And suddenly I care about nurdles.

To the long list of things to worry about, fascism, climate change, and the increasingly menacing greek alphabet letter names for COVID, we can now add nurdles. Yeah, goddamn nurdles which, despite sounding like the stars of an 80's Saturday morning cartoon are actually tiny plastic pellets that are slowly killing us.

Ok, these are Snorks, but you could have told me they were called Nurdles,
and I wouldn't have questioned you. Also, they too live in the sea.

Each hat is another, irreversible
environmental catastrophe.

Huh? No, nurdles aren't the tiny plastic balls that come in facial scrubs, although those too are ruining the planet. Nurdles are the form of plastic that's manufactured and then shipped to factories that then melt them down and make things out of them. And according to this article on The Guardian, when a container ship caught fire and sank in the Indian Ocean, 1,680 tonnes--that's metric for ton--spilled out causing a disaster on top of an already heinous disaster. It's like a hat on a hat...of terribleness.

Pictured: the stupid-looking hat
underneath all those other hats.

In addition to picking up toxins, these nurdles are also swallowed by fish and other sea life which think they're food. And who can blame them? Fish aren't terribly smart and besides, not even millions of years of evolution can be expected to prepare them for our addiction to the cheap plastic nonsense we pile on massive, oil-filled, ocean going cargo ships. So in many ways, the real culprit here is us. Consumers. But that requires a level of introspection I'm just not prepared to deal with, so let's blame Amazon, and specifically Jeff Bezos. Like, personally.

Ok, fine, it's not Jeff Bezos fault...exactly. I mean, it is, but it's also Walmart, Target, and Ikea according to a new study put out by Stand.earth and Pacific Environment, two non-profit environmental groups who say that the four companies together generated twenty million tonnes of harmful emission between 2018 and 2020. 

Admittedly, I have no context for twenty million tonnes, 
but like, there's no way that can possibly be a good thing.

People have actually started saying
Happy Black Friday, which is like the turkey
wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving.

The pandemic, the study says, has only made things worse. Well, obviously, but I mean for the environment. The shipping backup leaves container ships idling in ports already choked by their fumes, and being locked up all day has created even greater demand for online shopping. Yup, that's us again. The consumers. Ever year at this time, we eat way too much and then pile into our cars to race to box stores to trample each other to death because retailers have convinced us Black Friday is a holiday. Which it's not. At all.

"I don't get it, we've tried nothing,
how come it's not working?"

-Far too many of us

If anything, it's kind of a scam. One we walk into willingly because we like Roombas and iPhones, but still, a scam, although we tend to call it capitalism to make us feel better. Which it doesn't, but my point is that in a country where a decent chunk of the population thinks vaccinations are a conspiracy, I think it says something that many of the very same people line up year after year because goddamn Walmart or whatever has tricked them into thinking buying shit at midnight on Thanksgiving is a tradition. Or that it can go on like this forever. 

Because between the nurdles and the shipping carbon footprint of shipping nurdles to factories that themselves generate pollution to manufacture products out of nurdles, which are then shipped again across the already garbage filled ocean to ports and from there to distribution centers and stores, we're locked in a pretty unsustainable, possibly unbreakable cycle that will only end when we stop buying so much junk. So...never?

"Yeah, but I mean, 4K...that's like four times the k's..."

-us

Collateral spoiler alert about Fry's dog?

John Cho is perfect, and they even nailed
his hair which, when you think about it,
Spike's character is 90% the hair.

Can I--did you watch the live action Cowboy Bebop? I ask because I'm going to talk about it and I'll probably be spoiling elements of it and, I don't know, maybe you want to watch it? Just, be warned. Also, I don't write reviews of things. I mean, the last thing anyone needs is more recommendations for things to stream and what if you hate it? Then it's on me. So just know that I'm not saying you should watch this, I'm just saying holy shit, what's up with live-action Spike? But we'll get to that. 

If you were never into the anime upon which the new show is based, just know that it's an acquired taste. It's probably one of those things where you had to be just the right age when it aired on Adult Swim in the early aughts. That is, too old for Pokémon, but young enough to have had a Fight Club poster on the wall of your dorm. I don't know, look, if you cried when Fry's dog died on Futurama, then you probably get this.

