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# A Sea Made of Plastic [Podcast]
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/a-sea-made-of-plastic-podcast/
- Published: 2026-08-22T00:26:08.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-22T00:26:08.000Z
- Description: We go in on a police station built wrong on purpose, films rebuilt as late-'90s games nobody can play, and why Mario 64's water still felt like water.
- Author: Jamin Warren
- Tags: Podcast, Danny Snelson, MILES BUCKLE, RESIDENT EVIL, The Little Database, archive, film adaptation, low poly, nostalgia, Film

I open with a 2015 Kill Screen essay about a police station built wrong on purpose, and end up asking Danny Snelson, a writer and professor of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, a question that runs through the whole hour: what does a work become when you move it into the wrong container?

Ed Smith’s piece on *Resident Evil 2* called horror architecture “anatomically correct but tonally wrong.” Danny maps that onto Freud, onto the impossible geometry of the Overlook Hotel, and onto Zach Cregger’s *Resident Evil* film, where a typewriter on a desk is asked to carry 30 years of player fluency.

Then I turn to Miles Buckle, a London artist who rebuilds *Rear Window*, *Amarcord* and Hitchcock’s *Rope* as late-’90s games nobody will ever play. Danny traces the impulse back to Lego and forward to Roblox, and lands on why a JPEG face stretched over a low-polygon head is more unsettling now than it was in 1998.

The last stretch is Danny’s own book, *The Little Database*, free and open access from the University of Minnesota Press, and the desktop directory of 44 small archives it has grown into. His best example is Paul Sharits’s flicker film *Dots*, which on celluloid at Anthology Film Archives is close to hallucination and on YouTube is a blotchy field of squares. The compression is not the failure. It is what lets you see YouTube at all. Quick hits to close: Mitch Anzuoni’s money laundering simulator, Joshua Mattson’s *Defence Contractor Fantasy World* and its latex hand, and a new alt-control cabinet at Wonderville in Brooklyn.

## Links

- [My feature on Miles Buckle, who makes games you can’t play](https://www.killscreen.com/miles-buckle-games-you-cant-play/)
- [Ed Smith, “The horror of Resident Evil 2’s police station”](https://www.killscreen.com/horror-resident-evil-2s-police-station/)
- [The Little Database expands into a desktop directory](https://www.killscreen.com/the-little-database-expands-into-a-desktop-directory/)
- [Kill Screen on the Resident Evil film’s save points](https://www.killscreen.com/resident-evil-film-save-point-typewriters/)
- [Kill Screen on Defence Contractor Fantasy World](https://www.killscreen.com/the-mouse-in-this-ai-war-game-is-a-demonic-latex-hand/)
- [Danny Snelson, The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats](https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517918828/the-little-database/?ref=killscreen.com)
- [The Little Database desktop directory](https://thelittledatabase.com/?ref=killscreen.com)
- [Scott Richmond, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions](https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816690992/cinemas-bodily-illusions/?ref=killscreen.com)
- [Pippin Barr, v r 3](http://pippinbarr.com/v-r-3/info/?ref=killscreen.com)
- [Miles Buckle on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/milesbuckle.exe/?ref=killscreen.com)
- [Paul Sharits, Dots 1 and 2 on UbuWeb](https://ubu.com/film/sharits%5Fdots.html?ref=killscreen.com)
- [Fiasco, from Bully Pulpit Games](https://bullypulpitgames.com/?ref=killscreen.com)

## Corrections

- We refer to “The Curse of the Golden Idol.” The game is *The Case of the Golden Idol*.
- Joshua Mattson is based in Linz, Austria, not Germany.
- The *Grand Theft Auto VI* story concerned a single Army unit offering a four-day pass as a reenlistment incentive, not the US military broadly.

*Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by* [*Nick Sylvester*](https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com)*.*