message to his head to remind him not to catch snowflakes with his tongue, but then walks into a lamp post because he was too busy paying attention to his own reminder.

Archie now is kind of bland.

He's innoffensive for the most part, but there's a reason it's called Riverdale and not Archie; The TV Show.

Oh boy, and let's not forget that queer bait moment with Betty and Veronica at the cheerleading try-outs, what the actual fuck was that about?

The problem with Riverdale is the same problem I had with The Vampire Diaries when it first aired, and that's for the first 8 episodes or so, the show doesn't know what to do with itself. There's a lot of time spent finding it's feet and at the midseason point, it finally has, but the road getting here has been a garbage fire. And like many hard-boiled adaptations, Archie finds itself missing something super vital from its source material.

Whimsy.

You know, like, being playful and unashamedly cliché, being bright and fun and silly.

Kinda like Glee was.

I miss Glee, I really do. And Riverdale makes me miss Glee more. I look at Riverdale and miss Ryan Murphy's hyperactive style. I miss those lightning fast deliveries and lightning fast cuts, with those sugary sweet moments that made me cry. Glee gave me the "coming out" talk I never got from my parents. Glee introduced me to more genres of music than I can count. Glee also was just so epic, even to this day.

And despite having a Glee crossover in the comics, Riverdale decided to take no influences from the show other than musical set-pieces.

There's a good show under all this. There are moments of pure gold in there tucked between the vacuous crap that only the die-hard CW fans and teen drama lovers are going to get to see.

Riverdale is at best the modern take on Archie you didn't really ask for, and at worse, a show that butchers a lot of its source material as well as themes that its network is known for being great at tackling, whilst being at the Pretty Little Liars end of the quality spectrum, if even that.

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Screen Crunch; A Handful Of Problems

When porting games onto a handheld, or even sometimes when designing graphics without proper communication with the programming team, a fun little thing happens where a game can literally be made too large for the screen it's going to be played on. We've all been there, we've all felt the icy sting of being hit by enemies and obstacles you can't even see;

The magic of Screen Crunch.

Now I thought this might be only be an issue affecting handhelds and retro games, but hey, it happened a whole bunch in the life cycle of the PS2 and sometimes it even happens on modern consoles.

Usually screen crunch happens when a game made for a system intended to be played on a large screen is ported to a system with a much smaller screen, and thereby "crunches" the player's field of view. Less often, graphical assets are made too large for the available on screen pixels, and thereby making less screen visible. To illustrate, here's Sonic The Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive versus Sonic The Hedgehog on the Game Boy Advance.

And here's Sigma Star Saga for the GBA, a game with sprites wayyyyy too big for the GBA's screen.

This immediately adds a layer of artificial difficulty, since the player has to now react to objects they can't even see. In some games it's worse than others, ie. turn-based RPGs aren't going to show the same difficulty spike due to screen crunch as an action platformer.

The easiest way around this is to, of course, design smaller assets, and adjust physics accordingly.

The unfortunate downside is that smaller sprites don't often sell games.

Graphical fidelity is a marketing moneyshot that the publishing industry has to rely on to push products. After all, you can't physically play a game trailer, you can only look at it, and if it doesn't look good, it won't sell. I think gamers have unfortunately adopted the mentality of appreciating graphical fidelity over visual aesthetic.

But that has changed! Look at indie metroidvania game Axiom Verge, which make excellent use of HD screen space and sizes down the sprites, while upping the mechanic prowess of it's protagonist.

Yes, that little speck of  a person is you. And the advantages of this is that you *always* know when an enemy or obstacle is incoming and you.

I think this is something to always keep in mind. And while graphical fidelity is always nice, it should never come at the expense of your game's mechanics. And while it's easier to simply aim for higher resolutions and absurd amounts of anti-alias and millions of on-screen particles and polygon counts that you need a calculator to reach, sometimes you can achieve the same level of engagement by simply using a better colour palette, more striking character designs and some thought through world-building.

Visual aesthetic is going to always trump graphical fidelity. It's basically the entire selling point of Nintendo games, they sell consoles with last generation hardware but make characters and games so iconic that they can compete with modern triple A titles. Case in point, Super Mario 3D World on the Wii-U is much less graphically intensive than The Witcher 3, but the two reached nearly the same level of critical acclaim (SM3DW reaching scores of 9 to 9.6, with the Witcher 3 reaching scores of 9.3 to 10).

That's right, PC gamers, a Wii-U game reached the same level of greatness as one of the juggernaut games on the personal computer, and did it while wearing a furry cat costume.

So when designing your own games, just remember, you don't need to be a graphical juggernaut. You don't need assets that take up that much screen space. Just make a good game and give it its own flavour and quirk. Visual Aesthetic sells just as well as graphical fidelity.

And above all, let us poor gamers see the fucking bottomless pit coming.

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#MenAreTrash; A few thoughts

A new thing has been popping up on my social media feed, which is a collection of anecdotes, counter-culture statements, statistics and reactionary statements attached to the tag #menaretrash.

The air is poisoned, the ice caps are melting, and men are trash. Probably unsavoury, but in the general sense, it's true. Some are going to argue about it, and it's going to be mostly pointless because the arguing usually doesn't accomplish anything. If we all dropped everything and combined our human intellect and resources for a day, we could probably solve it all. But then we'd  all have to take a day out of our lives, and we only get so many of those.

My first thought was, well ,yes, I suppose, men have historically oppressed women, been violent towards women, subjugated women, sexually assaulted women, hell, men have done all of the above to other men for not being "manly" enough. You could swop out trash for any number of adjectives, including but not exclusive to garbage, shitty, genocidal, misogynistic, toxic, oppressive, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and in the most general sense it will ring true. Hell, you don't have to look far, there are parts of the world where women aren't allowed to drive, study, organize, choose who they eventually marry, show any parts of their bodies among other things. In the western world there's a gigantic debate about whether a woman is even allowed to make a choice about a fetus growing inside her. Men are literally bothered with the physical insides of a woman they can't see and subsequently try making laws to control those bits because God forbid women make their own choices.

