After playing through it these past two weeks, its ending left me feeling numb and shocked. Nothing was resolved, few of the remaining characters were sympathetic anymore and every choice and action in the game left morally grey. Fundamentally though, as the end credits rolled, it felt unsettled and incomplete. Perhaps though that it the main point.

To understand the incomplete nature of Part 2, you must first consider the self-contained narrative in The Last of Us. Here was a perfect distillation of so many of the themes and ideas that permeate through contemporary science-fiction and video-gaming in particular: Essentially a western-style narrative set in a post-apocalyptic future where the population of the United States has been ravaged by a Cordyceps fungal infection, a grizzled ‘gunslinger’ protagonist in the form of Joel Miller, must escort the a young girl Ellie across the desolate and dangerous ruins of the nation in the hope that she holds a cure to the infection. While the first game delved regularly into dark themes, it’s emotional anchor was in the simple surrogate-daughter relationship that developed between these two lead characters.

In this follow-up however, the game’s narrative purposefully does not have a centre driving it forwards. It is built around a concept a duality between two characters: Ellie the secondary protagonist from the first game, and Abby who is a new and divisive point-of-view character in this series. Amid a narrative centered around the theme of a revenge cycles, both Ellie and Abby’s stories complete each other as they are both on the same journey but at different locations on it. While Ellie in the Seattle missions is acting purely for self-interested reasons of revenge, Abby is slowly trying to overcome this and get out of it after finding no solace in getting her revenge. This duality of the narrative has led me to conclude that the unfulfilling and incomplete nature of the game overall might itself have been deliberate as well.

Such a narrative decision was never going to sit well with the franchises long-term fans, and the plot leaks earlier this year undoubtedly made the backlash far worse. After a seven-year gap since Naughty Dog’s first acclaimed entry into series, expectations were understandably very high for a potential sequel. For a publisher that prides itself on perfectionism and immersive gameplay, this long wait (with two Uncharted games in between) was clearly interpreted by many fans and critics alike as the developer ensuring that this game would meet those expectations.

But it is what happens once you finally complete this game which I feel explains why the story felt so incomplete to me. After the end credits you are shown the starting loading screen again, only this time it has changed from a boat moored in water during fog (the scene of the final confrontation between the two main characters in the game) to a boat beached on an island with a building off in the distance.

This is a reference the place Abby and her companion Lev were journeying towards at the end of the game and implies happy ending for them. It also suggests a potential marker for any future direction of this story. To me this image following the lack of levity and closure at the end of this story may be setting up the main theme for any future installment.

Whereas this game was a bleak meditation on vengeance and losing your humanity, a ‘Part 3’ to this story may focus on redemption and once again trying to save it. Much like how Ellie and Abby’s narratives reinforce each other within this game, it feels like Part 2 may need a further narrative to bring these themes to a satisfying confusion.

This game will never feel like a whole narrative to me, I just hope I don’t have to wait another seven years to find out if this was a deliberate move.

The current choice of new series to sink your time into is dizzying. If you’re not taken in by the latest much talked about series of Killing Eve on the BBC, then there’s the return of Black Mirror on Netflix, and if you want something more familiar then there’s even the remake of Joseph Heller’s iconic Catch 22 on Channel 4. All these series have been preceded by a steady advertising campaigns across various platforms, all designed to build that most crucial element to get your programme noticed in this most crowed of markets: Hype.

In terms of TV series, hype means accentuating the most intensely emotive aspects about the show and its content. It means encouraging the investment that viewers have in the characters of a series and building up an expectation that whatever it is that you haven’t seen, is something that you must see. When you get to the point of one of your viewers telling an uninitiated friend “You have seen it? You really have to so soon!” then you know that you’ve successfully build up hype in your TV series. With an increasingly crowded marketplace, many TV series are trying to do this before their program has even

By now I’m sure everyone has had at least one experience where the hype severely blunted my enjoyment of an objectively very good TV series you were late to come around to. For me it was The Wire. Admittedly I was very late in coming around to watching it, but in the end, I struggled to reconcile the subtle and understated drama I was watching with the endless praises that I had heard from friends, in magazine reviews and in documentaries about the series. Truly this was something it was better to come unencumbered by expectations, and so after forcing myself through the first series I never got around to watching the following seasons (despite how much I was told that I would love them).

There were times that I did find compelling TV before the hype set in. In 2007 I happened upon the first showing of Mad Men on BBC Four and stuck with the series for many years, as the slow-burning series slowly developed it strong cult-following and the hype that surrounds it. But ultimately that didn’t matter, I loved the series for what it was. The hype was secondary.

