HYPERTEXT WONDERLAND

Basically, Bikini Kill are  the riot grrrrl band. They’re the type of band who’d probably kill you if you didn’t listen to them on a bootleg cassette tape. They scream and shout and all kinds of crazy shit. They’re pretty cool, so if you want to be cool yourself you should listen to them. //

In 2014, South Korea adopted a number of big changes to taxation laws. It meant price hikes of many everyday goods. Contrary to media narrative, such things affect both old and young - especially in cities like Seoul where already high costs of substantially impact disposable income. Personally I wasn’t aware of this until I watched Jeon Go-woon’s Microhabitat . As an outsider, Korea has always struck me as a prosperous and easy country to live in. The film though illustrates a darker side to the country. It describes a situation in which people have to choose between what they regard as basic pleasures and necessary luxuries. This is especially prescient for the main character, who deems rent to such be an in-affordable part of her life that she chooses to ditch the pleasure of permanent accommodation to go apartment-hopping around several of her old college band-mates. Along the way, she discovers the decisions they've each made to achieve what they deem to be a good life....

Risk of Rain is an interesting game. I've never played it but that opening line rhymes so I had to start that way. It practically demanded it, don't you think? Risk of Rain is also interesting because of the number of permutations when thinking about the title. I have an online buddy who plays the game a lot. To him I call it Risky Rain . Rain of Risk . I once called it Rained Risk . Or maybe it was Rainy Risk . Risque Rain is a new one I've just thought of. Risk of Pain works too, and makes a lot of sense given that the game is about surviving on a desolate planet. There's just so many variations! It's exciting! But it won't matter a jot to anybody who isn't me so feel free to take pleasure instead in  Chris Christodoulou's  atmospheric soundtrack. It's very good music to leave on in the background while you work on something important. //

Unfortunately I don’t have much to report this week. Usually I’d try and churn out a review of a book/movie/game but I’ve been nursing a cold which has affected my ability to do anything other than sit quietly hoping it’ll eventually go away. The only thing I've been doing is playing Final Fantasy VII  which came out on the Switch at the tail-end of last month. I've happily been playing the game as a virtual antidote to my physical ailments. It's an old game so it's obviously come out on a few platforms before. This version is a port of the iOS game, which differs from the original only PSOne game because it has nicer graphics and features ‘cheats’ such as the ability to speed up time and avoid random encounters. I seldom use these but they’re fan-fucking-tastic if you forget to save, die and don’t want to relive an hour of the same bits all over again. Yeah that happened. All in all, it’s very fun. IThe Switch is a perfect console for JRPGs because I can play it...

Ethnography and film have a lot in common with each other. Documentaries follow the act of observing real world phenomena. They present real-life moments back to us in edited form. Watching them we almost become like researchers ourselves, meticulously drawing attention to the minutiae of events or things or characters or people or cats as they happen. In my opinion the best documentaries don’t demand that we agree with their world. It's a viewpoint shared by New-York based filmmaker Kazuhiro Soda . His latest film Inland Sea  aired recently on MUBI, and I'm happy to report that it's an excellent piece of cinema verite - important in presenting a different side to Japan than what we're usually afforded to in popular media. The film depicts an ageing fishing community, Ushimado - a favourite setting of legendary Japanese filmmaker Shohei Imamura. It follows the town's citizens as they live lives determined by the tradition of catching and selling fish - a ...