Film: George Miller: Happy Feet 2 (Australia, 2011)

The two biggest subsections of Antarctic books, movies and other media are the men of the Heroic Age such as Scott and Amundsen and penguins.

The first Happy Feet movie is probably the best example of penguin-related Antarctic children’s entertainemnt, at least in terms of quality. The story was sweet, but the Antarctic detail was done well.

The sequel, Happy Feet 2, suffers being pointless. The penguins are now parents themselves, and a lot of the drama revolves around worrying about the children. The script suffers from aimlessness, and while the movie features some gorgeous animated nature shots, you never really start to care about anyone.

The only exception to this are the krill, pictured above. A krill named Will attempts to evolve into a carnivore with his friend Bill. It’s funny.

This is a review of Lizzie Stark’s book Leaving Mundania: Inside the Transformative World of Live Action Role-Playing. Since I’m in the book, I cannot claim complete objectivity.

Leaving Mundania is a subjective description of Stark’s journey of discovery into the world of larp in the U.S. and later in the Nordic countries. A subjective style is almost the only one you can adopt in writing about larp, since larp cannot be experienced from the outside. Stark takes this into its logical conclusion by organizing a larp herself, and writing about the experiences that entails.

Reading the book made me realize how different U.S. larp is from the Nordic larp I’m familiar with. I don’t think I ever really understood the point of having so many rules until Stark explains it. She writes vividly about her larp experiences, both good and bad, and this makes it easy to understand why people play these kinds of games.

The book also includes portraits of various individuals Stark met during her exploration of the U.S. scene. They’re some of the best things the book has to offer, touching descriptions of the role larp plays in the lives of different people.

Self-hate is the one factor about U.S. larp and American geekdom that I have most trouble dealing with. It has been a defining feature in many accounts of U.S. larp such as Ethan Gilsdorf’s book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks. I love it that Stark has reduced it into something she writes about in one chapter because its real to the people involved, but doesn’t accept or internalize herself.

At the end of the book, Stark makes her way to Denmark and Knudepunkt to experience the Nordic scene. These chapters are quite flattering to Nordic larpers such as myself, but reading this book makes me realize that Stark didn’t come to us empty-handed. There’s plenty of ideas that can be stolen and repurposed.

One of the interesting factors in the games she writes about is the amount of organizer work during the game. If there was one thing I felt could be incorporated into my own larp practice, it’s this idea of creating new content for the game on the fly.

I have been portrayed by an actor in a short film once, but this is the first time I’ve been properly described in print. Finnish journalism and American journalism have a difference in culture in that Americans like to give little sketches of the people featured in the story, while in Finland these are rare, especially in serious journalism. According to Stark, I have a face “permanently set on ‘neutral’”.

(Kuva: Mass Effectin päähenkilöstä voi tehdä haluamansa näköisen. Kuvassa oma komentaja Shepardini Mass Effect 3:ssa.)

Kirjoitan Cityn sivuilla Mass Effect 3:n lopusta.

(Photo: Maria Pettersson)

More information about the book here.

Here’s the cover of the Solmukohta edition:

Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man has the distinction of being the first Antarctic novel ever written, by the English lawyer Robert Paltock. Unfortunately, it’s not very good.

Peter Wilkins loses his inheritance at an early age, and is forced to seek his fortune at the sea. After adventures in Africa, his ship is forced south and eventually wrecked on the coast of Antarctica. This was written before Antarctica was discovered, so some details, like the fact that Antarctica is pretty cold, are not there.

The descriptions of the shipwreck and of Wilkins’ life alone on the deserted shore are pretty tedious. Much of the material seems to be lifted from Robinson Crusoe, and feels like it’s been written by a simpleton. At his worst, Paltock uses his story to impart Christian morals on the reader.

Paltock’s claim to fame rests in the concept of the gawry, a winged woman who appears to Wilkins as he’s stranded on the coast. The gawry is called Youwarkee, and they marry, live together, and have a bunch of children. According to Paltock’s own introduction, the character of Youwarkee was drawn from his imagined idea of how a certain noblewoman he knew was like. Chaste, pious and so forth. It makes the whole thing feel like stalker fanfiction thrust through the centuries.

Youwarkee represents a whole civilization of bird people, and eventually Wilkins finds his way to them. He’s a savior who can do no wrong, a super smart man who solves every problem. The bird people love him because he’s so cool and not at all a Mary Sue character. The end.

Alkuperäinen artikkelini käsitteli Modern Warfare 3 ja Battlefield 3 -pelien kilvoittelua. Se julkaistiin 15.12.2011, ja Kuusimäen kommentti 18.12.2011.

Tunnen oloni… imarrelluksi.