Hello all you lovely folks!
Intern-Paul here, the newest generation of the intern species here at Broken Pencil, fresh out of the Broken Pencil intern cocoon pods chamber I’m not actually supposed to be talking about. The furry mass of awesomeness above is Auden, my partner in crime. I model various aspects of my life according to his example.
But you’re not here to read about that, because it’s Friday, and you’re here to know WHAT’S HAPPENING ON THE INTERNET. Right? That was a rhetorical question. I already know it. I was created to know it. Here goes!
Month-Day-Year by Michael Penn is a series of zines each featuring a collection of photographs taken within the span of a single day. The result is a beautiful and ambiguous vignette of a singular period or environment. Each book is a story, and whatever that story might be is really up to you. And, rather than publish the project as a stack of expensive coffee table books, Penn has purposefully printed them in an affordable zine format at $7 each. You can read more about the project in a brief profile here.
Depression Quest – Chances are someone you know suffers from depression. Or you yourself might be an unfortunate victim. Whatever the case may be, depression is not a mere simple bout of sadness one can merely ‘snap out of,’ as many are finally starting to figure out. Depression Quest is a deeply-moving work of interactive fiction by developers Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey and Isaac Schankler. It aims to communicate depression in an especially meaningful and thoughtful tone using rather brilliant mechanics to get across the futility sufferers feel when in the worst of it. You might see an option to get help, seek a therapist and feel better for ultimately taking charge of your life, but it’ll be crossed out and unclickable. That option, like in real life, might just be too hard and arduous to take on. That’s the point. If you want to find out what your gloomy friend might be going through, Depression Quest is an amazing resource for understanding the disease.
Grave of the Lizard Queen by the ever-talented Emily Carroll is a small exhibit of the burial site of an enigmatic “Lizard Queen.” Clicking on any of the artifacts reveals even more cryptic peeks at the queen’s life and her legacy. But like all that remains of Ozymandias, her true legacy is ephemeral. She now rests only as a pile of decaying flesh (or scales?) and shoddy artifacts. You could just click away from the page and forget all about it. But she was a queen. Her subjects seemed to preserve her with great care and effort… all for the foolish hopes of being remembered. How will you ensure your own memory survives? What will your loyal subjects do for you? Just make doubly sure that you’re buried with your favourite servant/footstool. I know I will.
This is Not a Conspiracy Theory – Okay, I swear, I’m not going to subject you to any more bummers. This is Not a Conspiracy Theory is the latest project by indie documentarian Kirby Ferguson, most known for his fantastic series Everything is a Remix, which documents the nature of appropriation in human culture. Conversely, This is Not a Conspiracy Theory is all about pop culture itself. It’s about the mainstream. It’s about politics. It’s about how all these culturally-sustained entities and systems may now be controlling us, rather than us controlling them. This isn’t a crackpot ramble about grassy knolls and shape-shifting lizards, but rather how the memes we create may have more influence on our thoughts than we’d like to think. The first installment is up for free, but the rest you can preorder for 12 bucks. Give it a look. It’s delicious food for thought.
A Dark Room by Doublespeak Games is a text-based interactive experience in the same vein as the popular Candy Box pseudo-RPG. But unlike Candy Box’s lighthearted and silly approach to narrative, A Dark Room uses similar mechanics to build a story from the ground up. What starts out as a simple series of tasks in a (surprise!) dark room by a fire slowly evolves into a richer narrative, as A Dark Room’s world is gradually unveiled from its darker confines. There’s a wonderful narrative mechanic at work here that really needs to be experienced for yourself. You can play the game for free online, or get it for iOS here.
That’s all for now, my new friends! But I’ll be seeing you again real soon with fresher styles and more awesome internet gems!
This brief anecdote opens the door to discussing current approaches to psychiatric problems and depression in particular. The term “bio-psycho-social” was coined by Dr George Engel, an internist and psychiatrist in the s. He based his ideas on the work of Adolph Meyer who talked about “psychobiology” and Franz Alexander, the founder of the Chicago school of psychosomatics. Dr Engel developed his ideas working in the area of psychosomatics and more specifically what is now called Consultation- Liason Psychiatry i.e. psychiatrists working in medical and surgical departments to help other physicians understand the psychological concomitants of physical diseases. Engel’s paradigm concluded that psychological factors interact dynamically with biological and social elements in both health and disease. The model goes further in stating that the cause and effect relationships are not usually linear but rather interactive and reciprocal. This model is proposed as an antidote to two other theoretical approaches common at the time and still today—–that is “dualism” (the mind/body dichotomy ) and “reductionism”—–an ever-present danger in medicine, whether it be biological reductionism common in today’s high-tech environment, or psychological reductionism, common in the Freudian era.
will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it ‘Fascism’, sometimes ‘Communism’, sometimes ‘Regimentation’, sometimes ‘Socialism’. But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical…. Plausible self-seekers and theoretical die-hards will tell you of the loss of individual liberty. Answer this question out of the facts of your own life. Have you lost any of your rights or liberty or constitutional freedom of action and choice?