Today in targeted ads with poor aim:

Once again I'm left with the vaguely disappointing impression that the Facebook algorithm doesn't even know me. I mean, look at this ad it threw at me:

Why even watch? For the lavish costumes and sumptuous set design?

I assume they're paid? For all I know,
they could just be people with far, 
far too much time on their hands

Yeah, it's an app that edits streaming TV for you. I'd never heard about this so I had to investigate and it's exactly you'd think it is: a service that you subscribe to, which, once you've plugged in your streaming accounts, cuts out all the naughty bits. What constitutes a naughty-bit you might reasonable ask? Violence, sex, nudity, you know, all the "won't someone please think of the children?" stuff. You can adjust the settings and even eliminate specific swears. I guess it does this by paying people to preview and then flag material someone might find objectionable. But that's censorship! you exclaim.

I honestly mean no offense when I say
this, but you guys kind of stand out...

Ok, maybe you didn't exclaim that. Which is good, because it's not. Censorship I mean. I think that word gets thrown around a lot. Usually by politicians who want to say racist shit on twitter and not be called out on it. I think for something to qualify as censorship, it has to be carried out some kind of authority, or institution, like a government or a school or something. This is just a bunch of Mormons trying to sell an app. Sorry, I just assumed they're Mormons. Which is unfair. Correct, but unfair.

They're from Utah and run a business that bleeps swears out of movies. I was just doing the math. Oh, and also they produce a series called The Chosen. It's about Jesus...who's looking remarkably white for a first century Judean. 

Although, incidentally, did they think this all the way through?
I don't want to spoil anything, but some viewers might want to 
fire up that filter for the series finale...

Like a GameGenie for movies.
Except it makes them less fun...

Speaking of Jesus, neither the Bible nor the Book of Mormon have any specific rules against pirating intellectual property, so VidAngel's--that's the company--original business model was to rip DVD's, edit them, and then stream them to customers. And this worked great until Disney and Warner Bros. sued the ever-living swearword out of them. They settled, and now they just insert themselves between the streaming services and the customer.

According to their site they're pro-free expression and their app lets customers control what they watch. Which, I mean, I feel like if you don't want to see Regency-era rich people bone down, then maybe Bridgerton isn't for you? But whatever. What I do want to know is why Facebook even bothers tracking my internet behavior and gathering my personal information if the best they can do is to try and sell me a Mormon dick-bluring app.

There are other ways to control what you watch. Ways that don't cost $9.99 per month.

We're not made of Gil you know...

So, couple of things. First, twelve thousand dollars for this thing is preposterous. Secondly, capitalism is gross. And yes, I will get to why I say this, but first behold this thing:

Bet you don't have one of these...uh...things?

It works out to 1,485,000 yen which
just seems unwieldy, but who am I to
tell Japan how to currency?

What even is that? Is a completely reasonable question. That is a SquareEnix Final Fantasy VI Masterline one sixth scale figure of Terra riding her Magitek Armor--and I'll have to explain like every word in that sentence, won't I? SquareEnix is a video game developer and Final Fantasy VI is a video game. Masterline is a word they made up to justify an outrageous asking price. One sixth is the scale, but one sixth of what? I mean, it's a video game. Terra is the protagonist of Final Fantasy VI, and Magitek Armor is...well it's, um, like a steampunk mech suit? The point is it costs twelve thousand dollars.

Pictured: What Terra (on right with
the green hair) looks like in the game.

Yes, of money. Can you believe it? No, you can't. No one can, although the figure is, admittedly, very detailed if you're into whatever someone has to be into to want one of these things badly enough to take out a loan or a mortgage or whatever. The design is based on the work of Amano Yoshitaka who did the art for the first six Final Fantasy games, although some of his style was lost in the translation to sprites. Like, it's not even close (see left) so instead this thing is based more closely on the game's cover art. 

It's the opposite of Funko Pops
which literally nobody wants.

