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John Semley

John Semley is a writer and researcher based in Philadelphia.

Against Virtuosity

February 12, 2020
Recently, idling away an especially rainy Saturday in January, I found myself sinking a solid six hours into Sony Interactive Entertainment’s 2018 blockbuster game God of War: a stupid-violent farrago of Greek and Norse mythology notable for employing a fixed, ...
A four-armed woman in futuristic garb poses with a robotic dog in front of a neon-tinted Japanese business sign.

Cyberpunk is Dead

November 4, 2019
Held annually in a downtown L.A. convention center so massive and glassy that it served as a futurist backdrop for the 1993 sci-fi action film Demolition Man and as an intergalactic “Federal Transport Hub” in Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 space-fascism satire Starship Troopers, ...

So Metaphorical

October 24, 2019
Parasite, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes (in a reportedly unanimous decision) and was (less unanimously) a finalist for the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, begins in a dead-end. The film opens in a dingy sub-basement at the ass-end of a ...