Today in fine art snickery:

Don't think about it, just get out
your goddamn credit card.

Look, I like Game of Thrones as much as the next nerd, but this is going to far, right? Yeah, I know, you're a busy person and don't have time to click on links, so let me sum it up for you before you have to go off to go scrub in for surgery or head to your board meeting: HBO® officially licensed Game of Thrones™ fine art prints. And before you ask, this is a strictly limited special edition thing so don't even think about-huh? You weren't going to ask? Oh, well they are. Strictly limited I mean. It says so right on the website.

The prints-sorry, the fine art-is made by a company called Classic Stills Fine Arts Gallery, who sell framed still shots from movies and TV shows. Each one is numbered which, according to the website "ensures that [thier] artworks remain rare and are likely to appreciate in value over time." They even come with certificates of authenticity.

You know, in case the authenticity or provenance of your print
of The Dude from The Big Lebowski is ever called into question.

Move over Justice Coin...wait, anyone
want to check and see how much the
Justice Coin is worth now? No? Ok.

Are you ordering some of these right now? No? What's the matter, aren't you a fan of the show? These are limited edition prints meaning once they arbitrarily stop producing them, the artificial scarcity is guaranteed to ensure these increase in value. Well, I mean, I assume they're going to increase in value. Like, they're already pretty expensive. Did you click on the link? No? Because they range from $145-$1,000. Of money. For a still shot from a TV show. Which...

Pictured: typical goons.

Huh...look, I'm not saying you should do this, but couldn't you-couldn't one-like, just grab a still off the show, print it out, maybe even go take it to a professional printer and then frame it for a lot less than what they're asking for these? I mean, it'd still be kind of spendy, but not thousands of dollars. Again, I'm not saying anyone should actually do this. Anything you make yourself would obviously not be licensed by HBO® and you don't want to cross them. They probably have goons. But you could do this is what I'm saying.

I don't know if it's art but-wait,
no, I do know. And it's not.

And am I being a dick when I suggest that they're taking some serious liberties when they describe these as 'fine art?' Well, yes. A dick and a snob. A snick if you will (you might). But I looked it up-yes on the internet. Do people even own dictionaries any more? Sorry, there I go again, being a snick. Anyway, fine art is defined as: "art concerned with the creation of beautiful objects" or "an activity requiring fine skill." And, I don't think these apply here. I mean for one thing, I'm not sure how selling you screen grabs of a TV show requires skill. And for the beautiful object thing..well, I mean, see corpse pile at left.

I don't want to yum yuck here, but for real? If this is something someone really wants on their wall, more power to them, but I kind of think maybe HBO or Classic Stills Fine Arts Gallery needs to dial it back on the suggestion that these things are both fine art and they they will one day be worth something.

I mean other than as a valuable object lesson in
making smarter decisions when it comes to money.

It's like the Avatar 2 of video games...

"Just...here. Take it. Take it! Goddamnit."

-Me, everytime

...except I actually kinda hope this one comes out. Then I can debate the wisdom of giving Square Enix another sixty dollars of money for a game I've already bought like three times on like three different platforms even though to this day I have never even completed it once and-huh? Yeah, I should probably explain what I'm talking about and-ok, look, there's a new trailer for the Final Fantasy VII remake-now officially and un-creatively entitled Final Fantasy VII Remake and I think we should discuss it, because, I mean, what else are we going to do? Not talk about it?

Above: me and basically anyone
else who remembers the term gametape.

Ok, so Final Fantasy VII, for those of you either younger than my FFVII game save or for those who maybe enjoyed sports and social activities, is the seventh main line game in the Final Fantasy series (they're up to fifteen now, so Final is used kind of loosely). I'll spare you the numbering nonsense, but it was the fourth one to make it to the U.S. Anyway, when it came out, despite being a huge fan of the Final Fantasies? Finals Fantasy? That particular game series, this was the first one I didn't play all the way through to the end.

It was fairly different from previous games and not all the changes were great. It had long, unskip-able cut-scenes and interminable summon animations. It just wasn't-right, I keep forgetting, you had a life. In the game, you can attack your enemies by summoning monsters. Doing this usually results in an animation that plays every time. Every time. And you can't skip it.

Using Terra Flare requires you to watch as a space dragon
nukes your opponent from orbit for a full minute. A full minute.

Pictured: the cast of Final Fantasy VI
battleing an octopus in an opera house.
Not pictured: anything that's ever topped it.

