Pokémon and Digital Nostalgia [Content Made Simple]
#249: Twitter reviews new rule, American aesthetic online, and more.
TOP OF THE WEEK:
Pokemon and the First Wave of Digital Nostalgia
Quote:
A year ago, Marcus Dewdney, an artist in Toronto, started a project inspired by Pokémon, the beloved series of monster-collecting video games that launched on Game Boy in the United States in 1998. He pulled up images from the 2001 games Pokémon Gold and Silver and, using the image editor paint.net, copied them in his own style, illuminating the rudimentary, decades-old pixelated landscapes with richer colors and patterns. Scant grids of symbolic leaves from the original game became swirls of gnarled trees; straight lines meant to suggest cliffs became craggy, precipitous rock faces. This past March, Dewdney and several other artists completed the entire map of Gold and Silver—which can be explored screen by screen on a dedicated Web site. Now the group is working on overhauling the original Pokémon games, Red and Blue. Viewers of Dewdney’s images often comment, “This is how I saw it in my head as a kid,” he told me. “That’s the feeling I want to evoke. It’s when I look back and get that fuzzy, nostalgic feeling.” (He first played Pokémon Red at the age of five, choosing Charmander.)
Commentary:
I am a huge Pokémon fan. It’s my favorite video game series of all time. This article was super interesting to me, and I thought it was worth sharing with you all.
HITTING THE LINKS
Link #1: ‘So vague, it invites abuse’: Twitter reviews controversial new privacy policy
Yeah. I kinda saw this coming, honestly. Most folks did.
“After this was rolled out, we became aware of a significant amount of coordinated and malicious reports and unfortunately, our enforcement teams made several errors,” said Twitter spokesperson Trenton Kennedy. “We’ve corrected those errors and are undergoing an internal review to make certain that this policy is used as intended – to curb the misuse of media to harass or intimidate private individuals.”
Link #2: America as an Internet Aesthetic
Written by the same person who wrote the Pokémon article, this is from a few months ago and is an great read.
The ultimate joke of Americancore might be that sense of disillusionment. What began as a commentary about the narcissism of white, Pocky-crazy shoppers became an intriguing term for the notion of Americanness as just another hollow Internet aesthetic to be adopted, the same as being really into wildflowers and prairie dresses.
Link #3: Twitter’s Highest-Profile Users Get VIP Treatment When Trolls Strike
Hmmmm….
Code-named Project Guardian, the internal program includes a list of thousands of accounts most likely to be attacked or harassed on the platform, including politicians, journalists, musicians and professional athletes. When someone flags abusive posts or messages related to those users, the reports are prioritized by Twitter’s content moderation systems, meaning the company reviews them faster than other reports in the queue.
THE FUNNY PART
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