All posts by Margaret Killjoy

Margaret Killjoy is a wayfaring author, editor, and photographer whose interests include ecology, gift economics, and the serial comma.

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The End of Anarcho-Geek Review

June 1, 2018 Margaret Killjoy Leave a comment

It’s with a strange mix of joy and sorrow that I announce the end of Anarcho-Geek Review.

Writing for this site got me through one of the darkest periods in my life. When anxiety had me too crippled to do anything but work, sleep, and consume media, it gave me an outlet. I could barely get out of bed, but I could rant about the video games I was playing, the books I was reading, and the movies I was watching. Amazing contributors came out of the woodwork, and Sadie the Goat let me talk her into becoming my co-editor.

But I never put in the work it would have taken to make AGR as amazing as it could have been. I wanted, most of all, to pay our contributors (and potentially pay our editors eventually). I wanted to do that because I believe that we need, as anti-capitalists, to learn to value otherwise un-valued labor. Certainly including writers. That would have taken a lot more work at promotion and fundraising, which none of us had the energy for.
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Interview

Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: an interview with Ursula le Guin

January 23, 2018 Margaret Killjoy Leave a comment

Ursula le Guin died yesterday. She was 88 years old. She was the pillar of anarchist fiction.

I’m not someone impressed by celebrity, I don’t believe. I’m not even impressed simply by talent. But I can’t easily express how important it was to me that le Guin existed. When I was a baby anarchist fiction writer, I reached out to her. I wanted to write a zine about politics and fiction. She agreed to let me interview her, and started me on the path I’m on.
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Here’s to the Punks: Stranger Things season 2

November 5, 2017 Margaret Killjoy Leave a comment

Showrunners: The Duffer Brothers

Director of Punx Episode: Rebecca Thomas

Recommended? Yeah duh

Stranger Things season 2 was different from Stranger Things season 1, which is probably a good thing but sometimes I was not happy about it because season 1 was so good. This isn’t a review of Stranger Things season 2. It’s an ode to the punks, and to their representation.
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Movies

Just Like A Real Girl: Blade Runner 2049

October 17, 2017 Margaret Killjoy Leave a comment

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Writers: Hampton Fancher, Michael Green

Recommended? I dunno.

Blade Runner 2049 is a movie about women, and it’s a shame that the people who made it didn’t realize that. Almost every interesting idea that lies untended in the fallow thematic field of the movie is about women. Almost all of the interesting characters in the movie are women. Hell, most of the characters with power and authority in the film are women. Which, it’s curious to realize, doesn’t make the film passably feminist in any regard.
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Movies

The Dark Tower and Swarms of Evil Nihilists

August 9, 2017 Margaret Killjoy Leave a comment

Director: Nikolaj Arcel

Based on a novel by: Stephen King

Recommended? eh

I heard that The Dark Tower wasn’t very good, but you have to understand that tickets are only $5 on Tuesdays at this one theatre and also The Dark Tower is speculative fiction and I’ll watch pretty much any spec fic you put in front of me.

So off I went to go see The Dark Tower.

And the thing is, it’s actually a decent movie. The landscapes were pretty, the evil skin people were creepy, and maybe most importantly the central mythos of the whole thing is weird enough to be cool. Maybe I’m just easily amused, I don’t know. I like being easily amused. It means I get to be amused a lot.

The thing that is garbage about this film is the same thing that is garbage about half the shit that Hollywood shoves down our throats. Which is:

Why the fuck are the bad guys doing what they’re doing?
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Video Games

Endless Space and Why Can’t We Have Anarchist Strategy Games

July 11, 2017 Margaret Killjoy 2 Comments

Publishers: Amplitude Studios, Iceberg Interactive

Release: 2012

Recommended? Yes.

This morning I conquered an entire galaxy as a race of spacefaring, pacifist-ish, ecologically-focused anarchist robots. I won an economic victory. There’s probably some irony there.

Endless Space is a damn good game. I’ve played its non-space-based sequel Endless Legends a couple of times, and I think I actually like this spacey one better. I play strategy games to lose myself for a day or three after too much bullshit like work and the world being a garbage fire, and this is now one of my favorites. I’m sure I’ll sacrifice more of the finite hours in which I’m alive to play this game.

