This year in bleh...

Although at least they didn't have to
deal with two-factor authentication
in the sixth century, so toss-up?

I kind of feel like this year just felt like more of last year, you know? We added another long-running, apparently endless war. COVID is still a thing, albeit more of a "yup it's going around again" than a "let's hoard toilet paper and soup." In many ways 2024 just felt like 2023-B. Bad, yes, but not quite the rancid garbage fire of say your 536 with it's volcanic winter and subsequent global starvation. Or 2020's height of the pandemic combined with real-life bad 1985 Biff Tannen behind the wheel. Keeping with the movie theme, maybe 2023 was like a forgettable sequel?

Or when someone adapts a book series into a bunch of movies, but decides they want to squeeze just one more out? Like, Dead Reckoning pt. 1, or Mocking Jay pt. 2. Like, 2023 was the Desolation of Smaug of the 2020's. But that's not to say nothing happened. 

Above: butter, seen here being scrapped over too much bread.

"So it's agreed then? No need to do
anything at all about fossils fuels."

-basically

Lots happened, but it was just more of the same. The planet had a giant climate change convention and in classic "we not even going to pretend we care about this anymore," an actual oil executive ran it. Speaking of cognitive dissonance, the Republican Party slid further down the path of acknowledging that their frontrunner for the nomination is a fascist who committed actual sedition, but at the same time being ok with it because he's their fascist who committed actual sedition. 

And here we are. You know, I miss the 90's. I was a teenager, so I'm sure my fondness for that time is rooted largely in having no responsibilities, but there wasn't this persistent, inescapable dread of the future back then. There probably should have been, as we're living in the future of the 1990's now, but you know what I mean? 

To be clear, I'm not saying the 1990's were all that great, I'm just saying that they
were, in maybe ways better than now, and that I wasn't really cognizant of the
things that sucked about them because I was too busy playing video games.

Pictured: the family values party.

Climate change was a vague, far off problem for our generation's great, great grandkids. Nobody had ever heard of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. And elected officials were just kind of sleazy, and not "attempt a coup" and then get a pass because they appointed all the federal judges, and then run for office again threatening vengeance on entire cities because they didn't support his bid for dictatorship sleazy. Oh, and remember JNCO jeans? Wild times...

Shit, are the 90's my 60's? You know in that way older people can't shut up about the Beatles and how everything was better back when they were teens? And what about kids now? Are they going to sit around camp fires in the burnt out remnants of civilization pining for the days of Twitter (you heard me) and Taylor Swift ticket fiascos?

I mean, yeah, in a best case scenario...

Today in the triumphant return of buttons:

Is it just because I'm an old or does everybody kind of hate touch screens? Like, as a technology, it's the worst, right? 

Above: a gif of multiple Oscar winner Meryl Streep agreeing with me.

Wow, that's way more interesting
 than watching the road.

I ask because Volkswagen announced the triumphant return of buttons and nobs to the interiors of their electric vehicles. Up to this point they--and I think a lot of car manufacturers--had been steadily decreasing the number of physical controls in favor of a single big touchscreen located in the center of the console. It's like they just started gluing iPads to dashboards. I don't follow the auto industry, my car is just a thing I use to get places, but I think this is pretty universal now, especially with electric cars.  

Ever stuck your head into a Tesla? Maybe just to ask the driver what it feels like to drive a car from a company owned by a fascist and named after a eugenicist? I've never driven one, but it seems, you know distracting. Dangerously distracting. The screen that is, not the deplorable politics of Elon Musk and Nikola Tesla, although, yikes, right?

Although it's not like Teslas need distracted drivers to help them run over pedestrians.

Touch screens work alright on Star Trek,
but I think it may seriously take another
four-hundred years to work them out.

VW was getting complaints about how frustrating it is to use touch screens, and I 100% agree. I got a new used car over the summer and it has a small touch screen in the center. It doesn't really control any of the car's vital functions, it's mainly for linking to my phone so I can control my podcast or make calls or whatever, but it kind of sucks. Sure, it looks high tech, but it feels vague and unresponsive and I end up calling the wrong person because the contact list kept scrolling or my finger slipped, or I pressed too hard, or not hard enough. Finicky is the word, I think.

Curmudgeon is, evidently,
a valid career path.

It just seems like too unreliable a technology to trust people lives with, you know? I mean, Volkswagen's motivations here are almost certainly purely monetary. Sure, everyone hates them, but corporations don't change a thing unless they decide that not changing will cost them more (thanks Milton Friedman). Whatever the motivation, I suppose I appreciate the fact that they're walking back touch screens. It's validating in a way that appeals to the air of curmudgeonliness I've been trying to cultivate. 

Does this just come with age? This desire to bristle at the new? A perverse joy taken from watching innovations prove themselves untenable? I don't know. But what I do know is that while touch screens might feel like the future, they're also slippery, uncertain, and potentially lethal...which, I guess is also true of the future. 

Remember that time someone put Mega Man 2--a game famous for
requiring precision and accuracy--on to smart phones? You don't?
That's because it was a terrible mistake and everybody hated it. 

Maybe stay away from the Garbage Plates?

It's unexpectedly cold in the winter, I'll
grant you, but not unexpectedly welcoming.

I must say, I take issue with this headline from theguardian.com: “Trans people are finding safe haven in an unexpected place: Upstate New York.” Unexpected? Why unexpected? It’s famously progressive New York, not say, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Arizona, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, or Florida (the worst state), all of which have passed bans on gender affirming care. 

"Trans people? Like Optimus Prime?"

-a shocking number of Americans

So why unexpected? I'm not saying that New York is blue through and through. Nowhere is. As the article points out, New York is (like California, and really the country as a whole) kind of purple. My hometown of Rochester is surrounded by red counties. But like most red counties across the land, they're like forty people and a Bass Pro Shop. The cities in New York state are progressive. It turns out when you live in proximity to people different from you, it's harder to pretend said people don't exist or aren't deserving of the same rights and freedoms that you have. 

Maybe this is just the smug liberal in me talking (it definitely is), but I wonder if a lot of our frustration stems from the idea that that proximity necessarily influences our perspective. And that despite our numbers, our national policy ends up being shaped by underpopulated red states with outsized voting power thanks to some poor decision making by a bunch of landowners in powdered wigs.

Pictured: the Constitutional convention coming up with the
Electoral College and basically ruining everything forever.

Above: the second largest hole in the state.
The first being in the chests of Republicans
where a heart in a human would reside.

Anyway, the Guardian specifically recounts the stories of several trans people fleeing hostile states, including a twenty-three year old trans man named Travis Covitz who moved to Rochester after college to escape the transphobic legislation and culture of his home state of Arizona. There, he found a supportive and diverse community representative of everything that is good and pure in America instead of the book banning goons of the Grand Canyon State on some moral crusade to run everybody else's lives. 

New York is a "sanctuary state" having passed legislation preventing law enforcement and state agencies from cooperating with out-of-state agencies that try to interfere with things like gender-affirming care. Which, I mean, it kind of bums me out that we need something like sanitary states, but until people stop voting Republican, it's what we've got.

With each passing day, Republicans move closer and closer to being X-Men villains.

If conservatives should be outraged by
anything it should be the Garbage Plate.

So why even am I talking about this? I don't live in Rochester anymore. I was lured by the unpredictable weather and unsustainably high cost of living of the Bay Area (well, Santa Cruz anyway). But I am feeling a sense of, what's it called? Hometown pride? Yeah, pride in my hometown and state for being such a safe place (relatively speaking, I mean, it's still America) for one of our country's most vulnerable groups. Pride that is slightly diminished but the fact that we invented the Garbage Plate, but still... 

An open letter to an aging hippie:

I mean, there must be what, a hundred
websites out there? What would be the odds?

I'm just saying, maybe shut up? No, not you, you. The person who blew past me on the way out of the bookstore in which I work to tell me World War III had started. You're almost certainly not reading this blog, but on the incredibly, and mathematically unlikely chance that you happen to stubble upon it somehow, I'm going to take this opportunity to invite you to please shut up. I know you're something of a local character, and we're all super-interested in your take on world events, and everything they don't want you to know, but seriously, you really messed up my day.

Neither or which sound like the kind of crisis
that would involve reinstating the draft, but
it's hard to argue with a passing rando.

You may recall stopping briefly on your way out of the bookstore to remark to one of the staff that you are glad to be in your sixties so that you don't have to fight in the war that's just started. "Everything's over, this is the end" you warned before turning to go. "Wait, what happened?" said the bookseller--me--reaching for his--my--phone, so see who'd declared war or which country launched ICBM's, only to find nothing but some nonsense about Prince Harry's lawsuit, and how Wonka was kind of a letdown.

Here's the deal: I, like many people, woke up one day to buildings exploding and then collapsing on the news. This was followed by two prolonged wars against unrelated countries--something something yellow cake--during my most draftable years.

Was it though?

Above: Pretty much.

And ever since, I and pretty much everyone in Generations X-Z obsessively check our phones half a dozen times a day to see what new and terrible calamity has befallen the world. Tsunamis, mass shootings, Republicans. We live in a state of constant dread at all times of these and any number of similar disasters both real and imagined. And at this moment there are currently two wars threatening to drag the rest of the world into conflict, so like, I'm already at an eight out of ten all the time. All the time.

So as a member of an anxiety-addled generation that can find no solace in pot or the Grateful Dead from the many terrible things out of our control, and who will probably spend twenty or thirty years after you're gone living with the consequences of climate change, please, please stop spouting paranoid nonsense, because you're freaking people out. Oh, and while I'm at it, maybe shut up about Robert F. Kennedy Jr? He's full of shit too.

thanks,

-a bundle of nerves 

Pictured: Anti-vaxxer Robbert F. Kennedy Jr. seen here with
noted white nationalist Eric Clapton. I'll just leave it at that.

Somehow this is about Texas

Want to start a fight in a room full of video game fans? Take a strong stance on whether or not video games do have or should have stories. It's a debate as old as time itself. Or as old as video games anyway, so I don't know, maybe since the late 50's? Doesn't matter. Oh, and fair warning: this one's going to wander, and then it takes a turn.

"This televisual game is interesting, but what's the triangle's 
motivation? Why is it having a space war? I need context, Steve!"

-literally no one when first introduced to

Spacewar! one of the earliest video games

"Especially if they don't make any sense."

-noted game producer and

nonsensicalist, Hideo Kojima

The answer is, obviously, that games can have stories, but they don't have to have stories. Debate: over, thank you for coming. It's a question of definitions. A movie is usually understood to tell a story, but not all films or videos are narrative. So video game, as a term, describes a medium, not a genre. A puzzle game like Tetris probably doesn't have--or need--a story while something like Last of Us or Final Fantasy does. Even if they don't make sense, they have some kind of plot.  

Bored yet? Yeah, me too, but to be clear, I'm just talking here, I'm not an expert. What got me thinking about this is the guy behind the Zelda series said in an interview with IGN that he doesn't care about the timeline. The Zelda timeline that is, not everything that's happened since the Big Bang.

I actually have an easier time following this than the Zelda timeline.

"Hey! Listen! It's about family."

-I mean, obviously

To be clear, Eiji Aonuma didn't say he was opposed to story, he's just not interested in series continuity for Zelda games. A few years ago Nintendo finally gave in and released a weird flow chart that attempted to put all the games in the series into some kind of coherent history. It was decidedly incoherent, and relied on alternate timelines and time travel and I mean at that point, what's the point? You might as well include the Fast and the Furious movies and say they're set in a parallel universe. 

The point is that they tried to smoosh a series of narratively unconnected things into one continuum and my question is why? And my speculative answer to that question is that people are way too into shared universes and giant interconnected whatevers.

Don't bother zooming in, it won't make more sense.

Amazing until the fans start pitching
you their movie ideas that is.

There are people whose entire job it is to oversee fictional universes. Kevin Feige for Marvel, Pablo Hidalgo for Star Wars, and now James Gunn is trying to cobble together one for DC movies and don't get me wrong, these sound like amazing jobs. What do you do? Why I sit around and decide if Thor would win in a fight with Galactus and whether or not a droid can use the force. Nerds would literally kill to wield this kind of power over made-up nonsense. But is it healthy? For storytelling, I mean. 

Pictured: Aonuma, seen here enjoying a
giant pretzel instead of worrying about canon.

In the interview Aonuma said: 

"I don't like to put too much stock in the chronology of the seres, because from a design perspective, that can kind of box us in and limit where we're able to take the story." 

-Zelda Producer Eiji "I'll give you 

damn a timeline if it will make 

you shut up about it" Aonuma

What about the Nintendo Cereal System?
Where does breakfast figure into all of this?

That is, it's harder to tell a story about an elf and his magical iPad that can craft hover cars if you have to worry about some overall continuity, so why even bother? Is it Aonuma's job to make an interesting video game or is it his job to make an interesting game that supports, advances, and is beholden to a narrative universe stretching back decades? Are the CDI games canon? Is the cartoon series? Sure! Or not! Doesn't matter, it's fiction. Nothing matters.

The carpets of Conference Room B at the
Denver Hilton ran red with nerd blood that day.

Fine, stories matter, fiction matter, but literal wars have been fought over things like this. Not about Zelda or Star Wars or the MCU, but like, religious wars about people who really love, for example, the Bible. People get really testy over what it does or does not say (it does say don't be a dick, it does not say don't have an abortion) and sometimes have a schism over it, or an inquisition. I'm not saying that our culture's current fascination with shared universes and canon is going to lead to a thousand years of bloody conflict, I'm only suggesting that maybe we could all calm down about it.

Wait, you say. Calm down about the entertainment industry's substitution of self-reference and lore for compelling storytelling? Or about clinging to weird and often textually unsupported religious interpretations that lead to things like, transphobia, racism, and women having to flee their homes in order to get medical care they had a constitutional right to just a couple of years ago? Um...yes? Both.

Pictured: the smug, self-satisfied face of Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General
and one of the many straight, conservative, white dudes making America a worse
place to live. I hope you'll join me in voting them all out of office. #fucktheGOP

Pasqually P. Pieplate, we hardly knew ye.

I mean, you can just say it's because Five Night at Freddy's ruined it. We all know did. In a shocking move, Chuck E. Cheese is removing the animatronic animal band that have been a part of the pizza restaurant/Lord of the Flies simulator longer than I've been alive. In an even more shocking development, Chuck E. Cheese, as a chain, still exists. 

Coming soon: Spirit Halloween Store!

(source: the crushing inevitability

of capitalism's death spiral)

I remember it being poorly lit, like maybe they
were trying to hide something? But now I realize
it was probably cheeper than cleaning the carpets.

If I may wax nostalgic for a moment, I remember fondly the days where whatever adult happened to be watching the kids that day would take us to Chuck E. Cheese where they could, for a couple hours, sit at the bar and smoke while we ran amok in the arcade, ball crawl, and some weird rat maze under the stage that housed the workings of the aforementioned animatronic nightmare fuel that was the Check E. Cheese band. Hey, did you know that arcade machines once had built-in ashtrays? Well they did. Because the 1980's.

I wonder what kind of background checks
they did back then...wait, it was none, wasn't it?

Don't worry, this isn't going to turn into some kind of old man rails against change because things were better when I was a youth. The weren't. Chuck E. Cheese was great if you were say, seven years old, but for adults it must have been a cacophonous, chaotic, hellscapes, and almost certainly a super-spreader event for colds, flus, and any number of projectile-vomit-inducing illnesses. Of course they needed a full bar. And God help the staff of glorified baby-sitters that had to work there for what I'm sure were laughably low wages, even for the time.

Above: a gif I found of the pizza chef
shoving a pizza, presumably topped with
the souls of children, into the oven.

Anyway, the band, if you're unfamiliar, was a line up of dead-eyed animals and, for some reason a pizza chef called Pasqually P. Pieplate. The band would gyrate and jerkily imitate the playing of instruments while prerecorded and barely intelligible songs would blare out of synch with the puppets' mouth flapping. But I guess when you're a child it's diverting? Or possibly the stuff of night terrors, which brings us to Five Night at Freddy's. The video game series about similar robots coming to life and murdering people, or something. Look, I don't know, I was born when people could still smoke in a kid's pizza restaurant.

The game and related media are shockingly popular and are almost certainly the reason the restaurant chain is loosing the band. The company says it's something to do with appealing to the digital generation which is, you know, bleak, but I think they're just trying to avoid comparisons to the murder puppets from Five Nights so beloved by zoomers.

Honestly, I don't care. I'm a grown adult and at some point in the 90's
Chuck E. Cheese was retconned (ratconned?) from being a rat who owns a
restaurant to a hip mouse who roller blades and has "'tude." #notmychucke.*

*is that how one hashtags? Did I get it?

Today in end-stage capitalism:

And thus, with the last lingering thread of our cultural self-respect so brutally snapped, I welcome the errant asteroid or super volcano that will put an end our blighted little civilization. I give you:

"It's the heart-warming chimera born of cynical materialism
and the death of artistic integrity you're been waiting for!"

-an actual review*

Pictured: Walmart's chief marketing officer.

Behold and despair. This is a...well, I hesitate to call it a film or a streaming series, so let's just call it a death knell of the pretense that the holidays are anything but crass consumerism. No? Too florid? Fine, it's a series, but it's also a commercial. For Walmart. Or, as Walmart's chief marketing officer says: "It's not a RomCom. It's RomCommerce." Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go shower. Hang on...ok, I'm back. So it's a streaming series consisting of twenty-three episodes full of conspicuously placed Walmart products that you can buy. 

