Today in Urban Assault Collectibles:

Here he is punching Commissioner
Gordon. Do with that what you will.

I want to be absolutely clear on this point: I am not anti-Batman. Far from it. In fact, I'd say I'm a Batman fan, but I realize there are many, very valid criticisms of Batman as a character: He's a billionaire who inherited his wealth. He spends quite a bit of time beating up poor people. Vigilante justice is, no matter how well intended or positive the results, still a crime. Also, much of his rogues' gallery suffer from mental illness. His track record with how he treats women is questionable at best. And I mean, if he's so rich, why doesn't Bruce Wayne fund social programs to reduce crime instead of just punching the symptoms? But despite all that, he's still my favorite DC character. 

Anyway, I mention all this so you know that as we discuss this story about a three million dollar, screen-accurate version of the Tumbler, please know that my criticisms are coming from a place of affection for the character, and deep loathing for this kind of ostentatious rich-bro nonsense. Also, I always kind of thought the Tumbler was dumb.

At the risk of lapsing into toxic fandom, this is simply not my Batmobile.

No offense to actor Christian Bale, but his
Batman is also, mathematically the worst.

The Tumbler, for those unfamiliar, was the incarnation of the Batmobile seen in the Christopher Nolan Batman films. That is, instead of a sleek bat-themed car, the Tumbler is a weird future tank Nolan's ostensibly more grounded take on the Dark Knight crushes around in. How literally no one in the film wondered how Batman has the resources to afford a Wayne Industries prototype urban assault vehicle without himself actually being Bruce Wayne strains credulity, but ok, cool, whatever. 

Isn't Bruce Wayne famously anti-gun?
You know, for some reason?

Anyway, doesn't matter, what I'm here to complain about is not a nearly twenty (!) year-old movie, but rather the collab (ugh) between the corporate Voltron that is Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products, and the almost equally absurdly named PR company, Relevance International to sell ten, yes ten replica Tumblers. The not exactly street legal murder wagon is made of Kevlar, Carbon Fiber and Fiberglass, can deploy a smoke screen, and features gun turrets. Non-functional gun-turrets, but still...

The world's richest man trying to form
the letter 'X' with his body while shilling for
another rich guy who's running for dictator.

The Tumbler can be ordered through Relevance International's ludicrous website: The Bruce Wayne Experience at brucewaynex.com. It's a website which, in addition to perpetuating the notion that simply adding the letter X to something makes it interesting or cool, offers rich people the chance to prove precisely why they shouldn't be rich by selling them offensively expensive goods all themed--in some cases, very loosely themed--around Batman. Or at least Bruce Wayne. I don't know, the point of all this is rather murky. 

There're overpriced home goods to furnish Wayne Manor, not particularly Batman-y beyond they idea that they're expensive. They've got exercise equipment (so you can train up to punch some doors), vacations at various resorts and manors houses, luggage, electronics. They even sell jewelry including--I kid you not--Martha Wayne's pearl necklace.

You remember, the one she was murdered for? Well, now it can
be yours for just forty-two thousand dollars. Of money.

Pictured: arguably a better use.

My issue with all this is two-fold. Fold one: Batman's whole thing is that he tortured by his parents' murder and dedicates the rest of his life to fighting crime. Billionaire playboy is simply a facade he must maintain to carry out his more noble purpose in life (which again, often takes the form of punching criminals, but I think my greater point still stands). Fold two: who the actual spends enough money on this Sharper Image nonsense to justify existence of The Wayne Industries Experience? And, follow-up question: can we seize this wealth and put it to better use?

I don't want to tell rich people how to rich, but there will come a day when the rest of us will be finally fed up with the constantly widening wealth gap (hopefully this will happen before Tuesday), and break out the pitchforks and torches and it's stuff like this we will point to when the ga-jillionaires ask "why?"

I guess what I'm saying is don't be surprised when an angry mob
wheels a guillotine up to your screen-accurate stately Wayne Manor.

No One's Gonna Guess Evangelization

Have they thought about, oh, I don't know, not being shitty to queer people? Or admitting that the whole "women can't be priests thing" is a bit, you know, medieval? 

"Women? Priests? Whoa, whoa, whoa, it'll never work. Why? Uh...
They'd have to um...uh...well, there's the whole uh--hey! Look over there!"