It's the xennial of anime.

Although Spock shouting "Khaaaan!" in
Into Darkness was, inarguably, hot garbage.

Anyway, I liked it for the most part. I've tried to temper my nerdish instincts when it comes to revivals of things I enjoyed in my younger days. Like, I spent way too much time back in the early twenty-tens losing my mind over the Star Trek reboots and how the new thing was different from the old thing and therefore hot garbage. Which, it wasn't. It was just different, and that's fine. I've matured. There's nothing wrong with taking creative liberties.

Right? Yes, I'm talking to you, live-action Cowboy Bebop. This version replicates many of the costumes, designs, plots, and even shots exactly that you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a straight up recreation of the anime. Like, it looks and sounds like the cartoon and it all works pretty well even if there is something a little cosplay-y about it.

Above: evidently a shot from season 2 where
the Bebop crew attends ComiCon on Ganymede.

Although given that we're basically relying
on lunatic billionaires for space exploration now,
 another couple hundred years wouldn't have hurt.

The show's aesthetic faithfully duplicates the cool-but-weird space noire of the anime without feeling like a Blade Runner knock-off. The sci-fi elements like the space stations and the Bebop itself are more or less unchanged although the timeline's been bumped a bit further into the future. The anime was set like, fifty years from now (seventy from when it first aired), which never seemed like enough time to populate the solar system. This show however is more like a hundred and fifty years into the future, so it's a bit more plausi--ok, a bit less implausible. 

Above: series antagonist Vicious, seen here
in a still from the live-action adaptation.

But these are three dimensional real people playing these characters now, and each episode is more like forty-five minutes compared to the original's twenty-two, so the creators of the new show decided to flesh everyone out a bit more. Some of these changes work, like Jet having a family, and Ana (Annie in the cartoon) and Gren going from unrelated side characters to important series regulars. And some changes don't, like Vicious going from a cold sadistic nemesis for Spike to an incompetent goon with both rage and daddy issues. But oh no Spike, oh no...

While far from the worst thing Joss Whedon
is guilty of, I think the blame for characters'
constant quipping can be laid squarely at his feet.

So again, John Cho is great. His version of Spike varies from the cartoon in that he's a lot more talkative and that's fine. Anime Spike spent a lot of time brooding or grunting monosyllabically between long drags of his cigarette where as live-action Spike engages more with the other characters particularly Jet. It's a choice that better fits both the actor and the contemporary trend towards quippier writing. What's a little harder to watch is the flash back to his Syndicate days in which he massacres a rival gang. Like, we watch Spike shoot everyone. Everyone. I think he even kills a kid.

And in fairness that was always his backstory, but goddamn. It's brutal, and seeing the always lovable John Cho murder it out in live action and HD it made it a lot harder to root for the character from then on out. Anyway, like I said, I support creative liberties in adaptations like this, but yikes, interesting choice turning your lead character into a sociopath nine episodes in to a ten episode series.

Wait, maybe the chain-smoking ex-hitman turned
bounty-hunter maybe isn't supposed to be a role model?

I suppose low standards are still standards...

Pictured: Me, upon realizing that
GTA III was twenty yeas ago.

Ok, confession time: despite all my recent talk about how I find violence in video games and movies gross, I've actually really been a GTA fan for like twenty years which--huh? Yeah, Grand Theft Auto III came out twenty goddamn years ago. So, obviously I'm a big huge hypocrite. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't fun from time to time to put in a bunch of cheat codes and go on a rampage with a jet pack and a missile launcher, but for the most part, I'm there for the parody and the open-world stuff.

Obnoxious, egotistical behavior stemming
from the assumption they can do no wrong?
Why, they sully the very name Rockstar...

Anyway, I mention all this because I was kind of looking forward to the remastered versions of these 3-D murder simulators. Again, for the biting commentary. But then it came out and it became clear that the games were riddled with bugs and weird, terrible design choices and were based on the shitty mobile versions instead of being remasters of the better console versions. Because business. Then, an another tone-deaf move, Rockstar, the publisher, then further pissed off fans by removing the non-busted original versions from e-shops and basically just made everything worse. 

