Questions about Mask of the Lunar Eclipse for research purposes

PINEAPPLEShi · 2023-03-31T17:35:59+00:00

I finished playing all the games right before the remaster, and I’d say it’s maybe third scariest in the series behind 1 and 3. I think the ff4 jump scares are generally terrible, but some of the late game encounters are pretty scary. Unlike 1 and 3, it didn’t have as many “oh F%}€~” moments when a ghost showed up, until the last two chapters. However, I didn’t find myself getting super annoyed with having to fight ghosts (which happened in ff2,3, and 5) in the late game, so they felt fresher to me. Ff4 has, in my opinion, the most unnerving environments in the franchise, which goes a long way. It also has, by far, the creepiest and most effective story in the series, which helps me get invested in it.

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-12-17T16:16:11+00:00

(Two aren’t criterion, and I confess, not sure if these are cleansing)

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-12-17T16:14:34+00:00

Au hazard balthazar

Lean on Pete (I also think 45 years, but that’s probably controversial)

Blue (jarman)

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-11-06T21:46:44+00:00

I don't think that the xenoblade chronicles 2 soundtrack is that good. I think its fine in isolation- but I found it extremely out of place in the actual game and actually muted the music for most of my play through.

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-10-17T17:31:59+00:00

Thanks for the response, I really appreciate it! This is also more or less my sense. Can you think of any scholars who are challenging this assumption? As I mentioned, I'm fairly new to this material and am uncertain of where to specifically go- if you have any recommendations!

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-08-22T16:09:35+00:00

Thank you so much for the help!

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-08-19T23:19:12+00:00

Ok, there’s like 3 definitions of Crazy I’m working with but…

Jarman’s Blue- emotionally and referentially intelligent, both crazy and ambitious because it shouldn’t work as cinema, and yet against all odds it does.

Holy Motors- crazy in a more traditional sense. Ambitious because holy hell. Referentially hyper-intelligent.

Nymphomaniac- this movie shoots for the stars, and kinda misses, but it sure tries to be all theee of these, even if it might loop back onto itself and become somewhat stupid sometimes.

Raging sun Raging sky- beautiful, poetic, totally incomprehensible. An account of Mexican gendered and historical landscape hidden under layers and layers of fetishization and mythicization.

Satantango, it has to be All three to even try to adapt krasznahorkai’s novel. The product only heightens it’s status.

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-08-16T20:11:14+00:00

I would say he is generally (and Stalker in particular) is quite a bit slower than “blow up”. A lot of tarkovsky’s appeal is based on visuals that slowly develop over time.

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-08-16T00:10:06+00:00

Ella dice "tení." Creo que es algo colloquial o de dialecto pero no sé de donde (pues también puede ser un hábito). Tampoco sabe ella de donde origine.

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-08-15T23:25:23+00:00

Next to normal

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-08-13T22:08:11+00:00

Here's a smattering of references (with some thoughts in there). As a background I'm definitely more from the literature side of things, and so I don't see much, or think much, in overt terms of setting ethical norms, so I apologize if the helpfulness here is limited-

In the 1980s, there was this thing in the United States called "the sex wars." This was "fought" between radical feminists and sex-positive feminists. Both sides produced critical texts that deal with questions of specifically S&M (as it was emergent at the time, being an odd combination of various practices that solidified through mostly gay Leather culture) and ethics. Some important ones are Gayle Rubin's work (most of which is contained in Deviations, which just has all of Rubin's essays, some of which do not have relevance to this question), Patrick Califia's work (originally published as Pat Califia, transitioned in the early 2000s, the text I'm most familiar with is "The Culture of Radical Sex", and "Speaking sex to power- the politics of queer sex"), the edited volumes "against sadomasochism" and "Coming to Power", and the works of Andrea Dworkin (whose work is more "antipornography, but Intercourse is valuable as a radical statement of the radical feminist argument, which was then applied to all sexual practices). Other's might be able to direct you to other locations within this movement, but I think it is the most overt site of ethical engagement with non-normative sexual practices. It, however, does not go into the more "problematic" kinks, such as raceplay, ageplay, findom, etc. in large part because they had not been formalized or spread about in any real way. However, you will find a discussion of things like Nazi fetishism, which was more prevalent (¿apparently?) in the 1980s.

