276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Flatmates: Straight Lads Turn Gay

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Love is why I made Hard Lads. Like many people around the world, I really love this video. I’ve watched it hundreds of times, paused countless freeze frames to examine the most trivial of details, and at this point I’ve written thousands upon thousands of words about it. It has problems, it has beauty, it’s a complex piece of culture that merits our attention. There’s two different game programming strategies here. Prevention prevents the game from breaking at all, while repair and maintenance assumes the game will break all the time. Prevention might seem more stable at first, but it’s actually very brittle because it requires flawlessness. Repair covers more edge cases because it assumes everything is broken all the time. It’s a big change to my coding style, but I believe a reparative approach provides the best of all worlds. Unique malfunctions make the player’s performance feel special and emergent, while not being so serious as to permanently break game progress. The real insult is that they think queer energy can be dispelled so easily! The video shows how straight mate energy is actually quite fragile. It just takes one minute to utterly destroy the lad’s masculinity on video. In the end, I argue that queer love is also the force that honors masculine vulnerability, that only we have the power to reclaim these lads. The purpose of those traps is to hide a third way: an intersectional history of solidarity, especially in the UK. In 1984, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) supported mineworker unions against Thatcher during the national strike, and in turn, miners supported gay rights movements and pushed against the 1988 anti-gay law, Section 28. This was a political alliance forged long ago by our elders, proof that we can all organize together.

Watch: Gay Rugby Players Strip in Locker Room Shoot Watch: Gay Rugby Players Strip in Locker Room Shoot

Like many young men, McLeod felt the pressure of having to fit into aladdy mould he didn’t see himself fitting into, being queer and in astraight male-dominated school. His more recent work, like ashort film titled Understanding: Masculinity, features clips from apub with adeep-voiced narration playing over the top. Its contents are critical of the ​ “boys don’t cry” rhetoric which tend to plague school corridors and changing rooms. I watched him steadily rise into the air, as if transcending this mortal plane of pain and suffering and chairs. It was beautiful to watch his worn-out body rise above the rooftops and into the endless sky. Icarus was finally achieving his dream. While it wasn’t two shirtless hunks holding each other, there was still a sense of gentleness here. We have no choice but to appreciate the video and the game for what they are. This is the simple love one might reserve for a succinct capture of early 21st century himbo masculinity, a brilliant tragicomedy in three 20-second acts… an important failure. In honor of all the HOT STR8 BOYS who aren’t hard straight lads. Truly madly deeply softly, with tenderness, pain, and camp.

Victim (1961)

This research and sympathy are important here, because that work is about love — and the video ends with love. At ECW Hardcore Heaven 1994, a pro wrestler asked for a chair to smash on a fellow performer. Fans proceeded to give him many chairs, literally hundreds thrown onto the stage. This avalanche derailed the entire match. The staff begged the audience to stop, but the chairs just kept flying. It was a massive surreal breakdown in the laws of pro wrestling events. Among many queer moments in pro wrestling, this ranks among the queerest. In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essen­tial element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve… Let’s assume these lads are straight. In her book “Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men”, Jane Ward asks, why do seemingly Straight White Men do such seemingly Gay White things? This was also a central question in my previous game The Tearoom, whose primary source, Laud Humphreys’ “Tearoom Trade”, shows how I think anti-realism designers overlook possibilities for realism in game aes­thetics. Hard Lads is, perhaps, neo­realist. The characters were generated from Mixamo Fuse, the camera doesn’t cut to the action, and it endeavors to maintain social realism with documentary framing.

