tartley.com (Posts about media)

Iron Lung

Jonathan Hartley — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 01:55:23 GMT

Game by David Szymanski, published 2022

Movie written, directed, and starring Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach, released 2026

New work meeting background just dropped!

Invited to view the movie at Pop's with Phil and Sarah, I crammed the game it was based on from start to finish the night before, with Zander watching disdainfully over my shoulder every step of the way. I gave SCP-354, which inspired the game, a wide berth.

Both are tense and engaging, but clearly only for a particular kind of viewer. The game itself has a very narrow focus, as befits a single-person indie production. This means you'll only really enjoy it if you're dorky enough to fixate on the mechanic of cross referencing your submarine's map co-ordinates sufficiently hard to orient your way around a whole system of underwater trenches. Every step of the way you negotiate your way past unseen but deadly canyon walls by dead reckoning alone, a tense enough exercise even without the proximity alarms. On top of that, strange noises and... other interuptions... when they drop, are technically relatively tame and limited, but in context, entwined in the co-ordinate grind, they are experienced as shocking and panic inducing.

Similarly, I enjoyed the movie, but I see reviews are all over the map. Clearly some don't have patience for its limited scope - 99% of the runtime takes place with one character in a single room. But I found it taut and thrilling. Some patches of unclear dialog softened the high-concepts thrown around, but for me it was always an experience of style and vibes anyway.

Here

Jonathan Hartley — Sat, 31 May 2025 14:24:15 GMT

by Richard McGuire (the 304 page graphic novel, not the original 6 page comic.)

If you dug Understanding Comics then you will probably like this. Every panel is a view of the exact same space, occupied by a modest living room in our time, but the frames span a vast time period, and are presented in a chaotic, overlapping, non-chronological way that heightens the drama of several stories that happen, at times, to pass by that location. Experimental stuff.

I hear there will be a movie. Reminds me of the movies of Alan Moore's comics, which entirely missed the point that he was exploring what could be done in the comic medium which doesn't work in others.

Blackout / All Clear

Jonathan Hartley — Sat, 31 May 2025 14:16:59 GMT

by Connie Willis, 2010

Blackout and All Clear are two novels, planned as one, but which grew out of control. They form the latest and most ambitious entry in the delightful Oxford Time Travel Series, in which Oxford University historians of 2060 perform routine observational field work in the distant past, often for weeks or months at a time.

I've positively loved several of these. The initial novella Fire Watch touchingly depicts a historian joining the watch that prevented the destruction of St Paul's Cathedral during WWII. Doomsday Book is by turns droll and tragic, telling of a young historian enduring the horrors of the black plague in the Middle Ages.

This was followed by To Say Nothing of the Dog, which follows a slightly different cast of time-travelling Oxford historians sent to an English aristocratic household in the 1890s. There, the necessity of hiding their true identities and intentions compounds the many other confusions in a comedy of manners, as a need to restore a historical object to its proper place and time, at the risk of destroying the entire continuum, is complicated by hastily improvised plans, a severe case of time-lag, overbearing matriarchs, mistaken identities, missing cats, crossed marital hopes, boating parties, and a Jeeves-like ferociously competent manservant.

Indeed, the whole thing is strikingly similar to a P. G. Wodehouse novel, and I don't say that lightly, as I think he's one of the best comedy writers ever, and this homage is entirely worthy of the comparison.

Finally, we come to Blackout, which by comparison is is a bit of a relentless downer, as historians scattered about the period of WWII sink into despair as they get trapped in the past, cut off from each other, unable to return to their future university, and slowly come to accept that not only will they have to live through the difficult and dangerous war years, and very well might never be able to return home, and further, might in fact have accidentally caused changes in the past which mean the future they came from no longer exists, and possibly even is overwritten by a catastrophic timeline in which Hitler's forces were globally victorious.

I did find it frustrating that on many different occasions the plot is driven by characters withholding information from each other, often motivated by wanting to save each other the worry of bad news. In a comedic setting like To Say Nothing of the Dog, this sort of thing only adds to the farce. But in the life-or-death precarity of Blackout, I found this to be immensely frustrating and contrived, and it happens over and over again.

Another of Willis' books that does this a lot is Passage, which isn't part of the Oxford time-travel series. I really did love it, although it absolutely has a lot of the same style of contrived mechanisms, whereby characters simply cannot bring themselves to perform this absolutely vital action because if they head in that direction, they might bump into that other character who they really dislike and who talks your ear off. But it redeemed itself with a bold and creative take on psychological events that occur during the process of brain death, which I really enjoyed a lot.