In all this it did strike me to wonder if this will accomplish anything. The feminist side of me is revelling at all the butthurt manbabies with hurt emotions because a bunch of strangers on the internet called them a bad thing, and some of their friends kind of agree. The skeptic side of me did start to wonder if this isn't an exercise in futility. After all, it's hard to imagine this having any longevity apart from the initial traction it's already gained.

While I've read some genuinely rock-solid points in not only defense for the tag and it's users but definite reasons to support it, I've also read a bunch of defenses which can ultimately be summed up as "because you don't think men are trash, maybe you are trash". Sure, it's a clever way to put down a detractor and there are plenty people I don't want to debate the issue with because, let's face it, the ratio of people with something genuinely interesting to say on the matter versus special snowflakes who've never been insulted in their lives is disproportionate and well, at some point I have to get back to scrolling through memes and geeking out over stupid 90s videogames. But there is a culture of dismissiveness. They disagree, so they must be mostly conservative, which means the eventual argument that's going to break out from this will mostly be a waste of time. I'm not going to ask anyone to listen to every argumentative ass-whistle, because most of it is a steaming pile of crap. But there are valid criticisms. And you are going to run into one, eventually. And you're not going to want to, but I urge you to consider for a moment pushing aside doubts and trying to listen.

Another weird thing I've noticed happening is the defenders of the tag trying to almost deny detractors the right to criticism. And I'm not going to give any detractors credit here, as of yet the most nuanced thing anyone has managed to say is that generalizing is generally bad and calling half the people on the planet garbage is probably not the best way to get them on your side. Sometimes detractors devolve into criticisms of the far left, which is weird because it's not the far left that's saying this, it's actually normal women noticing terrible things and vocalizing an observation they've made. Your beef isn't with those darn leftists and their little feminist clubs, and it might feel that way because it is people with generally left-leaning political views propagating the tag, but just listen. You're going to have to tell real women who've been through real trauma why you think they're invalid for vocalizing an observation about their every day experience. And yes, perhaps the nomenclature is objectionable and you're perfectly entitled to that opinion, hell, it's a rather popular and valid opinion, you also have to try put aside your own personal objections and try understand why this isn't a viewed as a put-down on men and as a statement about everyday womanhood in South Africa.

If nothing else, it's a pretty interesting social experiment. The amount of men responding to #menaretrash by actively proving how trash men can be is astounding, like watching a bee repeatedly fly into a window. Furthermore, let's be real, we tolerate and even glorify song lyrics, television and media that actively call women bitches and hoes, but when men get called trash, we react like a bunch of precious snowflakes who've never been insulted in our lives. It's a little eye-opening, if nothing else.

Look, I'm not saying to not be critical of it, because let's face it, there is going to widespread use of this to backhandedly talk down to almost literally half the planet and you know what, yeah, that's a shitty way to do anything. No one wants to be scrolling down their feed on some idle Tuesday and be told their entire gender is trash, regardless of how well-intended it may be. I also don't know if I feel great about people putting the tweets on shirts and making money off them. I get it, bills to pay, capitalist economy, free market, if you're good at something don't do it for free. I don't care about what people wear on a shirt, wear what you want, none of us are going to escape the degradation of entropy anyway. But if it doesn't rub you a little wrong that the people making these shirts don't care about the message behind it and just want to make a quick buck off a social media trend, you're a more sensible person than I am.

I do think that if women can go through their entire lives being referred to by gender specific slurs, even when those don't apply to them (ie, being called a slut for wearing skimpy clothes despite not being especially sexually active, and this is of course not avocation to call a woman anything but her name) us dudes can take one for the team and deal with women calling us trash, even if we don't deserve it. If only to get one man to open his eyes and say, huh, so this is what women go through.

But all in all, the air is poisoned, the ice caps are melting, and men are trash.

Sure, the both the aforementioned and the responses to them ring true. Not all the air is poisoned, not all the ice is melting, not all men are trash. But despite repeatedly saying that a stupidly large amount of air is poisoned, a stupidly large amount of ice is melting, a stupidly large amount of men are trash, it's not like a lot of people give a fuck about poisoned air or melting ice caps if it's not happening right in front of them. Life is full of little worries. People have jobs to get up for in the morning, debt to pay off, taxes to do, groceries to buy, existential dread to keep at bay. If it's not my air that's poisoned, if it's not my ice that's melting, why should I give a fuck, and who are you to tell me that I'm a bad person for caring about my own issues over the issues of others?

Naturally this logic is a little flawed, because these issues affect everyone.

But getting people to care about the issues that don't directly impact them is hard. It's really fucking hard, trust me. And if you're saying you've never avoided or put down a good cause just because it was inconvenient at that point in time, you're lying. Hell, I'd wager as to say you probably do it on a regular basis. We've got limited time, we've got limited resources and honestly, limited fucks to give. And yeah, we've all at some point gotten made because someone called us out on it, and it does feel like bullshit because most of us are generally not bad even if we could be better. Sure, it's probably wrong of us to get mad and it probably isn't bullshit, but that's how it feels because life is hard and fuck it, we've got to keep ourselves entertained before we all fuckin die and our existence just ends and the more time spend getting called out is the more time that could have been used laughing at tasteful memes.

Maybe we won't ever understand each other, and me pretentiously trying to hold a higher ground while deriding both sides is just an attempt to feel better than everyone else and bolster my own ego. But truth is that the air is actually polluted, the ice caps are actually melting, and men are actually kinda trash. Not all air, not all ice, not all men. But too much air, too much ice, too many men.

And we're all going to get to that age where we're going to have to leave a legacy, plant trees we'll never sit under, fuckin leave something for our idiot great grandchildren we'll never meet. We probably don't want to leave them unbreathable air, melted ice caps and trashy men.