Sure, they've since issued a statement apologizing for how terrible the--sorry, apologizing to anyone who encountered issues playing these games, which is, evidently anyone who tried playing these games. And lamented that they "did not launch in a state that meets our own standards of quality, or the standards our fans have come to expect." Far from the worst corporate apology, like, they actually used the word "apology" even if there was a bit of the usual passive voice. The games "didn't launch in a state" rather than "we launched them in a state that...etc." It just sort of of happened. Somehow. 

"We don't know what to tell you, we were just sitting around when suddenly
our game just released. I think...I think it might have become sentient."

-Rockstar, on how this is probably Skynet's fault

Above: Internet trolls seen here discussing
the best way to cook and eat game
developers who have disappointed them.

Rockstar did promise updates to fix the problems and that they'd re-list the non-remastered versions in the meantime. That's cool. But looking at the video compilations of the glitches, and my own limited time with San Andreas--it's the one on Game Pass. What? I'm not paying for the full version--anyway, one has to wonder exactly what Rockstars standards of quality are that these could release so broken. Like, did anyone at the company try them first? Unfortunately a botched job like this one combined with the consequence-free anonymity of the internet makes for an even shittier situation: that of disproportionate online backlash. 

The company, in the same statement as the passive voice apology also mentioned that members of the development team have been getting harassed and they ask that people, you know, cut that shit out. That's never ok, no matter how bungled this whole thing was. I mean, it's not like anyone was harmed by a buggy release. No one died here. Just...just what is wrong with people?

They probably played too many violent video games...

Murder: totally legal now*

*some restrictions apply. Murderers must be white men and feel threatened by some nameless and/or vague menace to be eligible. Cannot be combined with other offers. 

Pictured: the real victim here.

Above: Rittenhouse, seen here strolling
down the streets with nothing to defend
himself with but an AR-15 rifle.

I mean, did any of us really think it wasn't going to go this way? Like, the goat rodeo that was the trial and that lunatic that was the judge not withstanding, this kid was never, never going to see consequences for his actions--at least not legal ones. Why would he? If the last few hundred years of human history have taught us anything, it's that white dudes simply don't do consequences for their actions. Hey, wait, I'm a white dude...does this mean I can get away with murder? Look, I'm not saying I want to kill anyone, I just guess want to know my options.

This protestor has a small child on his shoulders 
and was saying police should stop murdering
Black people, so you can see why the officer
felt the need to point a weapon at them. 

Because there's no explanation for today's verdict. Obviously I wasn't on the jury or even following it that closely, but as I understand it, Rittenhouse, a minor (he was seventeen at the time) and a huge militia fan, drove across state lines-- with a gun he wasn't legally allowed to carry--to assist the police--who didn't ask for help--during the protests in Kenosha--where he doesn't live. Like, police go through training to be police and even then there's a shocking and terrifying number of them who should never have been given badges in the first place. So where this kid gets off playing junior deputy is beyond me, as is why the cops were cool with it.

While we're no the topic, I love
Batman and all, but if he were real,
he'd be a tremendous psychopath. 

I mean, if you want to be law enforcement, go get a job with law enforcement. If you want to play with guns, do not, whatever you do, get a job with law enforcement. Go play paintball. Guns don't make you an officer of the law any more than owning a cape makes you Batman. I mean, what is it with white dudes thinking that gun ownership empowers them to be de facto police? Or say, to overthrow democracy because their wheezing, shitheel reality TV show host lost the election? Where do they--right, sorry, we--get the idea that any of this is ok?

Oh, right, because of shit like what happened today. Every time a Kyle Rittenhouse weeps on the stand about how scared he was when the liberals tried to take the gun he was threatening them with away, we just give another shitty white dude with a persecution complex and a passion for gun ownership permission to self-deputize himself. So like, see you next time this happens again. Which will be in what? Three months? Four?

Pictured: a bunch of people who live their entire lives in
abject fear of some vague, baseless threat. They are, in short,
a bunch of wusses. Well-armed, sure, but wusses nonetheless.

What is spicy? What!?

I ask because of this dumb ad that keeps popping up on YouTube. It's Kumail Nanjiani driving a car through some city streets and weaving around flaming wreckage. At the end, he remarks "Ok, that's spicy." And then the ad ends. That's it. And it's driving me (absolutely no pun intended) out of my mind. 