Which brings me to the recent Chernobyl mini-series. Though boasting a strong cast and production value and backing from HBO and Sky, its launch essentially appeared unannounced and under the radar (I literally noticed it was set to go out later in the day it air and set it to record), and the lack of hype for such a big production was something which I hadn’t seen on TV for some time.

It’s of course not true to say that there was hype or advertising campaign at all, there were a vast number of billboard and social media campaigns, and fans even made an accompanying and still ongoing shitposting group on Facebook tastefully called ‘Graphiteposting’. But crucially none of this came until after it was clear how well the series was being received, and it played only to accentuate the viewing of what would only ever be a 5-part mini-series rather than a Game of Thrones-style behemoth with an episodic and constantly be expanding central storyline. As a result, the series became one of the few big productions this year to actually grow its audience with every episode.

As the medium of television becomes increasingly atomized between channels and blurred with online streaming, it’s likely that this trend of hype will grow further in coming years as the incentive to build it increases. However, the success of a series like Chernobyl shows that there is still a way for big productions to make to the TV screen hype free and still be successful.

Even if you’ve never seen a film or book about the Holocaust, there’s no doubt just from the word Holocaust that you’ll already think you have an implicit understanding of what it was. Schools and civil societies have rightly invested much time and work over decades to explain to children what happened and why people still remember.

My experience of learning about this at school was not particularly exceptional, with The Diary of Anne Frank and the Genocide episode of The World at War burned into my memory, as are films like Schindler’s List and The Pianist. As a child I was always drawn more to encyclopaedias than literature, so I never read much of the direct accounts of what happened.

Recently I finally got round to reading Night by Elie Wiesel, a book many consider required reading for children when learning about the Holocaust. To my shame I’d only ever heard it referenced in relation to other works, and in to lead up to today I felt compelled to try and set this right.

This account by Wiesel, written some ten years after he and his family were deported first to Auschwitz and then later to Buchenwald, is a powerful and ultimately devastating account of how this experience stripped him of his faith and humanity. As first, he endures and survives out of a love for his father and to spur them both to survive, but towards the end of the book feels increasing resentment at his dependence on him, something about which he feels relentlessly guilty after his father is taken away and killed.

Following reading Night, I was shocked to find out (much to my ignorance) that Wiesel had featured in an iconic photo taken at Buchenwald shortly after its liberation:

I remembered this photo from a 20th century history book at my primary school that I was obsessed with as a 10 year old. It is a photo that was my first memory I have of the holocaust as a concept, and something I just didn’t really understand at the time. Wars and conflicts are generally less complicated to explain to children than racism and genocide.

With an increasingly febrile and intolerant atmosphere in the western world, learning and education of the Holocaust in schools is vital to foster understanding. We remember.

— -

One country where horrific yet important chapters in recent history have often not been taught in school is Cambodia. Between 1975 and 1979 the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot killed around 3 million people through starvation and executions at sites dubbed Killing Fields.

While museums and memorials are easy to find across the country, the countries’ official curriculum does not teach schoolchildren yet alone the general public about the brutality and chaos that engulfed the country at the end of the Vietnam War. As such, most young Cambodians only know what happened through anecdotes from those old enough to have remembered what happened.

I and my wife travelled through the country last summer and we visited Museums built on the torture camps and execution grounds of the old regime. But in retrospect I’ve keep thinking of a conversation we had with a tour guide at the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh which dates back to French colonial times and under the Khmer Rouge was largely used a farm while the Royal Family of Cambodia were under house arrest.

I can’t remember how exactly but that period of history came up in conversation, and our tour guide (a man in his mid-40’s or early 50’s) began telling us about how as a child he and his family were all forcibly evacuated from the city to the countryside under “year zero”, and how many of his relatives and siblings died of starvation during those times.

He then during the tour went back and forth between saying what each room in the complex was used for now, and what it was used for during the Khmer Rouge period. I some ways that was a heartening thing to hear, given what my wife said after visiting in 2004 when it still seemed like many people were afraid of talking about that period of history. But in other was I felt somewhat sad that so little is still known about this history, and that 40 years on Cambodia is a country that in many years has never fully acknowledged its past.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_(book)

https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/aug/25/elie-wiesel-night-jewish-identity-amnesty-teen-takeover-2014

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_ph.php?ModuleId=10007176&MediaId=4052

https://www.usip.org/publications/2015/04/cambodias-schools-breaking-silence-over-killing-fields

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choeung_Ek

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuol_Sleng_Genocide_Museum

http://www.hmd.org.uk/genocides/cambodia

About 5 or six people from some far-right group called the White Pendragons, who had a US Flag and a “No2EU” banner, disrupted the keynote speech of London Mayor Sadiq Khan for about 25 minutes before being removed by police. I can’t say it’s totally unexpected given the febrile atmosphere following the indefinite delay to Trump’s UK visit. With the London Mayor’s very public stand against a US President who has given succour to such groups, and against the Brexit process that these sorts groups want to lay claim to, the targeting of this public meeting was perhaps inevitable.

