Poliglocia

To begin to imagine the impact of Watchmen on a die-hard superhero comics fan like me, visualize a train-wreck taking place in twelve monthly installments. I may not have recognized Watchmen as a deconstruction of the hero, but certainly I realized (with a combination of horror and fascination known to rubberneckers everywhere) that there my precious heroes were being shattered before my very eyes, taken apart from the inside-out, in the pages of the medium that had always loved and cared for them, and in a style that demonstrated an obvious mastery of the medium that it now set out to implode. Thomson, Iain: "Deconstructing the Hero". In: . Superheroes and Philosophy . Open Court, Chicago 2008, P. 102. As for me, I never experienced superheroes as part of my childhood. When I was around 7 years old, everybody was crazy about "Batman Returns", but my parents wouldn't take me to watch it because it was too dark for a kid. In a way, they were right. I must ha...

This weekend the Europe's largest game fair, the Spiel, took place in my neighborhood. Since it has proven impossible to fully describe events that cover several days, I will focus on the Roleplaying Games I met on the fair this time. Of course, there are many others I didn't get to know enough about even to mention them, but here's a report on the bits I learned. Meikyu Kingdom: I had one more chance to try what calls itself a "cynical pop dungeon fantasy" with an experienced GM. The setting is a world consisting in its entirety of a massive dungeon and full of every random eclectic cliché of fantasy you can imagine, only even a little weirder because Japan. Characters are rolled together to produce absurd, but somehow consistent combinations. This time I was a butler called "Champion of the Messe" who had a constant itch for fighting. The system is confirmed for hilarious, random story driving and fun adventuring. In a long run, the party should a...

As every year, the Oberhausen Film Festival delivers more than anyone could possibly chew or swallow. The Latin American theme screening delivered excellent insight beyond the clichés the region often loses the perspective of itself. I also missed out on the retrospective on grand Chinese animator Sun Xun. Still, I will for now focus on the animation films in the international competition. One of the big winners of the year was Hayoun Kwon's "489 years". The film uses 3d animation to reconstruct the real testimony of a soldier on the border between South and North Korea. Of course, this reminds both of popular 1st person shooting games and of the "serious games" used for reconstruction of traumatic military situations, widely known through the work of Haroun Farocki. The director is conscious of these connections and sees it as placing her work between reality and fiction. The visions can, after all, only be true to memory and not to fact, and are mostly the i...

I just translated a tale of wolves and humans, of men and women, of nature and spirituality. In it, characters all too often "find themselves" on the road. Driven by instinct, one starts doing things before knowing it. Some claim it's the subconscious or the social performance. I don't think anyone else can know what it is, it's just stuff that happens. I happen now to find myself as a pagan, celebrating solstice and Walpurgis, trying to keep my body in touch with a cycle that should never end. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that in Europe I am at last in touch with a cycle that actually makes time visible, in which nature interacts with time. You don't get much seasons in a city which is damp and cloudy all year, but in which it never rains. On the other hand, you do. I did write something about that: La calurosa navidad debería en verdad ser una gran celebración, una bacanal que glorifique el término del ciclo junto con la aparición de las...