-Three priests, shortly before running out

the door, into a car, and speeding away

It's not, as I initially assumed,
a reference to the X-Men character.

Who? And what am I on about? Great questions, and instead of answering that, I'm going to turn the tables and ask you a question: what is the absolute last move you thought the Catholic Church would pull? Bearing in mind of course that it's a nineteen-hundred year old organization was basically the unchallenged ruler of Europe from the fourth through sixteenth centuries? Because if you said introduce a an anime mascot for the 2025 Jubilee, a celebration that rolls around every twenty-five years (when you're founded in 33 AD, that's often), you would be correct. 

Huh? Yes, an anime mascot. A little girl with unsettlingly large eyes, a yellow raincoat--for some reason--green boots and a pilgrim's staff.

"Ta-da!"

-Archbishop Rino Fisichella, aged 73,

 wondering what he's doing with his life

How...uh, marketable.

But don't worry, Luce--whose name is Italian for light--won't be spreading the good word alone, she's got a whole gang of "& Friends." Three more be-rainslickered pals, who are basically just Luce in different colored coats, a winged cherub in a baseball cap, a dove, and a dog because awwww. The characters are designed by Simone Legno, whose American company (although Legno himself is Italian), Tokidoki specializes in "lifestyle brands" that are inspired by--imitative of--Japanese pop-culture. 

Move over Christ on the Cross,
Luce has youth appeal!

I went to their website, and it's all very, I don't know, Claire's? As in that store at the mall? Tokidoki has previously partnered with other companies--because creativity is dead and the best we can hope for is brand synergy--in what they--and not I--call collabs. Basically they produce merchandise like t-shirts and mugs with cute, manga-ish versions of whatever company they're collab-ing with: Marvel, Overwatch, Major League Baseball, and now the folks who brought you the crusades. If that all sounds a little--a lot--weird, don't worry, that's just because it sounds a little--a lot--weird. But then, I guess I'm not the target audience: Gen Alpha. After all, kids love the anime, and pondering existential questions about the nature of God? It's a match made...uh, somewhere, I guess.

Will it work? I guess that depends on what we mean by "work." Is it suddenly going to make everyone forget the scandals, financial malfeasance, and unwillingness to join the twenty-first century when it comes to women, LGBTQIA+ people, and bodily autonomy? I'm going to say probably not. Is it friendlier than some of the organization's previous recruitment efforts? Yes.

Pictured: a thirteenth century crusader, seen here about
to beat the love of God into an infidel with a mace.

Today in coping with existential dread:

"Hmm...a qualified public servant or a
ranting racist, misogynistic, fascist clown..."

You know, this has been bothering me for awhile and--huh? The election? Oh yes, absolutely. I can not fathom why we, as a nation, are even still entertaining this felonious goon who, by all rights, should be serving a life sentence for his role in the attempted coup. I've just not been talking about it because I think my anxiety around it is literally killing me. Instead, I've been avoiding the news and trying to think about anything else while we wait for a bunch undecided voters in Pennsylvania or wherever to decide our fate as a democracy.

"Ahhhhhhh!"

-people beaming

(source: memes)

So instead of dwelling on that, I've been thinking about the transporter on Star Trek and whether or not it kills the people who use it. I bring this up because I've come across a few internet memes lately about how every time a character steps into the transporter, it converts their molecules into energy and then beams that energy to another location where they are reassembled. So in a sense, the person who materializes is not the original, but an exact duplicate created from energy of the original's molecules. 

Chief Miles O'Brian, seen here doing
what he does best: murder.

Real life physics seem to bear this out. I did an internet search of the question: "does the transporter kill people?" and the science-based answer is generally yes: that the act of conversion into energy destroys the original object. Sort of like how someone standing next to an atomic bomb when it detonates is instantly atomized by the explosion. The only difference here is that the atomizee can be put back together. The question then is, are they still the same person? Are we unique instances in space and time or are we essentially molecular NFT's: not bound to a single server, individual, but transferable from place to place as long as the code is intact?

The answer is that any amount of time
thinking about this is too much. Any.