To be clear, nothing against Kumail Nanjiani.
He is a--are we still saying snack?

Dear Lexus, I'm not buying a Lexus 
because you interrupted my YouTube watching.
Oh, and also because I can't afford a Lexus. 

Now, let me stop you right there. No. The ad has not done its job. I realize it's living--as the expression goes--rent free in my head, but I am not now, nor will I ever buy a Lexus. Because that's what they're selling. As much as I love Kumail Nanjiani, and I do, this ad is dumb and frustrating and I hate it. I'm sorry, you know what? Hate's a strong word...let's say resent. I strongly resent all advertising, like in general, but particularly the commercials on YouTube which interrupt whatever you're watching, sometimes mid-sentence, to sell some nonsense you don't care about. Mid-sentence! Can you beli-

The Eternals is a film that forces us to ask
the questions what the fuck are the Eternals?

I'm left with so many, many questions. Questions like, what's going on here? Why are things on fire? And crucially, what does he find so spicy? My understanding is that he's using it in the colloquial sense rather than the literal, but doesn't spicy mean sassy or rude? Is the destruction all around him a result of sassiness? At no point am I thinking to myself: why not buy a Lexus? And then, afterwards, go see The Eternals. There's-huh? Oh, forgot to mention, this is an ad for The Eternals. 

Because synergy. I guess the thought here is that we're going to be so intrigued by the mystery created by Kumail Nanjiani's assertion that spiciness is afoot that we'll go to the site, watch the full ad and be persuaded to buy both a ticket to the movie and a forty thousand dollar luxury sedan. But mostly all its succeeded in doing is make me shout at the screen "What? What is so spicy?" 

Above: Actor/writer Kumail Nanjiani remarking on the spiciness of the situation.

健康长寿·繁荣昌盛*

Meanwhile, we're living with the 
looming threat of authoritarianism 
and no Star Trek- themed park...

Like I've mentioned before, I'm not an amusement park person. The mix of inedible food, nausea, and screaming children has never appeared to me. That said, I'm a little jealous of China. Well, ok not the authoritarianism and human rights violations, but they're getting a Star Trek theme park, so there's that. Ok, it's not a Star Trek park per se, but rather an eight billion dollar resort themed around Paramount studios in Kunming, China and part of it will be Star Trek themed. The rest of it, I suppose, will be based on Paramount's other streaming series? 

Which, I mean, what else do they have? Survivor and like five different versions of NCIS? One is a TV show about trying to survive in a harsh, unwelcoming environment and the other is a police procedural for olds. Neither sounds like a particularly appealing vacation, so why not make the whole thing Star Trek?

Wait, what's even going on here? Is this what Survivor is now?
Because this looks like a ropes course for team-building getaways.

"Lebel lange un gedeihe, Nerds."

-an old German saying

Anyway, if a Star Trek attraction sounds familiar, it's because Star Trek the Experience in Las Vegas did exactly the same thing but closed like ten years ago. So now, according to Trekmovie.com, the only Star Trek themed park attraction in the world right is in Germany--which is again, inconvenient for me--at a place called Movie Park. Although this makes more sense than China, as Germany is pretty keen on Star Trek. In fact there's a subset of the extended universe novels written in German. But does anyone in China know or care about it? But an exhaustive search of the internet--by which I mean I googled it--came up with a kind of confusing answer to whether or not Star Trek is popular in China. Mostly it appears not to be a thing, but there's nearly one and a half billion people there, so statistically someone's got to be into it.

Although the crew of the Enterprise did
once team up with Mark Twain, so, I mean,
the Chinese government isn't wrong here.

Searching for "Chinese Star Trek fans" yields some results including some lunatic CEO who modeled his company's headquarters after the Starship Enterprise. My sense it that the fandom in China is something akin to the following say Blake's Seven or Space Battleship Yamoto has in the US. So, you know, nerds. Not helping matters is the fact that the Chinese Government bans movies and television about time travel--a well Star Trek dips into kind of a lot--saying that they "treat history frivolously." Which is a weird thing to get upset about, but I don't want to tell them how to police state. 

Anyway, all this is to say that while I would never begrudge overseas fans the experience of paying way too much for watered down cocktails in a recreation of Quark's Bar or getting married on a replica of the Enterprise-D's bridge. Never, more power to them. But what I want to know, is why isn't there one of these in the U.S? 