Anyway, if you want one, you'd better hurry because SquareEnix is only going to manufacture six hundred of them. Why? One might reasonably ask. Because scarcity, that's why. Again, the thing certainly looks detailed, so I'm sure a lot of time and resources are going into them, but at twelve thousand dollars a piece, you'd think they'd want to make as many as they could. In fact, screw making games. If fans will pay that much for tchotchkes based on games why even bother with games? Look, no one actually needs a one sixth scale Terra riding Magitek figure. Every single one of these that sells will do so because someone thinks they're scarce. SquareEnix is baking on the collector mentality. Which is gross.

Both the mentality and the exploitation of it. I mean, look at the crazy amount of money people have paid for rare game cartridges over the last couple of years. Super Mario 64 is by no means scarce, but a sealed, in-box first copy is (kinda). It's in no useful way different from the your copy sitting in a box in your parent's attic, other than the fact that someone paid $1.56 million for it. Since SquareEnix can't manufacture more rare, sealed games from the 1990's, they're just going to do the next best thing.

Sorry, second best thing. The best thing they could do is put the Pixel Remasters
on Switch because playing retro games on smart phones is nonsense. And if you
don't know what I'm talking about, good for you. You have your priorities straight.

Halo? More like Ha-long...

"Twenty-three-skidoo!"

-me, playing video games

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably tell you that I've been playing Halo for like, twenty years. Twenty. Years. Goddamn. Anyway, I mention this because it's a fairly violent shooter full of guns and I hate guns. I think the Second Amendment was talking about hanging on to our muskets in case the British come back, and since we have like an actual military now, there's absolutely no justification for putting up with forty-thousand gun-related deaths every year because a bunch of goons collect assault rifles. I mean, get a new hobby. But still, Halo.

Actual people are going through this
kind of horror right now. It just seems a
little, you know, gross?

I think it's because the violence in the game is sci-fi nonsense. That is, you're shooting aliens and not, you know, people. It's not something like Call of Duty or those Tom Clancy games which just simulate conflicts that are actually happening in the world, but I admit it's a dubious distinction at best. Whatever, where I'm going with this is that I'm familiar with the Halo games and therefore have a reasonably informed opinion of the streaming series based on them. Which, yeah, there's Halo TV show now.

Video game adaptations are--as we talked about recently--historically pretty awful. Sometimes it was because the games being adapted didn't always have much in the way of stories to work with. Take the Super Mario Bros. movie for example. Or, it might be because those producing it didn't think much of the built-in audience that comes along with the fandom. See Mortal Kombat Annihilation. 

I mean refer to it was an example. To be clear, do not see Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. 

Although Cortana is a bit more Polar Express
when everyone else around her isn't CG.

But recently video game adaptations have been taken more seriously and some of them have been pretty decent. And Halo is just that, decent. The cast is good, the special effects and CG aren't as overwhelming as one might expect, and if it matters, the production design is spot on. Like, the world in which it is set feels very Halo-ish. I don't review things on this blog, but let's say it's a B. Like, second tier sci-fi television. But what I can't understand is the pacing. The slow, deliberate pacing.

I mean, it's not Shakespeare, but
at least something's happening.

I just watched episode five and there was a very-Halo-ish extended action scene the likes of which I don't think we've seen since maybe the pilot. And I'm not like, an action person. That is, I tend to lose interest when movies or TV turn into a gratuitously violent series of barely comprehensible jump cuts and explosions, but this was faithful to the game series. And coming as it did in the midst of so much slow burn world-building, it was kind of jarring.

"Oh so that's what Master Chief's
childhood home looked like..."

-no one, ever

So many of Halo's episodes up to this point have been spent following a revolution on some random planet, and the Halsey/Keys' family drama, and delving into Master Chief's childhood, you kind of forget what you're watching. And this would be fine if the games lacked any kind of story, but they don't. Sure, some fleshing out needed to be done. And yeah, I get why the writers needed to humanize Master Chief, but it seems like they could, I don't know, pick up the pace?

In a surprising twist, it wasn't aliens
who built Halo, but ancient Egyptians.

Bail now if you don't want anything from the games spoiled, but the first entry in the series has Master Chief being taken out of stasis to defend a spaceship against an invasion of aliens. The ship then crashes on--wait for it--Halo: a vast ring in space so large that it has an atmosphere and a habitat on the interior surface. The reveal of the ring comes maybe twenty minutes in, and the rest of the story is built on uncovering the mystery of who built it and why. Oh, and running around shooting stuff. It is, after all, a video game.

