Tim – Page 2 – Not So Unwashed

Books What I Read In 2019 (Part 2)

Previously: October, by China Mieville

Red Meat Republic: A Hoof to Table History of How Beef Changed America, by Joshua Specht

Economics as a field of study becomes a lot more interesting when you stop thinking about it as “stocks and graphs” and start thinking about it as a way of deciding who gets to eat and who doesn’t. By the same token “food” becomes a lot more interesting when you stop thinking about it as “a delicious treat for the hungry boy” and start thinking about it as a way of deciding who has any value to society.

The politics of food is an astonishing minefield that is irrevocably tied up with our beliefs around gender, race and class, and it’s one of those things that everyone would much rather not think about – why talk politics when we could simply tuck into a delicious steak, after all? Am I right? Fellas? Red Meat Republic says a big “fuck you” to that line of thinking and delves into the history of beef in America, starting right at the beginning and going all the way up to the present day, and in the process showing how despite coming so far, in many ways nothing has changed at all.

Books What I Read In 2019 (Part 1)

In 2018, I read a bunch of books and I wrote down what I thought about them. I enjoyed the experience so much that I decided to do it again this year. Let’s see if we can make this an annual thing!

I wrote a lot more words than I intended so I’ll break this up into multiple posts in order to increase the chance that someone reads it! Honestly, the things I do for you people.

October, China Mieville

Before this book was released, anyone who wanted to learn about what happened in Russia during the Revolution of 1917 you only had one choice: listening to a wheezy hardcore leftist whose Twitter bio included so many “-ist” suffixes that you needed to stop for a tea break before he had even finished introducing himself. Thanks to China Mieville, millions of people have been freed from this terrible fate and can now simply read a book instead.

10 Times That James “Jickle” O’Connor Was Very Funny On Point & Clickbait This Year

Earlier this year I was struggling pretty hard to find anything funny about video games anymore, and was seriously considering putting Point & Clickbait on an indefinite hiatus until, well, everything stopped being a fucking nightmare.

I did not do that. Instead, I asked James “Jickle” O’Connor to help out, and he has since done a stellar job which I want to take a moment to recognise in the traditional form of a listicle, which is how games journalists communicate.

In no particular order other than chronological, here are ten delightful pieces of James from the year of our lord 2019:

Quick thoughts on The Lizzies

The Lizzies are the Australian IT Journalism awards, presumably named after the fact that the first ever journalist to cover the information technology industry in Australia was a lizard who made a nest in a ‘press’ hat and hissed angrily until it was given an employment contract. I refuse to investigate further.

The point is that video games are included under “IT Journalism”, and so every year, Australia’s increasingly-precariously-employed videogames journalists make their way to Luna Park to enjoy an open bar with the secondary thrill of finding out who gets to take home a trophy.

It rules to get nominated for the Lizzies. They are, even with all the criticisms I’m about to write, the most exciting and prestigious award for games writing in Australia. It’s a thrill to see your name up there and to feel like your talented and hard working peers think you’re hot shit.

But despite all that, the Lizzies kind of suck. Here’s why, and how to fix them.

Some Books What I Read This Year And My Thoughts On Them (The Books)

I read a bunch of books this year in an attempt to make my brain bigger. Here are some of them.

1. 1984, George Orwell, 1984

I’ve never actually read 1984 before, although thanks to the magic of cultural osmosis I basically absorbed the entire plot and most of the catchphrases at some point over my adult life. In the last few years I’ve become an insufferably woke socialist so a lot of the themes of 1984, which it turns out actually run a lot deeper than what if surveillance, but too much were particularly resonating with me as I read it. The entire second part of the book, where George Orwell basically uses the flimsiest pretext to drop in a blatant self-insert character and writes an enormous essay called “HI READER, IT’S ME GEORGE ORWELL, CAPITALISM IS BAD”, is especially great.

I started to wonder why this book was never taught in school to me or any friends I know, but quickly realised that there were probably two reasons for it. The first, that it directly asks the reader to question undemocratic social hierarchies and the artificial poverty which is deliberately created and maintained by a state of constant war and fear (hmm, doesn’t ring any bells); and the second, that every time the main character meets up with his girlfriend they absolutely go to town on each other and fuck like rabbits.