Weekend Reads: "Final Fantasy 7," "Cats," the F-word, Introverts
Recommended weekend reading material for April 11, 2020.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting, thought-provoking, and enjoyable articles, blog posts, and reviews. I hope you’ll find they’re good weekend reading material.
Final Fantasy 7 is one of the most beloved video games of all time. Does Square Enix’s ongoing remake add anything new to the game?
Gaming has grown, and so have we, but what have we lost in the transition? This isn’t a replacement for the original game. It’s another take on the same ideas, blown up to fill multiple releases in a way that feels artistically justified in some ways and mercenary in its approach to becoming a commercial juggernaut in others.
Related: Bandcamp has compiled a list of albums inspired by Final Fantasy 7 that spans genres like metal, vaporwave, and hip-hop. (To their list, I’d also add Lo Pan’s Midgar.)
Cats was one of the biggest box office bombs in recent history, and apparently, it was a nightmare production for the visual effects artists.
The visual effects source I spoke with described the situation as “almost slavery,” and recalled working 90-hour weeks for months. Some colleagues, they recalled, stayed in the office for two or three days at a time, sleeping under their desks. But worst of all, the source said, was the treatment visual effects staff received from Tom Hooper. The director, the source alleged, has no idea how animation works — but that did not stop him from sending crew members individual emails denigrating their work.
The article also contains important information about Cats’ infamous “butthole cut.”
If you’re looking for some good pop culture lifelines to get you through social distancing, etc., then Christ and Pop Culture’s writers have got you covered.
The weight of this cultural moment can be eased, ever so slightly, by turning our hearts and minds toward cultural works that give us new life, right when we need it. Call it escape if you must, but we need balms for the soul in times like these.
If you’re tired of relying on social media algorithms to provide you with the content you want to read, start subscribing to your favorite sites’ RSS feeds.
You get to choose what you subscribe to in your feed reader, and the order in which the posts show up. You might prefer to read the oldest posts first, or the newest. You might group your feeds by topic or another priority. You are not subjected to the “algorithmic feed” of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, where they choose the order for you. You won’t miss your friends’ posts because the algorithm decided to suppress them, and you are not forced to endure ads disguised as content (unless a feed you subscribe to includes ads inside their posts).
Via CSS Tricks.
I love the freedom that RSS offers to readers. You can subscribe to the Opus RSS feed right here.
Why do corporations use nonsensical terms like “parallel path,” “complexify,” “shareability,” and “pain point”?
When we adopt words that connect us to a larger project — that simultaneously fold us into an institutional organism and insist on that institution’s worthiness — it is easier to pretend that our jobs are more interesting than they seem. Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves.
Related: A dictionary of ridiculous business jargon.
Many designers consider Helvetica a boring and ugly typeface, and yet it’s everywhere.
Look around you. It’s likely that some manifestation of Helvetica won’t be too far away. Since its launch in 1957, it’s become the go-to type for company logos and transport hubs, making it one of the most widespread designs of all time.
Via The Loop.
Also, regardless of whether you’re a designer or not, I highly recommend watching Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica documentary.
As a 500-year-old manuscript proves, the “F-word” has been with us for a long time.
The Bannatyne Manuscript gets its name from a young 16th-century Edinburgh merchant named George Bannatyne, who compiled the roughly 400 poems while stuck at home in late 1568, as the plague ravaged his city. It's an anthology of Scottish literature, particularly the texts of poems by some of the country's greatest bards (known as makars) in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Via 1440.
Despite it being a common, every day material, nobody seems to understand why glass exists in the first place.
It’s the mystery posed by every window and mirror, every piece of plastic and hard candy, and even the cytoplasm that fills every cell. All of these materials are technically glass, for glass is anything that’s solid and rigid but made of disordered molecules like those in a liquid. Glass is a liquid in suspended animation, a liquid whose molecules curiously cannot flow. Ideal glass, if it exists, would tell us why.
What happens when you’re the parent of college-aged kids who’ve returned home because of the coronavirus?
We’re all students now. Or, to put it more precisely, we all live like students, but two of us are still parents, and we confront one of the most profound parenting challenges of our lives — how do you lead a household through a crisis when everyone is smart enough and sophisticated enough to understand that, at the end of the day, everything might not be okay?
You’d think that a pandemic would be an introvert’s time to shine (so to speak), but that’s not necessarily the case.
I’ve come to realize that one of the most difficult things for me in this pandemic — acquiring toilet paper aside — is that I’m no longer able to easily compartmentalize the different aspects of my life.
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