As promised, a few images from last Saturday’s (1 October) steam train ride from Kloof to Nottingham Road (a part of the Natal Midlands by Mooi River) for the Vintage Steam Fair, or something like that…
In the 4th pic, the one with the tractor, that expression on your face, the body language, both tell a tale of forbidden lusts in the hazy hinterlands, of the illicit passion shared between human and mecahnical harvesting device. The love that dare not speak its name! :p.
As some of you know, I’ve been fangirling hard over the new Tomb Raider , the first entry in the video game series since 2008, and ostensibly a reboot for the entire franchise . Taking the form of an origin story, Tomb Raider 2013 depicts the events that transformed a beautiful, if bookish, archaeology graduate into a pistol-packing adventurer with a devil-may-care attitude. We meet Lara Croft as a pretty, fairly ordinary 21 year old, brooding over her work notes, listening to her mp3 player and very much confined to the shadow of her male mentors. By the end of the game, however, she’s taken charge – she’s had to! – and, battered, bruised and bloody, she’s both a survivor and hero, right down to rescuing the princess and carrying her away in her arms. Yeah, this is probably the best point to mention that there will be some Tomb Raider 2013 spoilers in this post, so read ahead with caution. Anyway, I loved the game. Technically it’s near faultless, it looks beautiful, the ov...
Part 2: Lara and the ladies So evidently an old euphemism for lesbians was “ female adventurer .” Who, in the whole of Popular Culture, is more of a poster child for those two words than Lara Croft? Disregarding her own mysterious sexual orientation (to be covered in Part 4 of this blog post), no wonder she is an icon for queer women. On a more serious note, it would be easy to dismiss Lara’s appeal to ladies who like ladies as simply a mirror of her appeal to heterosexual men. In other words, it’s purely about sexual attraction. Whichever version of the character is your favourite, Lara is intimidatingly intelligent, gorgeous, and sports a smokin’ hot body. So queer women just want to get into Lara’s shorts. Right? Uh, no. Evidently, even if queer women are sexually attracted to Lara Croft, admiration trumps objectification every time. As already mentioned (in Part 1 ), Lara Croft is held in high esteem by fans for the qualities she embodies as opposed to her many undeni...
Young documentary-maker Samantha Nishimura is for Tomb Raider fans a love-her-or-hate-her character. Appearing in the 2013 video game reboot , Sam is fledgling archaeologist Lara Croft ’s long-term best friend, flatmate – and One True Pairing, if the shippers were to get their way. In the game, Sam’s naiveté leads to her kidnapping by Solarii cult leader Mathias. Technically twice. The second time occurs when the twenty-two year old is just as trusting of expedition colleague, Dr James Whitman, and falls asleep under his “watchful eye.” (To be fair, Lara makes the exact same mistake the first time she meets Mathias). During the game, Sam is successfully rescued twice by Lara (there’s a third botched attempt that almost kills them both). Sam also notably manages to shoot off a mounted machine gun in the direction of her friends while trying to prove her usefulness. And she tries to get sympathy from a battered, bleeding Lara by commenting how terrible she, herself, must look … ...
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