Anyway, like I was saying, Final Fantasy VII was different enough from the other entires in the series and it just didn't hook me like the earlier ones did. But it was the first JRPG to get mainstream attention. It was the one you could admit to playing without getting nerd shamed, but I just wasn't into it and have spent that last twenty years being the curmudgeonly fan insisting that the series peaked with part VI. Still though, I've been curious about what I've missed out on and have tried to go back and play it but holy shit, the graphics.

Hot garbage now, back then it looked...well,
ok, still like garbage, but cutting edge garbage.

Maybe I'm just a retro snob or something-ok, I'm definitely a snob, but 8 and 16-bit games are charming and nostalgic to me with their quaint and razor sharp pixel graphics and they even look good on LCD TV's. Final Fantasy VII on the other hand, just...I've tried to appreciate it as a product of its time, but yikes. The overworld is blurry, the characters all have Popeye arms and the models in the cut scenes are jarringly different from the ones in gameplay. It is aggressively unattractive and looks like, and I don't think I'm being unfair here, hot garbage.

It wasn't just Final Fantasy VII, or even the PS1 that didn't age well, it's the whole generation of games. The technology just wasn't there yet. Remember Goldeneye on the N64? That game was mind blowing in 1996, but, I mean:

Oh...oh no no no...this will not do.

"Huh, weirdly the 8-bit, grey market
de-make holds up better than the original."

(source: shade)

Anyway, hence the remake. The remake Square Enix has been insisting is happening for like-and I'm not kidding you-fourteen years. In that time it's been sequeled, prequeled, remastered and even de-made for the NES, but still no remake. First it was coming to PS3, now it's for PS4. At one point the developer announced that it was supposed to be broken up into several parts, presumably so we could pay them more than once. It might be an action game instead of a traditional JRPG, or maybe it's an action RPG? And as of a year ago they were still hiring staff for the project which kind of suggested that it's still a ways off. 

It's been, so far, a shit show, but today (well, yesterday now) we got the trailer and the promise of further updates next month. So maybe it's really for real coming this time? The trailer looks like an actual game, with gameplay and voiced cut scenes-in English no less-so...maybe? Hey, maybe since they're remaking it and all, they could see their way clear to rolling back some of Barrett's insensitively written dialogue? Oh, and that whole bathhouse sequence should probably go. And-huh? No? They're leaving all that in? I see...

But on the upside, the characters look like people
and not, you know, vaguely humanoid box-monsters.

Bezos I, Padishah Emperor of the Universe

Like for real, who does Jeff Bezos think he is? Ok, obviously he thinks he's the richest human, and I think that's true, but...I don't know...does anyone else feel icky about him ushering in the future?

Pictured: Jeff Bezos stands in front of one of his company's new lunar landers
which his employees will soon use to conquer the Earth's largest natural satellite. 

I'll stop calling them Nazis when
they stop acting like, you know, Nazis.

I ask because the guy who turned a website that sold books into the death of American retail, summoned the press before him today to announce that we'll be going to the moon-which seems like Kennedy's job. Obviously he's dead, and the current President is a-is there a word for a goon who's also a criminal? Goominal? Crimigoon? Doesn't matter. The point is the leader of what used to be the free world isn't what you'd call inspirational. Unless you count white supremacists. Nazis find him super-inspirational.

...oh, I see, he's playing the long game.

What were we talking about? Oh right, Jeff Bezos, who announced today that we'll be going back to the moon in his new rocket. And then we're going to live there. And then we're going to live in space colonies. Specifically in O'Neill cylinders. Holy shit, right? Huh? What's an O'Neill cylinder? They're kinda like big tubes in space. People would live on the interior and the whole thing spins to simulate gravity. Which I'm sure it's not as nauseating as it sounds...right? Better pack some Dramam...oh...

Ever see Babylon 5? No? It was a little like Star Trek, except way nerdier. Like, Trekkies look down on B5 fans. Anyway, Babylon 5 was a type of O'Neill cylinder.

"Neeeeerds!"

-Someone just out of frame,

dressed as Geordi LaForge

"Consume!"

-Amazon.com

And all of this sounds super. What doesn't sound super is how tech-bro-entrepreneur all this sounds. Bezos' pitch...announcement? Directive? Whatever, his plan is to make space more accessible for business. Space business. Which on the one hand I sort of get, I mean, if no one's interested in investing in space technologies we're never going to get to live in space. On the other hand, do we really want the guy who brought us dash buttons owning space?

While I mean that metaphorically, the
Bay Area might as well be radioactive.

I live in the Bay Area...well, Bay Area-ish. About an half an hour south of San Jose. Like, if you were to picture the housing prices on a map, sort of like those Cold War-era maps that show nuclear blast radius' overlaid onto American cities, I would be in the slow death by radiation zone. My point is entrepreneurs might be really good at taking an idea, slapping a dumb, trademark-ably misspelled name on it and making a billion dollars, but they're not good at not ruining cities they live in.