But five episodes in, we've not even been to the ring. At this point, I'm thinking it's the big reveal for the season finale. A reveal that's spoiled by the source material and in a sense, the title. And I guess that's fine for people unfamiliar with the game, but for the built-in fanbase it's kind of a frustrating game of wondering when are are going to see the titular Halo.

"Ah, now, eventually, you do plan on going to Halo
on your, on you Halo TV show, right? Hello?"

-Dr. Ian Malcom

Today in tantrums with tax implications:

Look, I don't live in Florida, because if I did, I'd move. I mention this because despite not living in Florida, I have opinions about Florida. You may have noticed.

"Booooooooo!"

-Me, pretty much any time 

Florida makes the news

Is it me or is there something a little
North Korea-ish about Disney World?

Anyway, I mention this because one of those opinions is that it's pretty screwed up that Disney has an arrangement where Disney World somehow exists in some kind of weird self-governing business-topia. According to my extensive research of Wikipedia, the Walt Disney company manages it's own infrastructure and emergency services and is immune from land-use bills passed by county and state land-use bills. And other than having to pay property taxes and submit to elevator inspections, Disney World is its own government entity.

Unsurprisingly, it's an arrangement signed into law by a Republican. I mean, it's city run entirely by a corporation. It's the most Republican-y thing that ever Republicaned and yet now it's all coming to an end because of Republicans. 

Disney Worlds Special District Status, American credibility on the world stage,
democracy...a lot of things are coming to an end because of Republicans. 

"I'll ban math books, LGBTQ topics, criticism, 
anything. If you don't understand it, I'll ban it!"

-DeSantis, to his base

The Florida State House and Senate have both passed a bill to end Disney's special status and you might be forgiven for thinking that maybe conservative politicians have finally seen the folly in letting a company run its own fiefdom but no, this has nothing to do with business. Wait, hand on, Republicans? Not caring about money? Impossible! you might say, but no, there's only one thing they love more than money and that's pandering to their base. And the pandering-er the better, even if it means cutting off their tax revenue to spite their dumb, smirking, Trump-worshiping faces.

I wouldn't have thought rejecting those textbooks
would come back to bite them so quickly but...

The move is--and I'm sure when Ron DeSantis signs it, he'll say it's not, but it is--retaliation for Disney's opposition to his Don't Say Gay bill (yes it does) and it's apparently going to cost--according to CNBC--Florida Tax payers one billion--that's billion with a "B" dollars--in bond liability. Which, yeah, I don't know what bond liability is, but I'm pretty sure you don't want a billion dollars of it. That's in addition to the burden of providing services (fire, emergency, et cetera), that Disney is currently providing, but now will be on the county to cough up.

All this because an insecure, angry, Trumplet is butt-hurt that Disney (eventually) sided against him in his bullshit culture war. 

Hey, remember that time he yelled at those kids for wearing masks? God, he's the worst.

Make Altered Beast, you cowards!

I appreciate that Sonic The Hedgehog: The Movie wasn't total trash. I mean, it wasn't good by any objective measure, it was just, I don't know, inoffensive? 

Well, once they fixed whatever is going on here on the left anyway...

"Harumph."

-Andy Rooney

It promised one and a half hours of Ben Schwartz quipping and Jim Carey mugging and gave us exactly that. Cool. And it probably didn't hurt that it released during the pandemic when the only other thing to do was hope you didn't catch a respiratory disease. Oh, or catch up on the thirty of forty billion other things on streaming television right now. Which, I mean, doesn't anyone read anymore? And whatever happened to big band music? And have you noticed that everything costs more than--shit, sorry, I was Rooney-ing. Yes again. Where was I?

Right, Sonic the Hedgehog. It made a ton of money and so now there's a sequel with Idris Elba as Knuckles. On the surface it sounds ridiculous that some nonsense kids movie would get someone of Elba's caliber, but Orson Wells once played Unicron so nothing, nothing should surprise us anymore.

Pictured: The guy that gave us Citizen Kane, seen
here voicing a cartoon robot who eats planets. 

Above: the tower of hubris that marked the
beginning of Sega's downward spiral.

