Squaremans | Gaming Culture Blog

Spotify – dConstruct 2022

If you were at dConstruct on Friday and you enjoyed the mood music during the breaks, this is what you were listening to.

Gendered AI: Gender Presentation and Distributions in sci-fi AI | Sci-fi interfaces

Thorough (and grim) research from Chris.

TANK (short film by Stu Maschwitz) - YouTube

This fun little film gives me all the feels for Battlezone …but then watching the excellent “making of” video really made me appreciate the love and attention to detail that went into this.

Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’: A Game-Changing Science-Fiction Classic • Cinephilia & Beyond

A nexus of hypermedia on all things Blade Runner, from links to Tumblr blogs to embedded screenplays, documentaries, and scanned images.

This Future Looks Familiar: Watching Blade Runner in 2017 | Tor.com

If you subtract the flying cars and the jets of flame shooting out of the top of Los Angeles buildings, it’s not a far-off place. It’s fortunes earned off the backs of slaves, and deciding who gets to count as human. It’s impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. It’s having empathy for the right things if you know what’s good for you. It’s death for those who seek freedom.

A thought-provoking first watch of Blade Runner …with an equally provocative interpretation in the comments:

The tragedy is not that they’re just like people and they’re being hunted down; that’s way too simplistic a reading. The tragedy is that they have been deliberately built to not be just like people, and they want to be and don’t know how.

That’s what really struck me about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: the tragedy is that these people can’t take action. “Run! Leave! Go!” you want to scream at them, but you might as well tell someone “Fly! Why don’t you just fly?”