I don't wanna leave my great grandkids trashy men.

So I guess I'm just asking, hey, guys, going forward, can we try not be trash? If nothing else, can we stop sending unsolicited dick pics?

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Why I Love Pixel Games, and Why You Should Too!

(A piece of Background Art I did for a personal project)

Anyone who was born before the year 2000 has probably at some point played a video game console that wasn't capable of rendering polygons. Whether it's the Nintendo Entertainment System/ Famicom, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the Atari 2600, The Genesis/Mega Drive, early arcade cabinets... You have some memory of videogames before the glorious age of 4K Gaming at 144FPS. Back when we measured the fidelity of games by how many colours could be shown on screen at once, not how high we can set the resolution, anti-alias, particle effects, field of view, shadow quality, texture quality etc. etc.

And there's a genuine nostalgic feeling that spurts butterflies into your tummy and fairy flutters into your heart when you pick up one of these games and you're like "Man, I played this so much as a kid!"

And while everyone might get a different feeling, for me, playing the Metal Slug arcade cabinet, along with Daytona or 1943 or the various incarnations of Pacman gives me that feeling.

So imagine my surprise when I got my first computer, I was told, hey, people still like games like that! Hell, we've made an art form out of using small images and pixel based graphics!

(Insert Shameless Plug)

My mind was blown. At the time, Grand Theft Auto and Need For Speed were at the height of their popularity but my shit munching calculator of a PC couldn't even handle that. Eventually I got my first rumblepad and a copy of the PC port of Bubble Bobble. I think that solidified my love of gaming.

I bring this up because, well, old games have a special place in my heart. From the NES knockoff consoles they sold in the toy aisle of our local supermarket, to the various ports of old games, these were an important part of history. Super Mario Bros on the NES is a classic. It's not just a classic, it's a landmark. It's as important to the history of gaming as the Mona Lisa is to the history of art.

It bugs me when people just write these games off. Yeah, things were done that way because of technological limitations, but those limitations brought real innovation. And a lot of developers could learn a thing or two by imposing some of those limitations on themselves. Not only that, a lot of first time game developers get their start in classic 2D pixel games.

And some manage to make games that rival the R600 ($60, roundabout) experiences we get today in Triple A titles by simply emulating old games.

So let me talk about that!

The sphere of Indie Games is bursting at the seams with games that emulate older, more classical games! From Shovel Knight, to Momodora; Reverie Under The Moonlight, to Axiom Verge, to Owlboy, to Cave Story, to Crypt Of The Necrodancer, to Downwell, to Hyperlight Drifter, to Stardew Valley, Sonic Mania, Disgaea, Terraria, Undertale, Hotline Miami, Nuclear Throne, Luftrausers and the list goes on! Seriously, you don't have to look hard to find quality games made with a hi-bit pixel art style.

Hell, Flappy Bird was a game using retro aesthetics that got everyone and their mother to play videogames, some even for the first time! I think that's amazing! A game made in a fraction of the time it takes to market games like Call Of Duty or Fifa got non-gamers to play a video game!

Of course, Flappy Bird cheats. For starters, it can scale images, and most of our phones are capable of displaying 1080p pictures. Flappy Bird rotates sprites, which you definitely couldn't do on the NES.

But there's this emergent art of making games that look like the could have been made for the NES or SNES, but look much, much better. I say emergent but it's actually been going on for a very long time. It's just that we've only recently figured out that these games, that are made for a fraction of the price of a Triple A experience and that the end user pays a fraction of the price for, are actually really, really good.

One thing that always annoys me is people assuming that pixel art games are done as a nostalgic cashgrab, which couldn't be further from the truth. It takes love, and patience, and passion to make a good pixel game. And another pet peeve of mine is writing of a style as "retro". Modern pixel games are made with modern sensibilities in mind (most of the time, you'll get a couple that haven't fallen out of love with the golden age of gaming, bless them). These are games meant to be played today, by today's gamers.

And pixel art is definitely not a lazy person's art. It takes time. any given artwork on Pixel Joint will show you how incredibly difficult it is.

One of my favourite pixel artists of all time, Paul Robertson, even does little animated shorts for adult swim (you can check one of those out here!)

And I think there's something that pixel games have that other games just don't.

Modern games will do everything in their power to show off the spectacular feats that the latest hardware can pull off, but when that spectacle fades, the game ages considerably faster. By emulating an older art style that's much less demanding on hardware, pixel games age considerably slower, simply by looking unashamedly retro from the get-go. Pixel games also... Well, they remind us of when videogames were videogames.

Videogames nowadays are multi-billion dollar productions that aim to immerse with graphics that are near photorealistic. So much time, money and effort is spent in trying to trick your mind into thinking the computer generated images on screen are actual things and people from the real world that sometimes, a lot of game design just gets skipped over. Pixel games are usually, unashamedly, videogames. They do videogamey things. Platforms float in the air because you need something to jump on. Enemies have AI about as intelligent as a comatose toddler, but they're super satisfying to bop. And don't get me started on how generic orchestra music has invaded everything. With the sound hardware limitations of the NES and such, composers had to work really hard at creating themes with strikingly memorable melodies. Think about Green Hill Zone, the Super Mario Brothers theme song, the Bubble Bobble theme song, the Zelda Theme, the Megaman 2 theme, or that bass line of the Final Fantasy battle music! Music had to be memorable to disguise how legitimately poor the hardware was at emulating real instruments, and how few audio channels the composers had to work with. Wanna hear a timeless song? Listen to Vampire Killer from Castlevania. Want to hear exactly how goddamn timeless that theme is? Listen to the modern mix of Vampire Killer from Castlevania Harmony Of Despair. Or something more modern? Roller Mobster from Hotline Miami 2. Damn, that song is a jam. Or if that's not your thing, how about Megalovania from Undertale? UGGGH, SOOO GOOOOOOOODDDD.

