first and foremost, you can listen to my album "Saint Elizabeth" here: https://ellaguro.bandcamp.com/album/saint-elizabeth earlier this year i also did a talk called "What Doth Videogame" at the venue Boshi's Place here in Brooklyn that i worked on concurrently with the album. it's more about my personal artistic history than the subject of this post, but it's certainly connected and very much…
note: you can also read this post for free on my Patreon . plz consider subbing though, if you don't! chart of Steam demos launched during the window of each Steam Next fest for the past five years posted by Chris Hanney on bluesky it feels like every other month in these troubled days new info makes it way out onto social media about how the amount of new game releases on Steam has again…
hello - this post of mine i've been working on for the past few months! it's a sequel of sorts to last year's California Problem post and it's about let's plays, youtube, and internet culture. it is book-length, so i have divided it into three parts. i could not write something this ambitious without my supporters on Patreon . money is particularly tight for me right now, so if you enjoy this post…
greetings! this is a very long post about video games and capitalism. feel free to take breaks if you need them. make sure to stick around till the end, if you can. plz enjoy. and support me on patreon if you like (and read this post on patreon here for free if you don't like orange). i have a new indie music-related podcast, by the way, in case you're interested in checking it out. anyway...... -…
hello, friends. today is my 33rd birthday. coincidentally, i have also just finished this big post about the 2010's. plz enjoy. and support me on patreon if you like (and read this post on my patreon here if you don't like orange). i also have a website , in case you didn't know. anyway...... - liz --------------------- Part 1: Trauma Porn There is one little incident I experienced circa 2012 that…
note: you can also read this post over on my Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/37840892 Back in late 2014 when gamergate was in full force, there was a lot I or others couldn't predict about what would come out of it. It seemed curious that it had achieved national media attention at all, especially given that it was happening in tandem with the Ferguson Black Lives Matter protests that…
read #23 here: https://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-25-tracks-of-2010s-23-angel-olsen.html if you don't like orange, you can also read this piece on my patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/32941504 #22: Dragging an Ox through Water - Sparrow Command Panic Sentry by Dragging an Ox through Water " freak folk " music may be something that seemed like another blip in time for other people…
read #24 here: http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-25-tracks-of-2010s-24-vessel-paplu.html if you don't like orange, you can also read this piece on my patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/32559481 #23: Angel Olsen - Lark this is probably not the only time i'll mention this, but the 2010's were the decade where i lost almost all interest in the critical darling American indie rock/folk…
read #25 here: https://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-25-tracks-of-2010s-25-kanye-west.html if you don't like orange, you can also read this piece on my patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/32500345 #24: Vessel - Paplu (Love That Moves The Sun) as someone originally from the Midwestern United States of America, where much of modern electronic dance music is originally from, i always find…
hi folks! this is the beginning of my writing a list of my top 25 musical tracks of the 2010's. this is the first of the list. more will be coming, bit-by-bit, as i write them. think of this as sort of a longer term writing project. i hope you enjoy it! if you don't like orange, you can also read this piece on my patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/32405138 #25: Kanye West (featuring…
note: if you don't like orange (what's wrong with you?), you can also read this post on my patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/28896472 from: https://www.wired.com/2014/10/video-game-literacy/ i n a Discord channel i started recently to talk about art games, someone brought up Eric Zimmerman's "The Ludic Century" and it made me re-read the manifesto published on Kotaku that so aroused my…
It shouldn't be too crazy to say that videogames have a lot of problems right now. For a variety of different reasons and factors, a lot of shitty people with shitty opinions have taken refuge in the videogame space, and have become very popular doing so. And as youtube establishes itself as the premiere land of video punditry for far-right reactionaries and more and more popular game youtubers to…
i wish i could say the recent revelations of (now ex-)Polygon video producer Nick Robinson sexually harassing several women over an extended period of time was any surprise or event where i'd be hopeful for any kind of productive dialogue to happen in the videogame space. but it feels long past the point where that kind of dialogue is possible. for me, it's just another item of the exhausting list…
(obvious spoiler warning) i didn't want to write about The Beginner's Guide , at least not publicly. while i don't know its creator Davey Wreden extremely well, i have talked to him a bit over the past several years about various life things and generally appreciate his openness with the struggles of being thrust into the realm of indie game celebrity from the success of his previous game The…
1. i don't care about Undertale. i don't like talking about things just because they're popular. 2. i have accepted that most people don't know, care, or understand how much effort or thought i put into my work. i have accepted my obscurity as an inevitable result of following my own path. in some ways, i'm fine with this. but i'm tired of being walked over and stepped on because i'm so afraid of…
i didn't want to talk about this in a public setting because part of me wanted to protect the people involved. i was trying to pretend it didn't really happen like i thought it did - that everything was okay, and that i could deal with it. that it was my responsibility. it was personal business after all and i didn't want to bring it public, because of all the other drama in the past that had been…
i tweeted this out about a week ago , but basically: after this next month's QGCon and Indiecade (where i'll be doing a talk with David Kanaga about art and politics), i'll be leaving games. this has been a long time coming, and something i need to do for many reasons. the biggest one is that music has always been the most important thing in my life, but i never seriously thought i'd be able to…
this is a comment someone wrote in response to this recent article about gamers vs. Art and Tale of Tales closing its doors . I found it quite amusing, and would like to present to you a translation: “Actually, I believe my straight white maleness affords me some clarity and nuance to this issue that you may have missed in your article. (I mean, obviously you have missed it. I'm just trying to…
note: this is an edited/updated version of a talk i gave at Indiecade East in 2015 i have to admit that lately i kind of dread the prospect of speaking at videogame conferences. the events we gather in and the communities we work in, no matter how much we stretch and pull at their boundaries, are still all built around this ideal of games as some kind of super-medium, a kind of Eden or great…
The house Notch just bought for seventy million dollars It's that time of year again, when I scramble to follow the tacit assumption that I need to sum up my work of the past year. But my problem is my sense of individual years as disparate units inherently separable from each other has all but disintegrated. I don't think we're necessarily any closer to answering the questions that have been…
"we need more comprehensive game criticism" is something i remember seeing a lot of people say on the twittersphere a couple years ago, partly in response to me writing some of my Wolfenstein 3D level design posts . mostly this call seemed to come from dudes who were really into first person shooters. as such, i was already skeptical that they even really understood what i was trying to get at in…
(this is a heavily revised version of a talk given in the "Influences" session at Indiecade 2014. spoiler alert for the plot of Videodrome ) there's a tendency that i keep sensing popping its head up indie games that i call the "boy genius syndrome". it's about being the first to carve out and colonize a new idea space in the digital world. it often takes the form of being really hung up on a…
(this is, in part, a continuation of my " on right-wing videogame extremism " post from a couple weeks ago) when i was in sixth grade, shortly after the Columbine shooting happened, i remember having a strange conversation with my mom. after seeing a report on TV, i said something like "i just don't understand why these school shootings...." before awkwardly trailing off, unsure what i was trying…
exhausted by hearing reports from people i'm acquaintances with of being harassed, their accounts hacked, personal info spread, phone numbers called, front doors showed up at (in one case) by random MRAs (Men's Rights Activists), 4channers, Redditors or whoever the fuck it is, i decided yesterday to finally look on 4chan for more insight what is actually going on. i share the fear with a lot of…
so i'll be better about this - i'm trying to work on an album this and next month. i have this idea i want my voice to sound like (namely a lot better/stronger than my own), but i might just have to accept what i have in the short term... at least until i can get vocal lessons or something. i really don't like it, and have intense dysphoria about it. i feel like a gross guy most of the time. i…