#barry is genuinely a ridiculously good portrayal of it

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Ive been trying to collect my thoughts for like two weeks now on what sally reed’s real happy ending would look like and I have found absolutely no answer but it is I think helpful in understanding what’s going on with her last episode before she agrees to go with barry.

Because it’s an absolutely bonkers decision and we see absolutely none of her deliberation really - in fact she has a connection with an agent and might be able to get some minor roles! So it’s kind of surprising when you see her decide to go to her home where you both know he is. Like it’s weird! Until you remember Barry is about how the entire entertainment industry is inescapably exploitative especially towards women. The thing is that Sally wants to be famous but tied up in that is needing to feel safe and powerful. Its not worth disentangling the two theyre co-constitutive. And with Joplin? When she was her own boss with recognition and power? It was taken away from her in a heartbeat and there was no recourse. And she’s furious because she thinks if she’s just good enough and if she works hard she should be owed it. And if someone else like Natalie or Barry gets it she can’t handle it.

And so her entire subplot in episode 4 is in this frame the most concise perfect storytelling. She gets back and is so close to the Thing that will Make it Better, it’s the moving and fame and production and the lights flare. And then she meets a famous oscar-winning director who’s working on a project she hates, with actors cast to be conventionally beautiful and a nonsense plot and 90% green screen. And Sally acts for her, assuming that being good will actually get you something, and fails! (Don’t EVEN get me started on the gender politics here. the only man is the agent offering her a gig but it also doesn’t move the needle because women in barry do misogyny too)

So the realization that HAS to come is that this is futile. She will absolutely never be powerful without someone holding a trapdoor that can take it all away. You can direct CODA and you’ll still be stuck here. She will never be safe. And she can’t go home. So after that, well. Barry.

#as a person for whom straight patriarchy has just a low emotional valence #(ie. it factors into my conscious day to day experience very little even as it has enormous unseen impacts) #barry is genuinely a ridiculously good portrayal of it #its fairly isolated to a specific context (white entertainment gender politics) #so like. outside of LA the idea that sally reed is too ugly for fame is very very silly #but its so enmeshed in that context that it scans. it doesn't reach. its about entertainment and it knows it #barry hbo #this is too long but im on my laptop so typing is too easy and. yknow. sally

[anthonysstupiddailyblog]

Anthony’s Stupid Daily Blog (5): Thu 17th Mar 2022

Little Britain has been returned to BBC iPlayer after extensive cuts have been made by Lucas and Walliams in order to erase the insensitive portrayals of black and Asian characters. I won’t be a hypocrite and say that when the show was first on I took the moral high ground and refused to watch it because it used blackface. Like a lot of other people it never even occurred to me that a couple of white guys blacking up might cause offense to black people. Also it’s not like when the characters in Always Sunny black up because in the context of that show, those characters are white and are also fuckwits who don’t realize why it’s bad to black up. In Little Britain when David Walliams blacks up, the character he’s portraying is supposed to be black. I’m sure I’m not the first one to point this out but in ten years time the things that are funny now might no longer be acceptable (Hell, they may not be acceptable now and we just don’t realize it). I was never really into Little Britain as a kid, I was more of a Bo Selecta fan (although I tried watching that a little while back and fuck me has that show aged much worse than Little Britain). I never liked the show because it seemed too reliant on catchphrases and gimmicks and not in ironic way like The Fast Show was but it did have the odd funny moment. I genuinely don’t think that Lucas and Walliams meant to cause harm or were trying to make black people to be figures of ridicule, I just think they had ideas for black characters and at the time naively thought there wouldn’t be a problem with them portraying the characters. To be honest I don’t think that they should have put the episodes back unedited because to me that’s a little bit like pretending that casually racist attitudes to comedy never happened. Similar to the racist cartoons of the 1940’s I think that they should remain available in their original context so that the youth of today can look at them and see just how racist the culture at the time was and how far we have come in terms of acceptance now. I know that a lot of BBC shows featuring blackface have a disclaimer that comes up before the show warning viewers that the portrayals of black people may cause offense. I can understand them doing this because they don’t want the youth of today seeing that and thinking that this kind of humour is still acceptable. You need to leave them unedited unless you’re basically pretending that it never happened. Maybe you should give people the option of watching the unedited version or the edited version. That way people could watch the older version in order to see just how much more respect black people are given compared to back then (On TV at least). Yeah you’d get the odd twat watching the older version because they think the blackface and silly voices are funny but there are always going to be dickheads like that. I’m not sure what the correct answer is so it’s a good thing the decision isn’t up to me.

Had another chat with Kev over Messenger who was telling me that I should get an SIA license. I told Kev that personally I’m not a fan of her music and even if I was I didn’t see why I would need a license to listen to it. Kev then explained that a SIA license is something you need to get a security job. It sounds good and Kev says that for the whole time he’s been working in the job he’s had no hassle but I know for a fact that as soon as I start the job the number of incidents will shoot up and I’ll probably get stabbed or blown up on my first day. Hell, a few months ago someone tried to steal my bike from work and if it wasn’t for the security guards they would have because I sure as fuck wasn’t going to try and stop the cunt from nicking it. So if I’m not brave enough to stop someone from stealing my own property how am I going to stop criminals from stealing other people’s property? I keep telling Kevin and Barrie (who used to work at the call centre with us) that we should do a podcast or a Google livestream but Kevin is scared that I will reveal too many of his secrets. For instance he’s worried I might tell someone that after he hit rock bottom following his TV show “Kev’s Kitchen” (where he would specialize on cooking Cheesy Beans) was cancelled, he was arrested late last year after attempting to steal an egg salad sandwich from Sainsbury’s when the staff refused a signed photo of him as payment.