"What if we used entertainment to sell products?"

-some genius having

totally original idea

Depending on what platform you're watching it on, you can either click on a link or have a link texted to you--because who doesn't like adds texted to them?--which will take you to the company's site where you can buy all the things so seamlessly inserted into a particular scene. Seamless if it never occurs to you to wonder why the camera is lingering on a power drill, or what the narrative rational was for a close up on the coffee maker. I watched a few of the scenes--for science--and it's a gross as it sounds.

Above: a scene from literally any
holiday romcom. Like, name one.

I have seen, in my life, one Christmas themed rom com, and I know they're famously not about story, but the plot was exactly the same as this series': our protagonist is a hard working New York professional with a tough, but ultimately kind-hearted boss, and a seemingly perfect boyfriend who proposes. Said protagonist is overwhelmed and she can't decide whether or not to say yes when, due to reasons, she is compelled to spend the holidays with her family in the small town where she grew up. 

Get ready to thirst after that Hart 20-Volt
combo kit with lithium batteries, now
only $148, with free shipping.

There, she re-encounters her down-to earth and ruggedly handsome ex with whom, despite a series of misunderstandings, she rekindles her relationship, and ultimately they marry--I assume. The complete series hasn't launched yet, but I mean, of course that's where this is going. Of course it is. Also, there's a gay best friend who is as perfunctory as the phrase "also there's a gay best friend" would make him sound. Sorry, I'm complaining about how a twenty-three installment Walmart commercial didn't have a terribly interesting or original story, aren't I? 

In a way you do have to admire that they're not even pretending that this is anything other than shallow and unvarnished marketing. Well, ok, you don't have to admire it. The idea of advertisement-driven narrative "entertainment" is end-stage capitalism and a grim portent of the world to come. But at least it's on-brand for a giant, faceless corporation like Walmart. 

Pictured: a scene set in Walmart wherein Jess introduces her gay best friend Micheal to her
ex-flame Javi, but pretends that Micheal is her boy friend in order to--huh, I think I just this moment 
realized why we use "end-stage," a phrase usually associated with cancer, to describe capitalism. 

 

*by me. What?

Today in rethinking the pickles:

"What a scoop!"

-Some reporter who 

definitely exists

In the grand tradition of offering ones opinion about something one knows nothing about, allow me to wax befuddledly on McDonald's burgers. Specifically on the company's plans to improve their offerings. The real article about this is behind a paywall, so mostly let's just skim the local news websites glossing of the topic, shall we? Yes. So evidently, according to internal memos--which, I mean, let's stop right there. Internal memos obtained by the Wall Street Journal? Yes, I'm sure this was the work of a plucky young reporter and not McDonald's just getting some free press about their slightly better burgers.

Above: the hunt in which I have no dog.

Anyway, according to the "leak," the plan is to introduce the changes to the...recipe? Assembly instructions? Look, I'm not a snob I just--ok, I am a little bit of a snob, but I'm leery of fast food as a concept. Apart from an occasional In-N-Out, which in California one is legally required to eat, I avoid it. And yet here I am, raging on McDonald's and their new, less disappointing burgers? Well, you can't say I didn't warn you about the internet and uninformed, yet surprisingly strong opinions.

So the changes to McDonald's heretofore bland faire include fancier brioche buns, more artfully scattered sesame seeds (no, really), and "[t]he lettuce, cheese and pickles have been rethought to be fresher and meltier." 

"I propose that we make our burgers...less terrible."

-Some maverick in the boardroom

"Whomp whomp..."

-the audible sad trombone noise 

all McDonald's burgers make

They rethought their cheese and pickles and that thought was "what if they were less stale?" Look, I'm no marketing genius, but these changes were announced back in April and it kind of seems to me that if they weren't planning to institute these changes until 2024, that maybe the thing to do wasn't to announce them so early. It was like they were saying "our food is terrible, but please continue to choke it down until we've rethought our pickles." It reminds me of that time Dominoes Pizza based that whole campaign around the idea that their pizza has always been terrible, but now, less so.

Again, I'm not an advertising person, nor do eat enough fast food to justifiably chime in on what McDonald's does with their marketing, but it kind of seems like you'd want to keep this under wraps until the new, less awful burgers were imminent, you know? Oh, and does the Wall Street Journal know that they've been played? Because they've been played.

"Hello? Wall Street Journal? I think I have some information you just might be interested in..."

-some anonymous tipster