James Clavell’s Taipan, A Sort of Review – On Milton Friedman Versus The Pudong New Area

In the opening chapter of his epic historical novel about the founding of Hong Kong, Taipan, James Clavell describes the mission of his protagonist, entrepreneur and alpha male Dirk Struan, the Taipan or boss of the Hong Kong expat community, as “to use riches and power to open up China to the world and particularly...

Short Fiction – DANGER FROM HEAVY SEAS

English coast; great splendid roar of the waves battering the cliffside, the rush of wind, the howl of despair from across the freezing sea – over there within the abyssal sky nothing, brother, but death and slow and squalid death at that, and here, at your back, the verdant Jerusalem, the fields where in ancient...

SimFührer – Strategy Games And The Conquest Of History

So I grew up reading books about World War Two. As a kid my dad and my grandad were always big into military history, and I was a hungry reader; I started reading about The War – the only war ever, the big boy war – because like any kid I liked machines and like...

US Imperialism And Quake (1998), Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Strogg

“Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie.” John Carmack once said, when id’s Tom Hall was getting too caught up in the deep lore of hit 1995 classic shooter Doom during development. “It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” In 1996 id Software released a game called...

In A Cave! With A Box of Scraps! – Iron Man And Futurism

“We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath...a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” – F.T. Marinetti...

Your Memes End Here – Metal Gear, A Retrospective (Or, The Life And Times Of Big Boss)

! lots of spoilers ahead for basically everything metal gear ! “GO AHEAD, SOLID SNAKE!” – Beginnings – Metal Gear 1 and 2 In 1987’s Metal Gear for the MSX, you play as rookie soldier Solid Snake (lmao) of the special forces organisation Foxhound, deployed to the South African military base Outer Heaven on the...

Jaroslav Kalfar’s Spaceman of Bohemia, A Review- On Visible/Invisible Places, The Czech Republic, And Mo Yan’s Diseased Language

Last year I read the novel Spaceman of Bohemia, a scifi tale of the Czech Republic’s first astronaut venturing into deep space for a dangerous solo mission, a man doing so trying to atone for his family’s communist past, who runs into trouble and meets an alien and thinks a lot about home. It was...

Disneyland with Chinese Characteristics – Culture, Capital and Splash Mountain

“Shanghai Disneyland is authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese.” – Bob Iger There’s many restaurant chains in China that offer Sichuan-style spicy hotpot, and in the middle of dinner at one of them it’s possible you might get a surprise. As you’re choking on a piece of especially peppery beef, reassuring your Chinese friends -who are...

Project Itoh’s Harmony – “The society that strangled you with kindness.”

-everyone agrees suicide is a selfish, shameless act - On the 20th of March, 2009, Japanese science fiction author Satoshi Ito, better known by his penname Ito Keikaku (Project Itoh), died of cancer at the age of 34. Ito had been struggling with cancer since 2001, long before his literary career took off, and at...

Totalitarianism in Polygons – Or, Goldeneye Vs. The USSR

First time I played a Nintendo 64 I didn’t actually know what it was. I was a wee kid who’d grown up on Mario on the NES when I was so young I lacked the cognitive ability to actually tell Super Mario Bros 1/2/3 were different games (or maybe I was just a dumbass, but...