I mean, we invented obsessive fandom.

*I guess it's Chinese for "live long and prosper" but this is Google translate we're talking about so, who can say?

Today in approximations of human emotion:

"Research? But that's hard and lame." 

-Americans

The phrase crocodile tears refers to a false display of emotion and it's usually a charge we level at kids for pretending to cry when they don't get their way. But I was curious as to why that is, so I looked it up. Fortunately for me, we live in a world where doing research is a simple as a lazy internet search, with the best, most accurate results always being among the first. Ok, obviously I'm being sarcastic and we can easily blame the internet for the spread of white supremacy, climate change disinformation, and the entire Trump administration.

Pictured: almost enough salt.

Fine, but I think I can be fairly confident that there's not a bunch of conspiracy theorists out there spreading fake etymologies. Sure, we should take everything we read online with at least some salt, but let's assume that what I found about the origin of crocodile tears is probably correct. Anyway, it's an old phrase that's been around since ancient times and it comes from the way crocodiles appear to cry when they feed which people in the past, being dumb, interpreted as the reptiles crying for their prey.

Above: like, a week ago?

The biological truth of it is that they're actually lubricating their eyes while they feed. Since we tend to only observe crocodiles eating while they're on land, they're usually a little dried out, hence the tears. So like I said, ancient people: kind of dumb. I mean, they followed leaders who didn't have their interests at heart, some thought the world was flat, and still others mistrusted science because they felt it challenged their worldview. Luckily for us, humans have moved on and are now driven by reason.

So why even bring this up? I don't know. The question popped into my mind yesterday for no reason at all. I guess I was suddenly curious as to why we use the image of a cold, calculating predator without the capacity for remorse to describe an insincere child.

Pictured: an unrelated photo of Kyle Rittenhouse weeping at his 
trial for those murders we all saw him commit. Like, on video.

Yes, I'm talking about the Rock again.

So couple of things. First, what is it with Dwayne Johnson recently that I'm talking about him two days in a row? Second, it's happened. I've become an old. 

Pictured: me, evidently.

Don't worry gun fans, he's still going to
use guns, they just won't be real ones. He'll still
be shooting tons of people for years to come.

Allow me to explain. Just the other day I was reading about Dwayne the Rock Johnson's pledge to stop using real guns in movies because using real guns in movies is incredibly reckless and totally unnecessary and for some reason it's taken a fatal on-set accident to point that out. And then today, I read this thing about how Johnson is playing the supervillain Black Adam and the movie is going to try and get away with as much murder as possible and still be PG-13. And I mean, I don't know, it this what it's come to?

"Kids still like edgy, right?"

-Garcia, keeping his

finger on the pulse

According to the film's director, Hiram Garcia, fans can expect a murder-filled adaptation of the comic:

"Black Adam is edgy, right? That's gonna be a PG-13 movie where it was very much like, say, The Dark Knight, where that pushed the edges of PG-13. I think we do that very much with Black Adam. We have a very high kill count for our movie."

-Hiram Garcia, gushing

like a severed artery 

Pictured: also me. Although that one's no joke,
I think I'm really going to need readers soon.

And this is where the "I'm an old" part comes in. I don't know that there was a point in my life where I was looking for more violence in movies. Possible when I was like, an early teen or something? I don't know, it's just not something I remember caring about. But as I get older, I'm finding myself more and more uncomfortable with it. Maybe it's age, or maybe it's because the real world has gotten so much more aggressive lately, who can say? Maybe I'm just violenced out at a time when a lot of popular entertainment relies really heavily on violence.

I'm not super-familiar with Black Adam as a character beyond the fact that he's a Shazam villain, which makes this a spin-off of that film. So is a high body count a selling point? In this movie that's a spin-off of a movie about magical kids who transform into, I don't know, magical adults? Or Power Rangers. I'm not sure. I think there were wizard involved...doesn't matter. This is the movie whose sequel needs a high body count?

I actually thought the movie was pretty fun, just not super memorable. 

Just because it's super-violent doesn't mean
they won't have time for comedy. Like Black Adam
buying beer for his nemesis. Who's also a minor.

