Cyberpunk 2077, considered as a Witcher III DLC
Cyberpunk 2077, considered as a Witcher III DLC
This is the first essay I've written on Cyberpunk 2077; I doubt it will be the last – indeed, I hope it won't, because if it is that will mean the game has failed for me. I'm currently fifteen hours in, and, at this moment, I have to say that it's on it's way towards failing. And the question you may well ask, is 'why?'
Sexual morality in the world of the Witcher
Monogamy, as it has developed in the west, it intimately related to the concept of heritable personal property. The male partner gains confidence that the children of the female partner, who will inherit the wealth and power he is able to accumulate, are his get; the female partner gains confidence that all the wealth and power accumulated by the male partner will be inherited by her children. Thus monogamy became established in the highest echelons of society, where there was significant amounts of wealth and power to be passed on.
Indeed, one may speculate that the reason for the sheer amount of loot buried with the elites of pre-monogamous societies was that it prevented fights about who was going to inherit.
Virtual Cities
A review of Dimopoulus, Konstantinos: Virtual Cities; Unbound, London, 2020. ISBN 978-1-78352-848-6.
The Pelennor Fields around Minas Tirith, as rendered in Peter Jackson's film of The Return of the King, are at best rough grazing; the land outside Cintra, in Netflix' The Witcher series, is little more than moorland. This cannot be right.
Who is the fairest of them all?
There's a princess. She has a stepmother. Her stepmother has a magic mirror that always tells the truth. Her stepmother is jealous of the princess, and seeks to get rid of her. You know this story, don't you? It's Snow White. It's a fairy story. We tell it to children.
But fairy stories are almost always dark stories, almost always intensely sexual stories, and if you strip away the saccharine sweetness with which the Victorians enrobed them, you find the darkest places of human psychology.
Saving the union? Maybe naw
This post is in response to Will Hutton's piece in today's Observer.
My first response to Will Hutton's piece today is to sigh wearily. He doesn't understand what he's writing about, and he doesn't want to understand. He — clearly — isn't interested As far as he's concerned, Scotland must stay in the union so that he can continue to wave his union jack and sing Rule Brittania with the rest of the braying mob at the last night of the proms.