Don't get me wrong. I am all for outer space, and living in outer space and let's face it, the planet is probably doomed, so we're going to need a plan B. I just don't want that plan B to be some kind of orbital tilt-a-whirl under the iron fisted rule of Jeff Bezos.

"Your Amazon Air® subscription is about to run out,
would you like to renew? You have thirty seconds to decide."

-Our grim future

Q-tips, just slathered with history!

Science, it turns out, is gross.

Hey, get this: since 2015, researchers at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. have been furiously swabbing the pages of their collection in search of DNA. It's called Project Dustbunny, and the idea is to collect and eventually analyze genetic samples from their books. The Library has the world's largest collection of Shakespeare manuscripts and folios, some of which date from his lifetime and may contain his some of his skin flakes, eye gunk or-fingers crossed-dried sneeze. Note: may. 

Look, I don't want to tell them how to science, but it strikes me as a little like swabbing the program from Hedwig and the Angry Inch on the off-chance that Neil Patrick Harris might have licked it.

Which, ok, bad example. Like, he might have.

If only there was some way to be sure
that Shakespeare touched-oh. Right.

So super-big waste of time, right? Yes. But also no. Sure, the Folger Library has a ton of stuff he could have touched, but lots of other people probably touched that stuff too. Also, he was a writer and loved to sue people so his name's all over things, plays, lawsuits that kind of thing, so I guess we can be reasonably sure he touched those. But ok, say someone at the Folger Library wants to know if some four-hundred year old eyelash wedged between acts II and III of Much Ado or something is from the man himself. I suppose Project Dustbunny could step in. 

Assuming they have a sample of Shakespeare's DNA. Luckily Shakespeare, despite what some conspiracy theorists say, was a real person and is buried in Startford-upon-Avon. Well, most of him is anyway. The point is that if we need some DNA for comparison all we really need is a shovel.

He said don't move his bones, he didn't say anything
about retrieving samples for autosomal DNA testing.
Although in fairness, not many things rhyme with autosomal.

That baby is Shakespeare's 14th great
niece. So really anything less than 39
timeless masterpieces of playwriting
 from her will be a huge let down.

Ok, of course Shakespeare handled his own documents. What does Project Dustbunny do that you can't accomplish by looking at a signature? Folger Library director Micheal Witmore says that crazy sci-fi nonsense aside, DNA is valuable new tool for archeology. With it, you can learn a lot about an era and the people who lived it through their genes. Who were they? Do they have any living descendants? Did they cover their mouths when they sneezed? The possibilities are...well, those are the only ones I can think of, but then I'm not a researcher, so I'm take it as read that Witmore's not just making this up.

Anyway I think the real question here, the thing on every reasonable person's mind here is how far away are we from cloned literary figures once again roaming the Earth? And, to take that thought to its logical conclusion, how long until they break out of whatever elaborate containment pens we build for them and run amok?

"Clever girl..."

-Game warden Robert Muldoon, 

moments before being devoured 

by the clone of Aphra Behn

Move over K-T Extinction Event!

Have you ever found yourself wishing there were fewer species of plants and animals? I mean, who can keep track these days? Some of them walk around like they own the planet or something, and don't get me started on coral reefs.

Psscht...coral reefs...think they're so great just because they're home to 25%
of all marine species and form an integral part of the planet's delicate balance...

Well, experts, knew but
we never listen to them.

Well, soon the other life forms we share the planet with may no longer be a problem. Yes fellow humans, our species-the best species based on Avengers Endgame's unprecedented box office returns last weekend-may be on the brink of victory in our millennia-long struggle against the planet and all other life that lives on it. A new U.N. report says that there are over a million species of plants and animals in danger of extinction. A million. It boggles the mind, doesn't it? Who even knew there were that many to begin with?

The U.N.'s report is apparently unusually direct since these kind of things require all member nations to agree and sometimes that can be tricky given the willful ignorance of certain members of the Security Council...cough...not saying who...cough...us.

"We object to the Rape Prevention Resolution on the grounds
that a significant segment of our citizens are ignorant goons."

-U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley,

actual quote (*not an actual quote, but close)

"Huh...you know, this place is
kind of a shithole, isn't it?"

-Future astronauts

The report explains that human civilization is consuming land and resources at an exponential rate and that we're either farming or paving three quarters of the planet's land area, squeezing out the plants and animals that live there which, coupled with the related problem of carbon emissions, will, if left unaddressed, will leave the Earth just another lifeless ball of rock baking in cosmic radiation like, what's that other one we keep shooting Tesla's at? Mars? Like Mars.

