Hey all, been lurking for a bit since the bluesky influx and thought I'd post an intro/response prompt. Most stuff are as in my bio, but I'm also a software engineer turned manager and have small humans I'm raising with my partner in our small portion of the world.
I don't want to doxx myself by sharing too much, but think it would be worth sharing three pieces of media:
- one I found formative as a child
- one I've been enjoying recently
- one that I'm hella looking forward to
For the first, I'll admit to enjoying the perhaps somewhat problematic Settlers II (1996) by bluebyte software. I loved building the economic engine and the emergent pattern of hexagonal road networks that the isometric nodes of its world resulted in. It was the first game I enjoyed that had graphs as part of the metrics you could use to determine how well your colony was doing and I poured hours of myself into it. I didn't appreciate how colonialist it was at the time given that the game's main campaign puts you into the sandals of ancient Roman occupiers and defeating in-turn African, Scandinavian and East-Asian enemies (all of which have exactly the same mechanics as the player's colony - it's just the sprite graphics that were different!) before pitting you against another Roman faction. As these enemies are increasing in difficulty this results in some extremely problematic implications. The core game however was gorgeous.
Currently I'm enjoying the reboot of Mike Duncan's revolutions podcast with the latest series covering as speculative fiction a future Martian revolution. It has a great write up here, which I'll not attempt to emulate as it would be a poor facsimile at best, but suffice it to say that when I discovered there were six episodes of this new season I hadn't yet heard, I binged them all in both directions of my commute, loved every single moment, and am enjoying each weekly release as it continues to come out.
Finally in something I'm looking forward to, on a recent day out with my partner, we picked up from a lovely bookshop an anthology of solar punk short stories. I haven't had a lot of opportunity to read physical books in recent years, so very much look forward to diving into the pages and hope that there are some lessons for the future we can share with our family.
I invite others to share things of a similar vein and look forward to hearing them!
Welcome! Let's see
The Redwall books (I met Brian Jacques a couple of times as a kid and still have signed books), C. D. Payne's underappreciated masterpiece Youth In Revolt
I caught a 4K restoration of The Wages of Fear that really surprised me. Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World blew me away recently. Currently reading a collection of Ursula K. Le Guin's writings on gender and feminism called SPACE CRONE
This band I really dig called Weakened Friends has new album in the works
Thank you so much for your answers!
Wow, meeting Brian Jacques must have been wild! I enjoyed the Redwall books too, though not as much as my sibling, who had and read all of them multiple times; my partner really loved them too, so it's been a joy to begin to share them with our child, who is getting deep into them.
I've not got a connection to anything else you've posted (though enjoyed some of LeGuin's other works) so thank you for the recommendations 🙏
He was really nice. My kid is not quite old enough for Redwall, but I'm hoping he'll enjoy them