Sundays are for rediscovering the joy of bouncing a tennis ball off your bedroom wall. When’s the last time you bounced a ball? I recommend it. Sometimes I play a game with myself where I say “if I bounce and catch this ball 10 times in a row, I will win a million pounds”. Then I get to five and hit myself in the face. Every time. If you are able to accomplish this seemingly impossible feat, please let me know your secret after reading the below collection of interesting articles and fiction.
Somewhere south of Paris, a bunch of carpenters, painters, blacksmiths, basket weavers, historians, and archaeologists have spent almost 30 years building a castle, the way people built castles in Olden Times. Ben O’Donnell has written it all up for Archaeology Magazine, with some sexy fortification photography. I know there are medieval masonry nerds in the RPS readership. Get in there and set ’em straight. I’m sure you could have had that castle up in six months, with enough cash left over to declare war on Belgium.
The project launched in 1998 with a straightforward mandate: Build a thirteenth-century castle using only thirteenth-century tools, techniques, and materials. Medieval archaeologists would provide guidance. And the hope was that every obstacle would reveal something that historians, architectural researchers, archaeologists, and castellologues, or scholars who specialize in studying castles, didn’t know. “At Guédelon, we’re looking for what disappeared in traditional archaeology,” says Florian Renucci, the master mason and longtime site director at Guédelon, who was formerly a researcher at Sorbonne University. “Experimental archaeology means bringing to life what workers can do. We’re always looking, hearing, feeling. Now, with our work, the castle can speak.”
The top-voted submissions for this year’s Annual Interactive Fiction Competition have been announced. There are stories about turning Phobos into a missile, detective mysteries set in fantastical 17th century Venice, didactic speculative fiction about the current anti-‘NSFW’ crusade, and stories about exolinguists that feature “an interactive score that creates itself as you play”. It’s a rich spread. I’ve only checked out a couple. First place goes to Ben Jackson’s Detritus, which has a resource management element – here’s the summary:
Lost in deep space, your cargo vessel has suffered a catastrophic hull failure. The engines are offline, the AI is silent, and there’s no sign of the crew …and that’s just the start of your problems. Explore the remains of the derelict ship. From fragmented memories, discover what became of the crew and piece together the events that led to the disaster. Find codes, hack keypads, and make your way past biometric locks in order to get the engines back online. The ship is filled with debris; make use of it to help you survive. Perhaps you’ll find the truth you’re searching for among the detritus.
Over at Vittles, Sasha Patel and Ben Jacob have an inside-outside report on labour conditions at UK high street coffee chain Gail’s following its acquisition by private equity, making connections to discrimination in Gujurat.
Since the takeover, Gail’s has more than doubled its number of branches – and its parent company has almost tripled its annual earnings – while staff in its cafes report ever-worsening working conditions and poor management. In July, a report by Novara alleged understaffing, overwork, union-busting and the use of CCTV to intimidate workers, which Gail’s denied. Even though these allegations are beginning to reach public consciousness, what is still missing from the story is how the company drives expansion through a reliance on recently-arrived migrant workers from South Asia.
From Maddy Myers over at Endless Mode, a close-read of Super Metroid’s sound design. I think some of the analysis is a bit bluntly ‘this means that’, but I like how Maddy picks apart the game’s silences. I am perpetually kicking myself for not taking audio into consideration in my reviews. Also Metroid is good, innit. They should make more of those and put them on PC.
In addition to pure silence, huge portions of the Super Metroid soundtrack make use of long, sustained, low notes that evoke the industrial sounds of a machine hum. There are also songs with very spare percussion intros, similarly allowing the musical score to sound more like the background noise of machines clanking, as opposed to recognizable tunes. It’s only when the actual melodies kick in that the player might realize that the sounds they were hearing were part of a musical score, not just sound effects that accompany whatever dangerous area Samus happens to be exploring. These minimalist songs, interspersed with specific moments of silence, allow the more high-octane and propulsive musical cues–during boss fights, timed escapes, and so on–to feel that much more dramatic.
Over at Thrilling Tales Of Old Video Games, Drew Mackie shows up about 39 years too late to ask what the hell is going on with Bubble Bobble. This was published three weeks ago, but I found it too funny not to include. It just keeps going.
To summarize, two twin boys (both ten years old) who are dating two twin girls (also ten years old) venture out into a magical forest, where they’re accosted by Super Drunk, who kidnaps the girls but also turns the boys into magical dragons whose special bubble powers ultimately bring about his own undoing, at which point it’s revealed to everyone’s surprise that Super Drunk was actually Bub and Bob’s own mother and father, fused together Crystal Gem-style into a single body at some unspecified point in time before the game’s story takes place.
If I explained this basic outline to my therapist as a story I’d written, I think he’d have some really understandable follow-up questions about my relationship to my parents, the role alcohol played in my household growing up and, quite possibly, trauma that I might be sublimating into a fairy tale that uses some archetypal imagery and then also a lot of weird stuff that just does not make much sense.
A shout-out to our peers at The Gamer who were laid off this week by clownshoes operation Valnet. Best of luck to you all, and to the writers and editors who remain.
Music? Hmm, maybe another wander through Balamb Garden.