The gracious folks at Lorehaven have decided to run my review of The Chiveis Trilogy by Bryan Litfin. You can read the review here. (I did not like it.)
Slowly at first, then with plummeting acceleration, Chiveis devolves from a mediocre adventure story into something that I can only describe as comprehensively bad. It is predictable to the point of self-parody, ridiculous to the point of surreality, and its presentation of Christianity is so poor and muddled that I suspect it would do more harm than good to non-Christian readers.
Our goal with CI is to have a podcast that is “anti-topical,” mixing commentary on a variety of topics that are relevant to everyday people rather than hammering on any one subject every week.
In Episode 4, we talk about Reformation Day, the tension between wanting to reform groups and needing to leave them, and discuss how our electoral system might be changed to allow for easier reformation of political parties.
Bioshock Infinite is one of my favorite stories. It’s deep, complex, thrilling, sobering, weird, tragic, horrifying, and subtly beautiful, and it’s told in a way uniquely suited to it’s sophisticated sci-fi premise.
It’s also a first-person shooter filled with dumb and gruesome violence.
For that (and other) reasons, this amazing story has gone largely unappreciated, despite the game’s popularity.
I hope to rectify that with Bioshock Infinite, Abridged, Explained. The first part of the project (Abridged) has been completed. I recorded a playthrough of the game and then edited that playthrough down to a movie-length 2 hours and 38 minutes. I omitted non-essential subplots and almost all of the combat in order to just tell the story.
That video is here:
In addition, I’ve divided the movie up into five acts:
These five acts will correspond to the five videos in the second part of the project, Bioshock Infinite Explained, which I am currently working on. The Explained videos will feature my commentary on the plot, themes, and character relationships in the story. It some ways Infinite is a difficult story, and I hope that my commentary will help people understand it.