Videogames don't make songs like these anymore. Want evidence of that? Just compare the soundtrack of the first Ratchet and Clank with it's 2016 reboot.

So I guess what I'm saying is, Pixel games are awesome. Pixel Games are fun. And if you've written them off, give them a try again! Hell, a brand new pixel game is going to cost you less than a second hand Triple A title, god damn, if that isn't enough reason to invest in these smaller, more awesome games, I don't know what is!

Indie Games deserve love too. And I don't just mean games like No Man's Sky or Mighty No 9, I mean, fuckin look how disappointing those were. I'm also talking about the little ones. The pixel ones.

Go give them love.

Check out this vid from PBS Ideas Channel!

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Ghost In The Shell (2017); A Post-Mortem

Warning: [Beware of a few major spoilers for the 2017 live action film adaptation of Ghost In The Shell]

After having decided to watch Ghost in The Shell (2017), I can honestly say that I had mixed feelings. The more time I spent with Scarlett Johansson, the more uncomfortable I became with her as a protagonist. It wasn't abundantly clear why. She was alright, she could be a little stiff at times, and some lines were delivered a little awkwardly but overall her performance was inoffensive. I could even tune out and enjoy her stoic portrayal of The Major.

When the twist at the end arrived, it hit me hard. It was problematic. Here's why;

1. There was an Asian-American actress cast as The Major, buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuutttt...

So [Spoiler Warning] in the end it turns out Motoko is a runaway girl captured by Hanka Robotics and turned into a cyborg after rebelling against society... Or something. I'm unsure if my memory is foggy or if it just wasn't clearly explained but hey, her name is Motoko, and she is Asian.

Too bad she gets twelve seconds on screen.

I admit, I got angry. I was like, wow, that was just condescending. The studio went through the trouble of casting an Asian-American actress but couldn't be bothered to actually give her the lead role. I could practically hear the snide remark of some studio exec saying "See, we did cast an Asian-American as Motoko! We've got no racial prejudices!"

I had to look up Kaori Yamamoto, who plays the younger Motoko.

2. There's literally no reason for Motoko to be white.

There could have been. There could have been. I'm serious, there was a way to make this film show an active awareness for white normativity and add a layer of depth to the film that would have made this a breakthrough title that played entirely to the strengths of a caucasian lead.

All they had to do was say why Motoko's cyborg body was white.

And not subtextually, not in a throwaway line (if there even was a throwaway line, I definitely missed it) all they had to do was explain that Motoko was white because she was made to resemble a standard of beauty at the time, and that even in a dystopic future, society still views caucasian features as superior to that of people of colour.

Have her look at some mannequins in a store, or an ad on television, or something. Show Motoko that her face is an ever-present, an unobtainable ideal. Something. Anything. Instead, Motoko's cyborg body is white because Motoko's cyborg body is white. It could have been asian, or black, or indian and with the sound reasoning of there being no reasoning, no difference would have been made.

I get that studios are afraid of displaying to much left-leaning politics since it might alienate a part of the audience. But if you don't want to alienate the left as well as your core audience, don't make mediocre whitewashed adaptations of anime.

3. Problematic queer subtext

There's a moment where Motoko finds a sex worker on the street and they sit in a secluded room, and Motoko feels the sex worker's face. Motoko does this because she pangs for the feeling of organic skin and wonders what a human body feels like. The end result is that there's some rather heavy sexual tension. Which then makes you question Motoko's sexuality, and any hopes of queerness is bashed by the heteronormativity of her relationship with Kuze who is then revealed to be Hideo, Motoko's love interest fomr before she was taken.

Good old fashion queer bait strikes its head again.

Overall it's damn frustrating because there are parts of the film I really liked! The scenery was gorgeous, and I love Michael Carmen Pitt (although I still think there are plenty of Asian American actors who could also have gotten the role and done just as good a job). The Geisha automatons were creepy and spectacular. The film's fight choreography and stunts weren't much to write home about but they were entertaining. Some scenes were lifted right out of the original anime film and several shot by shot comparisons reveal how faithful this film was.

I've heard tell that a lot of the subtext is missing, and while I can't confirm that, I do feel like the film was a little thin with it's existential questioning but that's hardly it's most egregious offense.

Which means, with the way that this film flopped on opening weekend and the unfortunate casting of Death Note (My eyes roll into the back of my skull just thinking about the name 'Light Turner', ugh), this means that while GitS was, if taken without the aforementioned issues, an inoffensive adaptation, it wasn't great. It wasn't stellar. I don't even know if I could stretch it as far as good. It was passable. It did a couple things very right, but it did some Major (hah!) things very wrong.

And that unfortunately means it's still going to be a long ass time before Hollywood gets anime right.

Here's a great think piece from PBS Ideas Channel, check it out.

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13 Reasons Why; My thoughts.

First of all, if you're thinking about watching 13 Reasons Why, it's a show that explicitly shows a suicide, two rapes, and physical assault, as well as I think there was also a point where one of the kids experiences domestic abuse. I'm not someone who usually thinks too much of warnings, but as someone who usually isn't fazed by much shown on television, this is one of those rare circumstances I think that a warning for this kind of thing is in place. I do however support the notion that there are few things that should really be censored or not shown, and I can't fault the show for showing these things, I can only praise or criticize the intent behind it and the usage thereof. I also can't really talk about the show without talking about the things contained inside, which means this will be a post talking explicitly about suicide, rape and physical assault. Either way, spoilers will follow, so maybe watch the show first if you don't want some of the bigger elements to be given away. The show isn't easy to watch, this wasn't easy to write, and this serves as a warning to anyone reading this that might need to prepare themselves or avoid content that is triggering.

