It's probably not a holodeck...

God help you if you were a Turbografx-16 kid.
It was the T-Mobile of video game systems.

I am, as you may be aware, of a certain age. That is to say, I was a first-hand witness to what we now refer to as the "console wars." That period of time were advertisers for video game console developers turned sibling against sibling, neighbor against neighbor, and vague grade school acquaintance against vague grade school acquaintance over which game system they preferred. Some people hung on to their Ataris and rich kids had Neo-Geos, but mostly you were in either the Nintendo camp or Sega camps, and never the two shall meet.

So it was super-weird when Sega stopped making consoles and started publishing games on Gamecube. I suppose it would be like if Warner Brothers gave up making DC movies and let Batman show up in the next Avengers. 

Show me a nerd who wouldn't see this and I'll show you someone who's dead inside.

"Yes, more of this please!"

-Xbox's shareholders on 

the subject of money

But those were different times. Sure, most gamers now have a Switch and then opt either for a Playstation 5 or whatever ludicrously named iteration of the Xbox is out there, but it's not the same. There are some exclusives, but for the most part if a game is on say, Xbox, there's probably a Playstion or PC version of it too. And now Xbox, coming to the twin realizations that they're a distant third to Nintendo and Sony and that they would like more money thank you very much, have announced that they'll be publishing games on the PS5. Which, ok. Super. 

"Cross-platform? I have the word as I
hate hell, Ken Kutaragi and thee."

-Xbox stans

After all, this is anno domini  MMXXIV, and we're all of us past all this Montegue vs. Capulet nonsense now, right? Like, ones particular gaming console of choice isn't a thing one needs to base an entire personality around anymore. In fact, it probably never was, that was just aggressive 90's marketing aimed at kids, telling us to tribe up over the dumbest things. But here we are and evidently some fans are upset that Microsoft is basically saying that they've lost the console wars (not a thing), which is weird because unless you own stock in Microsoft or something, what difference does it make if someone with a PlayStation gets to play Sea of Thieves? But whatever, that's not what I'm here to talk about. What I did find interesting was this article from IGN.

As they say in business: always overpromise.
It definitely works out every time.

It's about Xbox President Sarah Bond going on the company podcast and saying:

"A what we're focused on there is delivering the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation, which makes it better for players and better for creators and the visions they're building..." 

-Xbox's Sarah Bond maybe overpromising? A bit?

Pictured: I don't know. Like,
what even are we looking at? 

I am the first to admit that I don't know anything about hardware lifecycles, game development or CEO-ing, but I am a grown-ass adult who's played video games his whole life. And the last few generational leaps have been, you know, incremental. There's been nothing like the leap from the inscrutable squares and beeps of Atari, to entirely recognizable 8-bit and 16-bit pixel art. Or the leap from that to the--admittedly janky by today's standards--first 3-D games.

Above: ray tracing. Possibly, I can't
tell. And neither can you. No one can.

The difference between PS4 and PS5 is ray tracing, and I'm still not sure what that even is. My point is the largest technical leap we've ever seen in a hardware generation is a bold claim. And one that to my layman's ears sounds like Xbox trying to convince shareholders that they're not getting out of the hardware business, but instead are putting the finishing touches on totally amazing next gen console and it's totally going to blow everybody's mind and make all the money ever. 

I guess what I'm saying is that to live up to Bond's claims, this next Xbox would have to be what? A holodeck? Is she saying we're getting holodecks? I will 100% eat my words here if Xbox is working on a holodeck. Here, take my money now.

"I didn't say holodeck, you said holodeck. But I'm not denying it either so..."

-Sarah Bond, not saying no to holodeck

Humans just got on the board!

Wow, uh, chalk one up for the organics, I guess:

I'm suddenly feeling slightly better about our chances
in the upcoming War Against the Machines.

Yeah, my view's pretty lack-luster too, but 
almost certainly more interesting than a blog.

What you're looking at--ok, what I presume you're looking at, I mean, maybe something interesting just went buy the window--but if you're looking at the photo above, you're looking at the charred and melted remains of one of Bay Area Tech Company Waymo's autonomous cars. A robot-taxi, if you will. It was just minding its own business in San Francisco's Chinatown last night when an angry mob descended. First they spray painted it, and smashed the windows before ultimately setting a firework off inside of it. Because Lunar New Year. Can you believe it?

