La Tinaja

Links

• Video Games are Better Without Characters—The Atlantic: This essay from Ian Bogost links the recent closure of Maxis (Will Wright-founded studio originally responsible for SimCity) by Electronic Arts to the debates and activism around representation in game design, taking their chronological proximity as an opportunity to discuss the eclipse of systems by characters in game design. In short, he questions whether systems might be better engines for empathy by drawing us into situations as ourselves rather than asking us simply to understand the experience of another in that situation. In the early days of defining our editorial focus for The Appendix, I had similar conversations with Chris about the importance of individual narratives versus more systemic analyses for promoting empathy in history writing. The Appendix was always going to be a place for narratives, but this Bogost essay reflects my thinking on what is lost when narrative and systems are understood to be exclusively personal and impersonal, respectively.
• Digital History as Data Transliteration—Michael J. Kramer: This extended comment posted by Michael Kramer struck me as a particularly concise exploration of the role of computer data analysis in historical methodology that avoids the kinds of essentialist or exceptionalist thinking that drives both data enthusiasts and data skeptics. Of course, a similarly straightforward ‘these are all just tools at our disposal’ approach strikes me as the prudent answer to almost all methodological conflicts.
• Cloudy satellite imagery: A chronicle of imagery collection over Nepal, post-disaster—Mapbox: Charlie Loyd, an imaging specialist for Mapbox, wrote this fascinating explanation of some of the technical obstacles involved in using satellites to obtain timely images in times of crisis, using efforts to track damages resulting from the earthquake in Nepal by way of example.

Books

• Neal Stephenson. Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing. New York: William Morrow, 2012.

  I wanted to re-read Mother Earth Mother Board, so I grabbed this from the library. There’s other worthwhile stuff here: a foreword written for David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More that is a sort of DFW origin story based in the culture of Midwestern college towns and a lecture at Gresham College about genre and literature, in particular. My favorite parts of Stephenson’s fiction tend to be his deep digressions into the systems and tools being used or created by his characters. He tends to manage to give these sections real significance for the narrative or setting of the work in a way that a lot of name- and tech-spec-dropping speculative fiction does not.

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• G. Willow Wilson, Jacob Wyatt, and Adrian Alphona. Ms. Marvel. Vol 2: Generation Why. New York: Marvel, 2015.

  The family dynamics of the first collected volume of this book won me over, and they’re unfortunately not much in evidence in this arc. However, it’s still a lot of fun, and even though it’s more focused on typical super-hero-y action, the setting and thematic trappings of that action keep the same sense of humor and unique, light tone.

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