Trying to speak to the objective qualities of the show is impossible. It demands feeling and emotion, and anything I write is going to speak from my subjective experience. The shows does have a couple things it does do objectively well, and others it fails in. But for the most part, 13 Reasons Why is as much about what happens to the characters as it is about the experience of the individual watching it.



The ending shook me. As I watched Clay and Tony drive off into the distance in the Mustang, and Clay gives one last smile. After all the awful things that happen, Clay smiles. The tapes have been passed on, he's done what he can. He's said his piece. And maybe, just maybe, things might just get a little better.

But it feels out of place.

13 Reasons Why is heavy, from start to finish. It's a show that never lets up on its oppressive atmosphere. Any moment of levity is undercut by the ever lurking tension. Everything from the sound design, to the lighting, to the cinematography is designed to let you know just how bleak everything is. I think I have to praise just how violent and dreadful 13 Reasons Why has made its setting, which is honestly just another public school. A school that could in fact be your school. Every moment of it feels like something that could happen in the real world, something that can happen to you, or could have happened to you. And to be very honest, it depicts events that do, unsettlingly often, happen in the real world.

A very clever detail you might not notice is in the lighting. The past is bright. It's lit by these warm colours and bathed in a light that makes everything that happens before Hannah eventually commit suicide, seem like there's a small tinge of hope. The present is cold. The colour is drained out of the world. It's bleak.

To be honest, it's hard to watch. I felt like my experience watching the show was mirrored by Clay's listening of the tapes; It just couldn't happen all at once. I had to take breaks in between. I had to turn it off.

There's a beautiful moment where Tony is telling Clay not to listen to the tapes because he wasn't in the right headspace. And I felt the same way. Some of these scenes are genuinely hard to watch. after one big emotional blow, you have to stop for a bit, regain yourself, and come back in again. The show doesn't relent. It's one blow after another to Hannah, who obviously doesn't get a happy ending. I doubt any character really got a happy ending. You don't even know if we get justice for what happens to Hannah and Jessica.

The show just ends, with Clay and Tony driving off, hopeful that things may get better, the only warmth to be found in the picture is the red of the Mustang against a bleak, grey world.

I think I would like to address a criticism about the show, and the most often cited one, that it glorifies or at least romanticizes suicide.13 Reasons Why is not a PSA condemning suicide or a poster on a highschool wall telling you everything will be okay. It's not trying to be, and while I personally don't know if I believe anyone who doesn't already severely need psychological help will attempt to recreate or imitate the events of the show, there are things to remember about 13 Reasons Why. It's not a kids show. Despite the highschool setting and young actors, 13 Reasons Why is a dark, unnerving and graphic. This isn't some boy meets manic pixie dream girl highschool romance. It's about the real darkness in human nature that turns what might seem like a superfluous mistake into a genuine consequential event that leads to the death of a fellow human being. I think when you start, Hannah's suicide is treated as a non-thing. She died, the world moved on without her, everyone has to now deal with the consequences.

For the most part, Hannah's suicide isn't actively condoned or condemned, it just is.

Afterwards, you have to decide whether you agree with Hannah's motivations for doing what she does, and by that I mean leaving the tapes, not committing suicide. You have to ask yourself, if you're going out anyway, if it's okay to put people what Hannah puts people through. Listening to those tapes are genuinely traumatizing. It's akin to psychological torture. But it punishes those who did what they did. Most people get their comeuppance.

I think I have to praise the characters. No one is innocent, but no one is entirely bad. Bryce is a genuine friend and help to Justin, who comes from a broken home with no money. It makes it all the more heartbreaking and unbelievable when you find out what he's on the tapes for. Justin, who is a monumental ass, has a sense of justice. He makes mistakes, but he feels genuine remorse for his part in it all. Zach does a childish and petty thing to Hannah when she rejects him because of a severe to mild case of nice-guy-complex, but the fact remains that Zach is actually one of the nice guys. He's a good big brother. But all of these characters do genuinely bad stuff, with varying degrees. Only Tyler and Marcus come off a little one dimensional, but that's more a flaw with the writing rather than any fault with the performance of their respective actors.

And Clay and Hannah, they are genuinely flawed people. Clay is a compulsive liar, and he's damn good at it. He's stoic, he's awkward, and he just lies. He lies even when it's entirely unnecessary. He's secretive and distrusting. Clay says exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. But Clay (maybe arguably Zach as well) is one of the only truly innocent people on the tapes.

Hannah can be vindictive and spiteful. She pushes people away, and expects others to understand the hidden intentions in her actions. She can treat Clay especially badly, who does genuinely try to connect with Hannah. She fins amusement in exploiting the awkwardness of others, and often bears this pretentious air of intellectual condescension. None of which justifies any of the things that happen to her, of course, nothing could justify anything that happens to Hannah. But you don't immediately like Hannah. I'd go as far as to say that you're going to get to the end and not really know if you even like Hannah, despite feeling remorse and sympathy for her.

And can I just say, episode 10 can go fuck off. I felt myself getting so angry watching it. Hannah experiences trauma, and it catches up to her during a moment when she and Clay finally connect, causing her to literally repeatedly scream at Clay to "get the fuck out of here", with tears in her eyes, having witnessed exactly what she had just witnessed. Clay, then does exactly this, but Hannah later reveals in the tapes that she didn't want him to leave.

 And I think this is a problem at the heart of the show, for all it's condemnation of ignoring consent, when someone actually listens to someone taking back her consent, and then that someone stops like a rational human being would, the show backtracks with the same mentality of some neurotypical saying "We build up walls to see who cares enough to tear them down". I felt so angry because the entire seen is just condoning ignoring someone explicitly not consenting and I had to stop again.

I understand that this is the logical flaw that Hannah's entire character is based on, and the message is clear, you won't receive help if the way you ask for it is to lash out. But there are hundreds of better ways that scene should have gone down, and I just had to stop fuming for a few moments before I could continue watching.

Another gripe I had with the show was Hannah's narration.

