Why even is this?

I am, and I think you know this about me, a grown-up adult who still plays video games. I mention this because I recently--again, despite being a grown-up adult--paid sixty dollars of money for the absurdly titled Bravely Default II. 

Pictured: what I imagine adulthood is supposed to look like.

Or a drug bomb.

And it's good. That's not why we're here. I'm here because of pre-order bonuses. Which isn't something I've ever cared about, but it is still a hazard of buying physical copies of games. So when the be-masked box store employee handed me my copy of the game along with a little square package full of whatever, I took no notice. It could have been a bomb, or it could have been drugs, I didn't know. I was too distracted by the fact that he invited me to have a blessed day. I mean, who says that?

No it wasn't bees, but
it is equally baffling.

So now, days later I notice the thing sitting on the table, just existing and taking up space, so I decided to open it. Do you know what was inside? Go on, guess. I'll give you a hint: it's promotional material for a Japanese, turn-based role playing game with a sort of swords and sorcery vibe. So can you guess? Come on, no wrong answers. Ok, I actually can't hear you, but if you said four paper coasters and an equally paper placemat, congratulations, you're a goddamn psychic. Or you can see me right now. Wait...can you see me right now?

You had one job, coaster. One. Job.

I mean, four paper coasters and a paper placemat? Sure, they feature art from the game, but I have questions. For instance, why? Why one place mat and four coasters? And why paper? Thin paper at that. It's a material famously unable to stand up to moisture, thus undermining the very purpose of a coaster. What made someone at Square Enix, the game's publisher, think that anyone would need or want a branded place setting? I mean, is there some thematic connection between JRPG's and a placemat that I'm missing?

I ask you...

If this were Cooking Mama, I'd kind of get it. That's a food-themed game, it makes sense. If this were a little map on the placemat like they give to kids at chain restaurants to give their parents five minutes' peace, I'd get it. It's an adventure game, that tracks. But no, it's just this weird artwork of the main character serving dinner outdoors and I can't help but thing of those poor trees that were cut down to print these things that literally everyone who preordered this game has already thrown out or added to their hoarder nest. 

Look, not to get all "back in my day," but back in my day, I played a lot of JRPG's and they'd often come with rad extras. Yeah, we used to say rad. Posters, maps, sometimes bestiaries. It was great. Now we're lucky if there's a QR code to an online manual. So while I appreciate the sentiment, and realize that this is a weird thing to even have feelings about, I guess I just can not fathom why they wasted the paper on a placemat and coasters and not a kick-ass monster manual or something. 

Pictured: a typical NES RPG with an instruction manual, a map, a double-
sided chart with items and weapons on one side and a bestiary on the other.
Not pictured: a placemat and coasters because why would
you even think to include a placemat and coasters?

Thirteen movies and forty two years later...

After more than forty years and just in time for the death rattle of cinema, Paramount Studios has announced that they've hired a woman to write a Star Trek movie. 

Above: Kalina Vazquez will be the first woman to write a
Star Trek movie which, wait, that can't be right, can it?

"In our defense, women writers are usually too 
busy getting pregnant and buying shoes."

-Executive Producer Rick Berman*

On the one hand this is shocking because this will be the fourteenth film in the series and you'd have thought that by now they'd have had at least one woman screenwriter. But I guess on the other hand this is not at all shocking because America. I mean, for a...sigh...franchise that has historically presented itself as inclusive and progressive and ahead of its time, Star Trek hasn't always put it's gold-pressed latinum where it's mouth is when it comes to production. Until its revival in 2017 with Discovery, it's had a dismal record when it comes to women writing and directing installments.

Pictured: Kalinda, seen here in
humanoid form because budget reasons.

Writer Kalina Vazquez has genre credentials having written for Runaways (a TV adaptation of the comic), Fear the Walking Dead, and the current run of the comic series America Chavez. Also she's already worked on Star Trek having written one of the best season 3 episodes of Discovery as well as one of the Short Treks shorts. Oh, and get this: she's apparently named after Kalinda, an immense, extra-galactic, multi-limbed tentacle monster from the Original Series Star Trek episode By Any Other Name. Not a qualification per se, but, you know, neat.