It was a tedious public stunt above all else (however I did get quoted in a news article), though the reaction in the hall was worth noting. At first many booed and slow-clapped as cameras circled around this small group who read out their “citizen’s arrest” against the London Mayor. The conference then disintegrated into periodical groans as the protesters shouted out lines like “Brexit is the will of 17.1 million people!” and “millions of British people support Donald Trump!” Khan meanwhile just sat there and read the paper. At one point, some anti-Brexit activists at the conference brought out a European flag and “Labour against Brexit” banner, and the audience cheered loudly. After the group were ejected, Sadiq Khan made a quip about “very stable geniuses” before delivering the speech he had planned to deliver on the issues of women’s rights and of fighting intolerance.

— -

This disruptive event while concerning served to illustrate how much the centre of gravity within the wider Labour movement hues towards the pro-EU option. Later in the opening plenary session, MP Wes Streeting gave his pre-briefed remarks calling for the Party to commit to staying in the European Single Market after Britain leaves the European Union, arguing “there is no Socialism in going it alone!” This was of course played down as an option by the Shadow Cabinet Minister on the panel with him, but it illustrates how this issue will be a running sore for the current Labour Leadership for the foreseeable future.

While the policy of Single Market Access is popular with the parties rank and file, and is one that I find some sympathy with, there is currently little political space for the option following the referendum vote where the Single Market is seen as an impediment to controlling freedom of movement from Europe which was a key driver of the Leave vote, and was effectively put on the ballot as well by David Cameron and George Osborne. The most risky aspect of this policy if it doesn’t have wide support is that it could fuel a “betrayal” narrative that leads to further chaos and instability, and besides it seems to increasingly be resembling another proxy battle between the left and right of the party.

But then, I’m sure that the vast majority of attendees at the conference share the same view as the majority of current Labour members and voters and would ideally like to see the whole Brexit process scraped. The fear I have is that while it is of course important to make sure we have as much access as possible, it borders on complacency to suggest that Labour pledging single market access will not fuel the “betrayal” narrative among the same groups that punched the political establishment in the face only 18 months ago.

—

Later on I came across a stall at the conference for a newly minted organisation the English Labour Network, which was being manned by an old friend of mine. I talked to him for a while about what the aims of the network were, which is advocating for Labour to grapple with issues of English identity in its policies and messaging. This issue is not as abstract and woolly as it might once have been, as he noted that 73% of those who identify as ‘English’ rather than ‘British’ voted to Leave the European Union.

For many on the left English identity has historically been something the British left has not seriously grappled with, allowing the issue to be colonised by the populist right. It is something that they either find hard to take seriously or increasingly ‘other’ as the preserve of xenophobes and ‘Little-Englanders. But if it is ever to reconnect with British public and regain power, it is going to have to confront some serious questions about why core parts of its traditional electorate disagreed with it on arguably the fundamental issue of our generation.

References:

https://www.channel4.com/news/corbyn-under-pressure-over-brexit

https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/165088-180113-trump-supporters-demand-arrest-of-london-mayor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjoYpUnY-Tk

https://englishlabournetwork.org.uk/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/single-market-brexit-eu-trade-deals-what-is-uk-leave-european-union-why-a7627061.html

I’ve worked in jobs that require me to writing on a semi-creative level for many years, but I’ve never given myself the task of writing for myself: of making my own observations and views and backing them up with factual arguments.

So as an exercise for 2018, I’m going to aim to post here every weekend and a semi-regular basis for this blog page. A few ground rules first:

Plan and Aims:

· Topics to be covered: Current affairs, film, music, life events and anecdotes, history, debates and arguments, politics.

· Blogs should be posted every weekend (emphasis on the ‘should’.)

· Each entry has to be between 600 and 800 words long.

· Each entry can have between 1 and 3 parts to it (e.g. the structure of this blog).

· Illustrative images should be used where appropriate.

· Hyperlinks can be included in the case of argument pieces , but a bibliography should also be included underneath

Avoid:

· Wooden and technical language.

· Verbal clichés and other page filler.

· Generic structures and outlines.

· Posting about mainstream or popular topics.