Hannah has a little bit of this aloof, monotonous voice over, and it's meant to indicate how numb she is at this point, where she has decided to end herself, and that she'd punish the people who drove her towards it. This is where it gets a little personal for me, and I'm to try not let my personal experience interfere too much with my thoughts on the show, but I don't think I can write this review competently without bringing them up. I've struggled with depression for years, and I've been where Hannah was. I wrote two suicide letters, or at least, I got halfway through each before the actual act of what I was doing caught up with me, and I managed to pull myself back from the attempt each time, and have since not tried or attempted it again. Things did get better. I did make it out. I got to the other side and I'd like to think I'm a stronger person for it.

But I remember the state I was in.

I remember my hands trembling as I wrote and I remember scream-crying and I remember the gargantuan lump in my throat. I remember being practically unable to breathe. Hannah's voice over, sounding decidedly like a morning radio-host over anyone on the brink of ending themselves, is jarring. At times, it broke my suspension of disbelief, and I think anyone who has ever gotten to that point might experience the same thing.

Otherwise, the rest of my gripes are minor. I think the indie/folk tracks the show use are a little melodramatic, they can take away from a genuinely sad moment and give the show that quirky feel you'd get from your usual boy meets manic pixie dream girl films. The intro sequence also has a little too much quirk for me, it just doesn't mesh very well with the entirely oppressive and bleak atmosphere of the show. Swap out The Social Network or 500 Days Of Summer or It's Kind Of A Funny Story or The Perks Of Being A Wallflower or Easy A for whatever comes after the intro sequence and I doubt anyone would really think it out of place. Some dialogue can be awkward, some lines can be a little cringey, but nothing overly so.

The pacing can be a little slow, but that's more on account of about a two hour film's worth of source material being stretched into twelve hour-long episodes. Nothing deal breaking, but it makes watching the show all it once harder than most other things (like my Jessica Jones binge, and I have absolutely no regrets, Jessica Jones was fucking fantastic).

I do think the overbearing atmosphere works against 13 Reasons Why after a while. There are very few moments of catharsis. And even fewer of levity. An episode that broke the tension and just showed what everyone was like without anything going wrong for once would have been nice. All the hallucination scenes overstay their welcome really quickly, and 13 Reasons Why takes a weird joy in embarrassing Clay, which means as the viewer experiences the story through Clay, you'll be receiving a lot of secondhand embarrassment.

One thing I do like is how little agency Clay has. He is the eleventh person to hold the tapes. He doesn't act, he reacts. Things happen to him, he does make much happen himself. Clay is the lens through which we view, but I think Hannah is really the main character of the story. Clay is the Nick to Hannah's Gatsby.

Overall, 13 Reasons Why is actually a lot more nuanced than it initially seems, it's deep and complex with intensely complex characters. Morality is murky, and it isn't a going to preach anything to you, if anything, the show can be a little nihilistic at times. It's a show that asks you to make up your own mind about it and the themes it contains within. It's hard to watch, it's overbearingly bleak, it's sad and tragic and I definitely don't recommend watching it all at once.

But it's good. It's worth watching at least once, if you have the stomach for it. The show has genuine issues, and I don't even know if I can say I was entertained by any of it, I felt deeply unsettled for most of the experience. But I think that how unsettling it is despite its highschool romance setting speaks to how subversive it really is, and I can almost guarantee you haven't seen anything like it.

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Sonic Generations; Possibly the only Sonic game you'll ever need to play.

**The following post is a review I did on another blog I had that I have since shut down, which might explain to why it feels dated or different. I simply decided that it wasn't much worth throwing away.

Following the one thing those dudes from that one Game Review site we all love to hate had said (TL;DR version, IGN has a YouTube segment, a couple guys started talking about the 25th Anniversary party and the tease for Project 2017 and Mania, and then one of the blokes uttered, and this is not verbatim, "Sonic was never good.") I feel like I should probably bring up the one (of the few times, including Colors which IGN rated 8.5/10 so kinda dropped the ball there gents) that a Sonic game was just really, undeniably, unnervingly good.

So, in 2011 it was Sonic's 20th anniversary, and considering how his 15th Anniversary game went, you'd be justifiably skeptical about Sonic's future. At the time, the fantastic albeit just unfortunately Wii exclusive Sonic Colors had been released just one year before, and the surprisingly not terrible Sonic Unleashed (also known as King of the Framerate dips) had graced the world with their existence. The potential was there but would Sonic Team pull it off?

Yes.

In spectacular fashion. I cannot praise this game enough. It has rocketed me towards death more times than I can count, the final boss fight was subpar and underwhelming at best and honestly the game has the originality of a Twilight joke in 2016 (a little like this review actually). But to list all the great things about the game would take ages. But I think I'll talk about the game from a different perspective rather than the usual Gameplay/Graphics/Story/Soundscape format. It's boring, you can go find it anywhere and if you need a recommendation on whether or not to pick up the title I can simply give you a "fuck yes, be on your merry way and enjoy the adventure you little rascal."

But if you're still here with me, let me dive into the meat of it all here.

I wanna talk about Game Feel first. A kind of meh term to be honest but I can't really come up with a better one and far be it for me to try and sway the nomenclature of the world. But the question I want to ask is how exactly does it feel to play Sonic Generations?

Fantastically.