Alternate title: Doctor Franchise and
The Multi-Verse of What Even is This?

Anyway, it's all very exciting, but if you're anything like me, you want to know where in the increasingly vast--some might say exhaustingly so--Star Trek MCU this movie is going to be set? Nobody knows. The announcement also mentioned that J. J. Abrams and his company, Bad Robot are producing again, so this might be the Star Trek Beyond sequel that's been off and on again for years. But with the success of the prime-timeline-set Discovery and Picard series it might make more sense to stick with that world and avoid that confusing DC CW crisis on infinite crossover nonsense. 

It's also unclear where Vazquez's movie fits in the crowded room full of Star Trek movies already "in production." There was supposed to be a sequel to Star Trek Beyond, and movie about a space pandemic by Fargo writer Noah Hawley, and an R-rated Quentin Tarantino joint about that planet from original Star Trek that was run by 1930's gangsters. But it kind of sounds like those are off now and Vazquez is in so, fingers crossed.

And I think I speak for all Star Trek fans when I say that no one,
literally no one, was asking for an ultra-violent Star Trek gangster movie. 

*Ok, not an actual quote from Rick Berman, but I mean, it might as well be.

This is why I can't sleep:

Are you even...are you even kidding me? Like, ok, so one of the things that literally keeps me up at night is the GOP. Why? I'm glad I pretended you asked. Because for some reason I take it incredibly personally that I live in a country that just lets it continue to be a thing. 

Pictured: Me. Every night.

(overly dramatic reenactment)

"Yeeeehaawww, yaa'llll!"

-Texas Governor Greg Abbo-

what? He might as well have...

Because it's the political party that as recently as two months ago attempted a coup. A coup! And saw nobody responsible for inciting it or abetting it saw any consequences. Because they let one of their congresspeople harass another congressperson with transphobic horseshit directed at her trans daughter. Because just today the Republican governor of Texas decided to end the state's mask mandate and allow businesses to open despite everyone who knows what their talking about begins him not to. Thanks Texas. I was hoping for ten more months of this.

Look, they are, and I don't I'm being unfair, the single cause of everything wrong in America today. Ok, ok, I need to calm down, I get it.

I know I sound like a lunatic right now, but think about it.
Student debt, healthcare, guns, like name a problem that wouldn't
be easier to deal with if the GOP just evaporated one day.

Which is something that's not
really a problem for Republicans.

Did you see this thing a lawyer for the RNC said to the Supreme Court today? It's part of a case about ballot harvesting which is I guess legal in most states and both parties do it as a way to get their voters to vote--particularly ones who have some sort of barrier preventing them from doing so. These barrier disproportionately affect people of color. The Arizona (Republican) legislature passed a bill banning it, but a lower court struct it down because it, say it with me, disproportionally affects people of color.

Is it me, or does Michael Carvin look
exactly like someone who would argue,
without a hint of shame, that it's unfair
to Republicans to hold free elections.

Michael Carvin, their lawyer, was asked by Justice Barrett...yes, that Justice Barrett, the one Mitch McConnell--you know what? This will go faster if I don't fall down that particular hole right now. Anyway, she asked why the RNC is interested in keeping people from turning in ballots to other precincts. To which Carvin replied:

"Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero sum game."

-Michael Carvin, Republican lawyer on how

his party relies on racist laws to hold on to power 

You'd think their issue would have been
with the cis male creeps who are trying
to perv on women, but here we are. 

Which, I mean, of course, but he's not supposed to say it, right? Like we all know that Republicans will twist themselves into logical pretzels to justify their racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic platform. Remember the bathroom bills a couple of years back? They came up with some nonsense they were protecting cis women from cis men who might dress up as women so they could hang out in women's restrooms. They made up a nonsense-or at least incredibly unlikely scenario and then tried to use it as justification to treat trans people like shit. 

