Soldier Ant 

Interesting article on Slate about a recent trend of throwaway Flash-based games as social commentary. Take a quick side-detour and play a round of New York Defender - as social commentary goes, it's kinda discrete (discrete more in the mixed-emotions response it teases from me than the brick-over-the-head 'subtlety' of the message.) And pretty disheartening. Powerful stuff.

It reminds me of Jon Haddock's Screenshots exhibit, that reframes real (and fictitious) historical events as video-game isometric projections.

Which itself brings a whole new set of associations: Reginald Denny and the brick somehow puts me in mind of State of Emergency - civil disobediance as voyeuristic entertainment. Wasn't the helicopter news footage of the Denny beating itself shot from a similar 3/4-overhead perspective?

And Haddock's spin on Ruby killing Oswald sent me on a furious search to find In-A-Gadda-Da-Oswald, perhaps still the funniest, most morally ambiguous Photoshop manip I think I've ever seen.

These are probably not the associations that Haddock was going for in his exhibit. And I'm not sure where this entry leaves us when all is said and done. But hey -- as m'friend Duffy likes to say. This is a journal, not journalism.