Let me first address the classic gameplay segments. There's a recurring problem I have with all the classic Sonic games, including the untouchable and ever fault-less Sonic 3 & Knuckles. It's the amount of weight Sonic had. I mean, he was a little tubbier back then but Imagine if you pressed on the accelerator of a car hard enough to feel the pedal touch the mat. Now imagine that whether or not that pedal was floored or only slightly touched, you'd still only accelerate at the same, painfully slow rate. That's what it felt like playing classic Sonic games. The issue is that Sonic felt like he never has any urgency, he starts at 0 and then slowly climbs his way to top speed, which is hella fast, don't get me wrong, but classic Sonic was always more about keeping momentum than quick reactions. In Generations however, this isn't the case. Sonic feels lighter, more carefree, and much faster. The camera is zoomed way out so you have plenty of room to see what's ahead. While it isn't perfectly up to scratch and you find yourself in Crisis City experiencing the worst of it due to this wind mechanic that honestly makes me see flames and curse the existence of Sonic The Hedgehog 2006 even more, but for the vast majority of the game, it feels fucking fantastic to zoom through stages, trying your hardest to get a good run and reacting as well as you can to the spikes and pits and enemies. In addition to remaking classic stages in a way that not only feels fresh but stylizing them to look absolutely gorgeous whilst allowing the player to witness the spectacle of it all, the modern stages are given the same treatment, putting them in 2.5D and Seaside Hill is the one that feels just the best. There's a point where you will end up on a certain lane if you lay a certain way but you can still see the other in the background and this kind of horizontality would have been impossible in the classic games, and the use of the z axis just goes such a long way into making the levels feel like a real place. Another fantastic improvement and I would be extremely poor to exclude is the choppers. In the original Green Hill Zone and in all subsequent games, the choppers are all dangerous hazards from the moment the appear on screen. However, in generations, they're safe for the first few frames where they jump up behind the bridge and only become a danger after reaching the fullcrum point of their jump and then dive down onto Sonic. It's small but it makes such a huge difference. Finding all five rings in Planet Wisp let's you unlock a homing attack for Classic Sonic but I never felt it was necessary. I never felt like at his most basic, he felt like he needed something more. And I think it goes to show how timeless the classic Sonic formula is.

And now that we've gotten the boring fluff out of the way, let's talk about the real star of the show. Modern Sonic. Sonic as he is today. One issue that I am so glad didn't carry over from Unleashed is the problem unleashed had with lanes. Quick stepping with Sonic in Generations is always perfect and I am baffled at just how tight the controls are every time I play. But onto the feel.

The game does so many things to get the feel of Sonic right it's just hard not to put the controller down, take a second to just marvel at what you just saw, pick the controller back up and jump in for more. Let's start with the boost mechanic. It's a simple matter of variable x + Sonic's current velocity. However, the sound effect, that satisfying little boom that plays along with the sound of the air gushing past your face and the ripple that flashes across the screen as it happens, the gorgeous effect around Sonic, and something people don't often notice but Sonic normally runs really loosely, with his hands trailing behind his body and his head kind of bobbing with each step. But when you boost, he clenches his fists and leans in just a bit and Sonic just looks like he's enjoying the act of raeching his top speed. I really have to commend the animators on their work here because it's just so freaking stellar. The transitions between 3D and 2.5D is also just so seamless and you begin to understand why Sonic Team took away manual camera control. And the spectacle? Man, it's just ramped up. Jumping away from the Mega Chopper trying to nom you as an afternoon snack is just one of my favourite moments in the game and  the best part is how you can perform tricks, practically taunting it as you get away. The game is a power fantasy combined with the experience of an adventure through this brightly coloured world.  It's wonderful. Unbelievably wonderful. Sonic's moveset is just a joy to work with, combining the stomp with the boost and air dash to perform complex and timing based manuevers to beat a record in the best time possible, that's where it's at. The grading system at the end also only encourages one thing; speed. Beat the level as fast as you can. It's not unbearably difficult to get an S-Rank and you'll find yourself playing the game over, and over, and over until you finally perfectly beat that one stage. I found myself, even after getting an S-Rank, clearing all the challenge missions and finding all the Red Medals just replaying Green Hill Zone act 2, to get the best time, learn the secrets of the stage, and just unwind at the end of a long day blasting through a fun stage that's so superbly designed that based on the minute and a half it takes to complete it alone, I'd give this game a perfect numeric score.

And you want to know what else provokes those positive emotions? A full orchestral soundtrack remaking classic chiptune songs into massively scaled musical pieces that just brings the game together so nicely.

It kind of shocks me how easily people forget this game when saying things like "Sonic was never good." I mean, the game's story is extremely simple and doesn't overstay it's welcome. The few times you sit through the cutscenes you'll find yourself marveling at just how well the engine runs them. They aren't prerenders, and I think that says the most about them. But Sonic Generations is not just a good Sonic game, it's just a great videogame. I can just recommend it to anyone. I can just smile and say, play this game. Just pick it up and see what it's about and give it a bit of love and Sonic Generations will love you back. It'll be your friend when you're down and your rival when you need to prove yourself. This game is a lot of things, In this world, there exists no such thing as perfection, but Sonic Generations comes so close I'm willing to give it a mulligan.

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Why being sex positive is so important

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that slut-shaming has to end. It's pointless, its tasteless, its offensive and has no real place in society today. It holds us back and prevents us from progressing as people, and slut-shaming stigmatizes sex and makes people self-conscious about something that in reality just isn't that big of a deal.

If you've never encountered the term before, here's a loose definition. Slut-shaming is the act of shaming, ridiculing or otherwise stigmatizing a person for having had many sexual encounters in the past, or being currently involved with several sexual partners, and extends to things even as trivial as dressing or acting provocatively. It's a little more nuanced than that, but it can range from anything from calling a woman slutty for wearing daisy dukes, or for actually just describing someone as slutty, loose, easy, whoreish, cheap or anything to that effect. Another unnerving common slut-shaming practice is to shame couples or people who have sex out of wed-lock.

If we have to go into the politics of it all, sluts-shaming is usually more of a problem in conservative circles, but every so often it rears its head in liberal circles. It's not really accurate to say it's a conservative or right-wing problem, because its symptomatic of another much larger problem, which is that its only recently that we've become more sex-positive as a society, and its largely only younger people who are very sex-positive. I was lucky to be raised in a house where sex wasn't treated like a taboo thing. My parents would often openly talk about it and joke around about sex and sexuality, and I think that very normalization is what made me the sex-positive person I am today.