In this case, Carvin isn't even pretending to be protecting election integrity from the no cases of voter fraud that happen every year. He's just straight up asking the Supreme Court to let the state party make up any bullshit they want. Will they fall for it? Who can say? A barking mad gameshow host that lost two popular elections got to fill three seats so you can see why I fly off the handle about this kind of thing.

"Look, you have to understand, the GOP is made up of a shrinking
coalition of bigots, religious zealots, gun nuts, and the wealthy. If you
don't let us throw out votes, how are we supposed to stay in power?"

-Michael Carvin, no really,

that's the RNC's argument

The Dead blink!

Have you ever been going through boring, old, static family photos and  found yourself wishing that the people in them would, you know, do something? 

I mean, what are we paying them for?

Oh, right, it's because the
results are similarly unnerving.

Well thanks to exciting and disturbing advancements in artificial intelligence technology, now they can! A genealogy company called MyHeritage is offering to animate your old photographs. Well, by animate I mean they can do things like make the people in the photos turn their heads, blink, that kind of thing. It kind of reminds me of how people in the 1800's would prop up the recently deceased when they had family portraits taken. I'm not sure why I make that connection though...

Anyway, it's based on the same deep fake software which you might remember from that fake video Channel 4 in the UK did? The one where the Queen made poop jokes and danced on a table? They said their goal was to warn us about how easy it is to falsify video footage, but I suspect they just thought'd be funny.

Which, I mean, kinda...

Something something...life finds a way?
Look, I'm not great at memes ok?

And it is, super easy apparently. Or so I gather. I mean, I don't know how to do it, but You Tubers have been putting Nick Offerman's face on babies for a couple of years now, so if they can do it, right? By comparison, making people in old photos nod subtly or blink or turn their heads seems pretty simple. Creepy, but simple. And that's super. But at the risk of sounding like a Jeff Goldblum meme, did they stop to thing about whether or not they should?

Your grandparents, brought to you by 

MyHeritage®. All rights reserved.

I mean, not everybody who's ever had their photo snapped at a wedding or a graduation was giving their consent to being turned into one of those living Hogwarts paintings. And do we even know if MyHeritage own your photos once you upload them? Like, sure, it's incredibly unlikely that they'd want to use them for an ad or something. After all, we, like our ancestors before us, are nobodies. But I think we should probably all cultivate a general distrust of online companies that are interested in our old photos. I know how paranoid this sounds (very) but, I don't think it's a long walk, technologically speaking, between animating photos and producing a deep fake last will and testament video where your grandma leaves everything to MyHeritage's CEO.

Again, I'm probably worrying about nothing. I suppose the implications of colorizing, sharpening, and animating someone's old photos are mostly benign. Tacky, in a Ted Turner kind of way, but probably benign. Still though, Abraham Lincoln is doing their ad and something tells me he didn't sign off on it before heading to the theatre. 

Pictured: our sixteenth president, seen here alive and
un-assassinated, working as a shill. And that's...great...

Today in existential dread:

Above: The guy impeached Bill Clinton over
an affair while at the same time cheating on his
wife. Who was dying of cancer. Because morals.

Can I just...I'm having feelings. Specifically a feeling of existential dread. Sure, unity and moving forward and whatever, that's all great but goddamn, we really did get the short end of that stick, didn't we? Huh? We who? We us. The we that are the reasonable people that have just watched from the outside as the Republican Party deteriorated from an already unbearable assemblage of heartless fiscal conservatives and social regressives who loved bludgeoning the rest of us with how morally superior they are (but weren't at all), to whatever it is they are now. Which, I think is some kind of weird Trump worshipping cult. 

These are the kind of people who thought
Thanos had a point. Which, I mean, just use
the Guantlet to make more resources, asshole.

