Plan, Do, Review?
Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s edition of The Jumpstack! This week, we’re looking at the consequences of bad decisions, and how that manifests outward to impact many. And then, I’ll tell you about a game I’m obsessed with. Let’s jump in!
He’s made a huge mistake
How could I not talk about the scandal that erupted last week? Our prime minister was exposed as an individual who has worn various instances of blackface, and we’re not quite sure how many times.
While we were well aware of his exuberance for any themed event, we were shocked at the lines he crossed. A leader who had positioned himself as the man to drag Canada into a 21st-century consciousness had been revealed as a man who had mirthfully engaged in one of the more explicitly racist practices of the past.
Vicky Mochama put this in context, and called the Canadian media to account:
But racism — and indeed homophobia and misogyny — are hardly political levers to be pushed and pulled at will. Whatever points are being won or lost are being marked on the lives of people who most need a government that will defend and support their racialized lives.
The dismal man
This life story is an awkward one to navigate in this current cultural moment:
Close one eye and he is a unique tragic hero, a victim and an outcast, who consistently championed nondominant cultures and tried to bind his own deep psychological wounds by celebrating in prose the world beyond the white, European society that had tortured and rejected him. Close the other eye and he is just another nineteenth-century white man who appointed himself an expert on places and cultures in which he was a tourist, making a career out of depicting or interpreting these cultures as if they were his to represent or to profit from.
Hearn’s life was defined and directed by concepts of race: considered mixed in Europe, he was treated like a living stain on the honour of his family; the family he built in America was destroyed when his employers found he had illegally married a biracial woman.
By existing, Hearn challenged existing ideas of whiteness and paid the penalties that could be meted against him for it, while his whiteness and sex shielded him from the consequences his Greek mother and American wife were forced to endure. His journey to Japan and his life after brush against the current conversations on appropriation and assimilation, and like with race, you can’t easily categorize him there.
By not fitting neatly into one label or another, Hearn continues to challenge the ideas of identity and belonging (also a major theme of folklore and horror) long after his death.
A dismal system
As I type this, I can hear a plane soaring above my apartment, the long whistle as it climbs the sky fading to the sound of the streetcar rumbling down the street.
When you imagine the plane, you think of the pilot: in fact, that’s probably the only person you consider, if you don’t know any of the passengers.
This longread by Maureen Tkacik will destroy that impulse—it meticulously reports on the decades of decision making that lead to the horrific crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX airplanes earlier this year, and the disgusting tactics used to place blame on the doomed pilots themselves:
But the bigger picture was becoming clearer: Boeing had manufactured a self-hijacking plane, and in a display of grotesque cowardice, it had chosen to disseminate to pilots a checklist for counteracting the self-destruct mechanism that had killed them even faster.
Another plane is flying overhead: I don’t think of the pilot, or the passengers. I think of an employee at a computer in some time in the past, under unscrupulous management and pressure, who looked at his screen and thought, “Good enough!” And then hoped for the best.
Untitled goose post
When I play video games, it’s primarily escape the incessant roar of the news: I use them to unwind. Unfortunately, a number of puzzle and strategy games use anxiety and horror to up the stakes—finding one that doesn’t is a pleasant surprise.
Over the weekend, my family started to play Untitled Goose Game, and we’re all hooked:
As I’m not an influencer, I get no money to say this: Untitled Goose Game is lovely.
You’re the goose, and your mission is to irritate an idyllic community with your pranks and taunts. Both a strategy game and a puzzle game, your list of mischievous deeds at each level forces you to explore and test the patience of the townsfolk, while waddling around.
The stakes are low: there’s no time limit, and the pranks are family friendly. It is oddly cathartic to let go of the day’s troubles by successfully stealing a pumpkin, or throwing a man’s keys in a lake. The visuals and score are simple and clean.
After three days of handing the controls back and forth to each other, my family has one question: when will they release Untitled Housecat Game? We’re ready to pre-order.
And that’s it for The Jumpstack this week! If you enjoyed it, how about hitting that heart button and sharing the newsletter? Let people know that they, too, can take this smoke break with your work wife.
— Jump