The most annus Annus Horribilis!

This year, this seemingly interminable parade of horror and absurdity that has been anno domini two thousand and twenty, is just about over and it's time for my annual look back at the year that was. Although this time it felt at best like a year that wasn't, and at worst a year we wish wasn't, but here we are.

Remember a year ago when we all thought 2020 wasn't going to be the
  worst year ever in the history of-oh shit, how many maskless idiots are going
to show up in Times Square and breathe all over each other? It's lots, isn't it?

Pictured: us randoms.

Every year for the past eleven years, this has been the post where I go over a list of people who have died in the past twelve months. I list only famous people because for real who cares about us randoms? And then I'd occasionally drop some abstract concept into the mix: "So long irony, we hardly knew ye" or sometimes I'd get political and put something like "democracy was clubbed to death this year by so and so." It's kind of a tradition at this point. Huh, I have a tradition, how 'bout that? 

Also, especially these last few years, I've done a running gag about how the next year couldn't possibly get any worse and now I can't help but wonder if all of this is my fault...

"Couldn't get any worse huh? Sounds like a challenge..."

-The Fates, evidently

Yeah, but were any of us truly 
surprised when his presidency ended
up killing hundreds of thousands?

Anyway, I'm not going to do that this year, so feel free to go back and read the old one. When every year managed to out-shitshow the one before and when not caring about us randoms became the official pandemic response, the whole thing became a lot less funny to me. To be clear, we're all going to miss Chadwick Boseman, Alex Trebek, Kobe Bryant, Diana Rigg, Grant Imahara, Ian Holm, Little Richard, Bonnie Pointer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg--oh, how we're going to miss Ruth Bader Ginsburg--I'm going to break with tradition.

Instead I'm going to suggest that we all agree that the last year--the last four years even--never happened. Which, I know it's impractical and the ramifications of everything that's happened will carry over into 2021 and beyond, but it's not impossible. Time is a construct and has no meaning beyond our need to measure it, so what the hell?

Are you just going to let some calendar tell you when to go to work
and when bills are due? Or are you going to take charge of your life?

Something, something, resources, doesn't
matter, we're here for quips and explosions.

It'll be like the Blip. You know, that thing from the Avengers: Endgame? Here, let me refresh those of you for whom, like me, those movies all run together. In it, half the population was wish-gloved out of existence by Josh Brolin because the writers love Malthus. But then five years later one of the Avengers, I forget which one, manages to steal the Infinity Gauntlet and wishes everyone back, but now everyone has to deal with 50% of the world being five years younger than...uh...

Look, I didn't like or understand the movie, but my point is if living through this has taught us anything it's that life is too short to care what others think or what the calendar says. So I say let's just take the mulligan, roll back whatever we want to roll back, shave a few years off our ages and start anew.

What I'm saying is that the only difference between us and
Time Lords is that we're reluctant to admit that time is nonsense.

Today in Pied Pipers of the willfully ignorant:

You know, the word "hero" gets thrown around a lot these days, but sometimes it's appropriate. Sometimes, a person of great courage and conviction takes a stand against oppression and strikes a blow for freedom, faith and basic human kindness. This however is not one of those times and Kirk Cameron is not one of those people. 

"Alright, who's ready to endanger some lives?"

-Cameron, taking a stand

Above: pretty much this, but with
sputum. Did I mention the sputum?

A former teen heartthrob and current adult idiot, Cameron has been using his platform as a guy who was once on a sitcom that went off the air twenty eight years ago to organize what he's calling peaceful protests against public health official's desperate pleas to stop infecting others with a potentially fatal respiratory disease that's already killed hundreds of thousands and crippled the global economy. The actor, turned pied piper of the willfully ignorant, has held two separate Christmas caroling jaunts wherein maskless fools stand really close, sing songs and inhale each other's sputum. 

Above: white Christians are among the
most oppressed people in our nation's history.

(source: white Christians)

Singing, of course, was one of the first things the CDC identified as probably the fastest and most reliable ways to spread COVID-19. It's also one of the easiest things to avoid. Surprisingly few people's livelihoods rely on Christmas caroling, yet Cameron is framing the basic stay-at-home orders and mask requirements as a brutal assault on his and his fellow protestors' freedom. Because of course he is. Because if there's one thing conservative, evangelical Christians love it's to feel persecuted, no matter how down-trodden they're not. It's their catnip.

"How have I never heard of Jesus before?"

-no one

"We are going to be celebrating our God-given liberties, our constitutionally protected rights at this time at Christmas to sing Christmas songs to gather, to assemble and to sing about the birth of our savior."

