Video Games and Literature
Blood Meridian as a video game? What about P.G. Wodehouse? At The Millions, Maxwell Neely-Cohen writes about games as storytelling, and asks why there’s not more intersection between the narrative-rich worlds of books and video games. He talks to the video games community and to games writers, who share their ‘disappointment that there had never been a violent action game written by Bret Easton Ellis, and that no game designer had ever gone to David Foster Wallace and said “what do you want to make?”’
Entries Open: Big Issue Fiction Edition
Entries are now open for the annual Big Issue fiction edition, under the theme ‘Make Me Smile’. All entries will be judged blind, with no names attached, and humour is encouraged. (As is lateral thinking.) Stories should be 2500 words or under. Entries close 31 May. More information at the Big Issue online.
TV, Twitter and Nielsen Ratings
Australia is set to become the third country in the word to get the ‘Nielsen TV Twitter Ratings’ service, ‘the first-ever measure of the total activity and reach of TV-related conversation on Twitter’. Over at Killings, Stephanie Schilt looks at the love-hate relationship between Twitter and TV (and confesses that she joined Twitter because of Community - the TV show, not an actual community).
Unlikely superstar
A neighbourhood bag lady in Chicago turned out to be a world-famous street photographer, Vivian Maier. ‘Even rooting through trash bins at the beach or in the alleys, the haughty old woman always wore a long dress, a peaked hat, stockings, and blocky shoes, as though still dressing for a station in life she had long since fallen from.’
AIDS in America’s deep south
In America’s deep south, there is an AIDS problem: the death rate from AIDS in Louisiana is twice the national average. Why? ‘'If you think about where the rates are highest, it’s in the most conservative places … It’s where the conversation is not being had, and where shame and stigma exist because of religion, because of culture, because of racism, because of homophobia—you name it, it exists for those reasons.’ The New Yorker looks at the situation.