Weekend Reads: The Silver Surfer, Halo, Cyberpunk, Museum Creepiness, COVID-19,
Recommended weekend reading material for April 25, 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.
Longtime Opus readers will know that my favorite superhero is the Silver Surfer. A recent Twitter thread highlights some of the finest Silver Surfer stories from the likes of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, John Buscema, Moebius, Jim Starlin, and Ron Lim.
Over the years, comic books have used a variety of methods to depict God, Satan, heaven, hell, and the supernatural.
Under the [Comics Code Authority], criminals weren’t to be sympathetic or glamorous, legitimate government authority was not to be put in a bad light, and “deviant” sexual behavior was prohibited. The Code also blocked the depiction of demon worship, witchcraft, and “walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism.” Still, who got to decide what wasn’t acceptable sometimes depended on who was working at the Comics Code Authority office that day, and some creators realized that as long as you didn’t offend the beliefs of the Code employees specifically, you could get your story through.
A group of gamers spent ten years trying to unlock an Easter egg in Halo: Reach.
When a group of Halo: Reach players discovered a Master Chief Easter egg back in 2010, they weren’t happy with just appreciating the statue from afar. All they could think of was: How can I get there? What would it take to stand atop this franchise monument, which resides in the background scenery well beyond the game’s playable area? They wouldn’t get the answer until a decade later, in 2020.
In her latest column, K. B. Hoyle explores the quandaries of “resurrecting” the dead via CGI and virtual reality.
[A]s CGI and virtual reality technology becomes more accepted, more available, more realistic, and more affordable, obtaining consent from a person for their image to be used before or after their death will become a matter of course. The consent issue thus aside, though, we will still have an ethical dilemma before us: how much alteration of reality, especially as regards the human body, is healthy for us to consume? Is the body something we just recycle endlessly without ramifications, or is there a moral aspect to this sort of virtual reality, as well?
Thanks to the current pandemic, Kelsey D. Atherton argues that we may be closer to a cyberpunk future than we realize.
As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps through the world, it collides with governments in the West that have spent decades deliberately shedding power, capability, and responsibility, reducing themselves to little more than vestigial organs that coordinate public-private partnerships of civic responsibility. This hollowing of the state began in earnest in the 1980s, and the science fiction of that time — the earliest texts of cyberpunk — imagines what happens when that process is complete.
Museums are tweeting out photos of the creepiest items in their collections. Fiji mermaids are quite popular, along with ancient hairbuns, taxidermied bats, and — of course — creepy dolls. Via Prufrock.
Learn some social distancing wisdom from medieval Christian women:
The pandemic of COVID-19 is often called “unprecedented” — and for many people cooped up in their homes in different countries, the experience is both unparalleled and challenging. But in late-medieval Europe, individuals self-isolated professionally. Some people — women particularly — permanently withdrew from society to live walled in, alone in a room attached to a church.
Oof… as a homeschooling parent, McSweeney’s “We, the Hard-Working, Newly Homeschooling Parents of America, Have Rewritten the Common Core Standards” hits a little close to home.
Students will learn that the threat of loss of screen time is now entirely empty, as no grown-up is willing to deal with the catastrophic consequences of being stuck in the house with a bored, screen-less child.
Concerns over COVID-19 may put an end to Hollywood sex scenes for the foreseeable future.
“Everything in Hollywood is on hold at the moment, but moving forward there is a huge worry about getting insurance regarding virus concerns for projects,” said the agent who asked not to be named.
“There has not been a health situation like this ever in modern Hollywood, and no company wants to put anyone at risk not just for humanitarian reasons but also for liability too.”
I want to avoid politics as much as possible in this newsletter because Lord knows you can get enough of that from everywhere else. But David French’s recent column about American evangelicals’ slow-but-depressing compromise really hits home, touching on the feelings of loss and betrayal that I’ve experienced in the last few years.
Many millions of Trump-supporting white Evangelicals no longer care about character (though a surprising number are still remarkably unaware of his flaws). That much is clear. But the story now grows darker still. As they’ve abandoned political character tests, they’re also rejecting any meaningful concern for presidential competence.
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