-Kirk Cameron, finally getting the word out

He uh...he knows that Jesus is the central figure of the world's largest religion and is someone around whom western culture has basically revolved for the better part of the past two thousand years, right? 

And sure, he's correct that his protests are constitutionally protected. No one's arguing that. But they are also dangerous and incredibly selfish so maybe don't? I mean, I'm sure Jesus would understand if you took a year off from singing about Him off key in a mall parking lot, you know, if lives depended on it. Which in fact, they do.

"As a frontline medical worker, I may not agree with Kirk Cameron's constitutionally
protected, yet plainly reckless right to demonstrate how devoted he is by endangering
others, but I'm willing to die a slow death drowning in my own mucus to defend it."

-literally not one medical professional anywhere

There's not enough Febreze in the world...

Rome had the forum, we have
gifs, memes, and that poop emoji.

So President-elect Biden's transition team is upset that Twitter is-huh? I know, right? Here, let me say it again: President-elect Biden. Anyway, they're upset that @POTUS and the other accounts associated with the administration be deleted and then re-started rather than just handed over as they were during the transition from Obama to Trump. This will clear everyone following them and they'll have to build President Biden's follower base from zero. Given that Twitter has basically replaced the news and political discourse that's a big deal.

 The Tweets will also likely congeal 
into a negatively charged ectoplasm. 

Anyway, on January 20th, Trump's account, and the four years of accumulated vitriol, misogyny, racism, hyperbole, and demonstrably false assertions about anything from the size of his inauguration turn out to how rigged the election was contained therein will then be archived like some kind of incoherent all-caps cautionary tale about why the electoral college was a bad idea to begin with. Future historians will doubtlessly build entire careers speculating as to how an ostensibly reasonable people could let this go on so long.

Pictured: all of us in about six months
--God willing--watching the perp walk.

On the bright side, also on January 20th, Donald Trump will no longer be the President which means he'll have to follow Twitter's rules, so like, no more consequence-free death threats, typos passed off as secret messages, or lying about national health crises. He can, in theory anyway, get banned from the social media platform just like anyone else. And I don't want to jinx anything, but not being president anymore also means he'll lose whatever immunity from prosecution he's been insisting he has (he doesn't). So like, make some popcorn.

He locks kids in cages, brags about
sexual assault, blames others for his
failures, what's not to love, amiright?

And I don't know, I get that Biden's people feel like they're getting screwed out of millions of followers. I mean, they are. @POTUS followers will be given the chance to opt in to following Biden, but that's like a whole 'nother step. You have to hit "yes" and everything, so he's bound to lose some people. On the other hand, would that be the worst thing? Loosing people that followed Trump? Sure, some follow him for the same reason people slow down when they pass an accident on the freeway, but others are like, you know, fans.

So maybe starting fresh isn't such a bad idea. I think we'd all be happy to put the last four years behind us. You know, open the windows, let some fresh air in, symbolically speaking. And literally I suppose. When he moves in to the White House, he'll probably need to repaint. Replace the carpets. Curtains too, really all the bedding and towels. Chase the raccoons out of the disused press room and maybe take down the ten-foot perimeter fence. You know, it might just be easier to build a new White House...

It will take weeks to get the smell of narcissism
and incompetence out of the upholstery...

Well, I'm not calling them that.

Even when the Administration isn't doing something explicitly evil, like, kicking trans people out of the military or locking children in cages, they're just kind of dumb, you know? It's like the last four years has just been one comedy/nightmare with Yakety Sax playing in the background the whole time.

Pictured: the last four years.

"For the last time, yes, we're serious.
Does anyone have a different question?"

-Mike Pence

Take for example Mike Pence's announcement that people who work for the Space Force, the nonsense sixth branch of the military, will be called guardians. As in the same way that you're a sailor if you're in the Navy or soldier if you're in the Army. If you're in Space Force, you're a Guardian. Yeah, like the owls in The Guardians of Ga'Hoole. Someone or a group of someones sat down and picked guardians from a list of possibilities, all of which, mathematically speaking, had to be way better. 

I can say that with confidence, because in addition to being just terrible on the surface, "guardians" was chosen by the same people who both ripped off the Star Trek logo for the Space Force's official emblem and who failed to secure the trademark for the name before Netflix got to it for their streaming show.

Sure, it's got a 49% on Metacritic, but it's still
better run than the actual Space Force.

Pictured: the KFC Double Down, an
object lesson in what can happen when
you ask for the general public's opinion.