Anyway, I guess the sequel has done quite well, and now Sega is planning--you remember Sega, right? The video game company that once broke Nintendo's monopoly of the U.S. video game market and then through an almost comical series of dumb decisions slowly collapsed in on itself? Yeah, that's them. And now they're so drunk on the Sonic film's success, they've hired John Wick screen writer Derek Kolstad to adapt Streets of Rage as a movie. Yeah, Streets of Rage.

Incidentally, on behalf of all kids in the 90's,
I'd like to apologize for the clothes and haircuts.

"What's Streets of Rage?" you might ask? Why it's a series of side scrolling beat'em ups that was super popular among Sega fans in the 90's. "What's a beat'em up?" You might further inquire? It's a genre of video game where players move from one side of the screen to the other fighting wave after wave of foes--usually street thugs. Think Double Dragon or Final Fight, although Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons were pretty famous examples of these. Chances are if you were a kid in the 90's, you played one of these in an arcade at some point.

Oh right. Money. Money gave them the idea.

They're not exactly known for their in-depth story lines. Like, the plot of Streets of Rage is that a crime syndicate led by Mr. X--no, really--has taken over and three ex-cops absurdly named Adam Hunter, Axel Stone, and Blaze Fielding must walk slowly to the left for like eight levels. That's it. Now, I was surprised at how much I liked John Wick despite kind of hating that kind of movie, so if anyone can turn that poppycock into a ninety-minute summer movie, Derek Kolstad can, but what even gave Sega's executives the idea that anyone should have to try?

For every Detective Pikachu there's a Mortal Kombat Annihilation. Video game adaptations are more often miss than hit and I'm not sure the success of Sonic necessarily translates into success for anything based on the Sega name alone. Like, with Marvel movies, the logic was if people liked Ironman, maybe they'll like Thor, and yeah, sure, we did. But there's a long walk from funny CG hedgehog to gritty crime movie about three martial artists with porn names beating up goons. 

Admittedly Sonic wasn't exactly Hamlet, but are
we ready for an hour and a half of this?

Today in cake fake bake takes:

Climate change, war, the pandemic. Yeah, I
agree we all need a break, I just wish it was
something smarter than playing spot the cake.

Has it come to this? Is it Cake? What's Is it Cake? you might reasonably ask? It's a gameshow where contestants guess whether or not something is a cake. So yeah, I guess as we watch the death throws of human civilization play out before our very eyes, we might as well distract ourselves with streaming shows about things that look like cake but are not cake. But it's more that just a gameshow and harbinger of our entrance into an epoch where reality is so hideous that we will watch anything, anything, to take out minds off of it. It's also a competition. 

Burger or cake? Because you have as good
a shot telling from this picture as anyone
on the show does from twenty feet away.

Obviously I didn't want to judge this without first seeing an episode, so I watched one and walked away even more convinced that television, as a medium, was over. The show began with a qualifying round wherein the bakers had to pick which of six fast food dishes was actually cake and not chicken nuggets or fries or whatever. What's weird--well, weirder--is that they had to spot the cake that doesn't look like cake at a distance. So assuming whoever made the fake cake is even a little bit good at it, it's less about skill and more about luck.

Pictured: The moment of truth. Not Pictured:
Florida basically banning all abortions,
and letting Ron DeSantis draw the
legislative maps, but is that cake or what?

After some standard reality show tense music and a countdown, the host uses a sword--because whimsey, I guess?--to slice each food item in turn to see which is, you know, cake. But before doing so, he asked each contestant why they picked the item they picked and the answers basically all boiled down to: "It looked a little cake-ish." But whatever, three bakers who correctly and through blind chance picked out the cake then move on to try and fool the judges while the rest just watch. Judges who, again will be trying to spot the cake from twenty feet away.

They should make a show about producers
squeezing thirteen episodes out of a cake
show. I mean, I wouldn't watch, but still.

Look, I don't mean to knock these baker's and their art--or craft? There really must be a lot of skill and imagination that goes into fooling the eye with cake. There's also probably a lot of skill that goes into editing competition shows in such a way as to take competitive cake baking and through the use of clever cuts stretch what is maybe twenty minutes of interesting content into forty minutes of dramatic pauses, interpersonal conflict, and interviews with contestants who also take the opportunity to plug their businesses and YouTube channels. 

