western

A western con with your choice of ending.

(Source: https://webyarns.com/the-shootout-2016/)

Alan Bigelow's "The Shootout" is a wonderfully fun and interactive western tale with poetic language, immersive sound, and a surprisingly modern ending that you won't see coming. It seems, no matter where technology goes, we cannot help but love stories and puzzles. We just find new packages for them.

(Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/17Fall/editor.html)

Vaporwave is an artistic movement, developed under the conditions of global capitalism, which functions in the space of global Internet. Piotr Płucienniczak – author associated with electronic literature, but also with Polish redefinition of vaporwave aesthetics, emphasizes that vaporwave is, on the one hand, an international cultural code, and on the other hand presents critically and ironically "goods inaccessible to us, poor people". I would like to discuss this paradox in my speech based on the analysis of the Polish postvaporwave projects. The western, American vaporwave is generally described by its critics (also in Poland) by means of hauntology, accelerationism and nostalgia. The Western vaporvawe expresses nostalgia for the 90s – a time of utopian thinking about timeless prosperity and development of technology. I put forward the thesis that these categories (especially nostalgia) do not quite match the Polish varieties of vaporwave aesthetics. The most recognizable, comprehensive and well thought out Polish vaporwave project is Z U S w a v e. It was created by the Rozdzielczość Chleba group (a creative collective and a publishing house, producers of cyberculture, mostly cyberliterature). Z U S w a v e. is a transformation of the western aesthetic phenomenon and its critical potential into the Polish symbolic field. With Z U S w a v e., its creators look at the western original trend from a peripheral position – culturally, geographically, politically and economically. Z U S w a v e. is also postvaporwave and metavaporwave. The project was created in 2015 – the year of the diagnosis of vaporwave death, therefore their authors refer critically to the trend itself. Polish vaporwave focuses instead on „non-places” such as shopping centers, as well as a very specific institution – ZUS – a state institution responsible for social insurance in Poland. In my talk I would like to reflect on aesthetic, symbolic and metaphorical differences in Polish and Western visual and textual vaporwave works, for instance analyse which elements have been preserved and which have been legibly replaced by local equivalents. I will also try to answer the question - is there a place for nostalgia, a child's perspective in Polish vaporwave? Does the Polish vaporwave, like the western one, miss, aestheticize and idealize the past? What is the reception of the local vaporwave in Poland and is it read in the same way as the original trend? The symbolic layer used by Polish creators of vaporwave refers more to the present, suggesting that since the 90s, little has changed in Poland. Z U S w a v e. is strongly entangled in the most current problems of Polish people. Polish cybernetic poets notice the ominous imagery of the computerization and virtualization of the state institution and in the face of the realities of Polish employees who cannot count on retiring in the future.

Red Dead Redemption is a Western action-adventure video game developed by Rockstar San Diego and published by Rockstar Games. It was released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles in May 2010. It is the second title in the Red Dead franchise, after 2004's Red Dead Revolver. The game, set during the decline of the American Frontier in the year 1911, follows John Marston, a former outlaw whose wife and son are taken hostage by the government in ransom for his services as a hired gun. Having no other choice, Marston sets out to bring the three members of his former gang to justice.

The game is played from a third-person perspective in an open world environment, allowing the player to interact with the game world at their leisure. The player can travel the virtual world, a fictionalized version of the Western United States and Mexico, primarily by horseback and on foot. Gunfights emphasize a gunslinger gameplay mechanic called "Dead Eye" that allows players to mark multiple shooting targets on enemies in slow motion. The game makes use of a morality system, by which the player's actions in the game affect their character's levels of honor and fame and how other characters respond to the player

(Source: Wikipedia)

The post-apocalypse is a uniquely queer setting: a future where the institutions that keep queer banditas from screaming across the desert with their rayguns drawn and robot horses vibrating between their legs are ash and dust. And the Robot Horse You Rode In On is a breakup story set in the Old West of the Far Future.

(Source: ELO Conference 2014)