And I mean, what exactly did he do for them? Conservatives, I mean. Other then cost them the White House, the Senate, whatever respect they may have had left, and, of course, America's credulity on the world stage? Is it some kind of weird Malthusian philosophy and maybe they see the catastrophic death toll from his handling of the COVID pandemic as some kind of shrewd maneuver to make it easier to park? Was it his dumb border wall? Do they maybe derive sexual pleasure seeing children separated from their families and locked in cages?

Who can say? Well, you know what? I can, because why not? Yes, Republicans are incapable of reaching orgasm without first drinking the tears of children who have been forcibly separated from their parents. 

Pictured: Mitch McConnell responding to reporters questions about
whether or not he derives sexual pleasure from human suffering.

Pictured: Dumbs. Dumbs so dumb that
they can't even see how they're being played like
the stupidest fiddles in the ignorance orchestra. 

Don't believe me? Well there are plenty of reputable studies out there that prove that what I'm saying is true. What's that? Can you see them? I'm not the one on trial here. I think a better question is why do you want to see America fail? Yeah, you see what I'm doing here? I'm constructing a super subtle analogy for how it feels when the political right makes up some transparent bullshit and then repeats it until the dumbs take up the cause and say, storm the Capitol building. Some of them go to jail sure, but the guy most responsible gets acquitted by the Senate. 

What I'm getting at is that thanks to the former president, we now live in a country with millions of radical nationalists willing to die for the former host of the Apprentice. I mean, did you see the statue (below) from the Conservative Political Action Conference that kicked off yesterday? I think it's kind of telling that the Republican Party's response to their electoral defeats last November is a two-fold strategy that involves building a golden statue of the shitty conman who led them to said defeats and then trying to pass legislation to make it harder for people of color to vote.

Um...is...is this how he looks to them? All broad shoulders and flat stomach?
Because to the rest of us he's a punchy, slouching, septuagenarian who incited a coup.

Hogwarts and all

Maybe...maybe just leave the whole thing alone. Harry Potter. As a thing I mean. Like, I enjoyed the books and I saw most of the movies, and they were fine, but did you see this about the new Harry Potter game?

"Hey, what if we made a video game based on some already
established, super-successful multi-media property?" 

-Some visionary

"Please! We're in this up to our necks.
We built theme parks for God's sake."

-Warner Bros.

Yeah, I know you didn't click on the link. It's fine. I've even come to expect it now. Here, I'll just explain. It's easier this way: Warner Bros. Studios owns the film and video game rights to the Harry Potter novels and they've got a game in development called Hogwarts Legacy. And no, there's no colon in the title. I checked and everything. Anyway, they've been very clear that noted author and transphobia enthusiast J. K. Rowling is "not involved and didn't write the story and please whatever you do, please buy our stuff, we paid a lot for the franchise before we know she was horrible." Actual quote.*  

But if we can throw a wrench in her next yacht
purchase or home reno, it will be worth it.

I don't understand the nuances of how licensing works, but whether or not Rowling was involved in the development, she surely profits from sales of this game. So the best move here would be to not give her any more money, right? Because all she's going to do is tape it together into a big sheet that she'll roll up and use as a crude megaphone though which she will shout her gross nonsense about how trans women aren't women. And I should probably clarify that mean that metaphorically. She usually shouts her transphobia over Twitter, which is free. 

Ew...I'm not clicking on these. Look,
I'm not a journalist and I don't have to do
my due diligence. This is just a blog.

But people are going to buy it anyway, let's face it, despite everything, Harry Potter is basically a money printing machine. Or galleon printing machine, I guess. Or whatever. Doesn't matter, the point is that even without J. K. Rowling, buying the game is still tainted with the dilemma of supporting someone who's super-vocal about their gross opinions. It's come out that the game's lead designer, Troy Levitt, is a right-wing nutter who enjoys posting dumb YouTube videos about the injustice of social justice (no, really) and how awesome Gamergate was. 

Yup, between J. K. Rowlings transphobia--which she insists is somehow also feminist? And Levitt's red-state poppycock and misogyny, there's just no way for fans to pick up the new Harry Potter game without supporting someone with a shitty worldview. Which is a shame, because everyone involved suffers because of these two asshats. Are the kids stills saying asshat? Because they are. Asshats, I mean.

Oh, right, piracy. I suppose you could pirate
the game, but please don't pirate the game.

*no it's not. 

Tweets and hashtags of outrageous fortune

Ok, settle down everybody, no one is canceling Shakespeare. I mention this because of an opinion piece on The Washington Post from a columnist who saw some tweets from #DisruptTexts and is now leaping to the defense of all literature everywhere against left-wing "busybodies" (the columnist's word, not mine) and their famously anti-literary agenda. 

Above: the exact opposite of that.

Meanwhile, at the
Hall of Literary Justice...

Columnist Kathleen Parker starts her piece off with a none-to subtle suggestion of left wing conspiracy:

"Just when you thought our so-called cancel culture couldn't get any more ridiculous, the calibrators of literary justice surpassed themselves recently by targeting the Bard himself as just another racist, genders, homophobic fellow."

-Parker, on so-called cancel 

culture and the calibrators of 

liter-wow, paranoid much?

Ok, so, couple of things. First, can it be so-called? Like, that kind of suggests it isn't a real thing, which kind of undercuts the point. Secondly, she knows there isn't a cancel culture headquarters, right? There's isn't a smokey boardroom somewhere where a secret cancel council decides who to cancel next. 

"Excellent, operation Carano is proceeding nicely...
Now, who's career shall we ruin next for no reason at all!"

-The Cancel Council

Pictured: Shakespeare's grave,
wherein his headless corpse just
lies, not reevaluating anything.

And can you even cancel a dead person? My admittedly inexpert understanding of the phenomenon of "cancelling" someone, is that it's a sort of social media based ostracization where the cancelee--usually a famous person--is called out for shitty things they've said or done in hopes that they might stop and that it might help others examine their own bad choices. It's a technicality, I know, but Shakespeare died in 1616, so cancelling him now-which is not what anyone's trying to do, but we'll get to that--isn't going to change his behavior. 

And not for nothing, but he also
believed in actual witchcraft, so... 

Also, I kind of feel like people who refer to Shakespeare unironically as the capital "B" Bard, are already not looking at his work critically. Look, I love Shakespeare, but yeah, the guy was a white male in Elizabethan England, so by our standards his plays absolutely contain racism and genderism. Sexism and anti-semitism as well. And while I can't think of an example of homophobia, and I'm not sure gay as an identity even existed back then, I'd buy that there's homophobia in there too. So anyone suggesting that his work might be problematic to twenty-first century audience would be correct. 

Above: a picture of a straw man
someone left here. Wasn't me.

But canceling him? No one's canceling him. The organization Parker takes issue with in her piece is called #DisruptTexts and it's run by a group of four women, all of them people of color and all of them educators. Their mission statement makes it clear that they don't support censorship or banning books, but instead that they're just out "to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum..." So what even is Parker talking about when she says they're "targeting the Bard himself"?

"Called on account of plague" would
have been familiar to Shakespeare.

She sites some tweets, but they're from 2018, so if #DisruptTexts' goal was to bring the Big Shakespeare lobby to its knees, then they've failed. But it wasn't, so they didn't. People still produce Shakespeare's plays or, at least will when it's safe for a couple hundred people to be in a room and breathe all over each other for the two-hours traffic of the stage or whatever. And I think most productions now use the problematic content as a starting point for discussion. I've worked on a few and that's what we always did. That's all #DisruptTexts is trying to do. 

Despite Parker's weird and unnecessary defensiveness, I don't think #DisruptTexts are saying no more Shakespeare, I think they're saying not just Shakespeare. And that maybe it's not just straight, white, European, mostly male artists who have something to say.

Pictured: the Western Literary Canon which, I mean,
 a NASCAR race in Nebraska with free admission
for Republicans would have more diversity.