The choice of term feels like the kind of thinking that insists that people who get underpaid at Target are "team members" or that if you work for Disney you're an "imagineer." It's just kind of insulting. The name was arrived at--according to Space Force--"after a yearlong process that produced hundreds of submissions involving space professionals and members of the general public." So like, which space professionals? Who's a space professional? Elon Musk? Richard Branson? Did Lance Bass ever actually go to space? And which members of the general public? No one consulted me, you? 

Above: Space professional Elon Musk,
seen here, musing on the higher frontier.

Anyway, the statement goes on:

"The opportunity to name a force is a momentous responsibility. Guardians is a name with a long history in space operations, tracing back to the original command motto of Air Force Space Command in 1983, "Guardians of the High Frontier."

-The Space Force, trying 

to spin their terrible decision

Sure, I suppose it is a momentous responsibility to name a force. Too bad they fucked it up so badly. And look, I'd love to suggest alternatives, but I've never been entirely clear on why the Space Force even exists other than so Trump can say that he founded it. I am however sure that an administration who, on its way out the door after a stunning electoral defeat is scrambling to sell off as much Alaskan wilderness to oil companies as it can, isn't interested in being the guardians of anything.

Well that was certainly worth it.

So we're just eating Toad now?

A re-release of a game I already own, but 
with marginal improvements? Yes please!

I'm not like, an amusement park person. The crowds, the terrible food, the nauseating rides, oh, and kids, there's tons of kids. I don't hate amusement parks, they're just not for me. Because I hate them. But if I say, found myself in Japan and had a day to kill, it isn't not like I wouldn't not go to the Nintendo theme park. I'm only human, and, like a lot of my generation, a sucker for nostalgia. It's a weakness that the video game industry has exploited again and again and then again, but with better graphics.

The latest exploitation of fond childhood memories is part of Universal Studios Japan. It's called Super Nintendo World and it's rather ambitiously supposed to be opening on February 4th. So...maybe don't buy tickets just yet.

'Don't-a worry so much. The pandemic, she's a no big-a deal."

-Dr. Mario, who, to be clear, isn't a real doctor,

not that we listen to real doctors anyway...

Yeah, and Guillermo del Toro
directed Blade II, so...

There's a new video out where Shigeru Miyamoto gives a brief tour-whaaaa? You mean you don't know who Shigeru Miyamoto is? For shame! He's the chain-smoking graphic artist turned video game developer who created Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, and both regular and Super Mario Bros. He's responsible for some of the best and most influential games of all time and also Urban Champion. Anyway, he's a delight and walks us through the amusement park and some of the interactive attractions based on his most recognizable character who, absurdly, is a middle-aged plumber.

There're question blocks you can punch and Bob-ombs and Koopa Troopas walking around. There's even a Mario Kart attraction which, paradoxically isn't go-carts. You heard me. It's a ride based on a game based on go-carts, that isn't go-carts. I'll give you a moment.

"What if you could ride irony?"

-someone at Nintendo evidently

Cute? Sure, but also a grim harbinger
of your repeated failure to find the Princess.

Still there? Ok, so park looks like fun, if you're into that kind of thing. I'm not, but again, I'm a sucker for video game stuff. It's full of interactive animatronics and surprisingly faithful recreations of settings from the games. It's an amusement park, so of course it's full of nonsense you can buy, t-shirts and plushies and food. There's a café themed around Toad which has these LCD "windows" that look in on CG Toads in the kitchen making the food. Incidentally, I feel should clarify that Toad isn't a toad, Toad is the little mushroom person who tells you the Princess is in another castle. 

"Eat me!"

-Chef Toad

I know, it's confusing, but don't worry, I'm telling you all this for a reason. An unsettling reason! So Toad's Café serves all kinds of Mario-related dishes, burgers, pizza-bowls, deserts. You can practically taste the synergy. But here's where it gets grim: the food in Toad's Café is all mushroom-based. And, uh, so is Toad. If you follow this line of thought through to the inevitable conclusion, you'll see my issue with this: these little cartoon mushroom people are serving their own kind up to the park guests.

And look, maybe I've just been holed up indoors for ten months-wait, no, I've definitely been holed up for ten months. But that's some nightmare fuel right there, right? It also raises some uncomfortable questions about the Mario burger...

"It's-a me, Mario!"

Today in grudging acknowledgments:

Oh hey, did you see? Mitch McConnell congratulated Joe Biden on the Senate floor this morning, acknowledging that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won and are the President-elect and Vice President-elect respectively. And now I suppose he wants a cookie?

Well, he doesn't get one.

Pictured: someone who's never won the
popular vote, seen here introducing his
 third lifetime appointment to the Court.

