Have y’all got one-and-a-half days to spare?
Oooh.
I will admit that I watched this show as a kid.
Norman Caruso interviews the developers of Oregon Trail and explains how the game’s mechanics evolved with each successive iteration of the game.
At what point did the term “Doom Clone” morph into “First-Person Shooter”? Ahoy explains.
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Dan Olson from Folding Ideas does a video on James Rolfe, a.k.a. The Angry Video Game Nerd, which in turn also functions as a self-examination.
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I watched about 25% of this because, honestly, I didn’t feel the need to spend an hour of my life on an essay about James Rolfe and artistic self-reflection - but the time I did spend on it was quite good. I had no idea who Dan Olson was before this, but now I’m inclined to check out his other videos.
He also nicely articulated a lot of my own meandering thoughts about AVGN over the years.
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Dan Olson (a.k.a. Folding Ideas) is a great video creator, talking about both modern media and cultic internet movements that sometimes intersect with or directly result from misinterpretations of media. His probably best known video is “Line Goes Up” which talks about Cryptocurrencies and NFTs, thought of as the definitive takedown of the two. It has racked over 14 million views which is impressive considering it is a 2:20:00 long.
However, I think to get his output there are two videos you should watch, one is called “The Art of Storytelling and The Book of Henry” which talks about the movie of that name and the self-satisfied failure of the narrative within it, and the other is “In Search of a Flat Earth” about the Flat-Earth movement and other cults that have sprung from its wilful ignorance of well established facts.
If you want a shorter taste of Dan’s style, you could check out “Minecraft, Sandboxes and Colonialism” where he talks about sandbox games and how the game concepts both minimize the evils of colonialism and sometimes inadvertently encourage them. That video is only about 15 minutes long.
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Sandbox games and colonialism is a topic that I’ve thought about for years now, so that’s right up my alley.
So while watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier, I got the feeling the ending credits had something of a Jim Steranko feel to them. I’m going to include a YouTube clip of said credits so you can determine for yourself…https://youtu.be/95tF137_BKg?si=Y1W4AvmPM_m5qqfx
If you’re interested in The Winter Soldier ending credits, they were created by David Mack, who has done a lot of Marvel and other comic work.
He discusses the credits here:
Thank you for the information
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I just looked into my YouTube subscriptions feed (which I do several times a day) and what the hell, a new Every Frame a Painting video after seven years of absence.
Apparently there was an announcement video last month that I missed as well. This seems to be a limited series of essays to promote a short film written and directed by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou, the creators of Every Frame a Painting.
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I wasn’t sure where to put this, but since it isn’t really a review and more of an analasys of certain story telling points, I think it belogs here.
So I recently saw the Nicolas Cage film, SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL (2023) and a thought struck me that I just couldn’t shake; this film is a re-telling of the Red Oni Blue Oni story/trope from Japanese folklore. This is only a partially baked theory but I think it fits and I think the creators were not-so-subtly hinting at it on screen.
The first hint was Nick Cage’s inexplicaly bright red hair and red outfit. This confused me at first but I chalked it up to Cage just portraying a psycotic gangster type dude. But then, as the story unfolds, pieces come together in a way that make it hard to overlook the parallels beween the film and the folklore.
Vague Spoilers Ahead
One big difference is that the two main charachters are not and were never friends. But they were both monsters(homicidal criminals) working for the same organization. So there is no clean happy ending for these two. But one of them does fair better by the end, which is sort of in keeping with the old Japanese tale.
One obvious parallel is the fact that the Red Oni(Nicolas Cage) is portraid in classic Cage fasion as wild and passionate and on the verge of losing control, but sigularly focused on his goal. While the blue Oni(Joel Kinnaman) is initially portraid as a quiet, stoic, mild mannered family man who just wants to do good by humanity.
Both of the monsters allude to their desire to eschew their monsterous ways and lead happy lives among normal humans, but the inciting incident of the film sets them at odds with eachother. As a result, the Blue Oni is able to join normal human society while the Red Oni is violently thrown out. They both also have a sort of transformation, as part of their back story, where they figurativly become diffent people or at least disguise or change themselves.
Aside from Cage’s hair and jacket, the red and blue coloring motif is present throuout the film. To the point where the director or the DP must have known that it was part of the story and incorporated this red/blue contrast into just about every scene right up to the end.
Now I’m no folklore-ologist or whatever and I’m sure I’ve left a lot out, but I would be surprised if the Red Oni/Blue Oni story wasn’t in mind during the writing and creation of this film. Or maybe these tropes exist outside of the Japanese tradition.
edit: grammar
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Surviving Animation recently brought his channel back after a hiatus and is uploading more frequently with interesting analytical topics. His most recent video discusses how shonen seems to be getting darker and less child-friendly for its intended psychographic.
Kaptain Kristian is back with two new videos!
Philosophy Tube is trying an interesting experiment: An entire video in one take.
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AmusingLuis has been a channel that I’ve been following for a while. He likes making videos based on bizarre and obscure topics, and his recent rise to fame has been chronicling the history of TV channels. His most recent video took on a topic that I don’t think anyone expected: TV news channels that had gone defunct.