On the opposite side of things, there might be some prude-shaming happening somewhere in some circles, and I've definitely seen in come up in a film or two, and I don't really want to dismiss it as something that doesn't exist but it is something that definitely happens much more infrequently. I still don't condone shaming anyone for the amount of sex they do or do not have, or how modestly or immodestly anyone dresses or acts, it's a deplorable act. There is no "right" amount of sex to be having.

And I think the blatant way we shame each other about the amount of sex we have is why we all need to be more sex-positive.

It's really hard for me to define exactly what makes any person sex-positive, but by sex-positivity, I don't mean actively having sex or seeking it out. Sex-positivity is about normalizing sex, openly talking about sex, viewing sex as a positive thing and not stigmatizing or demonizing sex. It's encouraging exploration of ones sexual identity and allowing for the growth of one's sexuality, but also not forcing anything. I want to make the very clear distinction that being sex-positive isn't about blindly advocating for anyone to have more sex, but that sex-positivity is about having a positive attitude towards sex.

The unfortunate truth is that not being sex-positive only creates issues. It isn't the 1800s anymore, and we aren't puritanical creatures by nature. We derive pleasure from sex, we have the ability to have sex for reasons other than pro-creation or the often toted "intimacy" that we're told to wait until our wedding night for, and honestly, sex is just kind of great (I do also advocate safe sex, please, do practice safe sex, and don't take unnecessary risks). But the thing is, when we limit sex to just being about procreation or intimacy with a married partner, we do some really harmful things, such as:

• Turning sex into something shameful, rather than personal.
• Reducing each other into things to be owned, like little children claiming presents that only they can open and no one else can.
• Using intangible and relatively inconsequential concepts such as virginity as a measure of any person's objective character quality
• Defining sex in such a way that it can only mean penetrative penal/vaginal sex, rather than as the complicated and broad conversation that sex really is
• Reserving intimacy only for those married, which for many people in the world, simply isn't a reality, such as gay couples who live in countries where marriage isn't legal, or widows who don't want to remarry, or anyone who has sex that is intimate that isn't married! 

Sex-positivity is also what allows for empathy with sex workers, men and women who are the least protected from sexual crimes. The unfortunate reality is that sex-workers endure slut-shaming from their friends, families, strangers and even their own clients. Sex workers are also very much at risk of experiencing sexual violence, and due to sex work being criminalized in most countries, they are also unable to report sex crimes committed against them and are sometimes unjustly arrested when they are in fact the victims. And without any sex-positivity, as a person, it becomes exponentially harder to empathize with sex workers.

Sex positivity is important. It is so, so important. I can't stress that enough. I can't argue it enough. I think it's one of the most humane qualities a person can have, even if one doesn't personally agree with having a lot of sex or numerous sexual partners.

And I think, as humans, we can sometimes very much lack humanity.

We should work on that.

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Why There Aren't LGTBQ Heroes In The MCU (And why there might not be for a while)

James Gunn recently stated that there may already be LGBT characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Which is certainly true if we include the well-recieved Netflix series, as Jessica Jones features Lesbian lawyer Jeri Hogarth and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. features inhuman Joey Gutierrez.

But as for the films in the MCU, over its 14 film run starting with Iron Man in 2008, there haven't been any gay characters. Hot off the blink-and-you'll-miss-it gay 'moments' in 2017's Beauty And The Beast and 2017's Power Rangers, the comments by Guardians Of The Galaxy director James Gunn are unnervingly non-committal and honestly felt a lot like queer-baiting. But seeing as it's 20-freaking-17, the MCU has been going since 2008, you have to wonder if there isn't something a little more sinister at hand.

Which, there kind of is.

The unfortunate issue with the MCU being so damn popular is that a large source of that popularity and income is from foreign markets. And not every country is as liberal as North America when it comes to depictions of LGBTQ characters on television. Some countries can straight up ban films for depictions of same-sex romances, transgender characters or advocacy of LGBTQ rights. Two such countries are Russia and China.

China especially has strict censorship laws, which we can see from when popular Chinese drama Addicted was pulled from being streamed on Chinese websites, and how the country had banned 2016's hilarious and well received Deadpool from theatres. Now, this isn't to say that China is inherently a homophobic country but China's strict censorship from its government creates a roadblock on the path to diversifying the MCUs hero roster. Sure, known gay characters like Iceman or Daken might be hard because of licensing issues, but heroes such as Spiderwoman (Jessica Drew), Wiccan, Hulkling are all fair game, were it not for censorship in foreign markets.

Russia is another such a country. Going back to Beauty And The Beast's gay moment, the film came under scrutiny (although was luckily not banned) over Lefou's feelings for Gaston by Russian officials due to Russia's "Gay Propaganda Law", as it has come to be known. The legislation was passed with the intent to prohibit spreading "gay propaganda" to minors (ah yes, because films will brainwash your child into sucking dick. Stay classy, Putin). While it may not have prohibited, this obviously creates concerns among filmmakers. Film studios are for-profit businesses aiming to maximise on returns and gay characters are now a risk to their financial well-being due to foreign market censorship. The conversation is also hard to get off the ground when comment sections frequently get dominated by straight white men loudly screaming that "no one cares" or that they've had enough of this "gay romance crap".

While film makers probably are trying to create more diverse casts and stories, they're unfortunately restricted by marketing politics.

Despite what James says, no, there are likely no secretly gay characters in the films of the MCU. And until foreign countries decide to play ball with LGBTQ representation, there likely won't be, because its costing film makers money.

But then again, for a multi-billion dollar film franchise, you'd think the financial loss might from time to time be worth the hit in order to show solidarity with the LGBTQ.

Then again, film makers could also just not give a fuck about us and merely pursue diversity when it helps sell films.

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