Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ (Nintendo 2020) huge popularity has previously been attributed to escapism prompted by the singularity of lockdown life (Frushtick 2020; Zhu 2020), resonating with analyses which have been quick to frame lockdown as a radical historical caesura in experiences of work and leisure (Harari 2020; Krastev 2020). However, Adam Chmielewski and Fernanda Bruno argue that lockdown can be seen in relation to continuities in neoliberalism’s alienation, isolation and hyperconnected domestic digital labour (2020; 2020) - a condition of prolonged and displaced anxiety I term ‘ever-lockdown’ - necessitating a more nuanced account of Animal Crossing’s ambivalent mix of busywork and relaxation. Rather than escapist utopia, consumerist dystopia (Chang 2019), or softened capitalism (Bogost 2020), I will consider Animal-Crossing as providing absorbing boredom in which intense interactivity can be interpassively (Pfaller, 2017) withheld in a time of demanding and destabilising crises, facilitating a subtle, affective sense of place amidst the ‘ever-lockdown.’

This paper proposal explores the relationship of history and comedy in Joker (2019) through a comedy theory of broken thingness (Bergson 2003;Brown, 2001) and queer theory of failure (Edelman 2004; Halberstram 2011) -the interplay of the film's use of comic timing and signifiers of historical time in its diegesis. I argue that The Joker uses its black humour to probe a disjointed affective relationship to masculine dressage, and the repeating crises of a city coded as 1970s New York. While arguably courting the ironising nihilisms of the Alt-Right (Nagel, 2017), multiple points of disruption undercut a protagonist who is framed more as 'lucky fool' than 'canny trickster.' Repeated comic and diachronic failure, I argue, exposes the ambivalent thingness of postwar urban masculinity -critically, derivatively, problematically and foolishly.

This article considers Walter Sickert's Miss Earhart's Arrival 1932 in relation to contemporary discourses on heavierthan-air flight. I look at the negotiation of the future in paint, and through discourse analysis of its reception I conclude that Arrival questions the capacities of new technologies. By examining a cross-medium practice concerned with transcribing found press images of historic events, I situate this work in my larger argument that Sickert's late work offers us perspectives on painting's mediation of changing interwar notions of historical time, Utopia/dystopia, and the capacity of paint to critically engage technologies of memory and transit both materially and temporally.

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