And not for nothing, but does everything have to be a competition? Can't we admire the artistry--is craftistry a word?--of cakes? Doesn't matter, my point is can't we just appreciate what they do without the forced drama of two bakers enter, one baker leaves? 

Similarly, in football, what if they just gave both teams a ball?
Then they wouldn't have to fight over it. Incidentally, one of these
players is actually cake. Can you guess which one?

Today in marketing the dystopia:

All the energy you'll ever need to
keep you sitting in one place for hours!

So I think what I resent the most is that--huh? Oh, right, I'm doing it again, aren't I? Sorry, here's the link. It's to a theverge.com story about a Japanese company called Bauhutte and their new Electric Gaming Bed--an adjustable bed...for gaming. Which, I mean, no one sells a special bed for reading or watching TV, why is this one hobby treated as a full-on life style to which companies market purpose made chairs, snacks, and absurdly, energy drinks? Oh, and incidentally, stop playing video games in bed. It can't possibly be good for you.

I mean, this is what couches are for. The suggestion that we--people who play video games that is, I can't bring myself to use gamer as an identity--can't muster the energy to sit up to play Xbox or whatever is just so, depressing. 

See? A standard sofa is perfectly adequate. Incidentally, could the photographers
who take stock pictures of people playing video games stop telling the models to
lean and flail around? Nobody looks like this when they play games. Ever.

Seriously, the thing doesn't even have 
a single book shelf to--what? Why are you 
laughing at--people still read...sometimes...

But wait, there's more! The Bauhutte Electric Gaming Bed is just one component of an entire suite of furniture you can buy to suit your sedentary lifestyle. The Bauhutte Bed slots into the Bauhutte Desk and can even be paired with a microwave and mini fridge, meaning you never have to leave the sixty square feet this thing takes up. Which, sure, this thing is Japanese and apartment living in Japan is famously cramped, but just because you play video games doesn't mean your entire life has to revolve around one pastime. Like, what if you want to read a book?

Go outside, get some fresh air and spend
some time with--yeah, you go me, I don't do
this either. But in my defense, there are bugs
out there. And sunburn? Forget about it.

There's something almost admirably bleak about this idea. I mean, obviously it's terrible and no one should ever buy one--although it's already sold out on Amazon, because of course it is--but you kind of have to admire marketing that leans this heavily into selling people on such a cartoonishly desolate vision of a future. One that revolves around entirely around gaming. It's like they read Ready Player One and didn't clock that it was a dystopia--which, it was, right? Right? Doesn't matter. All I'm saying--and this is coming from me, a confirmed indoor kid--is holy shit, you have to put down the controller occasionally.

And look, I don't mean to yuck anyone's yum (I find myself saying this a lot lately). Video games are great, and whatever I think about it, there's obviously a market for this thing. But I just kind of feel like if you need a hospice bed to enjoy video games, it might be time to re-evaluate some priorities.

Sleep, play games, eat, and then back to sleep. All this thing needs is
a bed pan and a massage function to keep people from developing deep vein
thrombosis and--wait, that's not a serious suggestion! Do not add that feature!

To Boldly Monetize!

An abortion ban in Oklahoma? Uh-oh,
 white, conservative evangelicals must 
be feeling under-appreciated again...

Booooo. Yeah, you heard me. Boooo. I'm booing Star Trek NFT's which--huh? What's that? Yes, I am fully aware that there are more boo-able things going on in the world right now. Most of them having to do with Ron DeSantis, Oklahoma, and Putin, but you know what? Sometimes I just need a day where my outrage and disgust are of a frivolous nature rather than the soul-crushing oppression of real-world horrors. We'll talk about those other shitshows another time, but today I just want to rag on this NFT nonsense.

Pictured: yet another piece of evidence future
economists will point to when they refer to
this time as the death throws of capitalism.