What is the self? Are we a unique assemblage of atoms? If those atoms are rearranged, are we still us? Or are we our memories? If the person who materializes on some planet has all of our memories, are they us? And perhaps the most important question: how much time thinking about the transporter on Star Trek is too much time? I guess for me the answer is one of narrative logic: the transporter works because the script says it works, and if indeed it was essentially a murder machine, no one on the show would step into one. 

Are these important questions? Of course not. But unlike questions about how or why someone could be undecided or God-forbid, enthusiastic about a guy whose first presidency was an objective disaster that ended in a violent insurrection, mulling over the philosophical implications of a TV show's plot contrivances doesn't give me an ulcer. 

Sorry, that's unfair. I should say a violent insurrection he instigated and then supported.

Schmadoken

Pictured: my crushing anxiety.

Two weeks! Yes, it's been two weeks. Sorry? Like I said, we've been busy getting our show up and a running, and doesn't matter. The point it's up and for the first time in awhile I have a few minutes to chime in about nonsense. Specifically video game nonsense. Even more specifically, Astro Bot. Huh? Yeah, I know the election is looming on the horizon like grinning, creepy, anthropomorphic moon ready to crash down on us and condemn us to a populist authoritarian hellscape likely run by an addled, electoral college-winning septuagenarian. 

I'm not judging, but video games are
slightly cheaper. You should give'em a try.

This is just how I hide from reality, ok? Anyway, Astro Bot. Have you played Astro Bot? Maybe not, maybe you're an adult. Or maybe you're someone who escapes the grim reality of 21st century America through drugs or scrolling Instagram. Either way, I'll explain. Astro Bot is a 3-D platformer which, for non-nerds is a genre of video game categorized by a character running and jumping through a three-dimensional environment. So think like, Crash Bandicoot or the 3-D Super Mario games. 

Astro Bot is a cute little robot who runs and jumps his way around different planets, fighting evil robots by punching them in the face, and rescuing his robot buddies. Also by punching them in the face. He interacts with the world almost entirely through punching, but it's all robot on robot violence, so I guess that's ok. 

I can't help but wonder if people in the future won't look back on
this kind of thing like we look back on sixteenth century bear-baiting.
Although that would presuppose that there are people in the future...

When your ten, you don't really question
why Dr. Wiley would build a robot angler fish.

I'm only an hour or so in, but I'm struck, punched in the face if you will, by the similarities to other games. Like, borderline actionable similarities. Levels are selected via an outer space map almost identical to the one from Super Mario Galaxy, and the levels within are very reminiscent of Super Mario Odyssey. Some of the robots you battle are squat R2-D2-types with big expressive eyes while others take the form of robotic animals right out of 8-Bit Mega Man or Sonic the Hedgehog. It's a fun game if platformers are your thing, as they are mine. But between the art-style and gameplay there is an inescapable sense of, you know, I've been here before going on here. 

Above: the $100 Nintendo Alarmo
alarm clock with wake you up by directly
stimulating your nostalgia gland.

It's essentially a 3-D Mario game reskinned in PlayStation intellectual properties: Astro Bot's spaceship is a PS5 console. His landing craft is a controller. Many of the robots you rescue are robot-versions of Playstation game characters. Nintendo does this all the time (Mario Kart, Smash Bros, that alarm clock thing) and it never bothered me, which is, I suppose, because I'm familiar with the characters. I personally just don't have the nostalgia for say, Jak and Dexter to make this endearing.

Disney's 101st Airborne Lawyers
division, deploying over your house.

I'm not saying don't play it. Neither you nor I own Nintendo stock or anything, so it shouldn't make any difference us that this is Copyright Infringement: The Game. But is it? Copyright infringement, I mean. I'm just wondering where, if anywhere is the line? Should there even be a line? Nothing is created in a vacuum, and all art is in conversation with other art. Star Wars was just Flash Gordon with the serial number filed off, but who cares? But God help you if you make a Star Wars fan film, or a ROM hack of Metroid. 

Similarity is not a bad thing. Astro Bot is just more Mario Odyssey so, I'm not mad about it. A thousand years ago (in 1994) Capcom sued Data East over their Street Fighter knock off, Fighter's History  for being, you know, a Street Fighter knock off. Which it is, but Capcom still lost. Evidently, they don't own street fighting, which, of course they shouldn't. And now there are hundreds of one-on-on fighting games. Some are crap, but plenty of them are good and wouldn't exist if everyone lived in fear of getting sued for iteration. 

