This loving pose has prompted humorous comparisons to the painting “Lament For Icarus” by late Victorian painter Herbert James Draper. Like all good jokes, there’s actually a lot of heart and truth here. The painting is quiet, somber, and dignified. It depicts the sea nymphs tending to this fallen angel, this sweet prince. Behold the soft lad cradling his fallen bosom buddy! 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. If you actually read the study ( I kiss them because I love them: The emergence of heterosexual men kissing in British institutes of education) it never claims kissing is just a simple lad greeting, and in fact the word “greet / greeting” appears only once in the paper. (pg. 422: “Thus, a kiss on the lips has not been part of the historical repertoire of greetings or demonstrations of affection among men for centuries in Britain”) 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. This research and sympathy are important here, because that work is about love — and the video ends with love.

set of lads from outside of Leeds - leedssc - Tapatalk Best set of lads from outside of Leeds - leedssc - Tapatalk

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:Suicide remains the biggest killer among males under 45years old. When leading British mental health organisation The Priory Group surveyed 1,000 men in 2015, their results revealed that at its crux, 40 per cent of men were unwilling to talk to anyone about their mental health, with further findings showing that 77 per cent of those same men have suffered from depression, anxiety or stress. Worryingly, 40 per cent of men involved in the poll revealed it would take suicidal thoughts or self-harm to seek professional help. When talking about White working class people, there are at least two traps here. The conservative trap is to “defend” a “White working-class heritage” racist dog

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The lads’ shaved haircuts, fitted fashion, muscled bodies, exposed underwear, Tyneside flats, and Northern accents, signify a specific working class identity from North East England. In the 2000s these lads might’ve been called chavs, and in the 2010s they would’ve evoked the US reality TV series Jersey Shore or its British off-shoot Geordie Shore, and TV critics noted the clear social class implications.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: 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.)

Lads as an Important Failure | Full Stop Hard Lads as an Important Failure | Full Stop

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 At the start of the video, the men kiss briefly and instinctively, as if they’ve done it before so many times. It’s a strong and surprising hook. 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.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] 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.