To be honest, I only stuck with Blackout because I expected that All Clear would, as the title suggests, reverse course and pay off all this dramatic build-up with uplifting, triumphant resolutions. But it was actually just much more of the same. Even the character's final escape from their predicament is interwoven with terrible sacrifice and loss.

I guess that's what a book about living through The Blitz is bound to entail. And everyone else loves it. It has a Hugo and Nebula and everything, so my own flagging enthusiasm is doubtless entirely my own failing.

Tactical Breach Wizards

Jonathan Hartley — Mon, 26 May 2025 21:43:45 GMT

In this house, we use the metric system. Released in 2024 by Suspicious Developments.

I was toying with the idea of advancing the kiddo's videogaming curriculum into a turn-based tactics phase, maybe starting with the genius of 1994's UFO:Enemy Unknown, on which I spent endlessly fascinated evenings of my youth, or maybe one of the better of its numerous sequels and offshoots. Somehow I was distracted from that plan by multiple people enthusing about last year's Tactical Breach Wizards, and I'm so glad that I was.

It is such a lovely, synergistic blend of gameplay mechanics, setting, characters, story, plot-twists and whip-smart dialog, making substantial improvements on the traditional bombastic and yet intensely thoughtful turn-based formula.

First, it defuses the self-righteous seriousness of the genre's customary tone by replacing the gurning muscle-bound military types with a bunch of special-ops wizards. Still formidably competent, but now replete with pointy hats, hazardous runes, and bejeweled wands protruding from their assault rifle barrels. Further, while presenting a thrilling facade of enemies dispatched in a dizzying flurry of rapid-fire magic, the game explicitly disavows wanton killing. While one of our characters does sneer at the stance, your team is revealed early-on to use only nonlethal take-downs. This is soon followed up by a cut-scene which shows your team leaving a building after a mission, revealing the enemies you earlier dispatched out of eighth floor windows floating gently earthwards, each safely cocooned in a magical bubble.

Second, a fundamental mechanic bestows one of your characters with the gift of magical foresight, allowing you to see the outcome of planned actions before you actually commit to them. It's a slick narrative integration of a mechanic that serves multiple purposes. Preventing the anguish of losing a character due to dumb bad luck means the player is freed up to experiment more, trying audacious plans rather than playing it safe. Then, when it all goes wrong, you can rewind just a smidgeon, and try out nearby alternatives, until you have it all just right, bouncing generative combos back and forth between characters, unleashing staggering waves of action, discovering gleefully that a level you initially thought to be an impossible slog is actually completable in a single nimble turn. When combined with the inventive diversity of each character's specific talents, it simultaneously presents real challenges, while allowing the construction of surprising solutions that leave one feeling feeling incredibly clever and creative.

It's not often worthwhile dwelling on the characters in a videogame, but here they are the stars of the show. Distinctive, flawed and intensely likeable each in their own way, with personalities and back-stories that resonate so pleasingly with their in-game abilities. The writing is just top notch, with phenomenal dialog, giving the group as a whole a fresh, wholesome and real-talk vibe.

This is an all-time classic in my book, and has been fabulous to experience alongside the 13 year-old kiddo, as we've each run parallel games through to completion, ogling over each other's shoulders to get sneak previews of encounters we haven't seen yet.

The Black Parade: Level 04: Death's Dominion

Jonathan Hartley — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 02:33:01 GMT

So. Looking Glass's seminal 1998 PC game Thief: The Dark Project spawned an active and long-lived modding community, who created hundreds of fan-made extra levels, many of which are extremely artful and creative.

One group of particularly obsessed loons spent seven years crafting an extraordinary set of such levels, forming an entirely new single-player campaign for the game, named The Black Parade. This was released last year and I only just became aware of it. I'm four missions in, absolutely loving it, and completely lost in the catacombs beneath the pseudo-medieval city.

Hence, my lovingly hand-drawn map of mission 4, Death's Dominion:

spoilers

That Which Gave Chase

Jonathan Hartley — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 21:56:38 GMT

Released in 2023, played on Linux in 2024.

spoilers

Mush your dog sled across cruel Arctic wastelands, driven onwards by a brisk and intense companion, who hired you to take him back to some remote spot, where it becomes apparent he had some sort of revelation, or maybe a breakdown.

