The Walking Dead Season 1 Continued

The Walking Dead: Season 1

The Hunted, Part One (The Long Dark: Revenant Mode)

This is a Let's Play of The Long Dark, "The Hunted, Part One" challenge mode. The first ~45 minutes include my various attempts to get off the ground, which generally involves getting eaten by the bear, eaten by wolves, or bleeding to death a half dozen times.

After that, the last 2.5 hours are the final attempt to complete the challenge.

The bear is fairly relentless, which means you need to have adequate means to scare him off throughout the challenge. This can be quite exhausting on your resource supplies, especially since you can't throw torches any more which was a much more effective means of scaring off wild animals. In this 4 minute clip, the bear chases me, only being kept at bay because of a torch in hand.

These are the final sixteen minutes of the challenge mode. While trying to avoid the aggression of a wolf on the train tracks, I take the more narrow route in Mystery Lake planning to go up and over. I foolishly decide to try scavenging in one area that leads me into a dead-end with the bear trapping me. In escaping from this moment, I use two of my last three shells. This means I only have one shell left to get from mystery lake to the hunter's lodge.

I double back over a ridge but while climbing the ridge I sprain my wrist. This means I can't even use the one shell I do have! While the bear begins to come after me once more, I am forced to practically jump off a cliff, then making a fire and resting on a ledge over the derailment at the end of the railroad tracks.

From here I can wield my flare gun once more as I go into the snow to the hunter's lodge. A storm sets in and darkness encloses. In the final moments, I see the bear one last time.

Full Play (Let's Read) -- Planetarian

Planetarian: Reverie of a Little Planet is a "kinetic novel" -- a short novel (novelette) that uses audiovisual content (images, backgrounds, sounds) to convey a linear narrative.  

Apocalypse in Contemporary Japanese Science Fiction

Tanaka, Motoko. Apocalypse in Contemporary Japanese Science Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.

"Apocalyptic themes in Japanese culture can be observed not only in the Buddhist notion of cyclical life but also in premodern legends which describe natural disasters such as major earthquakes and the subsequent recreation of communities. Japanese new religious movements in the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods (from the 1860s to the 1900s) featured strong apocalyptic beliefs and advocated for radical social reform in the modern era" (2).

Same paragraph as above, cont: "The Japanese apocalyptic imagination, however, underwent drastic changes following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombings continue to be among the most prominent tropes in Japanese postwar culture, with science fiction anime (animation) and manga (comic books) depicting future cities devastated by nuclear wars. Japanese postwar fiction in various genres deals with the total destruction of the self, the community, the nation, the Earth, or the universe caused by the misuse of advanced technologies. The traumatic experience of defeat in World War II has shaped Japanese contemporary culture by destroying the traditional identity of Japan and the Japanese people."

American Pacificism

Lyons, Paul. American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

"This book critiques the massive senses in which, in U.S. cultural production about Oceania, both the responsibility to understand and learn and the willingness to imagine U.S. history as bound-together with Oceanian history in a way that is "managed from both ends" have been rudely abrogated. Even when the aim is a critique of imperialism, U.S. artists and scholars narrating stories of intercultural relation in Oceania have for the most part misperceived, misrepresented, disrespected, or ignored Oceanian institutions, perspectives, humor, and ways of knowing (and narrating), attempting to subsume indigenous categories into their own" (2).

Investigate: Toni Morrison 1992, Playing in the Dark. page xi

"My sense is that even fantasmic representations of Oceania -- invented images 'whose inventor is unaware of his act of invention' (Owens 1992: 4) -- are routed through an archive imbricated at the base in material relations" (3).

In particular, work which attempts to destabilize the exceptionalism of "America" "as a category with a rhizomatic approach "paradoxically seem to be transnationalizing American studies by expanding their reach into each point of local conjuncture" (3-4).

"Asia and Asia/Pacific" constructions

Debate: "Within the national narrative, the U.S. disavows having colonies in the sense of overseas territoris that are administered, generally with dual institional systems (legal, educational) that segregate colonizers and colonized" (6) citing Flores 2002, Kiste 1994: 228. Kiste: Tides of History


Chapter 1:
Where 'cannibalism' has been, tourism will be: Forms and funtions of American Pacificism

"Since the days of the early Republic, two fundamental conceptions of Oceania-coterminous, contradictory, synergetic -- have been entwined in the U.S. imagination. On the one hand, 'Pacific' islands are envisioned, economically and geopolitically, not as ends in themselves, but as stepping stones (provisioning and refueling stations, colonial outposts, communication centers, military bases) or passages (shipping lane protectors) toward the wealth of the Orient and the Indies. Such a vision shaped the U.S. relation to Oceania first in the China trade, in which private interests conflated with economic nationalism, and later in colonial ventures framed int erms of geostrategic needs. On the other hand, Pacific islands are imagined as ends-of-the-earth, cultural limit-cases unencumbered by notions of sin, antitheses to the industrial worlds of economic and political modernity, whose unfamiliar natives are compared for a variety of purposes to African and Native Americans" (24).

writers and regional planners "shared a tendency to recall selectively the scope of nineteenth-century U.S. involvement in Oceania and read it backwards and forwards as legacy of connection and prophecy of possession" (29).

Dingo suggests that the desperate salvagepunk life on earth is basically equivalent to life on DEVA; on Earth humans die of starvation if they "can't earn [their] keep," whereas on DEVA they are "archived" and suspended from access to the digital memory necessary to experience happiness.