More things, September 5, 2012
More Final Fantasy VII things
[A] heck of a lot of the time, you’re going to have to pore over some noisy, glowy, fancy, labyrinthine mish-mash abandoned construction site and wonder where the exit even is before you can decide if you’re supposed to get there by climbing over the ball of yarn or the stack of broken cinder blocks or the fallen girder or what.
It made some players cry. Some became angry; others were simply left confused and bewildered, and still others plumbed the Internet for years afterward looking for some way to reverse or avoid Sephiroth’s misdeed.
Time has been cruel to Final Fantasy 7 because it has polarised us, turning discussion of a game into a much broader argument about what video games should be or what they should aspire to - interactive stories hoping to sweep players up in their predetermined drama, or something more organic and open-ended.
More lit things
Shot at Smith-Settle Printers, Leeds, England. The book being printed is Suzanne St Albans’ ‘Mango and Mimosa’ published as part of the Slightly Foxed series.
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.
Writers are really good at creating that quiet space, in a room with the door shut. Writing’s too hard, and most of the time you feel dumb. It’s so difficult, you don’t have time to worry about being famous. That just seems like shit that happens outside.
The movie is just uncurious about its books or their writers; it wants to be some inspiring through-the-generations tale, but each tale is dull and would never make it past rough-draft form in any page-turner bestseller, let alone anything “literary.”