That's weird because while it runs on a slightly different cycle to the one we're used to, that is, 354.37 days as opposed to the 365.25 days of the calendar most of us are familiar with, it's still pretty regular, and I mean, they're celebrations all over the world. It's a pretty big--oh, you thought I meant the car thing.

This is the Year of the Wood Dragon. And while I'm not one to argue with 
thousands of years of tradition, but numbers seem a lot easier to keep track of.

Pictured: the victim, seen here creating value for
Waymo's shareholders at the expense of people
living in a city where the average rent is $3,200.

Right. And I did fail to mention that the business the car was minding was the systematic destruction of ride share jobs? And sure, ride share jobs are themselves the thing killing the taxi industry, but at least ride share drivers are, you know, people. People classified as independent contractors in order to ensure that companies Uber and Lyft can collect a cut of the drivers's earnings without taking on any of the responsibilities of being an employer, so exploited people. They basically just sell you an app and that little sign for your windshield for 25% of your fares.

"These robo-taxis are a menace, you hear me?!"

-J. Jonah Jameson, weighing in

Regardless, I'm sure the crowd wasn't just standing up for the gig economy like victims of some kind of collective Stockholm Syndrome, they were also upset about the dangers these things pose to pedestrians. Back in October, a pedestrian who'd been hit by another car and thrown into the path of one of Waymo's vehicles became pinned underneath when it stopped. Yeah, it basically parked on her. More recently, a cyclist was hit. They weren't seriously hurt, but I mean, the damn robot hit a person, so I can understand why people are upset.

Look, I'm not pro-vandalism. There should be better avenues for protesting something and there probably are. City officials don't think autonomous car technology is there yet, emergency services are concerned that they can block their vehicles from getting to calls, and clearly regular people on the street turn go V for Vendetta on sight and yet they're still rolling around hitting dogs. Yeah, one of them killed a dog. So again, I'm not defending the angry mob, but what did Waymo think was going to happen?

"Why do people hate our driverless cars so much? I mean, sure, we're rendering
workers obsolete, causing traffic jams in an already difficult to navigate city and
we killed that dog, but don't they realize how profitable this could be? For us?"

-Waymo's PR department

Today in ill-advised alliances:

I don't want to tell anyone how to sue Disney for firing them for making fun of people who voice their pronoun preferences, but is accepting help from Elon Musk really the best way to distance yourself from a reputation as "an alt right wing extremist?"

Because that's a little like teaming up with Chipotle to distance yourself from norovirus.

"The 2020 election was rigged!" 

-Carano, seen here 

ruining her own career

I ask because Gina Carano is accepting help from Elon Musk to sue Disney for firing her for making fun of people who voice their pronoun preferences. Oh, and I guess also she was spreading some dangerous bullshit about vaccines? I don't know, I didn't pay attention at the time. Sure, I was bummed that weren't going to get that Star Wars spin-off series, but holy shit, did she compare Jews during the Holocaust with Republicans? Yikes. Sorry, what was I talking about? Oh, right, the lawsuit.

For Carano's sake, I hope there are no
steep inclines along the way...

She's suing Disney because they didn't want to be associated with her.  You know, for all that nonsense she spouts. Anyway, like a knight in shining money, Elon Musk is now riding to Carano's rescue and to the rescue of anyone else who tweeted hateful vitriol on Twitter only to have people say: "hey, please stop with the hateful vitriol." Which is weird because he's this hyper-capitalist nutter who thinks that the ultimate arbiter of all things should be the free market, yet when Disney fired Carano for damaging their brand with the aforementioned nonsense, suddenly they're impinging on free speech. 

And I mean, I feel like we've been through this already. Free speech is free speech, and the First Amendment is the First Amendment, but Disney has no legal obligation to keep toxic people on their payroll and nobody forced Elon Musk to let the white nationalists back on Twitter. He chose to give them a platform. He bought it, gave the rabid foam lunatics their accounts back, and then gave it a dumb name that everybody hates. 

A dumb name that everybody hates and had to be taken off the building
because nobody at the company could be bothered to secure the
proper permits. But I'm sure their lawyers are top notch...

A veritable oroboros of mediocrity!

Wait, wait, to be clear, I'm not saying this movie will be mediocre. I've not seen it and I wouldn't want to judge Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire based it's trailer (although, that's kind of what they're for), but I do want to make a broader point about the perils of relying too heavily on nostalgia. Like, way too heavily.