"Schmadoken!"

-Ray, Fighter's History

(no, really, his name is Ray)

Today in shameless self-promotion:

Hey, how's it going? Oh good. Sorry, it's been a minute. I've been very busy. We're putting on a show. Wait, where are you going? Come back! Don't you want to hear about my community theatre project? I mean, your eyes are kind of glazing over...Huh? What's that? You don't want to hear about it, but you're going to pretend to be interested while mentally planning what you're going to do for dinner tonight? 

Although, c'mon, I think we both know where this is going...

We're not just surfers and a soul-crushing
cost of living, we also have a vibrant arts scene!
But seriously, one-bedrooms are like $2,500/mo.

You know what? I'll take it! So if you live around here--Santa Cruz, California--and like community theatre and/or feigning interest in other people's extracurricular activities (and who doesn't?), you should come see our show. It's called Who Killed Simon Braggart? and it's running for four shows only: October 18th, 19th, 25th and 26th. It's a gritty, queer, comedy, noir murder mystery set during the golden age of Hollywood and get this, it's immersive. What even does that mean? Good question, I'm glad I pretended you asked.

Embarrassingly awesome...

So you know how when say, fans go to the opening night of a new Star Wars movie Jedi wearing robes and brandishing plastic lightsabers? It's like that, only slightly less embarrassing. Here, the premise is you're attending a 1940's film premier, so you'll want to dress appropriately. Fedoras and suits, evening wear with faux fur stoles, that kind of thing. When you enter the theatre you're going to find yourself in a reception party before the movie 

Oh, you looked suddenly interested when I said movie...well, let me walk that back a minute. This isn't a movie, but rather a play set at a movie premier. But that's even better, right? Whoa, whoa, come back, you've made it this far. 

Pictured: a typical play-goer.

In my defense, what's even going 
on in this scene? Like, for real?

Look, I love movies as much as the next person, but theatre is different. And no, not just because of the giddy possibility that someone might botch a line, but because you're engaging with something live and in person instead of passively taking in a written by committee, carefully calculated for maximum corporate synergy, CGI-stuffed, cacophonous, product of a commercial industry. Again, I'm not knocking movies but...well, ok, I am knocking movies, but I mean, I still go to those too.

Anyway, we have a fabulously talented cast, a rockstar crew, and I wrote it, so you'll probably hear me recycle some jokes I've made on this very blog. Only they'll be much funnier coming out of our actors' mouths. It's l'art pour l'art as the French would say. Ok, they probably wouldn't and that is super-pretentious, but why not come get super-pretentious with us?

Again, so sorry. This has been a shameless plug, but if you've been
taken in by my sweaty, self-conscious pitch here's where you can get tickets.

It's a veritable burrito of compromised journalistic integrity!

Hey, did you see that the Penguin was on the loose again? Well look out, because he is, at least that's according to the Gotham Gazette. Never heard of it? A respected but, you know, fictional newspaper. And ad. It's an ad. An ad that was completely wrapped around every copy of the New York Times on Thursday.

The Penguin's in town? And just in time for the Gotham Museum
to be hosting an exhibition of diamond-encrusted penguin statues! 

They're not just a way to keep up on current
events, they're also a valuable resource for
time travelers unclear as to where they landed.

For those born in the twenty-first century, I should explain. The New York Times is a newspaper. Think of it as a website...sorry, an Instant Gram? Or a TikTok feed? Are the kids still into that? Doesn't matter, the point is that in the days of yore, knowing what was going on in the world required going down to the Newsstand or grocery store or whatever and handing over paper money for a printed record of the news. Well, yesterday's news really, because it takes an amount of time to print and ship out to stores. 

Pictured: a decent segment of the population.

But there is still a decent segment of the population who come down to the bookstore I work in and buy newspapers. Who? I would never generalize, it' doesn't matter. What does matter is that last week, whilst retrieving that day's papers from the lockbox to which they are delivered, I noticed that in lieu of the New York Times, we had the Gotham Gazette. This new addition to our usual line up was full of stories about The Riddler, District Attorney Harry Dent, and the cover story was about the Penguin. Ok, it's an ad for some new TV show starring Collin Farrel reprising his Penguin from 2022 film "The Batman."