[pixelgrotto]

The horrific Resident Evil playthrough, part nine

If there’s one word that can be used to describe Resident Evil: Revelations, it’s “solid.” This is kinda funny, since most of the game takes place on a body of water - or more specifically, a ship floating in the middle of the ocean. This is a good setting for a horror game that, interestingly enough, was used in Ubisoft’s Resident Evil 4 clone Cold Fear and the negatively reviewed Game Boy Color spin-off Resident Evil Gaiden, which I’ll get to eventually.

But going back to my main point, RE: Revelations is a very fine playable experience. It features the over-the-shoulder viewpoint and gunplay that’s been the series norm since RE4, but has a confined, ominous setting more reminiscent of the earlier Resident Evils. Just like the Lost in Nightmares DLC of Resident Evil 5, which saw Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield infiltrating a spooky European manor that bore more than a passing resemblance to the original Spencer Mansion, it seems that Revelations was engineered to combine new school Resident Evil with old school Resident Evil, creating a combo to please all the series veterans who complained that the sunshine of RE5 had made things decidedly un-scary, while still not alienating newer fans. 

There’s a lot of decent stuff in this combo, starting with the front and center return of Jill Valentine. While Resident Evil was a franchise that always did a great job of female representation in its earlier entries, as the games have gotten more bang shoot ‘em up, the main protagonists have increasingly become dudes while the ladies have been delegated to support roles. This falls into the trope of “action games star guys to empower male players while survival horror games star women to make male players want to protect the protagonist,” so it’s nice to see Revelations buck this trend. Jill does spend the entirety of the game in a skintight wetsuit that’s contributed to a lot of cringy fanart, but to Revelations’ credit, she is never sexualized throughout the entire campaign. The two other main females in the cast - Jessica Sherawat, a BSAA member who’s kind of a skank and rocks a ridiculous costume that’s missing an entire leg, and Rachel Foley, a "secret agent” who looks like a Twitch titty streamer - don’t fare nearly so well, but at least Jill is done right. 

Jessica and Rachel aren’t the only new characters introduced into series lore - Revelations has a whole ton of fresh faces, and since the game is divided up into 12 hour-long chapters, it seems like the devs were also inspired to make everyone seem reminiscent of someone in a television show. You’ve got the BSAA boss who seems based on every CSI boss ever, two funky dudes named Keith (finally, a playable black guy) and Quint who buck the trend of these games only starring highly attractive models, a whole bunch of bioweapon-stealing terrorists, a bad guy with a goatee who looks like he wandered in from the Metal Gear Solid party down the hall, and the best newbie of all - Parker Luciani, an Italian BSAA member who looks like Russell Crowe and fills in the same kind of “dad” role that Barry Burton occupied in Resident Evil 1.

Weaving these TV drama-esque characters together is a plot that trades zombies for mutated human/sea creature hybrids, which is an excellent combination since the sea is home to pure terror. The story twists and turns in a mostly understandable way until chapter 11 or so, when it suddenly devolves into deus ex machina cliches and faces the same problems as a lot of Japanese games that are trying to be too witty for their own good. (See: the vast majority of Final Fantasy titles.) It’s not a bad tale, and it plays things straight in the same way that Resident Evil 5 did, but is somewhat less memorable in the long run since it lacks a proper baddie like Wesker to really stick out in your mind.

And that’s probably the only issue I have with Revelations. There’s nothing really wrong with the game, but that means that it’s also oddly forgettable in some ways, and definitely feels like the side story Nintendo 3DS gaiden that it was originally developed as when compared with its recent predecessors. It lacks the super engaging pacing that Resident Evil 4 had, for instance - while RE4 was the sort of game that made me want to stay up late playing just one more hour, I was okay to take a break and go to bed after each bite-sized bit of Revelations. And while Revelations provides a decidedly more focused single-player experience than Resident Evil 5, the strange racial miscalculations of that title and the Hollywood-influenced (but genuine, I believe) portrayal of Africa just make RE5 more interesting, in my opinion. This isn’t to say that Revelations is dull - it’s just that it’s sandwiched in between other series entries that I simply find myself having more to say about. Sometimes when you’re the third child who does his thing well enough, yet is overshadowed by the perfect big brother (RE4) and an annoying at times, compelling at others second sibling (RE5), this sort of phenomenon can happen.

But lest we end on a meh note, I will give credit where credit is due - the many new faces that Revelations brings to the increasingly complex world of Resident Evil are mostly welcome ones, and the game does a solid (there’s that word again) job of bringing back the terror that used to infuse the series in an era when the scares were slowly being forgotten. Though, part of me wonders if I would have enjoyed Revelations even more if it had brought back fixed camera angles, too... Hmm, nine games deep into this series playthrough and it appears that I can finally choose a side in the great debate over which style of Resident Evil I kind of prefer. Make mine fixed camera angles! All screenshots taken by me. For more, check out this Twitter thread showing my step-by-step progress through the game.

#pixel grotto #video games #now playing #resident evil #biohazard #resident evil revelations #jill valentine #chris redfield #capcom