The NFT's are, to begin with, horseshit. I'm not saying I fully understand them--although show me an instance of not understanding a thing stopping someone on the internet from having opinions about is--but what I do understand is that they're essentially visual or audio files that you own. Like, own in the sense that they have some unique code that's stored on a server somewhere, so while your dumb gif of some random dunking a basketball or whatever could theoretically be seen by anyone, you own the "real" one. Also, you probably paid a shit ton for it. Speaking of, the Star Trek NFT's, which go on sale today, cost two hundred dollars. Of money.

So what does $250 dollars get you? An algorithmically generated starship. Yeah, I know, what even is that? Well, it's a starship assembled from random parts of other Star Trek ships. Which, I don't know if you're a big nerd about Star Trek like I am, but there is this phenomenon among Star Trek fans of inventing their own starships. And that's cool, I'm not yum yucking here, but there is a fairly large portion of Reddit that's just this.

So basically Paramount has just invented
an algorithm that generates fan-art.

Gambling is what addicts to. Play-to-earn
on the other hand is almost like having a job!
A job where you buy pretend starships...

Ok, let's say you just shelled out two hundred and fifty big ones for one of these. Now what? Well, I guess you look at it and bask in the knowledge that somewhere a server is running around the clock to ensure your purchase's provenance. Also, there's evidently some kind of game associated with this whole thing. A "play-to-earn" game. Which I had to look up, because I wasn't sure how that's different from gambling. It's a game wherein you earn in-game rewards that can then be converted into money. So it's exactly gambling. Probably should be called "bet-to-win" but lawyers, amiright?

And look, this isn't the first time Star Trek has been merchandised. There've been toys and video games and that infamous Spock Helmet. But this is certainly the most baffling tie-in for a series set in a utopian future where humans have abandoned capitalism.

Congratulations Star Trek NFT's. You've finally displaced the
Star Trek V Marshmallow dispenser as the dumbest piece of merch ever.

A front row seat for the Fermi paradox!

Well, 'tis the season. Yes, First Contact Day is again upon us and, as always, I am going to pretend that you don't know what I'm talking about, but I mean, you know. We both know you know. You big nerd.

"You have no idea where I'm from or if my people regard physical contact
as a taboo or an unforgivable insult. For all you know, I could have space plague,
or be radioactive, and you just stick out you hand and say put'er there? Really?"

-The first alien off the ship

"Yeah, we're from planet Vulcan.
You probably haven't heard of it."

-Some Vulcan Hipster

Anyway, as of today we are just forty one years away from the human race's first encounter with beings from another planet as predicted by the documentary Star Trek: First Contact. Four decades from now a Vulcan survey ship will detect James Cromwell's warp drive and land in Bozeman, Montana. Why Bozeman? Who can say? Maybe Vulcans are hipsters. Maybe they just love reclaimed barn wood. It doesn't matter. The point is we are--alarmingly--on something of a trajectory towards the post-apocalyptic nightmare as depicted in the film. 

Of course they also predicted the Eugenics Wars
of the 90's and instead we got The Spice Girls and 
ten seasons of Friends, so it could have been worse.

Star Trek's fictional future history as depicted in the film presupposes that the twenty-first century is something of a shit show culminating in a Third World War. Which, for a TV show that's supposed to be about a bright shining utopia probably seems like something of a bummer. And it is, but the idea is that we have to go through some seriously rough times before achieving a better future. This general goat rodeo of a century is also an in-universe explanation as to why the aliens haven't bothered with our backwater planet before.

"Yeah, but curbing emissions would have been like
really hard, and what about the shareholders?"

-Some now extinct alien civilization

Which I totally buy. After all, if there are space faring civilizations aware of our existence, we haven't given them much of a reason to drop by. Unless of course they want a front row seat for our cautionary tale of how not to survive Fermi's Great Filter. But I suppose there's always hope. I mean, that's kind of the point of utopian fiction. It's not impossible that we, as a species might turn things around in time. Not super likely, but not impossible.

Putin's people could oust him, the international community might suddenly come around on climate change, and maybe Ron DeSantis will--I don't know--clear whatever blockage is starving the part of the brain responsible for empathy and he'll start acting like a human being. If these and like, a thousand other things all line up, we might just be around to see if First Contact Day actually pans out. 

"Whoa, whoa--just because I'm incapable of understanding or
sharing the feelings of other doesn't mean I lack empathy."

-The "Don't Say Gay" guy