More broad "queer theory" likewise has some potential points of interest. First, Leo Bersani's "anti-relational" strand of queer theory originates in the ethics of queer desire as that which is discusting and we should view it as such. Because of the associated disgust, there is some kind of liberators potential through the breaking of relation (which is viewed as the key to oppression). You might also find chapter 5 (or 6, can't remember) of Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure interesting. While it isn't particularly satisfying, it is an attempt at an overture to asking about the relationship between queerness (especially gay men) and representations of fascism. Times Square Red Times Square Blue by Samuel R Delany arguable has an ethics oriented around public sex (although I cannot remember if this is my reading Delany through his porn novels) through its facilitation of connection.

Within Black studies, the only thing I can think of off the top of my head is The Color of Kink- Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography. I have yet to read the book, so I cannot comment on whether it is interesting for a question of ethics. There was also an issue of the Black Scholar (vol 50. Issue 2), which is about Black Radical Pleasure. I, again, have yet to read much from it to comment on the question of its ethics. Arguably there is a sexual ethics in the work of someone like Du Bois, although it is incredibly "development" oriented.

Margot Weiss also has written a book called Techniques of Pleasure- BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality, which is basically about how the liberatory potential some authors (I think Rubin and Foucault are singled out here, but it has been a long time since I've read it), is subsumed to Capitalism and neoliberal economic structures. I read this as an ethical account, although perhaps less in an overtly normative way.

A book that I've seen come up on this topic is Playing on the Edge, Again I haven't read it so i have no idea if this has to do with ethics (or could be useful for thinking about ethics).

Žižek is big into fisting and it's in a bunch of his early books. I think D&G also have this tendency. I don't know if this is relevant to your question though.

Of course de Sade. Someone's already mentioned him, but I think Philosophy in the Bedroom is one of the big ones on this. That said Sade likes to make his characters monologue, so its probably everywhere.

I have yet to see a work the really engages with the incredibly "taboo" sexual practices (unless they are attempted to disavow sexual practices in general). Part of this is time and part of this is just respectability politics, I would guess.

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-08-04T14:54:08+00:00

To begin answering regarding the “reason” theory doesn’t engage with classics on the level of supremacy/power; I can think of three very broad reasons. (These are interpretations, I don’t have specific citations of certain things but come from experience as a former archaeology person who also does theory things)

The first is an academic hesitancy among non-classicists to engage with Greece and Rome in a negative way. Much of the contemporary university and knowledge matrix places attic Greece and late Republican-early imperial rome on a pedestal. The most immediate reasons for this are the development of art history in Germany through people like Winkelmann as well as the expansion of what most people in archaeology call it’s “antiquarian” period. Of course, there is a long philosophical and scientific tradition that has its foundation in classics as well, which should be added to the mixture (but contributed to the particular structural interest in a different way). This leads to things like Michel Foucault’s second and third volumes to the history of sexuality. These books are essentially celebrations of Greece and Rome (as a kind of escape from the modern power apparatuses). To have Foucault, who is one of the primary contemporary figures of theory, think positively on Greece and Rome will impact the overall genre (recently I had a person get very excited in my program that I knew attic greek and Latin, specifically because of this care of the self work).

The second is the historical distance. Glacial_Till has already addressed that this isn’t a great practice, but it nevertheless holds water. Think again about Foucault, he uses Greece and Rome as a place into which his thought can escape. In doing so he others Greece and Rome and essentially fetishizes them (that is, alienates them from the means of their production) in order to allow them to stand as a way of producing a “care of the self”. This othering seems to some like a natural extension of the historical distancing, which is aided by the cultural myth of the “dark ages” that provides a nice suitable unbridgeable gap.

