Tag: guest contributor

Myervision: Puzzling

The Portly Politico2 Comments

About a month ago, Audre Myers left a wonderful comment on my post “TBT^2: Modern Art and Influence.”  She made some incredibly insightful points about modern art through the lens of puzzles, specifically a solid white puzzle that is, apparently, a major challenge because there’s no reference to follow.

I asked her to expand that comment into a post, thinking she might dive into modern art versus real art in a bit more detail.

Instead, she sent me this post about puzzles—and I couldn’t be more delighted.

I trust you will be as well.  Who cares about the nature of art when we can do fun puzzles?

With that, here is Audre on puzzles:

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Ponty’s Pen: The BBC’s Newfound Interest in the Gaming Industry

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Video games used to be a bit of a niche—a large and popular niche, but a niche nonetheless.  Sure, our mom loved playing Dr. Mario on our old Nintendo, but that was about the extent of it.  Video games were largely for boys, who grew up into men.  Those men rebought the classics when they became available digitally, and continued to fuel the development of new games with their hard-earned dollars.

Of course, video game companies sensibly sought to expand their market share.  They developed more casual games to attract older gamers and more women.  The Nintendo Wii marked a major shift, as the kinetic style of the console made it popular among many demographics, most notably the elderly.  Nary a retirement home or assisted living facility lacked a Wii, with which geriatrics could play virtual tennis and bowling.

All of that is wonderful.  More gamers means more games, and it means broader acceptance of video games as a fun, harmless pastime (in spite of the ludicrous stories that insist on linking video games to violence—malarkey!).

Lately, however, video game developers have followed in the footsteps of film and television, making a mad push towards increasing “representation” in games.  This development is premised upon a number of false premises, such as “women are objectified damsels-in-distress in games,” which ignores Princess Peach, Princess Zelda/Sheikh, Lara Croft, and many other “strong female” protagonists or supporting characters in game.

That obsession is linked to another false premise:  that in order to enjoy a video game (or movie, or book, or other work), we must see carbon-copies of ourselves in them.  According to this reasoning, a black kid can’t enjoy a Mario game because Mario is an Italian-American plumber, not an African-American one.

As Ponty so eloquently points out, video games are frequently a form of escapism.  We don’t want to be ourselves; we want to be a burly barbarian, or a sneaky thief.  When I play roleplaying games, I don’t play a six-foot-one, two-hundred-fifty-plus pound nerd with bad eyesight; I typically play a short rogue or bard character, pilfering loot from NPCs’ homes.  I’d never burgle a home in real life, and the game doesn’t make me want to do so; rather, it gives the thrill of being a second-story man without any of the terrible consequences for either myself or the victim.

Regardless, gaming, too, has been a major front in the Culture Wars, going back to Gamergate in 2014.  Nearly ten years on, we’re still fighting similar battles.

With that, here is Ponty’s essay “The BBC’s Newfound Interest in the Gaming Industry”:

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Guest Post: The Year Before the Year After Next Year

The Portly Politico2 Comments

This week is unofficially “Ponty Week 2023,” as good old Ponty/Always a Kid for Today sent me three excellent pieces over the long July Fourth week (his third will pop this Friday).  It’s great to see one of our most steadfast and lively contributors back on the blog.

It’s interesting to think that The Age of The Virus, which so dominated our lives and thoughts for nearly two years, now seems like a distant memory, a bad dream best forgotten when one wakes up, returning to one’s senses.  That is certainly how the worst of the self-proclaimed public health czars and czarinas hope we will regard it:  a well-intentioned nightmare that we needn’t talk about any further.  They know they eroded civil liberties, wrecked the economy, and made anyone without a diaper on their face feel like crap, all over a highly survivable virus.  Better to sweep all that under the rug and let bygones be bygones.  Forgive and forget, right?

We can forgive individuals—we all had family members who hysterically insisted that flimsy paper masks would save us from ourselves—but we should never forget the heavy toll of our public health tyranny.  As Ponty points out, they’re going to try it again, and it’s going to be worse next time.

It is perhaps a bit conspiratorial (and even hysterical on my part), but I sincerely believe The Age of The Virus was a test-run for the End Times Beast system.  Just as people willingly lined up for The Vaccine, which was promised to be the ticket to a normal life, people will line up to take the Antichrist’s Mark so they can continue shopping at Niemann Marcus.  What is one’s eternal soul when there is a sale on capris?

Even if I am wrong about that particular claim, The Age of The Virus was certainly a trial run to see how obedient we’d all be.  The answer, sadly, was, “very.”  Sure, we had some ructions after the first month or so of the “two weeks to flatten the curve,” but most Americans went along sheepishly with the dictates.  Yours portly wore his mask as little as possible, but even I took two shots of The Vaccine (not because I wanted to be “normal” again, but because I didn’t know any better at the time—and I should have!).