October 2016 – Sore Bottom Guys

Hard Lads recreates the main lad’s exaggerated pre-game gestures like smoking a cigarette, swigging a bottle, and manly kissing. Each of these actions can be endlessly paused, repeated, interrupted, and failed. Smoking for too long can cause a coughing fit, liquor can be spilled wastefully onto the ground, and a manly fist bump of a kiss can turn into a hot makeout session. My in-game damage model is straight­forward: The main lad starts with 20 health, and each strike inflicts damage based on chair velocity, usually 5-15 damage. Kissing beforehand heals 5 health per smooch / 5 health per second of makeout time, up to 200% overheal.) NOTE: Update, July 16, 2020. Michael Thomsen’s lovely review for Art in America argued a 2010 study found 9 of 10 UK university men kissed as a greeting. I think this is a bit misleading: As a nod to this incident, Hard Lads recreates this moment at the end of every round. Once the lad collapses from too much pain, the game drops additional chairs down from the sky, starting with only 1 chair on the 2nd round, and accumulating 69 chairs in the final 7th round.

Man up, boys don’t cry, toughen up. For Yorkshire-born artist Corbin Shaw, this stuffy rhetoric was all too common in the male heavy-environments he grew up in: football pitches, boxing gyms, his dad’s metal fabrication workplace. Places where machismo overshadows the need to open up, get talking and have acry on your pal’s shoulder from time-to-time. It was the tragic suicide of his dad’s friend, who he regularly played football with, which first prompted him to explore the damaging effects of hyper-masculinity through his art. Bold lettering is stitched on top of St. George’s flags, featuring slogans such as ​ “soften up hard lad” and ​ “save our bastard sons”. When finished, they form awitty take on the ever-recognisable pitch, pub and PE banter. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by Dutch renaissance painter Bruegel (or some other painter, who cares) emphasizes the humiliation of Icarus’ failed ambition. Viewers familiar with the myth will first look for Icarus in the sky — only to eventually locate Icarus awkwardly drowning in the ocean near the bottom-right corner. No one in the painting gives a shit about Icarus. Not only was Icarus foolish, but no one was even recording him on video! Gay poet W. H. Auden famously saw this painting in a museum and felt moved to drag / lament Icarus: High above the rooftops, just as the lads’ final chorus swells triumphantly, there’s a randomized 50% chance for him to suddenly plummet to the ground like Icarus. I thought the morbid humor would feel appropriately British; Even with the magic of love, these lads are still merely men, God giveth and God taketh away, and so on. Sometimes you have to know your own limits, like Icarus. So instead I pursued a different approach while still attempting to convey some sense of love

Twitter

asserting their straightness. The underlying joke is that LGBTQ intimacy is less real than their strong, infallible heteromasculine bond. This resulting straight male energy forms a magical force field to negate queer possibility. [note] The rain of chairs is also a succinct way to show some sympathy, because when one lad gets hit by a chair, we all get buried in chairs. It’s about solidarity. But with who? Brendan Keogh once wrote that my characters “are so perfectly imperfect as to fall square into the uncanny valley,” and Hard Lads continues this descent into uncanny queer embodiment. The article is based on areport by the Samaritans, and declared that ​ “macho attitudes to talking about problems mean men are denied the social support they need”. Further down, the statistics aren’t so dissimilar to those produced by The Priory Group four years ago. In 1999, it was reported that 12 men between the ages of 15 and 24 killed themselves per week, while asurvey of 1,400 men aged between 13 – 19 found ​ “67 per cent who had suicidal feelings said they had nowhere to turn for emotional help”.

As for the Legs been banned - not sure if your getting confused with our lot - The Kippax - who were def banned for about 18 months before eventually been reinstated - they were a banned Supporters club who drank and based themselves around The Three Legs & Nags Head late 70s early 80s alongside loads of other Leeds Lads and continued to run coaches - The Legs was a flag ship pub for Leeds fans in those days simlar to Spencers and The Monkey today May this humble game serve as official notice to the entire world: I hereby declare British Lads Hit Each Other With Chair to be Gay Culture, the shared communal legacy of LGBTQ+ people everywhere. Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation – not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy [… and] it doesn’t sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures. For this game I dive deeper into fumble­core, an indie game genre involving humorously inefficient and cumbersome player embodiment. Each round, the hurt lad is barely keeping it together, flailing in a very unmanly way in reaction to the slightest disturbance.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment