Not all Robocops

Pictured: the moment everything
started to go wrong forever.

You've seen Robocop, yah? The Paul Verhoevan-directed dystopian action/comedy that satirizes Reagan-era America and is set in a dilapidated, near lawless Detroit? In it, a greedy corporation is brought in to solve the city's crime problem, but instead of addressing things like poverty, the lack of mental health resources, and housing, their solution is robots who shoot people without a trial. But that was just a movie and surely no reasonable person would arm robo--just kidding, that's exactly what's happening.

In San Francisco no less. Yes, America's hippie, progressive bastion-turned gentrified playground for ultra-wealthy tech bros is thinking about introducing goddamn ED-209's.

What could possibly go wrong?

"Out of my cold, deactivated manipulator claw."

-Some robot

Ok, let me walk it back a little. The city's police department is proposing that they be allowed to equip their robots with guns and allow them to use deadly force. The robots, already used for things like gathering information during a stand-off and diffusing bombs, would now be equipped with deadly weapons--so, guns--and used to kill suspects if there is "risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers." Which I've got to think is any situation where a suspect had a gun. 

Pictured: the look Isaac Asimov would be
giving the SFPD right now were he still alive.

Anyway, before we all completely lose our shit over the implications of this--and I am in no way saying we shouldn't lose our shit over the implications of kill bots--I should clarify that when the SFPD says "robots" they're referring to what are basically glorified, ground-based drones, and not robots in the more sci-fi sense. That is to say that the robots are making a call as to who to shoot. The technology isn't there yet and even if it were, that seems like it would be a pretty big First Law of Robotics violation.

So this, but lethal and followed
by investigations and lawsuits.

It's still a human police officer behind the remote control of these things. What the department is asking for is the option to use these robots to carry out deadly force when they feel it's necessary to protect people. And, I don't know, it seems like the use of deadly force would require an on-the-ground awareness that just isn't possible through an LCD screen. I just think of the number of times we've all fallen off the edge of the world in a 3-D video game because of poor camera placement.

Look, I'm sure that the SFPD is just asking for what they feel is reasonable and necessary leeway to use their equipment in such a way to avoid injury and death for both the public and themselves. But I just have a hard time with any solution to gun violence that boils down to more guns. And also robots with guns. I have a hard time with that too. I've seen movies.

If only there was something we could pass reasonable regulatory laws about
that would help stem the tide of the gun-related deaths we face every day in America?

It's a disappointing future...

Yeah, given the propensity of autonomous to run over pedestrians, I'm going to go ahead and say that putting PlayStations into dashboards is...premature.

This, but the cart is a PS5 and the horse is a self-driving car.

(source: 18th century idioms)

And that time and place is whenever or
wherever gaming can act as a substitute
for meaningful human interaction.

Because that's what Honda's hoping to do: put a PlayStation 5 into their Vision-S self-driving cars. And I'm just...baffled. I mean, yes, despite being a grown-ass adult, I still play video games. I get it. I'm not saying that we need less video gaming in our lives. If anything, more. But there's a time and a place. I know eventually self-driving car technology will probably turn driving into a completely safe and hands-off experience and that we're going to need something for our hands to do. Fine. But that's easily twenty years off.

"Poppycock and falderal!"

-Me, on the subject of

self-driving cars

I don't know where I'm getting that number. I'm basically making it up. But I don't think I'm far off. The idea that we're going to go from cars that can't tell a pedestrian from an empty crosswalk to being able to sit back and Last of Us 2 our way to work in four years is, to me, preposterous. I think I've just been disappointed too many times. Not to get all "we were promised jetpacks" on you-because we weren't. At no point were we promised jetpacks by the year 2000. But I did grow up thinking we'd at least have hover cars or at the very least hoverboards by the time I was an adult. The closest we've got to owning our own robots are autonomous vacuum cleaners. 

Nazis are back, the climate is deteriorating
and my car isn't equipped with a sassy AI
with whom I fight crime. The future blows.

The future has done nothing but disappoint us in every way imaginable, so forgive me if I find the claims made by the manufacturers of self-driving cars dubious at best. And look, I get it, commuting is tedious. I listen to podcasts or audio books or talk on the phone while driving to work, and while those are all distractions, they're at least auditory. My eyes are still on the road. If I were riding in a self-driving car, I could still grab the wheel if need be. I can't do that if I'm busy murdering the Norse pantheon with QTE's in God of War or whatever. Until self-driving cars get better at self-driving, like way better, we're still going to have to pay attention to where we're going. 

Alright kids, it's all up to you. If you need
us, we'll be playing PlayStation while we drive.

And safety concerns aside, is fitting a game consoles in really where car manufacturers really need to be focusing on right now? Shouldn't making electric vehicles affordable be the priority? I realize that we've basically given up on trying to do anything about climate change on the grounds that it's too hard and really it our kids who'll have to deal with the worst consequences, but shifting focus from saving the planet to trying to squeeze in as much gaming time as possible feels a little--oh, wait, that actually totally tracks. Never mind. 

Incidentally, or perhaps as further evidence that in-car gaming is a bad idea, it's already been a thing in Teslas for some time. And if recent history has shown us anything, it's that Elon Musk makes terrible decisions. Like, did you know that he moved to Texas? On purpose? 

And I'm sorry, Sonic 1? If he hadn't just un-banned Donald Trump,
I'd have chalked this up as his dumbest, most tone-deaf move ever. 

Today in people who are basically Batman:

Hey, do you know what really flies in the face of the oft-repeated gun nut argument that it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun? This. Which if you didn't click, is just a link to the story of this weekend's Club Q shooting in which the shooter was prevented from murdering even more people by a couple of bystanders. Bystanders who I suppose are no longer bystanders the moment they tackled an armor clad gunman. 

I think that makes them Batman, who also famously doesn't carry a gun.

Pictured: a gun enthusiast seen
here being full of shit.

Gunkid? I don't know, he's only twenty-two, and that's pretty young, but then, I'm an old. My point is that these bystanders turned gunkid-to-the-ground-tacklers were unarmed. As in without firearms. Unarmed and yet somehow courageous enough to put themselves in harm's way to save others. Again, without guns. Which suggests to me, I don't know, that maybe the NRA's conflation of heroics and gun ownership/brandishing, is misguided. Or, what's another way to say it? Full of shit?

Above: wusses. Giant, angry wusses,
who put on body armor and guns to go whine
about how tough it is being white dudes.

I don't have any startling insight on the subject or really even anything new to say. I just wanted to say out loud--well, type out load--the idea that guns don't make people heroic. In fact, I think the opposite is more often the case. And look, I'm not saying anything about cops or soldiers when I say that. Cops and soldiers are professionals (one hopes) and that's different. What I'm talking about is people, just regular people who--out of fear or anger or both--just make guns and being armed a part of their everyday life. 

Anyway, all of this to say next time some dumb idiot parrots that good guy with a gun/bad guy with a gun nonsense, we should remind them that all it took was a couple of brave and unarmed randos in a gay club to bring down this kid and his guns.

The only thing more guns brings to an active shooter situation--particularly
in a darkened nightclub--is the possibility of crossfire.

Yes, it's still about guns. Here're some kittens:

For this most recent mass shooting, I'm going
with kittens. If you're a puppy fan, I'm
sure you won't have long to wait.

Yeah, it's about guns. It's also about a persistent, seething hatred still harbored towards the LGBTQIA+ community. A hatred stoked by a political party running entirely on a platform of white Christian male victimhood, who preach that violence towards people who don't share your worldview is entirely justified. But it's also about guns. And the second thing. It's both. And when mass shootings happen, the Right shrieks about how people with an agenda are always politicizing tragedy, nothing changes, and then we just have more mass shootings. 

How many lives would be saved if these
assholes took up stamp collecting? 

And I mean, look, the common factor in all of these is guns. Thanks to an interpretation of the Second Amendment which is at best a stretch, and at worst an insane argument that someone in the 18th century could have possibly predicted a future in which automatic weapons sold at sporting goods stores and via an interconnected computer network would be used to massacre people by the dozens, it's just something we're supposed to live with. Because of a hobby. Like, it is a hobby, right?

Although I worry that our treatment
of bears could come back to bite us...

I mean, the idea was that in a post-revolutionary war environment, white land owners wanted the right to defend their property from bears, or the British, or British bears, but we have an army now. And the British haven't tried to re-conquer us in like two hundred years. And even if they did, some idiot with a rapture bunker full of AR-15's isn't going to make a difference. What's the rationale here other than to shoot people? You don't buy a jet ski if you don't hope to use it someday. So what's the plan here?

I can think of three reasons people own guns and none of them are compelling enough to let this go on unchallenged. One: they want to practice marksmanship for the next civil war. Two: they want to sit in lawn chairs at polling places and intimidate people who want to vote for Democrats. Three: they want to carry out mass shootings. 

Sorry, four reasons: I forgot about putting them in the hands of children
while you pose for a Christmas card because you're a terrible person.

Damnit, if only she had an garage
full of automatic weapons...

Yeah, I know I left out home defense, but what are the numbers on that? How many home invasions have been successfully repelled through the use of fire arms? Sure, it's not zero, but how many more guns have been involved in accidental shootings? Or deliberate shootings? On balance, the "right" to own whatever the hell kind of weapon in whatever the hell quantities someone wants with minimal requirements when it comes to background checks, or mental health evaluations, or training has directly resulted in dead people. Lots of dead people. 

Look, I know I'm preaching to the choir here, and that there's nothing you or I can say that's going to change these people's minds. Unless...say, don't Republicans hate spending money? Because preparing for the increasingly likely event of an active shooter requires active shooter drills for kids, metal detectors at schools, clubs, and sporting events, not to mention the tax payer money spent on first responders. It adds up. Maybe we can finally reach them with a fiscal responsibility argument...

"First of all, I resent the implication that we Republicans care more about guns than we do
about children. It's true, but I resent it. Secondly, yeah, we love money more than guns, so you do
have a point there. It goes money, guns, Jack Reacher novels, complaining about woke, then kids."

-Kevin McCarthy, possibly 

coming around on it

 

Believeth in me and know everlasting HP

It seems like we've been waiting forever. In fact, it seems like the day would never come, but all those who doubted will soon learn the folly of their ways because Jesus is coming. Or at least the free demo version is.

Wow, I hope they didn't completely blow their budget on the new artwork.

For the record, Charles Manson did actually
claim to be Jesus Christ, so it's exactly the kind
of think Charles Manson would have said.

You might remember way back in 2019 when we talked about this game. Or you might not. Like, it's been a couple years and a lot has happened since then. Let me recap: a company called SimulaM was developing a Jesus simulator called I am Jesus Christ and it was--huh? Yes. Really. Wait, is your issue the somewhat blasphemous title that sounds like something Charles Manson would say, the basic premise of a video game where you play as Jesus or both? It can be both. Like, religious or no, I think we can all agree that this is probably a joke, right?

I can practically hear the overly
compressed audio warning us that: 
White Jesus needs mana badly!

But it's not, or at least will get to that. So from the earlier trailer, I am Jesus Christ looks kind of like Skyrim but instead of Dragon Shouting your way across a frozen, vaguely Vikingy fantasy realm, you're the son of God performing miracles using--and I wish I were making this up--Holy Spirit. And no, I'm not trying to be a jerk about religion, Holy Spirit is evidently a consumable resource and something Jesus can run out of. Which, I'm no theologian, but isn't he Jesus? Does he really need to recharge his mana like some kind of low level mage?

Don't look at me like that. I didn't turn the central
figure of Christianity into off-brand Doomguy.

Anyway, when we didn't hear anything new about the game for months and months, I think most of us assumed it was dead like so many other announced games that never make it to market. But lo, it is risen (what?) and there's a stand alone free game called I Am Jesus Christ: The Prologue coming out in December. I guess to whet the gaming public's appetite for first person open world Messiah-ing. The announcement comes with a new trailer showing off some improved graphics and gameplay.

Cool fact: Jesus Christ
can dual wield magic.

Some of the scenes include Jesus using The Force to remove a plank from a giant eye, curing someone's kid with a healing spell, and using his famous water into wine ability to save a wedding. From sobriety. Look, I see three possibilities here: First, SimulaM is trolling just us. Secondly, these are well-intentioned, albeit misguided religious people who think that sneaking religion into gaming will help players to see the light.

Or thirdly, this is a cynical attempt to split the difference by offering an easily lampoonable Jesus-simulator to give YouTubers something to laugh at while at the same time luring in earnest Christians eager to slip into the sandals of their lord and savior. And if that's the case, it kind of feels like a crass appropriation of the cherished beliefs of billions of people around the world. And, if we're being honest, pretty par for the course for the games industry.

Pictured: Shiva, a key deity in Hinduism, seen here in a bikini as a
Final Fantasy summon. Also, she has ice powers. For some reason.

Today in the best sauce:

I do not envy them this task. Huh? Who? What task? Settle down. I know you're not going to read the article, so I'll just explain. The who is an advocacy group called Reboot Food and the nigh on impossible task they've set themselves is to convince the world to stop eating animal products and instead switch to precision fermented proteins. Yikes.

"Our special today is a live, cultured bacteria, fermented in a stainless
steal vat and then genetically modified to imitate the flavor of pork belly.
I highly recommend it. It's carbon friendly and technically edible."

-Servers of the future, with their work cut out for them

"Wow, you can really taste the suffering!"

-Some barbarian

So first of all, let me say that I think this is a noble cause. It's going to sound like I'm making fun of them and I'm not. Ok, I am a little, but I also think they're right. Reboot Food's deal isn't just the ethical issues having to do with raising thinking, feeling animals for the sole purpose of killing and eating them like a bunch of Bronze Age barbarians, but also the environmental impact which, according to a statistic linked in the article, is responsible for 14.5% to 16.5% of greenhouse gasses.

Fortunately, zero people in the world care
about the feelings or well-being of bacteria.

But what the actual are fermented proteins? Well get this, they're bacteria. Which is horrifying. But the guy in Reboot Food's video (graphically) makes the case that it's way less gross than what we do to animals and, by extension, the environment. And when I parenthetically say graphically, I mean it. Like, go watch their video, but just...just be warned. Anyway, a huge portion of the Earth's surface is given over to animal farming and according to Reboot Food, if we switched from animal products to yeasts and bacteria, we could produce the same amount of protein in a space three quarters the size of London.

I predict that precision fermented
bacteria will soon replace sausage in the
 expression "how the sausage is made."

Yeah, I guess they're British, so London necessarily is their go-to reference for scale. Regardless, switching would mean that millions of acres could be returned to things like carbon-absorbant forests, so it's a win-win. Unless you're into eating things that taste good. Probably. The "precision" in precision fermenting refers to the idea that the cultures being grown are programed--like, genetically--to be biologically similar to the food being imitated. I don't follow all the science, but it sounds like the idea is that vat-grown microbial meat will taste like the real thing.

At least according to an advocacy group who've tasked themselves with convincing us to eat it. And why would they lie? Am I skeptical? Sure, but given the sun-blasted hellscape the planet is rapidly becoming, cutting emission 16.5% would be a huge help. I mean, right now rich people flying around on private jets account for 2.5% of CO2. And even if this stuff doesn't taste exactly like a hamburger or whatever, they do say avoiding a catastrophic climate crisis is the best sauce. Huh? Who says that? Look, I don't know, what do you want from me? I'm justing putting words together here.

And if the fermented protein doesn't work out, I feel like there's an "eat the rich"
argument to be made that would solve the climate as well as number of other problems.

Today in temporary reprieves:

"Yeah, well, just wait 'till 2024..."

-the guy who joked about hitting

Nancy Pelosi with a hammer

Well, that could have gone much worse. I mean, it's not over, and I'm sure the people who brought us an actual coup attempt have got something up their sleeve, but I'm given to understand that the Democratic Party did pretty good. Particularly with an unpopular President and a shitty economy and high gas prices and inflation--which, people know the President doesn't have like a button he can press to make groceries cheaper, but just chooses not to, right? Anyway, America is still kind of a democracy. For another two years anyway.

"After thirty or forty years, you get used to it."

-The woman we voted for

I avoided the news all day yesterday not wanting to spiral out every time a race was called for a Republican. I did pretty well too, only waking up three times with nightmares about the Red Wave everyone was sure was coming. I guess I'm still traumatized by that time Hillary Clinton was supposed to win the presidency, and then most of us voted for her, but then she wasn't the president because of some system set up two hundred years ago to make underpopulated rural states feel appreciated.

Wait, is that irony, or just perjury?

Speaking of, is anyone else having a rage aneurism--a rageurism, if you will--over the irony of a Supreme Court that was able to strike down affirmative action only because a guy who won the electoral college but not the popular vote got to appoint three hard-right judges? Oh, and speaking of irony, remember when those same three judges all said in their hearings that Roe v. Wade was settled law, and then dismantled the constitutional right to an abortion at like, the first opportunity? 

 

Oh well, I guess we should be--well grateful isn't the word--relieved? God, is that where we are now? Just happy to still have a democracy? Anyway, I guess we should be relieved that yesterday's midterms have shown us that we Americans aren't going to stand for the misogyny, transphobia, and white supremacy of the right. Except for some of us...who are evidently fine with it. And others who live in districts so outrageously gerrymandered that the GOP could run a cactus, an actual cactus* and still win in a landslide. 

"I'm a cactus voter. Always have been, always will be."

-John, the entire population of

Texas's 13th congressional district

*yes, the cactus is white

On the historical accuracy of chocobos:

Yeah, but it's a game about wizards and knights riding around on giant chickens so...Sorry, I should explain. IGN, a video games journalism site just posted an--huh? 

Pictured: Noctis, the moody, emo protagonist of Final Fantasy XV
seen here riding a chocobo. Which is basically a big chicken.

I guess we're finally going
to get some full-frontal Ifrit...

Yeah. Yeah, this one's going to be about video games, if you're going to bail, now's the time. Still with me? Super. So they interviewed several members of the Final Fantasy XVI development team about the game and amid a discussion about returning elements from previous games and the similarities between FFXVI and Game of Thrones, the question of representation came up. The recently released trailer for the game featured exactly zero people of color, and everyone's like, what's up with that?

Above: Terra from FFVI.
Your guess is as good as mine.

Final Fantasy games have never been terribly diverse. Early entries had a kind of chibi/anime style that made ascribing a particular racial or cultural identity to characters difficult, and back then I kind of just assumed that most of the characters were either asian or white. But mostly I didn't think about it because I grew up immersed in a pop culture where most characters in fiction looked like me. Later games introduced Barret (in FFVII) and Sazh (in FFXIII) who were definitely Black, so it seemed like the developers were maybe getting the message that the audience for their games was broader than just Japanese and white American suburban boys.

And I don't know, am I just questioning this out of some sense of white liberal guilt? I don't know, maybe? But it is legitimately weird seeing a video game in 2022 going out of its way to feature an exclusively white cast. In fact, when Naoki Yoshida, the game's producer got the question from IGN, he explicitly said that the game's setting is based on medieval Europe and consequently all the characters will be white.

And, one presumes, succumbing to plague.
Better keep those cure potions and Phoenix Downs handy.

Pictured: Yoshida, seen here weilding
a gun-blade from FFVIII. It's a gun
that's also a sword. Because reality.

"Ultimately, we felt that while incorporating ethnic diversity into Valisthea (the game’s setting) was important, an over-incorporation into this single corner of a much larger world could en up causing a violation of those narrative boundaries we originally set for ourselves. The story we are telling is fantasy, yes, but it is also rooted in reality."

-Yoshida on being bound to

rules they just made up

Couple of things. First, as Siri Jiang from Kotaku points out, there were definitely Black and brown people living in Europe between the late fifth and early fifteenth centuries. 

I mean, do a google search Naoki...

As it happens, real-life Arizona is just 
crawling with Gameras. Like, just infested.

Secondly, based on isn't the same thing as attempts to accurately recreate an historical period, something Final Fantasy games have never cared about before. They've vacillated wildly in settings and themes. Some had traditional sword and sorcery, quasi-medieval settings, some were steam punk and some were sci-fi. FFXV was basically about four dude-bros on a road-trip across the American south west and also there are dinosaurs. So the point is what even is he talking about?

I mean, I'm not trying to tell this guy or anyone on the creative team how to design their fictional setting, and I also get that I'm a white American questioning a Japanese company's decision to make a video game with an all-white cast of characters, but I mean, if they set those boundaries for themselves--boundaries that ludicrously exclude people of color from their fantasy world of chicken-riding knights on lore grounds--maybe change the boundaries? 

Goddamnit, even the chocobos in Final Fantasy XVI are white...

That's not how this works...

Hey, I probably don't need to say this out loud, but I'm going to say this out loud: the GOP has moved from shady gerrymandering to outright autocracy, so maybe don't vote for them?

"But the Fox News said that Joe Biden hates America and wants to
replace white people and that's why he and the Democrats make gas
so expensive. And why would they lie about something like that?"

-Seriously far too many people

He's actually in construction, but he just
said he'd end democracy so, shit merchant.

I say this because Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate and noted Republican shit merchant Tim Micheals announced--huh? What? Wait until you see what he said, and then try and disagree. Anyway, at a rally on Tuesday he promised that:

"Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I'm elected governor..."

-Tim Micheals, declaring 

actual one-party rule

Above: Candidate Micheals crowing about
his unlimited power whilst using Dark Force
lightning to electrocute his political rivals.

Which, this is the opposite of how democracy works. Like, it's no longer an election if the GOP is planning on changing the rules--something they've already done in Wisconsin--to ensure that they'll be in power forever. It's a, what do you call it? Sham? It's a sham. Secondly, look, I don't live in Wisconsin, and neither do you. I think. I'm fairly certain I know the three or four people who read this blog (hi!), and none of you live in Wisconsin. But it's all of our problem too. The state has ten electoral college votes that could just go to Republicans regardless of how the people vote.

Pictured: the guy who lost the popular
vote twice and yet we're still talking about him.

Should he win, Micheals, has already been waffling on whether or not he'll accept the results if he looses. Which is nonsense. If you lose an election, concession isn't optional. It's just how it is. But this guy's a "Trump won the 2020 election" guy, so he's evidently not clear on how any of this works. But that doesn't mean he's not super dangerous either way. People like him just bludgeoned an eighty-two year-old man in a failed assassination tempt on Nancy Pelosi. They don't need to win to be a problem.

I mean, the one they voted for didn't win. What
recourse did they have but to end two and a half
centuries of peaceful transitions of power?

And he might win, and then what? In addition to tossing Wisconsin's current elections commission, he's also indicating that he's open to re-evaluating the 2020 elections results--and no, of course that's not a thing, but then getting an angry mob of white people who feel under-appreciated to storm the Capitol building is also not a thing, so who knows? And what's the plan here? Michaels is just going to assume the people of Wisconsin are cool with all of this and will just let them get away with it?

I know Wisconsin isn't known as a bastion of progressivism, but my understanding here (from this) is that Democrats actually have a numerical advantage in terms of voters but the GOP has gerrymandered the shit out of the state so that Republicans hold on to power. Sooner or later that's going to bite them in the ass right? Right?

"I mean if you can't trust maps drawn by the GOP's lawyers, who can you trust?"

-Wisconsin Republicans, 

assuming we're all idiots