Although if I were to judge it based on the trailer, I'd probably point
out that there are too many kids in it. That is to say, more than zero kids.

Above: a tautological analogy?

I don't know if you've seen the trailer, but it leans into the original 80's movie like the guy in Hang-On leans into a curve and--huh? Oh, sorry, it's an old arcade game. Yes, from the 1980's. My point is that there's virtually nothing in the trailer that's not there to remind us of a thing from the 1984 movie. There's Harold Ramis, and Annie Potts, and wow, Rick Moranis? And Slimer, and the lion statues outside of the New York Central Library, and the ghost from inside the library. 

They even got Walter Peck, the EPA guy who hates the Ghostbusters because in the 80's I guess it was cool to hate the environment? Which, I mean, how'd that work out?

Pictured: how that worked out.

In an absolutely controversial opinion, the
Melissa McCarthy remake was better than
the Paul Rudd remake. There, I said it.

Virtually everything in the trailer is there to make you go: I remember that from Ghostbusters. I'm italicizing that because I'm referring specifically to the 1984 movie which, in an absolutely uncontroversial opinion, was the best one. And I'm kind of wondering if that's just for the trailer or if it really is just two hours of references and callbacks. Because if it's the latter and not the former, I have a concern that maybe hewing too closely to the original might work against it. You know, by making us wish we were watching that instead of, you know, Paul Rudd ghost busting with a bunch of kids. Like, I get the instinct though.

Like some kind of adult vitamin for
nerds, with 200% of your daily nostalgia.

The studios that put the money up for movies like this do so because they're banking on a built in audience, which in turn is going to see movies like this because they know that the studios are going to do everything they can to please them. It's sort of a closed system where fan service is converted into box office returns which then go back into more fan service; an ouroboros of safe entertainment. And I'm exactly the kind of person that this sort of thing is specially formulated for: a nerd of a certain age.

I know this, and yet it's not going to stop me from handing over my twelve dollars and perpetuating the cycle of movie studios guaranteeing an audience by pandering to their lost youths as the world spins further out of control and everything if unfamiliar and frightening. 

I'll feel kind of bad about it, but I'll still--hey! Hey, it's Slimer!
Wow, I can't believe they got him back. I thought he retired...

Wherein I complain about the weather:

In typical 80's movie style, it' more concerned
with a shitty dude's redemption arc than it is with
the woman with power over space and time.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't put our faith in some poor groundhog who, once a year, is torn from its peaceful slumber by some rando dressed as Charles Dickens who then pretends to talk to it about meteorology. But maybe we shouldn't? Better yet, let's knock the whole thing off. It's cruel and at this point the phrase "Groundhog's Day" is more closely associated with the movie about Bill Murray being stuck in a time loop that can only be resolved by convincing Andie MacDowell to have sex with him that it is annual animal abuse. 

Besides, can we just agree that we've broken the climate? I mention this because the forecast for Santa Cruz, CA--where I am--was for zero rain. And yet.

Above: the view when I stepped outside of work. Notice anything, precipitation-y?

"What if, instead of numbers, we use a 
repeating cycle of real and mythological animals?"

-Some Chinese Scholar, 1350 B.C.E.

So what gives? Sure, the weather app on my phone might just be really bad at predicting the weather, but all the forecasts seem to disagree with one another. Take a calendar for instance. Pretty much any 2024 calendar you come across should be reasonably good at predicting, say, Tuesday, or Flag Day. Should it put March between October and November, it would give you pause. And while I realize that the Earth's trip around the sun is somewhat more predictable and easier to map out (usually, see left) than the onslaught of atmospheric rivers we've been subject to, I still would like to talk to someone's manager about this.

I have a fraught relationship with weather. I moved across the country to avoid it, only to have the cumulative effects of three centuries of industrialization on the planet creep up on me. And, while rain is great if one lives in the heavily wooded mountains, as I do, it's less appealing when it's so heavy that the ground liquifies and the aforementioned trees fall on power lines and houses. All this to say, could we leave that rodent alone now?

"Let him go! He doesn't know anything. Take me, I'll you anything you want
to know. Early spring, six more weeks of winter, whatever you want!"

-hopefully someone

Today in unquestionably great decisions:

I know we've talked about this whole "Elon Musk wants to install brain implants" thing before, but now he's actually gone and done it. 

