Welcome again to We Have Always Live the Kraken, a pop culture blog transmitted directly to you from the belly of the beast. Here in the Notes we’ll show you this month’s posting schedule, but first here are some thoughts.
So as has been evident at times on this blog, I am a bit of a sports fan. While it is true I like some sports more than others, in general, I have a deep respect for all sports and when I can, I at least try to keep some idea of what is happening in most of them. That even applies to eSports, although I have little idea of how to play many of the popular eSports games. I have mostly been okay with that, because honestly, right now I find observing the evolution of eSports leagues as a whole as they become more and more mainstream far more fascinating than the games themselves. For starters, each eSport, whether it be League of Legends, Overwatch, Street Fighter or even NBA 2K (which is fully supported and controlled by the NBA) have unique issues they have to deal with compared to other sports. Notably, dealing with bringing video games front and center in a way that would be inconceivable as little as ten years ago. But more importantly, they have to build competent sporting rules and leagues for athletes who have extremely finite careers and who start at ages much younger than almost any sport in terms of how quickly they are forced to compete at the highest possible levels.
Now that they have gained a level of respect, are eSports like League of Legends ready for what comes next?
In this aspect, eSports have the advantage of, well, every other sport in existence as examples to use in figuring out the best way to govern a league and create rules for players and owners while also fixing certain aspects of sports leagues that are, well, suspect. I used to be concerned that companies like Riot or Blizzard have so much control over these leagues, but I have now come to view this as a bit of blessing, because that means that unlike, say, the NBA or the NFL, the league itself can actually balance the needs of the players and owners equally, because they don’t simply work for the team owners. This gives a level of autonomy that you wish at times the major sports would have so that their commissioners aren’t just highly paid stooges of the owners. Of course, this comes with growing pains, as can be seen from League of Legends, which went from having a more soccer-style relegation system to a more clearly defined major and minor system like the NBA. This has shifted some power back to the owners, and made the fact that the players lack a real player’s union a big problem. Just look at the Cloud 9 situation, or the 100 Thieves trade that seems to have left a player in weird limbo. Both of these seem to be situations where ownership is using its newfound power to flex its muscles and try and gain a bit of control back from star players. This in itself isn’t a bad thing, but it is a slippery slope that has to be monitored now that eSports are really shifting into something that is sustainable over the long term. It took a while for eSports to be treated with even close to the same respect of more traditional sports, but now, how they handle the transition and the expectations of being treated like all other sports is going to really decide how bright the eSports future will be.
David
From the depths of the Kraken, here is what we are bringing you this month.
David, by Kraketorial decree, finally emerges from his deep Oscars-induced hiatus to offer insight into his new feature, Playing Catch-Up With Pop Culture How Haven’t You Seen That!?
Catch of the Week Month:
Each and every week the residents here in the Kraken will offer one recommendation for the week that we think you all would enjoy. It might be a movie. It might be a book. Who knows? This is your… Catch of the Week Month.
David: After a nice break in the temporal pools, I have returned to offer up The Sentry. Back in 2000, Marvel attempted to bring about a character that they pretended was a long-lost Stan Lee character–basically, a schizophrenic and agoraphobic Superman, with a dash of Captain America’s origin story. Sentry’s run in Marvel comics then proceeded to be, well, mixed, because Marvel is not the best at handling superheroes that are as consistently strong as The Sentry was, but my God, did they give it their best go, in the process creating a unique and engaging character. Just the idea of a character that would refuse to help at times because he couldn’t bring himself to go outside, or that he dealt with the Superman problem (of basically having the power to constantly choose who lives or dies simply because of which crisis he averts) by having his robot butler basically do numerical simulations that determined what he should do based on what would save the most people, led to the creation of one of the most unique characters we have. After some time away from print, because Marvel clearly had no idea what to do with him, the Sentry has finally returned to having his own comic. That’s worth a read, but first, why don’t you check out his original run?
Kyu: Life has never been better for true crime fans, thanks to the Serial-inspired rise of the true crime podcast (a format memorably parodied by The Onion in the brilliant short podcast series A Very Fatal Murder). But traditional true crime mediums are also going strong, no doubt due in large part to the growing criminal justice reform movement. Lately I’ve been on a true crime binge, and although none of these three recommendations is far outside the mainstream, true crime fans should be sure not to miss any of them.
In podcasts, hit series In The Dark just finished up its second season, this time covering the wrongful conviction of Curtis Flowers, who has been tried six times by the same crooked, racist prosecutor and now may be executed for a crime he apparently did not commit. In the Dark‘s first season, about an unsolved child abduction, was excellent, but for season two the series kicked things up a notch by traveling to Flowers’ small town to investigate for over a year, talking to a significant percentage of the town’s residents and putting together a comprehensive portrait of how race and the American justice system intersected here to bring about an ongoing tragedy.
In television, Netflix brought us the final episodes of the French-produced, English-language series The Staircase, about the case of Michael Peterson, a man accused of killing his wife, whom he believes simply fell down the stairs. The stairs themselves, presenting a coincidental rhyme with the death of Michael’s friend decades earlier, loom large over the whole show. The news yells about them, the camera lingers on them, the defense presents them in a computer simulation, experts describe them at length, and even the jury shuffles past them as if to somehow answer the question by osmosis: murder, or accident? The documentary series had phenomenal access over decades to Peterson, his family, and his legal defense team, and the discussions of strategy and science are as exciting as the central mystery. The Staircase is smart, angry filmmaking about a case that’s worth getting angry about, from the government’s exploitation of bigotry to the sense, finally, that Peterson has been swallowed by a Kafka-esque process from which he may never emerge.
True crime was invented with the novel In Cold Blood, and the novel may always be the best place to delve deep into any particular case and the community’s response to it. The recent publication of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara stands well in that tradition, despite its rough road to publication. McNamara, whose singular obsession with the case of the East Area Rapist, who committed more than 50 rapes, and that of the Original Night Stalker, who committed more than 10 homicides–both of which turned out to be the same man, whom McNamara named the Golden State Killer–gives the book its driving force but also its disheartening tragedy, as the author died suddenly in her 40s with the book incomplete. The rest of the story was finished by her friends, and the case was, too, as the GSK was finally caught in April of 2018. McNamara never lived to see the results of a story she helped guide, through bringing an increase in energy and purpose to the killer’s longtime law enforcement pursuers, but I’ll Be Gone in the Dark remains a singular work of true crime fiction, not least because of her facility in writing it. Expert at swiftly characterizing real individuals, skilled at weaving past, present, and future into a condensation of hundreds of individual incidents in a way that’s never confusing or overwhelming, McNamara was the real deal, and although this one is not to be missed, her readers will forever miss the next book, and the next, and all the others not to come.
That’s it for this month. Visitors please note that temperatures are increasing in the summer months, leading the Kraken to submerge itself in cooler waters without warning. Try not to be outside when that happens.