The low-res, dithered presentation conveys the harsh, blinding conditions, as you struggle to make out details through the relentless wind and ice. The days and nights of the journey blur into one another, leaving you only fragmentary, disjointed memories: sledding across the ice; arriving at crude wooden huts for the night; mounting the sled before dawn; collapsing into rough bunks; righting the sled while your companion curses you for a fool; silent moments alone.

Smash cuts amongst snowy wastes echo the discontinuities in Alan Moore's "Nemo: Heart of Ice", albeit this is a far more understated tale. The sense is of a protracted, exhausting time spent covering the distance, through punishing conditions, and it's surprisingly evocative.

The narrative leans into the disorientation, making nothing clear. Your companion becomes increasingly cryptic. He urges you onward, never pausing more than absolutely necessary. The deer behave increasingly strangely. Your companion regales you with sickening tales of the investigative mistreatment he subjected them to on his previous visit. By the time the strange mushrooms come into play it is very obvious that you are in a place to which you should never have come, very far from anywhere or anyone, with mounting dread, alone with with a madman. What happened the last time he took this route? What did he leave behind here? What awaits at your journey's end?

It's hard to know whether the difficulty of interpretation, or the non-literal aspects of your journey, are intended as the result of your character's mushroom-induced fever, or the pretensions of intrusively figurative allusions. Most likely, it seems to be both. The deliberate ambiguity runs deep.

Doesn't outstay its welcome, all done in an hour. But the memories remain.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Jonathan Hartley — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 15:01:22 GMT

Directed and written by John Hughes, 1986. IMDB

So, way back in my teen years, we had a VHS tape of this, which friends and I played and played and played, probably racking up more rewatches than any other movie in my life. So it was a pleasure to break it out for our 11 year-old, some some 37 years later (!), to see whether it still holds up, and find that it really does.

By chance this was the week after we'd just watched The Blues Brothers, so we got to compare and contrast two movies set in Chicago - a privileged white story, and a poverty stricken, largely colored one, which even share scenes filmed in the very same restaurant.

Back then, I had no idea who Ben Stein was, so it was amusing to see him now and suddenly join the dots. Apparently his infamous "voodoo economics" speech had no script and was ad-libbed.

Reviewing Rooney's comical attempts to break into the Buellers' house made me realize for the first time that this was Hughes' dry-run at what would become Home Alone.

I had always been frustrated that I'd never been able to lay my hands on the "You're not dying" song that Cameron plays while sick in his bedroom (i.e. here's the few seconds of it on Youtube, exactly as it appears in the movie.)

Now we have the Internet, I can see that this failure wasn't exactly my fault - there is no such song. The few bars we hear were whipped up by Ira Newborn specially for the film, based on an old Louis Armstrong song, Let My People Go. Fortunately for us, one man was obsessed about it enough to actually recreate a full length song based on the snippets from the movie. Here is Daniel Simone's Let My Cameron Go, full of a lush Pink Floyd sound, and ripe with the sort of ecstatic anticipation that even Roger Waters would be proud of.

Duly added to my rotation for next time I'm sick.

Update: Dany Boyd's CinemaStix posted a lovely YouTube about how Ferris isn't the main character of this movie.

Resolution and The Endless

Jonathan Hartley — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 19:12:24 GMT

Resolution (2012)

The Endless (2017)

I only had a hazy awareness of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the writer and directors, before watching these movies. But having discovered them, I now realize that they are doing just about my favorite thing in film: Quirky, intense, psychological drama wound around some high concept science fiction.

Going in, I hadn't realized the two films are related. But then they contain the same scene, viewed from two different angles (pictured above), and it starts to become clearer. As it happens, I watched them out of order - my enthusiasm for The Endless caused me to look up their earlier Resolution. But with hindsight, I think this is actually the best order to view them. If Resolution has a weakness, it's that the science fictional elements seem a bit arbitrary. Why should this supernatural entity focus its narrative-obsessed attentions on these two men, here in this cabin, out in the middle of nowhere? But in The Endless, this particular brand of supernatural outlandishness is revealed to be just part of a wider pattern, affecting many people in this geographical area. Although this is the bigger, weirder story, it is more fully fleshed out and becomes more believable, creating a setting which recontextualizes and improves the earlier film.

Rating: 10/10 if you like mindbending SF horror, 0/10 if you prefer something a bit more polished and comfortable.