It’s a “4X” game, which is like some weird acronym for things that don’t start with the letter X [editor’s note: “eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate”]. Basically, it’s the genre of turn-based games in which you construct buildings, research technologies, extract resources, colonize territory, negotiate trade deals, and go to war.

Which doesn’t sound very anarchist now that I’m typing it out.

Why am I addicted to these fucking things?
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Satire

American Governors in the Zombie Apocalypse

November 17, 2015 Margaret Killjoy Leave a comment

Cover image: Juan Navarro

From: The Zombie Years

Image used with permission but without Juan having read or necessarily endorsing this piece.

It’s a week into the zombie apocalypse. Our plucky gang of heroes from all walks of life has holed themselves up in a sporting goods store at the edge of town.

Seven people, all worried about their friends and families. All worried about the end times.

They’re gathered together in the store’s office, nervously checking the security camera feed. The biggest herd of zombies seems to have drifted on, and there are only a handful of the living dead roaming the parking lot, plus nearly a hundred haunting the nearby grocery store. Our survivors are waiting for a few of their crew to return from scouting the department store on the other side of the parking lot.
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Movies

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (2014)

September 3, 2015 Margaret Killjoy 1 Comment

Directed by: Francis Lawrence

Screenplay by: Danny Strong and Peter Craig

Based on: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Recommended? Sure

I’ve only read the first Hunger Games book. That either makes me the perfect reviewer for the movies, or maybe a woefully incompetent one. It does mean, however, that I’m taking the movies one at a time, because I don’t know what happens.

I know it makes me a bad anarchist to say this, but the worst thing about the third part of the Hunger Games is that there aren’t any hunger games. It’s just a movie about revolution instead. Considering that the hunger games are an awful thing and revolutions are something us anarchists are known for encouraging, this is a strange statement. But frankly, the battle royale under the omniscient gaze of an evil dictator made for good fiction.

Revolution can too, it turns out. I liked the movie, but it was decidedly less fun, and in so many ways less spectacular, than the first two. It was just, well, a completely different thing. Which is better than just making the same movie three times, I suppose, from a storytelling point of view. So I’ll forgive it.
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Movies

Land and Freedom (1995)

August 31, 2015 Margaret Killjoy 2 Comments

Land and Freedom

Director: Ken Loach

Writer: Jim Allen

Recommended? Definitely.

Fucking Stalinists.

Fuck.

Fucking Stalinists are the worst.

Land and Freedom is an emotional tale of the Spanish Civil War, one that’s based loosely on George Orwell’s experiences as recounted in his book Homage to Catalonia. It follows a young unemployed communist from England who heads off to volunteer his life for the Spanish revolution, fighting at the Aragon front alongside the men and women of the POUM, a Marxist militia. There, despite poor training and poorer equipment, they liberate a village from fascists and hold the line.

The most important scene in the movie, twelve minutes long, is the argument in the liberated village whether to collectivize all of the land around the village immediately or to only collectivize the land of the Franco supporters at first. Everyone speaks passionately, everyone’s opinions are given weight and consideration by the filmmaker.
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Movies

The Anarchist Cookbook (2002)

August 28, 2015 Margaret Killjoy Leave a comment

The Anarchist Cookbook
Directed and written by: Jordan Susman
Recommended? hahaha no

It’s a good thing most of the movies about us are absolute crap and no one watches them.

What if someone took everything awful about Fight Club (the machismo and misogyny, the too-easy political nihilism, the cliche masochistic bromance) and mixed it with everything awful about SLC Punk (the oversimplification of anarchism, the obvious fact that youth doesn’t last, the yay-for-selling-out ending), amplified it, and turned it into a movie?

You’d have The Anarchist Cookbook.

The Anarchist Cookbook is the worst movie about anarchists that has ever been made. Some movies misunderstand us (SLC Punk). Some movies vilify us (El Bosc). Some movies condescend to us (The East, No God, No Master). This movie intentionally warps our words and practices, alternately mocking us and reviling us.
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