McConnell went on to say that despite their differences, Joe Biden has dedicated himself to public service and then remarked how wonderful it is that we finally have a woman Vice President. And I'd love to think this was some kind of magnanimous move on the part of someone ready to look past politics, but just so we're clear, this is a guy who sat on Obama's last Supreme Court nominee until after the election so that the people could have a say, and then rammed through Trump's last nominee while every poll in the country predicted the lamest of ducks. 

Well, yes, it is. Good thing there
wasn't any. So maybe pack it in?

McConnell's grudging and belated acknowledgement doesn't make up for what he's put us through and what Republicans who still groundlessly insist that the election was stolen, continue to put us through. I'm all for unity here, but we're not going to find common ground in the middle. Both sides do not have a point. You have people who accept the results of a fair election and then you have rabid-foam conspiracy theorists making up dangerous bullshit because they didn't like the outcome.

Above: a handy guide.

I don't know, it seems like if Mitch McConnell really wanted to do something to bring the country together, he would call off his goons. We know Joe Biden won, tell the Trumpies. They lost. They need to move on and holy shit, stop calling for secession. I mean, when has that ever worked out well for anybody? We're still tearing down confederate statues. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely a few states I think we'd probably be better off without. Florida springs to mind, but that kind of talk never ends well.

Pictured: Basically this.

I feel the same way about the "stop the steal" people as I do the "you can't make me wear a mask" people. Which I suppose is convent as there's a lot of Venn diagram overlap between those two. But the problem is that they're not going away because they're convinced, like, absolutely convinced that they're right. And unless the GOP gets their shit together and shuts them down, they're just going to keep ambling masklessly around from MAGA march to MAGA march, spreading COVID and babbling incoherently about Trump and voter fraud.

A perfunctory and way too late acknowledgement of the validity of an election that we all already knew was valid, isn't going to change their minds and neither is it going to earn Mitch McConnell a cookie.

Cookies are for people who don't undermine our democracy.

The Yor lore I have in store is bound to bore!

Look, I just have to apologize for this one up front. I am about to talk about a Star Trek thing so nitpick-y and so hyper-fan obsessive that you will almost certainly lose whatever respect you may have left for me. So either bail out now or brace yourself. We're going in.

Buckle up, we're in for some nerdulence.

Ok, one of the downsides...

I may have mentioned before that I've been really digging Star Trek: Discovery as a thing. It's great. I mean, obviously as a huge nerd, I have opinions about it and can point to certain things that don't work for me, but as a whole I look forward to each new episode. So when something clangs for me or feels a little off or if there's some minor error or data point that clashes with the fifty years of Star Trek canon I feel like such a dork complaining about it or pointing it out to my friends. It's the downside to having an encyclopediac knowledge of Star Trek.

Discovery's medical staff is so impatient.
I mean, I'm sure they'll patch it out eventually.

After all, the writers and actors and everyone who works on these shows aren't there to reinforce some esoteric lore, they're there to make compelling television. I mention all this because before I get into my nitpick, I want you to know that I am aware of how I sound. Anyway, on this week's episode, there's this scene at the very beginning where David Cronenburg-who's on the show, you should watch it-is telling Wilson Cruz's character why Michelle Yeoh is fritzing out like a glitched Ubisoft game. 

He explains that it's because she's both from another universe and another time. And so her temporal whatevers are out of synch or something. It doesn't matter, because he calls up a hologram of some alien who also died of similar techno-nonsense. This alien, says Cronenburg, both jumped across universes from the alternate reality introduced in the J.J. Abrams movies, and traveled through time. 

David Cronenberg and Wilson Cruz seen here
conducting some high-level nerdy exposition. Chef's kiss.

The 24th century is quite keen on the
 "goth mechanic's jumpsuit" aesthetic.

If you didn't watch this episode, it's not super important that you know what the hell I'm talking about, just know that there's this hologram of some alien named Yor in a Star Trek TNG uniform who David Cronenburg says either traveled from 2379, or landed in 2379. He's a little unclear on the point, but either way the costume department put Yor in a TNG season one lycra jumpsuit. Now this is the part where you might never look me in the eyes again: TNG season one is set in 2363, and the uniform for 2379 should be the jumpsuits from the TNG movies. 

No offense...

Does it matter? Of course not. It's a ridiculous piece of trivia and who even cares? But that's the thing, Star Trek fans care, admittedly way too much, but we do. I mean, what's the one thing Star Trek fans are famous for? If you said an obsessive attention to details about a fictional universe, you would be correct. And again, love the show, and I get that lore isn't their number one priority when it comes to producing it, but I mean, it takes like ten seconds to look at the Star Trek wiki page about uniforms. A page that exists for exactly this kind of thing.