What? From an ecological perspective
cats are useless at best. Invasive at worst.

Ok, plants and animals, but what have they ever done for us, amiright? Welp, turns out lots. The ever-expanding, all-consuming pavement blob that is humanity is like super-dependent on the natural world. Bees pollinate our crops, forests make the air we're so fond of breathing and cats do something. I suppose. Look, I'm not going to read the whole report, I'm a very busy person (full disclosure: no, I'm not), the point is we can't just let the planet's surface entire surface be nothing but highways and Amazon distribution centers.

We have to, grudgingly if necessary, admit that we need nature and make sweeping and immediate changes if we have any hope of surviving this mass extinction. Which, if were being honest we probably don't. I mean, how many of us view plastic bag bans as direct assault on the American way of life?

"What were we supposed to do? Buy reusable totes? No thank you."

-the last member of the human race, 

say fifty, fifty-five years from now?

High School Confidential

I'm having, what do you call them? Feelings? Yeah, feelings about something I read online the other day, get this, about my high school. Why should you care? Normally I'd say you shouldn't, but this is kind of a thing and I want to tell the world. Well, by the world I mean the five or six people who read my blog. If you're one of them, thanks!

Thanks people in the upper right hand corner of the screen!

I mean, how could you not want
to read about a school board meeting
in a town you've never heard of?

Here's the link. Next is usually the part where I make some comment about how you totally didn't read the article attached and then go on to explain it anyway and I'll do the second part, but maybe read this one? And then tell everyone you know? I'll get to why in a minute, but the article is about a school board meeting last week in the school district where I went to high school. At the meeting, parents accused Superintendent Micheal Pero of not doing anything about up the increasing incidents of racism at Pittsford schools.

Wait a minute...Asia's not
even a Mexican country...

The incidents include throwing the n-word around, jokes about nooses and slavery, bullying an Asian American student and telling him to go back to Mexico which-yeah, I don't know. Racists are, by definition, idiots. Oh, and there was also a Black History Month display about the contributions of black inventors that featured a bunch of white guys. This was at the elementary school, so I'm willing to believe that maybe the kids didn't quite understand what they were supposed to be doing, but like, where are the teachers on this one? The display was only taken down after a parent complained.

According to article, the parents who went to the meeting to take Pero to task can't even seem to get him to agree to call these incidents out as racism:

Nowhere in the definition of 'inclusion'
does it say you have to let kids get away
with racist shit. What else you got?

"If we called every incident out specifically by their category, I feel we're losing the message of our expectation that every single person who walks through this building deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. The word 'inclusion' means every one of our kids and families who fall into any category feels welcome and valued."

-Superintendent Pero 
on...uh...wait, what? 
Is he suggesting that-

  

"Well now who's being intolerant?"

-Michael Pero, flipping the script

-wait, what the actual-is he saying that if he calls racism out as racism he's risking making racists feel unwelcome because of their racism? Is this even real? Is this blood trickling from my ear? Look, I one hundred percent have no stake in the goings on of the school district I attended twenty years ago in a state I don't even live in anymore, but holy shit. Like, white kids calling black kids the n-word seems pretty cut and dry racism, doesn't it? I mean, how can he be in charge of educating children in 2019 without an understanding of what constitutes racism?

Anyway, according to the article the uptick in these racist dick moves seems to have-I'm sure totally coincidentally-line up with the 2016 election when a game show host lost the popular vote and still somehow became President.

And then, also coincidentally, said game show host spent the last couple years holding
rallies for himself in which he whips up nationlism and not-so-subtle white supremacy.
But again, I'm sure this is in no way related to all the emboldened white supremacists...

"Yeah, but the last President was
black, so, racism's over, right?"

-Far too many of us

At first, I definitely had a moment of 'naw...couldn't be.' I mean, that wasn't my experience at that school. It wasn't the most diverse environment in the world, but slurs and nooses? Impossible! But then I remembered that I'm not a person of color soooo...maybe my experience was, I don't know, not the same as it would have been if I were? Epiphany, right? Could that right there be the problem? Like maybe if white people kept in mind that just because we aren't personally experiencing racism doesn't mean it's been solved?

Yeah, you heard me. Dumb
idiots. Every one of them.

Ok, so startling realization that literally everyone in America who's ever been on the receiving end of racism already knew aside, should we be bothered more by the incidents described or by the attempt to keep them quiet? Like, both are horrible and disheartening, but kids are-and I say this as a former child myself-dumb idiots. The ones involved here are just parroting their dumb idiot parents. There's a chance they might someday come to their senses. But how can that happen if everyone's pretending there isn't a problem?