Pictured: not Batman.

Which, ok, fine. Why the world needs another TV show about people who know Batman but are not themselves Batman is beyond me, but that's not why I'm talking about this. I'm talking about this because the NYT is just stilling the entire cover as ad space. I mean, I know that their reputation has taken a dive in the past few years, but it seemed a little, you know, icky? It's not just the idea that journalism has been replaced by an ad delivery system, but it's alot that.

I'm sure HBO bought the ad long before the Israeli government used exploding pagers to murder a bunch of people, but were they anticipating a slow news day? Will there be a window between horrors in which doing something like this would be less insensitive? Because as it stands, this silly in-universe paper about pretend crimes in Gotham City concealed an actual New York Times with a cover story about war crimes in the real world.

"Enjoy late-stage capitalism! Quack quack quack!"

-The Penguin

No, more fins! More. Flared. Fins.

Seven hundred dollars? Of money? Yes. That's how much the Playstation 5 Pro will cost when it comes out in November which, depending on how the election goes, will either be purchased by folks drunk on relief that we're temporarily safe from right-wing oligarchy for another four years, or as a balm for America's spiral into fascist dystopia. 

Sorry, until this guy is safely ensconced in either prison or
some kind of facility, everything is going to be about this.

Above: PS5 Pro Lead Architect and
Ken Burns cosplayer Mark Cerny. 

But enough doom and gloom, let's talk about video games. This last week, Sony announced the next uh...well, it's not the next Playstation. It's the next, slightly upgraded version of the PS5. I say slightly because in watching the video presentation hosted by Mark Cerny I was having a real hard time distinguishing the difference in visual fidelity between the two split screen images they showed us in the technical presentation, but then I'm an old who thinks gaming peaked with Super NES.

Intellectually I grasp that more frames per second and faster loading times are good. Or at least better on paper. Like, video game graphics now are the most impressive they've ever been. Which is something that's kind of always been the case, right?

"That's it, it's over. Video games will never look better than GTA III. Ever."
-everyone, circa 2001

Won despite famously having something
like a 50% failure/catch on fire rate.

But whatever, this is mid-generation refresh is--and I'm taking Mark Cerny on faith here--the most sophisticated video games have ever been so far. At least until the PS6. But seven hundred dollars? The Playstation 3 was six hundred when it came out in 2006 and that's like nine hundred in today's future money. At the time, Sony President Ken Kutaragi suggested that everyone simply get another job to be able to afford it, a suggestion that, as you can imagine, didn't go over well and most people agree that Xbox 360 won that console generation.

"Oh, you'd like to put a game in your $700
console? Well, that's going to cost you..."

-Sony, evidently

But I reiterate, whatever. Despite being a big huge nerd, I'm not planning to buy one. I'll have opinions about it, this is, after all, the internet, but I'll probably pay rent or eat or something, so price points and teraflops aren't really relevant to me. Still though, some of these decisions befuddle me. Like, the disc drive and the plastic stand that allows you to set it verticality aren't included so it costs extra to use physical media and to stand it upright. And that just feels kind of, you know, nickel and dimey? Or, more accurately, eighty-y and thirty-y dollery.

"What it instead of selling consumers our
product, they just paid us for it forever?"

-businesses

Pushing us towards digital games--which players don't really own, only license--has long been a dream of video game companies. After all, why sell someone a thing, when you can sell someone the temporary ability to download a thing which you control and can revoke at any time? It's sort of like how you could once buy software like say Microsoft office like on a disc, but it's subscription only. It works out great for Microsoft, but we, as the customers, are getting, uh what's the word? Screwed? Dang, did I just define late-stage capitalism? 

I'm going bleak again. Ok, well then can we just discuss how it's still kind of ugly? After the resoundingly negative reaction to the design of the original PS5--that is, it has an awkward flared shape and weird fins, weighs seven thousand pounds, and takes up your whole-ass living room--you'd think they'd have taken the opportunity to do a bit of a re-think. You would however be wrong. 

"What? It's totally different. It's got a stripe now. Oh, and did we mention you have
to buy the disc drive and stand separately? Because you do. That'll be $700 please."

-Sony, on why it's still kind of woof