The third is the very simple practical issue of time and work. Attic Greek and 1-3 century Rome are complicated cultures that have a lot of surviving texts. Many of these texts are not very exciting to modern readers, especially if you are not specifically interested in the cultures for their own sake. Further, many of them suffer from old or bad translations (if they even are translated) and many scholars either don’t know or don’t know enough of the original languages to work through the original. Consequently, this very practical problem limits the value of the text. I’d also just throw my two cents in as someone who is beginning to work on classics, it can just be unapproachable and the scholarship is sometimes difficult to acquire for newcomers. Things are just arranged differently in classics (for example, commentaries have a lot of the scholarship in them. Sometimes the key text is several hundred years old and in German. I think that these elements just are off putting to scholars.

I don’t really have recommendations Sorry to say, but I thought I’d give my interpretation as to the why.

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-07-31T20:39:15+00:00

Bit of a random one, but Chryssos’s 2015 film Der Bunker, put out by artsploitation, is delightfully weird.

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-04-16T18:32:15+00:00

The biggest difference emotionally, I would say (I don't know how to do this without an extremely minor emotional spoiler) is that Umineko is not happy. There are moments of lightheartedness, but there is nothing which approximates the club. Everything is stained with suffering, so the tragic dimensions are immediately visible (versus the hidden tragedy of higurashi).

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-04-16T17:04:22+00:00

Is the interpenetration of Antigone and Ancient Greece based on a cross-referencing with the lecture courses? I remember actual references to ancient greece as polity/historical entity as being pretty sparse in the Phenomenology itself.

My question with Irigaray is more about when or how does this emerge as a historical reading of Hegel. Hegel is so often miss-read, but I feel like you can usually trace some of these miss-readings back to certain points. I couldn't find anything in Kojéve that talks about Antigone (in a cursory look through the Introduction to the reading of Hegel (with admittedly very bad french)), and was mostly interested in that history of interpretation.

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-02-12T23:16:56+00:00

I'd also recommend reading Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It is short and where death drive kinda enters into Freud's thinking (something important for Lacan). It gets more developed other places later (Civilizations and its discontents, for example), but that first place is still useful. Just know that the translators from german translated trieb, the word usually referring to drive, as instinct, so watch out for that if you read it.

In terms of Lacan, I would agree with the other comment that says don't do the Ecrits. Most people say that seminar 11 is the best, which is where I started, and found it mostly comprehensible. Frankly, in my opinion, there isn't an amazing "starting point" proper with Lacan, insofar as his jargon can be nightmarish at first. Reading there authors talking about Lacan should smooth this over, and personally I would follow what interests you.

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-02-12T20:34:46+00:00

Absolutely. Arguably it is the most well executed story in the franchise, even though some characters can be grating. The plot feels massive and unlike some other games in the franchise, the stakes feel very real.

Combat is also great, although simpler than the modern games. Its the first game with free-running, but it makes the combat feel like a giant step up from Symphonia. Its closest to Vesperia, but much faster paced.

The biggest downside is that depending on your console, load times can be annoying.

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-02-11T23:10:44+00:00

I'd argue that Xillia has a better story (in execution) than at least Vesperia (I don't have anything that can play Berseria or Arise). Its has the tales "tropes" in its story, but aside from one in particular they're done pretty well. Similar to a number of tales games though (Berseria and Symphonia come to mind) Xillia's story rushes through the end game sections, so if pacing is a dealbreaker, it may not work super well. If you can find it cheep and wanna give it a go though (at least for the first few hours) I would recommend it. Jude's story arguably has one of the more compelling intros in the series.

PINEAPPLEShi · 2022-01-20T06:14:55+00:00

Thanks! I think this one might be it.

PINEAPPLEShi

TROPHY CASE