Look, what I'm saying is if they need someone to skim over their scripts and find this kind of thing before some dork with a blog spends a Saturday morning complaining about it, I'm their dork. If you know someone who works on the show, give them my number. I have like, nothing else going on right now.

"You know what this script needs is some dork with a blog's opinions."

-No writer in the history of television

Breaking: Nerd comments on Star Wars news

Hey, remember how Disney bought Star Wars from George Lucas and everyone was like: uh-oh? And then they did Episode VII and we were like ok, cool? But then they made a new Star Wars movie like every year and we all just got like, super sick of it?

"No..."

-People who dress up 

for opening night

"A female...director? Highly unorthodox!
Most irregular! What if she gets hysterical?"

-The Film Industry, still

Remember that? Well good news! On yesterday's Disney investor's call, Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm announced only one new Star Wars movie, and you can relax, it's like three years away. Oh, and it's going to be directed by Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins, the first woman to direct a Star Wars movie and-huh? Yeah, can you believe that? There's been like a dozen of these things and in forty years Jenkins is the first woman to direct one. Oh, you can believe that and it's another example of the misogyny implicit not only in the film in industry but in the culture as a whole? Yeah, that tracks.

"Everything you love is grist for our mill. Ho-ho!"

-Some mouse

But finally, after a tumultuous five years of over-saturation and the polarized, toxic fan reaction to anything and everything, Disney, as a company, is letting things settle down and is taking their time with Star Wars movies. And I actually liked most of the Disney-era films, with the exception of that last one, but for real, they needed to give it a rest. I think this pause will make new Star Wars movies will feel like events again instead of an annual obligation. I don't like the idea of applauding a faceless and greed-driven corporation, but this is probably a good decision and credit where credit is due. 

Except that they also announced like fifty new Star Wars streaming series, so credit where credit is don't. Ok, I exaggerate, it's ten Star Wars shows, plus more Mandalorian, but still, eleven? That's a lot of uh...<inward shudder> content. 

"Now as you know, there's been a lot of discussion about franchise fatigue, so
 in response...here's a shit ton more Star Wars. Bet you didn't see that coming!"

-Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy

I'm not saying it was the best movie, but I am
saying Lando had a cape room so like a B-? B?

Now it may sound like I'm dragging Kathleen Kennedy here, but I'm not. She takes a lot of shit from people that maybe take all this way too seriously, but I don't think she deserves it. Like, she's often held personally responsible for Solo not making a ton of money and for Rise of Skywalker just, I guess, existing, but the fandom seems to forget sometimes that Solo was better than it's given credit for and that The Mandalorian was on her watch as well. 

But how do I fell about yesterday's news? I'm glad I pretended you asked. I'm first and foremost a trekkie rather than a warsie. That's the term, right? Anyway, I'm a fan, like, I know what a gaffi stick is and have opinions about the prequels, but I'm not going to post a YouTube video about the biological implications Hera and Kanan Jarrus' half human/half twi'lek son. Where I'm going with this is, this is fine. I'm into it.

Ok, now that I've brought it up, that is kind of weird. I didn't think different
species could interbreed in Star Wars. Maybe just say it was midi-chlorians?

The Obi-Wan show doesn't end
well for Obi-Wan, so, uh, spoiler?

If I had a qualm about any of this, it might be that most of these new series are apparently set before Episode IX, making them essentially prequels. And that feels like they're already relying on previously established characters and settings. Which, for a fandom so famously averse to spoilers, is a little weird. But on the other hand, Lando, Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan are getting their own shows, so I'm in. Usually I'd say here, take my money, but this is Disney, so chances are they've already got it.

Like lying on a bed of nails, but with
vitriol instead of, you know, nails.

And yeah, eleven shows is a lot. Like, a lot. Not even Star Trek is churning out that many right now. Sure, we're all hoping for quality not quantity, but I suppose if you don't like one of them you can just wait a few weeks for another one to come out. Actually, I'm beginning to wonder if this isn't something of a defensive maneuver designed to mitigate the inevitable and vocal jerk contingent of hard-core fans who will blame one show or another for ruining their childhood and then expound on how they would have written it differently. You see, with eleven different shows, the fan anger is distributed evenly. 

I suppose you have to admire Disney-wait, I take that back. They're a monopolistic leviathan of a corporation that will crush anything it can't assimilate into its portfolio of franchises. Their sheer size and power means they don't even have to be creative, they can simply inundate us with-ugh, and again, I hate using this word-content. We're bound to like something, and if we don't, our ire simply bounces off them and they move on.

Above: basically Disney. And yes, I realize I'm mixing
fandoms here. Like I said, I'm more trekkie than warsie.