Like I said earlier, feelings. And again, I mention this because in addition to being a story about the district not doing anything about racism in schools, they're also not talking about it. The story itself has gone unremarked upon. I told my mom, who looked for it in the local paper and nothing. The only mention of it anywhere seems to be that one article I linked to above. It's like they're keeping it quiet to avoid bad press. Maybe I'm being very suspicious here. I don't know, but I mean, it's not like I'm talking about lizard people.

"But by calling the lizard people out for being lizard people,
you're loosing the message of tolerance for lizard people."

-Micheal Pero, defending lizard people 

The Wrath of Calgon

He should have written a piece about
how pedantic Star Trek fans can be. 

I don't mean to pick on Johnathan Holmes, the writer of this Guardian article, but I'm totally going to pick on him. The article-and don't pretend you clicked on the link. I know you better than that. The article is entitled Bleep me up Scotty: why is sci-fi suddenly so sweary? and it takes issue with a perceived uptick in the instances of shall we say, more colorful metaphors in sci-fi TV and movies. Now sweary isn't a real word, but I'm going to let it go in favor of pointing out that never, not once in any Star Trek thing did anyone ever utter the phrase 'beam me up Scotty'. 

But more important is Holmes' contention that sci-fi has gotten swearier-great, now I'm doing it. More swear-filled? Whatever. Fuck it.

Aliens came out over thirty years ago, so what else you got?

Pictured: us when we sit
in front of Netflix all day.

His argument is that sci-fi, as a genre of television and movies contains more swears than it did in the past and I think that's nonsense. Yeah, sure, Ensign Tilly on Star Trek: Discovery said fuck. But I think this is more about how streaming services-which are generally free-er in terms of content-have eclipsed broadcast and cable as the way we consume content. Oh, and sorry for the phrase consume content. It's makes us sound like filter feeders.

"Quaaak quaaak quaaaak..."

-Meredith discussing the 

role in a 1978 interview

The point is that sure, Holmes is correct, Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone revival contains more instances of the word fuck than the 1950's version did, but I don't think it's just because it can, it's because the older show couldn't. Here, remember that episode Time Enough at Last? Sure you do. Burgess Meredith plays Henry Bemis, an avid reader who is constantly interrupted by people and can never have time to himself to read. Then, an H-bomb drops because the Cold War, and now he's the last man on Earth and can finally read in peace. Cool. But then his glasses break.

Pictured: the real vicim here.

And here's where I have to call bullshit on the writing. Instead of a grounded reaction to the reality of the horror around him, here's what he says:

"That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was-was all the time I needed. It's not fair! It's not fair!"

-Henry Bemis, last man on Earth

and apparent sociopath, I mean, 

everyone he's ever known is dead

The correct response to this should be "Fuck! Fuck fuck fuuuuuck!" But this was 1959 and nobody wanted to risk the wrath of Calgon. The issue isn't-huh? It was a laundry detergent or something in the 1950's. I'm suggesting that they wouldn't have advertised on The Twilight Zone if Burgess Meredith said fuck. What's that? Yeah, Calgon does sound like alien warlord or something. Huh, I think you're on to something. Call Jordan Peele.

"I Calgon, shall conquer the shit out of your puny fucking planet!"

-Next time on The Twilight Zone

Episode 14: The Wrath of Calgon

For all we know, qupla' is Klingon
for suck-it. Or suck them I guess. Oh,
 didn't you know? Klingons have two.

Where were we? Right, all the swears. Ok, let's say Johnathan Holmes is on to something and maybe in terms of volume there is more swearing on sci-fi. Which, there's more sci-fi as well, but whatever. I guess my bigger problem here is the underpinning assumption that a character saying fuck or shit in space is in itself a problem. Holmes tries to make the case that people in the future or from another planet would have future or alien swears or something and that's fair. But they'd probably also speak Klingon or Marain, so I don't so much mind that sci-fi is magically translated for viewers.

Why shouldn't we expect characters in sci-fi sound like real, relatable people? Like, when you're on a spaceship with Sam Neil and he's torn out his own eyes and opened a portal to hell, shazbot doesn't really cover it. People say fuck and shit sometimes. I mean, if you're going to play 'kids these days' with an entire genre of entertainment, why not go after the ramped-up violence and cruelty everyone loves so much now? I mean, has this guy seen Altered Carbon or Westworld? Because goddamn. 

"So many swears..."

-Johnathan Holmes, on these
grim times in which we live