As I write this I’m uncertain of just how committed I’ll be to this over the comings months of the year. I hope that the idea of exploring my thoughts and views, and of discussing things and ideas that I find fascinating will be enough to keep me dedicated to this project. But there will be times where I have doubt, where I feel that it’s not worth it, where I might falter. But I hope this isn’t the case and that this project goes from strength to strength in the coming year.

—

For four years, I worked as a TV Producer/Researcher, where my role entailed me churning out between 5 and 5 pages of autocue and/or video report script every day. Autocue scripts were simple enough; just change the presenter/guest names and add a new intro/outro for each section, then basically you’re done. But initially I was unsure about how you to structure video packages.

By the end of my first year, I had the generic structure down to a T’:

[Introduction]

(Either an interesting nugget from the story to expand upon, or just the flat facts of the situation).

[Context]

(Either the flat facts of the situation or further important details you held back on in the introduction.)

[Quote]

(Normally a sound-bite from a talking-head central or connected to the story, ideally with some further insight that chimes with my own.)

[Further Context]

(The potential ramifications of the story at hand. If and international story for example what the response had been from the international community etc.)

[Second Quote]

(Usually either someone with an opposing viewpoint to the first, or providing another POV. E.g. if first quote an Aid worker, the second either someone effected by the situation or a government official involved in it.)

[Conclusion]

(Always the hardest part to do for me. Usually ending in a question and providing some speculation for the future of the story. Sometimes unavoidably ending with a verbal pun or cliché given time constraints.)

This was the outline I used for many years to focus my mind amidst the chaos of producing a daily news program for a small and underfunded satellite program with between 4 and 7 people at any given time. There are still many times I look back and think “how the hell did that even work?’. But it taught me an important lesion: commitment and organisation are key to getting done what is most necessary.

—

I was lucky enough to be given a PDF copy of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury over the weekend by a colleague I used to work with. While I’m still working my way through the book I found the idea at the beginning that no-one on the campaign wanted to win the 2016 election, yet alone thought they could win, to be absolutely fascinating.

The comparison Wolff draws is between the Trump campaign and the Mel Brook’s famous musical film The Producers, in which a fraudulent musical producer and his accountant concoct a scheme to make money on a failing musical by overselling it’s shares because no-one would bother to look at the books of a failed production. This mood is summed up by the quote attributed to Michael Flynn on taking $45,000 Dollars from the Russian for a speech: “Well, it would only be a problem if we won.”

References:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B078GSYDZ2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063462/

It seems like every year I have made a gushing list resolution that look good on paper and make me feel better, but which are ultimately doomed to failure as they lack the requisite conviction to go beyond statements of intent at best and simple virtue signalling at worst.

This year, some simple intentions to take better care of myself and to better cultivate my interests. But setting targets for the next 12 months is something I intend to avoid.

John Lennon once said that “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans”, and at Christmas/New Years’ time this feels truer than usual. Already in the course of writing this short piece I’ve left to visit relatives, fight with siblings, and organise my plans for midnight of this final day of 2016. Life has a habit of imposing itself upon you when you least expect it, and least need it to do so.

In many ways that was the story of my 2016: Commitments often trumped aims and aspirations, realities often trumped hopes, life trumped plans. This isn’t any reference the incoming President btw, I’m genuinely using this word un-ironically as I’m sick to death of all the “woe is 2016” feeling that is sloshing around the internet of late (see here some of the positive news stories from the year that didn’t get as much airtime as Brexit or Trump).

This year was a time of some personal successes amidst the general turmoil, but I can’t say that I am fully satisfied with everything in my life so far. I have wasted so much time on the infinite distraction of internet video, online arguments, and trivial real-life problems, and not enough time cultivating personal interests and hobbies that might make me better in the long-term. In many ways, I come away from this year asking “what happened?” rather than that “what the fuck?” my social media feed currently suggests. But even with my personal audit of the year suggesting I should look toward self-improvement going forwards, I won’t be making formal resolutions.

With this in mind. Why do we make New Year’s Resolutions?

Its modern origins may go back to religious ceremonies, but I feel that most people continue to do it because people feel the need to reset themselves, and reaffirm their resolve to improve themselves going into the next series of events in life. Whatever your beliefs people need a clear start and stop point by which to set themselves, gage their relative levels of success, and by what measure they want to improve themselves in the coming amount of time.

I understand this impulse to set out a list of aims, to reset that board and reaffirm control of life, but I think that this approach doesn’t work for everyone, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it does not work for me. For me life is more of a journey than an event, and such lists of aims aren’t necessarily the right way for me to organise my coming year. At least not publically.

So to everyone making New Year’s resolutions this year: All the best and you have my full support, but I think I’ll skip the public resolutions for 2017. Here’s to a quietly productive 12 months of personal cultivation and improvement.