Aurora

Jonathan Hartley — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 20:29:16 GMT

by Kim Stanley Robinson, 2015

It has long been held by fans of science fiction that fantasy is a lowly subset of science-fiction, or perhaps a disreputable cousin, one for whom the normal rules of discernment do not apply. If such unlikely and unrealistic things as dragons and magic are allowed, the reasoning goes, then the book cannot be relied upon to deliver any kind of coherent narrative experience, since the lapsed rule-set now allows for any old ex machina plot twists to save the day. A magical "defeat the evil" spell? No problem. A new mythical creature capable of defeating the previously unassailable one? Why not? All reason is gone.

It's more useful though, is to invert the hierarchy of this received wisdom, and consider science fiction as a subset of fantasy. Mentioning this in fandom circles blows mental fuses. Does not compute. But the speculative flights of science fiction are also fantasies. Just fantasies that a particular type of person finds especially beguiling, compelling, and believable. To some extent, I concede that on occasion they are believable because they seem to be a reasonable extrapolation of our current situation. But no matter how reasonable your extrapolation seems to be, it's always possible that reality will zig instead of zag, and even the most humdrum tale of a rocket man's life will find itself at odds with the unexpected reality of suspended human spaceflight in the face of spiraling real-world costs. The vision that one is selling is always, to a greater or lesser extent, a wishful one - a fantasy.

This becomes immediately apparent once we stray beyond the confines of low Earth orbit, to take in the wider scope of science fiction, the vast majority of which encompasses tales across the galaxy, nay, the universe, including time travel, teleportation booths, aliens of every color, quantum reality displacement, and multiversal escapades in which literally everything is possible. These are very clearly fantasies, and it is intensely curious to me why this sort of fantasy is considered more "realistic" or "believable" than, say, flying lizards with fiery breath. Even though the narrative hand-waving that explains away the former - "It's an alternate universe, where different rules apply" - is abundantly adequate to more than completely explain anything in the fantasy realm.

I once asked my guru science fiction critic Damien Walter what makes people consider some stories believable, while other are not. He replied with a statement that has stuck with me ever since: People are willing to invest the effort to provide the conceptual scaffolding around an idea to make it seem believable (e.g. to speculate on the mechanism that might allow for a faster-than-light hyper-drive) when the story fulfills some deeper psychological need for them.

Hence, a story on the same topic as Aurora, of a generation ship sent to colonize an Earth-like planet orbiting the nearby star of Tau Ceti, is (usually) a story about the triumph of modernism. Such stories leverage the sources of strength in the modern world, science and technology and colonialism, and a reader who is invested in a modern world-view will feel validated and empowered by this type of fantasy. They will be will be willing to exercise whatever extracurricular creative effort is required on the part of the reader to make the story believable. Doing so will inspire them with the feeling that their world all makes sense, is leading to something, so that their daily grind is a part of the heroic story of how humanity transcends its planetary origins. This is much more fulfilling than investing any effort getting on board with the waning powers of superstition that are represented by the fantasy genre.

spoilers

In keeping with this, Aurora's colonists are granted every conceivable boon that science and industry can supply. A ship fully ten kilometers across, enclosing twenty four massive biomes, each stuffed full of hills and lakes, soil and forests, microbes and wildlife. A population of well over a thousand human beings. Miraculous nanotech fabricators, and megatons of elemental feedstock to run them. A miraculous acceleration laser, fired from Titan for decades after departure, allowing the ship to coast up to 0.1c, making the journey in only seven generations, while retaining enough fuel to decelerate for arrival. A miraculous magnetic shield protects the ship from catastrophic collisions with stray particles along the way. A benign AI runs the ship, amusingly pressed into service as the narrator of the tale, and grows visibly more sentient, emotionally robust and capable as the years pass.

And hot damn, they are going to need all these things, because in this story, human interstellar colonization is revealed for the fantasy it really is. Nothing works out, and the problems encountered are far bigger than anything the ship's designers planned for. Although the ship does limp into orbit around the destination planet, soon after that people start dying, major disagreements emerge which descend into catastrophic riots, and the ship's society falls apart - when have humans ever invented a reliable form of governance?

There is a rip-roaring final act, that stretched my credulity, but revives the stakes and entertainment value in what might otherwise be a relentless downer of a read.

The book, and interviews with the author, caused quite a stir in science fiction circles. People were extremely angry. The book was attacking their deeply held beliefs that the future of humanity is as a successfull space-faring species. They had invested their identity in this world-view, because of how it serviced their psychological needs for fulfillment and meaning. They had developed a religious conviction around this particular kind of fantasy.