Ponty argues that inquiries into The Age of The Virus in Britain serve no purpose other than to strengthen the regime the next time around.  I think he is only missing one point:  these inquiries remind us, the sane, about what they did to us.  We should never let them get away with it again.

With that, here is Ponty’s “The Year Before the Year After Next Year”:

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Guest Post: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) and Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)

The Portly Politico3 Comments

Good old Pontifex Maximus has returned from self-imposed exile with a trio of posts, all of which I’ll be posting throughout this week and the next.  The first of these is a dual movie review of two remake/sequels of the 1995 classic Jumanji, a flick that was both fun and terrifying to a then-ten-year old yours portly.

The film was remade/reimagined in 2017 as Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, and followed by a sequel in 2019, Jumanji: The Next Level.  Ponty gives both films a thorough treatment, and readers will be pleasantly surprised to know that, unlike many reboots of classic IPs from the 1980s and 1990s, these films don’t flounder.

With that, here are Ponty’s reviews of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle andJumanji: The Next Level:

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Myersvision: Goblins and Faeries

The Portly Politico11 Comments

No, dear reader, this post isn’t another screed against ghoulish sexual perverts, despite what the title might suggest.  It’s a fun installment of Myersvision, the intermittent series of whimsical posts from our senior correspondent, Audre Myers.

I reached out to some of my regular contributors to see if anyone had anything for me, and Audre whipped up this short, charming piece about alleged goblins and faeries—well, pixies—roaming the English countryside.  She notes that one YouTuber has around 400,000 subscribers, and asks, “So who’s crazy?”

Well, my money is still on the people that think CGI pixies are real, and the only Goblin I believe in is the Italian synth rock band.

At least, for now.  I’ll never forget learning about the Scottish researcher in the nineteenth century who went looking for faeries, because if he could prove faeries and other supernatural or folkloric creatures were real, he could prove God’s Existence.  After all, if God Exists, there is surely a rich world of supernatural entities—angels and demons (of which I am thoroughly convinced are real), but also all manner of other creatures.  The Bible speaks of giants and Behemoth.  Who’s to say dragons (clearly dinosaurs) weren’t swooping around causing trouble?  The Bible speaks of dragons, too.

All things to consider for another day.  For now, here’s Audre, taking us on a tour of the mystical English countryside:

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PlayStation Ponty Reviews: Hogwarts Legacy (2023)

The Portly Politico8 Comments

It seems that, despite his protestations earlier this year, dear old Ponty just couldn’t keep away from the warm, chubby, sweaty embrace of The Portly Politico.  We’re all too happy to take him back into our doughy arms.

Ponty’s breaking the silence with a powerhouse review of Hogwarts Legacy, a roleplaying game based on the beloved Harry Potter franchise.

I’m not a Potterphile—I was born just two or three years too late to be in the books’ key demographic upon their release—but I certainly appreciate magic and whimsy.  That said, I don’t know my Muggle from a Hufflepuff (except that I am, apparently, both), so for all you people out there whose only frame of reference for the world is a series of children’s books about kid wizards, don’t persecute me for my ignorance.

What I do know is that this game engendered (no pun intended) a great deal of controversy upon its release because the series’ creator, J.K. Rowling, is a TERF—a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist.  That means that, while she loves all the feminist foolishness a woman of her age tends to believe, she still believes that men are men and women are women.  For that, detractors decried this game as “violence against trans people,” because apparently we can’t separate a work of video game fiction—itself quite distinct from the original author’s work—from one’s personal beliefs, and because one’s personal beliefs are now deemed violence if certain mentally impaired individuals deem it to be so.

Well, there’s no use arguing with the insane.  Ponty, however, does commit a bit of violence against Hogwarts Legacy from the other direction, though purely in an editorial sense.  And before he gets to some of the bad, he does extensive yeoman’s work covering the good, too.

With that, here is Ponty’s excellent review of Hogwarts Legacy:

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Lazy Sunday CCV: Myersvision, Part VII

The Portly Politico2 Comments

As much as I love to beat a dead horse—or, in this case, a dead Bigfoot—this Lazy Sunday retrospective of the Myersvision series will be the last for awhile.  It’s a testament to Audre Myers‘s impressive output that I’ve spent seven Sundays looking back at her contributions to the blog.

Of course, there will be more Lazy Sundays featuring her work if she revs up the ol’ Commodore 64 and sends me some more juicy submissions.  Lazy Sunday typically comes in threes, and I have one additional post for the eighth installment of this retrospective.  That means Audre just needs to submit two more pieces, and we’ll hit eight!