I know that violent, edgy, comic book things are in. The Boys, Venom, Joker. I suppose that the idea is that it's time to subvert the squeaky clean super hero tropes and do something grittier. And that's fine, except we've been getting grittier since Tim Burton's Batman. We get it. Superheroes are flawed. At some point squeaky clean becomes subversive. But my point, if I have one, is that why is director Hiram Garcia foaming at the mouth about how violent his new movie's going to be?

Did he think that Black Adam fans would hear that it was going to be PG-13 and so he's out doing damage control? Because if that's the case, I think the question is less why is Black Adam PG-13? and more what's wrong with these blood-thirsty comic fans? And what's more is when did I become Emily Littella?

From Saturday Night Live? In the 70's? I-What? No I didn't watch
it in the 70's. I'm not that old...I have YouTube thank you very much.

What's Wallace Shawn up to these days?

Good for Dwayne Johnson. Like, I have 100% nothing against the Rock. I mean, I always kind of thought pro wrestling was dumb as it combined sports and bad acting, but he did an episode of Star Trek: Voyager once, so he's ok in my book.

Although the episode in question had Seven of Nine and the Rock in
some kind of space wrestling match; combining sports, bad acting and Star Trek. 
And it was itself pretty dumb, but who cares? Oh, and even did his eyebrow thing.

Uh...starting after his new movie
which comes out in a few days and
includes tons of guns. So after that.

I bring him up because the actor--yes, he's an actor and the second highest paid one in the world right now. Anyway, the actor has announced that in the wake of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins's death on the set of Rust, his production company will no longer use real firearms on set. Hutchins was killed two weeks ago when Alec Baldwin accidentally shot her and another crew member with what turned out to be a loaded weapon. And yes, before you ask, noted election loser Donald Trump has absolutely weighed in on that terrible accident saying:

Pictured: that coup he incited.

"In my opinion, he had something to do with it, but if nothing else, how do you take a gun, whether it's loaded or not loaded, how do you take a gun, point it at somebody that's not even in the movie and just point it at this person and pull the trigger, and now she's dead."

-Donald Trump, suddenly 

concerned with the consequences 

people's actions have on others

I mean, look at this nonsense.
Everything is added in post production
so why even bother with real guns?

Well, obviously Donald Trump is a piece of shit but like I was saying, good for Dwayne Johnson. I don't know anything about film production (but since when has not knowing anything stoped anyone from voicing an opinion?), but it seems insane to me that there is, in 2021, a need to use real guns on a set. And for that matter, what is real ammunition doing anywhere within a ten miles of a prop gun? Doesn't matter. If nothing else, maybe Hutchins's death will call attention to workplace safety in the film industry. 

Don't worry parents, nobody gets
laid in GI Joe Retaliation, just shot.

But why so many guns in the first place? Johnson's pledge wasn't "I promise to stop making movies with so many guns." Or even, "I promise to take a long hard look at the glorification of gun violence in films." Instead it was "maybe we won't use actual guns anymore." I'm not the first to point out that ours is a fucked up culture that's perfectly comfortable with violence in movies, but then when there's nudity or more than one instance of the word "fuck" everybody looses their minds. But why is that?

"Give us what we want or we'll
straight up murder you." 

-Rep. Madison Cawthorn

I'm not suggesting that movie violence necessarily leads to real life violence--ok, I actually don't know that, I'm not an expert--for all I know, maybe there is some connection. I'd personally chalk our appetite for movie violence up to the fact that we live in a violent world. Did you see the other day when Congressman Madison Cawthorn from North Carolina went on a rant where he said he'd "run over" all who oppose him? Which, in a world in which Republicans have tried to make running over protesters legal, is not an idle threat, it's part of their party platform. 

But the alarming rise of super-agro right-wing shit-heels aside, the market for violent movies did lead kind of indirectly lead to Halyna Hutchins's death. That is, if there's a hundred movies a year, and seventy of them involve real guns on the set, statistically, it's a matter or time before something like this happens. And admittedly I'm making up those numbers (again, not an expert, but who cares? This is the internet), but maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if filmmakers didn't rely so heavily on violence to tell a story?

Huh? No, I actually have no idea what they'd do instead. Reboot
My Dinner with Andre maybe? I don't know, I'm not a screenwriter.