The point of Aurora is to highlight the idea of human interstellar colonization as a dangerous distraction from the very real project of taking care of the long term health of our planet and our society right here on Earth. It is going to take beyond miraculous levels of technology and resources to start thinking about interstellar travel. If, by some miracle, we make it to a year 10,000 utopia, with infinite resources and the wisdom to manage them, then sure, we can worry about interstellar travel. But for now, can we just focus on some of the very basic problems of existence here on Earth, like how to make everyone fed and liberated, educated and fulfilled, without killing our planet to do it? Maybe invent some sort of government that is reliably able to do that? That would be nice.

Dhalgren

Jonathan Hartley — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 18:23:19 GMT

by Samuel Delaney, 1975

It broke me. I need to take another run up to this. Advice welcome.

did-not-finish

Update: Well, I did finish it eventually. It took me five months, and three attempts in the end, along with the reading of countless notes, critiques and analyses to keep my comprehension and engagement up. For my own sanity, I'm going to attempt a quick summary of the plot.

✻ ✻ ✻

The main character, Kid, is not simply an unreliable narrator, but is actually amnesiac, and delusional. Or he might be. His sanity remains unknowable. Certainly he cannot tell right from left, and hence is constantly getting lost. The city of Bellona's physical environment is deadly unpredictable, laws of cause and effect no longer apply, time is out of joint, and occasionally the clouds part to reveal two moons. A sense of chaotic unreality permeates everything. The social order is gone, as people wander from one encounter to the next, making friends or enemies or lovers on an hour-by-hour basis. Everyone is vulnerable to rape and death at the hands of the literally monstrous Scorpion gangs.

Kid discovers a notebook, containing unsettling entries which, glimpsed, are very similar to passages from the novel we are reading. Perhaps it is an alternate draft? These entries might, or might not be, Kid's own writings. He is unable to tell, as time loops and memory collapses. Regardless, he contributes further to the journal, and these entries are presented in duelling columns, as equal peers to the action, as alternate resolutions, entire different sequences of events, or metafictional commentary upon what "actually happened".

Kid is drawn into a Scorpion gang, at first reluctantly, but then rising to prominence amongst them for his crazy, heedless bravery. Mythological portents contribute to a sense of dread anticipation of a cyclic, apocalyptic frenzy, which subjectively comes about as Kid's mental condition - or the legibility of reality - deteriorates towards the novel's end.

The final words of the duelling channels presented by Kid's notebook end in mid-sentence, which is completed by the novel's opening, forming the promised cycle.

✻ ✻ ✻

I'm not sure I'm up to drawing conclusions on top of that without lifting them wholesale from elsewhere.

Certainly I must admit that I found it hard work. It's difficult for me to discern what it is about this text which I found unrewarding, versus, say, books by David Mitchell like number9dream, which I loved. Perhaps in number9dream, I felt like I was in on the joke, because I was able to clearly identify distinct strands of metafiction and moments of unresolvable ambiguity, wherein one perspective might shift impossibly into another, but each instance of this is, with thought, separable from the rest of the novel.

Whereas Dhalgren has a denser tapestry of prickly ambiguity. No part or level of the fiction can be relied upon, from the largest of characterisations of the main character, to the tiniest of descriptive detail. All is in flux, misdirecting, unreliable, making a casual reading just confusing, while a careful reading is the same, but more so.

In reading around, I discovered that Delaney repeatedly spoke about Dhalgren as an attempt to convey his experiences living with dyslexia and dysmetria - an inability to perform co-ordinated bodily movement - together with his time on a mental ward during a breakdown, and his repeated episodes of seeing destroyed urban landscapes that nobody else could perceive. Because of this, part of me feels as though the novel might just be an exercise in confusion. An attempt to simulate the helplessness of mental illness by undermining all aspects which the reader might otherwise have felt they could rely on.

This does, in principle, seem like a worthy experiment - and I'm sure this is only part of what such a relentless, ambitious work is attempting. But on the other hand, it makes me think that some of the more positive reactions to Dhalgren might just be from readers who perceive, in the chaos, a grand meaningful structure that simply isn't really there. Throw enough noise at a filter, and the resulting output signal is not a function of the noise on the input, but is instead characterized entirely by the filter.

It seems ironic to me that perhaps the most vehement of the book's many detractors is Philip K. Dick, who described it as "trash". I would have said Dhalgren closely resembles the kind of profoundly unsettling departures from realism that came from Dick channeling his own mental illness. Evidently I'm wrong.

Evidently, I'm wrong.