Sifu, Tate, Cipri

Sarah Gailey -

Welcome to the Stone Soup Weekly Digest! This is where I share what I'm up to and some of my favorite things from around the internet. Subscribe to Stone Soup to get this in your inbox every week.

Original Gailey Fiction!

Last week, I shared a piece of original short fiction written for CBC Ottawa’s radio show All In A Day. The story was inspired by Negocios Infernales, a writing prompt card deck created by C.S.E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez. If you missed it last week, you can read it in last week’s digest now.

We Have Blood On Our Controllers

The blood on our Controllers - The Complicity of the Game Industry in the Palestinian Genocide  Is OUT!! youtu.be/g7488to6Jpc?...

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— Hippolyte 🪐 (@hippolyte.bsky.social) November 25, 2024 at 6:49 AM

Tate Hacked by LGBTQ+ Hackers

It is absolutely vital to celebrate our wins, and this one’s big: Andrew Tate’s online “university” was hacked by an LGBTQ+ hacker collective, which exploited the abundant insecurities in the site to breach the data of hundreds of thousands of users. (In case you’re not sure why this is a win: Tate is a misogyny-influencer who is currently under house arrest in Romania as he waits to go to trial for charges of rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women.)

Get the full story here.

Support Your Community

CLICK HERE for a round-up of more resources that will allow you to serve your community at home and around the world by getting vaccinated and helping support those who are currently in need around the world.

Alasdair Stuart Reviews: Sifu

The incredibly insightful Alasdair Stuart is a pop culture genius, reviewer extraordinaire, and regular Digest contributor. Be sure to subscribe to The Full Lid for more brilliant pop culture analysis.

In a couple of weeks, Amazon Prime will roll out Secret Level, an anthology of animated short films set in the worlds of various video games. It's got a celebrity voice cast, some very cool choices (PAC-MAN?!) and some great writers on staff. There are two episodes I'm particularly excited about, Pac-Man (PAC-MAN! COME ON!) and Sifu. Today, we're going to talk about Sifu.

Developed by Sloclap, Sifu is a game built on the principle shared by martial arts and stage magic; misdirection.  Be where your opponent, or audience doesn't expect you to be. Don't (just) tell the story people think you are. That's an especially great choice in a genre like this and Sifu starts as an off the shelf 'I will avenge my teacher!' story. As a child, you watch Yang, a disgraced student of a Chinese martial arts school return with a group of hench-thugs and murder your father in a duel. He finds you. He orders your throat slit. You die.

You wake up.

You go to war.

That's the last time Sifu behaves as expected and it's GREAT. The game sits you inside the narrative of a traditional martial vengeance movie and the aesthetics of it are beautifully grungy. You fight your way through a night club, an office building, a drug lab, and an incredibly beautiful art gallery level I replayed three times because it's so gorgeous (and twenty times because it’s so difficult). Each level is full of thugs and countless opportunities to do creative violence to them. Each fight has character, stakes and threat, the camera shifting from third person to side-scrolling and back as wave after wave of enemies come after you. I particularly loved the art gallery fight in a room with a swinging pendulum dropping black ink on the floor, and the 'GETTHEFUCKAWAYFROMME' panicky improv of hurling baubles at an opponent in another room. The game's language is violence, and it's fluent in every dialect. 

You aren't. 

That's how it gets you.

You're going to die in Sifu. A lot. Every time you do, the talisman that saved your life as a child will bring you back until it breaks and you die for real. Every time you die, you age a year. This is the genius of Sifu, as it folds the concepts of persistence and experience into a linear narrative of punishment and the punishing linear narrative of time. You're always learning, always improving and every time you die, you can tweak what you know. But every time you die gets you closer to the last time.

Mortality is the one opponent who won't stay down and the game makes a feature, and a friend, of it. The concept of martial arts as a vehicle for self-improvement has been too frequently hijacked by the sort of people Spotify pay millions of dollars to spread bigotry and lies. Sifu takes that back from the Affliction t-shirt set, and delivers a narrative that provides you with a choice as stark as it is metaphorical. You can kill the gang who murdered your father. It will be all you ever do. Or you can move outside the cycle of violence and discover a future that isn't the past just more tired, more angry and closer to death. You can live. You can improve. Or you can just fight. Forever.

Rage or mercy. Catharsis or compassion. Big concepts, all delivered with the same subtlety, grace and breathtaking precision as every blow you strike. Sifu is something very special. It's relentlessly tough but it needs to be. Because then you'll learn you don't have to be.

Sifu is out now for Windows, Xbox One and Series X/S, PS4 and PS5 and Switch

There are rules for Voynich Woods: Always carry a whistle. Never go alone. Always come home before dark. And if anyone calls your name, don't answer. Because everyone who wanders from the path is never seen again.

Except for Riley Walcott.

Riley knows better than to stray from the trail in the woods behind her uncle Toby's house. But her little sister Sam breaks the rules in pursuit of a local legend, so Riley chases after her and discovers a knife-wielding figure and a waiting grave.

Madelyn lives deep in the forest. Subject to her mother's strict rules, she's forbidden from leaving home or using her magic―but one night, she risks everything to help a stranger who's lost in the woods.

Riley is murdered in a strange ritual, Madelyn uses her magic to resurrect her, and their lives are immediately entwined in the gnarled history of Voynich Woods. Riley, who feels trapped in her small town but too afraid to leave, was never a believer, but now the evidence is taking root under her skin. Madelyn has the scars to prove how terrible magic can be, and longs for a life beyond her mother's grasp. As the legends become all too real, Riley and Madelyn must confront their deepest fears to uncover the truth about Voynich Woods.

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In the meantime, do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up.

—Gailey