Um...hurray?

He usually dots all the "I"'s
and crosses the "t''s, right?

Ok, let me walk that back. Elon Musk didn't surgically implant devices into somebody's skull. Presumably a doctor or a surgeon of some kind did, and then only with express consent and what I'm sure is reams and reams of waivers and contracts signed in triplicate. But Musk is, as is usually the case, Tweeting about it, because, again, it's his company or whatever, and he likes to cultivate that Tony Stark: futurist persona which is, well, it's whatever. 

Pictured: that time Elon Musk
broke his unbreakable windows.

But it's his company, right? And he's not exactly famous for making business decision that aren't, well, terrible, right? May I direct your attention to the aforementioned Twitter. A company he preposterously rebranded to X, a name everyone either adds (formerly Twitter) or just outright refuses to use. Then there's chucking a roadster at Mars, moving to Texas, his multiple exploding rockets, and everything having to do with Cybertruck. 

It might help people walk again someday,
but I gather this killed a lot of monkeys.
Gruesomely. Like, a lot. So there's that.

Look, monkey murder aside, I'm on board with this technology in theory. If it works it could help millions of people neurological injuries, and evidently the first test subject's procedure worked. Like, the device is doing whatever the hell it's supposed to do. That first human test subject is "recovering nicely" according to the stories about this, and that's swell, but are they? And what if they're suddenly not? And what about Elon Musk's track record makes putting one's life in his hands a smart move?

Ok, fine, it's not like Musk performed the surgery himself, but then what is his role here? Is he just the money guy? Out there just putting a dumb face on the company? Or is he in some way involved in decision making? Decisions like the jumping on the MAGA train and letting terrible people back on Twitter? In either case, are these the kind of people you want to poking around in your brain? 

Wait, to be clear, he didn't perform the surgery himself, right? Right?

Today in eating our vegetables:

It flows so well...unless you need to 
pluralize a word ending in "r."

So ten year old me spent a fair amount of time and energy bemoaning that I had to learn cursive handwriting in school. I could never seem to get the tail of one letter to line up with where the next letter was supposed to start. It's the worst, although I did make some pretty valid points: I'll never use it, print is easier to read, and in twenty years, nobody's going to use cursive anymore anyway. I stand by these arguments, and would add that handwriting, as a thing people do, has declined precipitously. 

"Finally, a cis white guy weighing in..."

-no one

But, and this has no real bearing on my life as an adult childless shut-in, cursive is back. In California anyway. The governor signed a bill putting it back into the curriculum as a requirement, and I'm on board. Maybe it's just because I don't actually have to do anything, but I think it's a great idea. And since when has having no stake in something whatsoever ever stopped anyone from voicing an opinion on the internet? Never, that's when. The internet is something like eighty-percent unsolicited and uninformed opinions.

I once turned down a chance to go to
Australia for a geography competition because
I didn't want to miss Disney Afternoon.

According to science, says this article, handwriting is like really good for kids' ability to learn and retain information. Evidently, for kids, the act of writing--particularly about things they're interested in--forms stronger connections in their brains that just don't occur when typing. I, formerly a staunch and generally disinterested tween-age opponent of learning cursive, have a terrible memory and can serve as a cautionary tale about the value of handwriting. Actually, I can serve as a cautionary tale about a lot of things. I have a lot of regrets.

I say this from the privileged safety of
adulthood, but sometimes you just
have to eat your vegetables.

So why was cursive cut from the curriculum in the first place? I don't know. I suspect that it has something to do with a generation of teachers and school officials who, like me, grew up thinking it was a waste of time. Turns out that was a dumb move, because more people than ever can't find Canada on a map or tell you what onomatopoeia is. Are these things related? Probably? Who can say? What I can say is that sometimes just because something isn't difficult or not fun doesn't mean it doesn't have value or that we shouldn't ask kids to learn it. 

I can also say that no one ever improved a education by banning books. Or banning trans kids from sports. Or taking away bodily autonomy from--perhaps I'm getting off-track. All this to say, cursive is one of the reasons California is better than Flori--wait, Florida already requires cursive? Ok, well, Ron DeSantis is still a garbage human who still did all that other stuff I mentioned.

Pictured: California Governor Gavin Newsom signing
a bill to improve education rather than making life even
more difficult for trans kids.