Of course, there were only Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  Perhaps Audre’s writing is the Eighth:

  • “Myersvision: A Very Good Discussion” – This title is quintessentially Audrean in nature.  The discussion in question is in a YouTube video shared in the post, but the real meat of the post are Audre’s theories about Bigfoot, based on what are likely hundreds of hours of research.
  • “Myersvision: A Possible Language” – Apparently, Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) have a language, “Samari.”  Bigfoot enthusiasts picked that name because the alleged Sasquatchian language sounds like a bad overdub of an old samurai or kung-fu film.  That lack of seriousness and overabundance of hokiness tells you everything you need to know about Bigfoot enthusiasts (Audre being the exception here).
  • “Myersvision: Consider if You Will…” – A video of what appears to be a bipedal ape creature rampaging through a snow-covered parking lot.  Gasp!

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Lazy Sunday CCIV: Myersvision, Part VI

The Portly Politico1 Comment

When it comes to Lazy Sunday, I really put emphasis on the “Lazy” part of that title.  When I find something good, I milk it dry, which is probably what will happen to Bigfoot if we ever get the big lug into captivity.  Imagine drinking “Squatch Juice”—the sweet, slightly gamey, milk of the female Bigfoot (Bigfemme?), packed full of anti-oxidants and invisibility serum.

Uh, ahem… I digress.  Right now I’m only milking Bigfoot metaphorically in the form of Audre Myers‘s excellent Bigfoot-related posts.  March inadvertently became “Bigfoot March Madness” at The Portly Politico, to the point that even Audre expressed concern that she was doing irreparable damage to this site’s reputation, to which I responded (again, metaphorically), “What reputation?”

And so I digress yet again.  Here are three editions of Myersvision from 8, 15, and 22 March 2023, all about our favorite, elusive, hairy cryptid:

  • “Myersvision: The Books” – Audre offers up a short bibliography of Bigfoot books, including some by Jeff Meldrum, a Full Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology at Idaho State University.
  • “Myersvision: Other Sources” – Here Audre offers up some other Bigfoot sources, including an interview with Jane Goodall (who herself falsified some of the wild findings she made concerning apes).
  • “Myersvision: Structures” – Bigfoot is a builder (perhaps he should sign up for my Minecraft Camp).  There are apparently eerily similar structures that are attributed to Bigfoot, which suggests a certain degree of intelligence in our mystery pal.

That’s it for this latest retrospective into Myersvision.  There’s more milk to come!

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Myersvision: Hoarders

The Portly Politico12 Comments

What’s the opposite of Bigfoot, a hairy loner that lives in the woods and avoids people (but loves grainy, out-of-focus trail cams)?  Probably not pathological hoarders, but maybe that’s close:  they can’t get away from their meddling relations and the government, which imperiously demands their children not live in homes covered in old Chinese newspapers and rat feces. The gall!

Unlike our elusive, hirsute woodland friend, these folks have the opportunity to bask in the limelight—of shame.  If reality television serves any useful social function (debatable), it’s that it occasionally shames mentally-scarred weirdos, making the rest of feel better about ourselves in the process.

At least, I always suspected that was the point of shows with hoarders and morbidly obese people (I wonder how big—no pun intended—of an overlap there is between those disorders?) was for us to shake our heads and thank God we aren’t as screwed up as those people.  As Audre Myers gently implies here, we’re all screwed up (true), and but for the Grace of God, we’d be holding onto broken baseball bats and takeout flyers.

I also can’t criticize Hoarding Americans too much, as my natural inclinations towards packrattery and a weird holdover Depression/Recession Era mentality make me loathe to waste anything—or to let too much go.  I’m especially that way with books, so when I successfully donated a massive cardboard box of old books to the local library, I took it as a good sign that I am not a hoarder, just a slob.  Shew!

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  We all need grace and compassion—even the hoarders.

With that, here is Audre’s review of the A&E series Hoarders:

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Myersvision: Consider if You Will…

The Portly Politico10 Comments

Audre Myers just can’t resist the alluring song of the Bigfoot, and keeps coming back to drink at the well of grainy video footage and armchair cryptozoological speculation.  As she quaffs away, we benefit from her insights in the form of thoughtful analyses of our big hairy friend.

What I still can’t get over is the lack of compelling, clear footage of Bigfoot.  There’s always some post hoc rationalization for why the video doesn’t work (one of the more infamous examples I recall is the gentleman who had a branch in front of his trail cam, and the labored explanation that the infrared light emitted from it washed out the image).  Some of these videos of alleged sightings are so blurry, it seems that the power of suggestion is at play more than clear examination.  We want to see a Bigfoot, so we see one.  Clever YouTubers will draw a conical outline around the fuzzy form and proclaim, “Ah ha!  See!  It must be Bigfoot because it has a head shaped like a cone!”  Maybe it’s just Dan Aykroyd reprising his role in Coneheads (1993).  Now you’ll start seeing him when you watch this blurry footage.

This video, however, seems different.  Whatever the creature is, it is massive.

I’ll let Audre explain it from here:

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