Plato’s Caving

Game Criticism | February 5, 2025 by Bee Sprawlbug

“Plato’s caving” is the process of gradually dissociating certain knowledge one has about how a show was put together in order to immerse oneself further inside the show itself.

By ‘show’ I mean just about anything: movies, music, videogames, social media feeds. A ‘show’ could be a plate of breakfast sausages, or the people walking past you in the park while you’re seated at a bench. In Plato’s original allegory of the cave he imagines a sort of prehistoric cinema (a procession of different shadow puppets projected onto a cave wall using hidden light sources, such that there are no visible human operators and the figures seem to move on their own).

By ‘dissociating certain knowledge’ I mean reacting to a situation as if certain facts about it were somehow disconnected from it. People do this all the time—especially when they’re taking in a show—because a bit of plato’s caving makes the show a little better. Many fun & interesting experiences involve a certain forgetting of reality, and we have a bunch of different words for it: ‘suspending disbelief’, ‘roleplaying’, ‘getting into the spirit’, ‘losing yourself in the moment’. It’s a fundamental aspect of storytelling, and for there to be a ‘show’ some degree of it must happen.

Mixtape: The Labour & The Shame

Projects | November 20, 2022 by Bee Sprawlbug

My newest mixtape is entitled “The Labour & The Shame”; for me it was a way to process the feelings I have about working in the videogame industry. Side ‘L’ imagines the PoV of labourers: It’s full of reminders to protect yourself whilst creating art for money (and reminders about why we sought out creative work in the first place). Side ‘S’ imagines, often from a first person PoV, the class of executives & boss guys from whom we need protection… you know the ones.

Running all through this mixtape are tracks from Gentle Giant’s “The Power & The Glory”, which is a concept album about how power reveals things. I’ve been listening to it a lot lately! In the ‘seeking power’ stage, the antihero of this record cloaks themself in altruism (paying lip service to whatever ideals their community wants them to have); but later, in the ‘having power’ stage, the actions they take begin revealing that special sort of villainy that we can locate within executives or politicians etc.

Tk’emlúps 2022: Public Spaces

Photos | September 7, 2022 by Bee Sprawlbug

On the way up to Tk’emlúps we stopped at a beautiful place that in settlerworld is dubbed “Bridal Falls” (which pretty much looks the way it sounds, like a big bridal gown):

Tk’emlúps 2022: Little Farmers Petting Zoo

Photos | September 7, 2022 by Bee Sprawlbug

This month we travelled up to Tk’emlúps to stay with a friend for a couple days! A few blocks from her house is the “Little Farmers Petting Zoo”, a place for humans of all ages to come & feed animals (as well as a place for said animals to momentarily avoid the most horrifying parts of animal agriculture).

Cute pigs!

Tk’emlúps 2022: BC Wildlife Park

Photos | September 7, 2022 by Bee Sprawlbug

We spent a few hours this month wandering around “BC Wildlife Park”, which is a rehabilitation centre for orphaned and injured wildlife (that tries very hard never to call itself a “zoo” lol). In this place you can find several of the largest organisms on the whole planet, including these rescued grizzlefriends Dawson and Knute:

My FAVE grizzly pic from the set is this one, where they’re both hanging out:

Greenways, Bridges, Water & Trails

Photos | July 5, 2022 by Bee Sprawlbug

On a bicycle you can go just about anywhere in the lower mainland! Most of the dedicated paths run along rivers, lakes & old railway lines (or else beneath newish skytrain lines). These ones are from a variety of water bodies north from the river where I live:

And THESE ones are all from the north bank of stal̓əw̓ itself:

Lastly, here’s a picture of me:

ʔəleqsən

Photos | May 10, 2022 by Bee Sprawlbug

We visited the ‘George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary’ at ʔəleqsən last weekend! One thing that happened was that this adventurous red-winged blackbird landed on my friend Kim:

But really that was only the START of the bird-related activity. This time of year we were privileged to chill with this sandhill crane, one of the biggest/weirdest birds in the region:

FFH 331

Photos | May 1, 2022 by Bee Sprawlbug

Some navy people were hanging out at Lonsdale Quay today, answering questions & offering tours of their big-ass Halifax-class frigates. One’s called “The HMCS Vancouver (FFH 331)”, and it’s got a little orca on the side. The other one’s called the “HMCS Winnipeg (FFH 338)” and it’s got a little buffalo.

Mixtape: Loneliness Mania Blues

Projects | April 19, 2022 by Bee Sprawlbug

Today you can get quick streaming access to like, every single song ever recorded, just by typing its name into Spotify! It’s a horrible deal for everybody but that’s how it is now, haha.

In an era of Total Entertainment Forever, we know that all this abundant ‘content’ comes to lose its appeal; what matters instead is stuff like the curation of content, the sequencing of it (“the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in”, as Joseph Conrad once put it). So, that just means I’m getting back into mixtapes now!

q̓ʷulƛ̕əl̕

Photos | April 13, 2022 by Bee Sprawlbug

Last weekend Louise and I visited a place that in settlerworld we know as Boundary Bay (in particular a nature park near the bay’s western peninsula, a spot called Point Roberts). The Puget Sound Geographical Names map offers us a better name for this peninsula however: q̓ʷulƛ̕əl̕! (The Musqueam Place Names Map offers us another good name for it: smaq̓ʷəc!)

Before the industrial apocalypse, this area was great for the practice of catching salmon in reef nets. Today, well, it’s pretty good for taking photos haha.