Today in my particular area of snobbery:

You know, one of these days I'm going to stop re-buying the same games over and over again just because they're on a new platform. I mean, I have my dignity.

Pictured: basically me.

Strange. I don't see a controller, and yet
they appear to be having a good time.
How are they achieving this?

Yeah, buckle them nerd belts up because we're going to talk about video games. Yes. Again. But look, E3, the big video game trade show where all the new stuff gets announced, is happening right now, so it's kind of inevitable. Anyway, Final Fantasy, right? So when I was a young indoor kid, I discovered role playing games. Not the pen and paper like Dungeons and Dragons, those have a social component, but video role playing games which you typically play alone. In a basement. Where no one will bother you.

"Illegally download ROMS!"

-SquareEnix (exact quote)

Among the games that ate up a considerable amount of the time I supposed to be doing homework were the Dragon Warrior series and Final Fantasy before Final Fantasy was cool. You heard me. Final Fantasy VII came out and suddenly everyone gave a shit about the series. Before that, the series was sort of a cult thing, so much so that the second, third, and fifth entries weren't localized until years later forcing--yes, forcing--us to use legally questionable emulation and fan translation patches. 

Having been so deprived in my youth, I am now a sucker for every time SquareEnix publishes another re-release of either series, which they do and they are. Again. 

Goddamnit. Take it. Take your blood money...

It would be like if someone took 
the original Star Wars and just ruined
it with a bunch of CG nonsense. 

And I always fall for it despite the fact that there's inevitably something that sucks about it. The PlayStation ports of the original Final...Fantasys? Fantasies? Finals Fantasy. The ports had interminable load times. The Game Boy Advance version of Final Fantasy IV was buggy, the DS one had the difficulty jacked way up. The iOS ports ditched the pixel art for shitty mobile graphics and they tend cost just slightly more than a thirty year old game has any business costs, which never stopped me but-what? Don't look at me like that. 

For some people it's a band they like, other people are into sports crap. Still others buy million dollar Pokémon cards and wear them to pretend boxing matches. 

No, I will not get over it. A million dollars. Of money. 

You shouldn't need soldering skills to
play video games. That's all I'm saying.

Like I was saying, there's always something. And this time around that something is that the games are coming to Steam and mobile platforms which, I mean, what even is that? There're like a hundred and fifty million PS4's and Xbox Ones in the world, plus another eighty-four million Switches. All three have digital marketplaces that are 90% rereleases. I just can't fathom why they'd skip actual game consoles in favor of cell phones and PC's? Sure, everyone has a phone, but they're awful for gaming. And PC's are just--look, I'm admittedly biased, but I've always found them to be a massive, expensive pain.

Anyway, there re-releases are going back to the pixel style of the 8 and 16-bit era so yeah, I'm probably going to have to give SquareEnix money for these games. Again. The only question is, will I be able to respect myself afterwords?

Well, I'll have played a video game on an iPhone, so no. 
I think it's safe to say self-respect is off the table.

Well, this changes things...

Yeah, but that's still way too...I mean, it's gross, right? Huh? What am I talking about? Why, this thing about Karen Allen talking about hers and Harrison Ford's characters in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In an interview with Uproxx, Allen was asked about a conversation between Marion Ravenwood and Indiana Jones where it is heavily implied that they were involved in an age inappropriate relationship, years earlier.

What, a couple of years, right? Like, two?

That's not so much a sinister overtone
as it is a crime. Like, an actual felony.

Allen's response to the interviewer's suggestion that the exchange had sinister undertones was:

"Yeah, I guess you could say that. I think I say I was 16. I don't know. That's always what I imagined is she was 16, he was 26. And he was her father's student. And it's left very mysterious."

-Karen Allen, not making

us feel better about that line

Um...mystery solved: Indiana Jones is a monster. The characters' ages are never established but I think we all sort of imagined, or hoped that Marion was at least eighteen, and that Indy was maybe a couple years older, but now we know that Allen was playing that scene as if there were a ten year difference, and she was underage and Indy was in a position of power while working for her father. All of which changes things. 

No, the fact that the two ultimately get married changes nothing.
Indiana Jones still committed a crime, and I'll thank you not to offer
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as evidence of anything other than 
the fact that the series should have ended with Last Crusade.

If a fandom has cosplayers, you 
can trust that they know their stuff.

For what it's worth, actor intent isn't the necessarily the same thing as narrative fact. So I guess we can take solace in the idea that it's not canon. Except that we can't. At all. Because it's totally canon. I checked the Indian Jones wiki--which is a thing that exists--and yup, Marion was sixteen and Indy was twenty-six. Which, gross. I'm not sure what expanded universe material established the particulars of their relationship, but if it's on the wiki, it's probably the result of exhaustive fan research, and if fans are good at anything it's exhaustive research.

Marion's full line is "I was a child. I was in love. It was wrong and you knew it." So in many ways, I guess we probably should have clocked this as problematic a bit earlier than decades after the film's release. I only caught on a couple years ago, but like I said, I'd head canon'ed that she was speaking figuratively. Sure, Indiana Jones is a thief and a grave robber who kills a lot of people--I mean, a lot of people--but why would Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas make their protagonist an actual child predator? 

Of course, a lot of the people he kills are Nazis, so...

Sour grapes, sure, but not unjustified...

Is this what it's come to? I just want to be clear that I don't care about boxing, Logan Paul, or really even Pokémon, but I am somehow intrigued by the intersection of those things and the out of control speculative collector-ism that only a year of pandemic and the absurdity of internet celebrity can yield. 

Although I do care slightly more about boxing when it
involves an internet celebrity getting punched.

People who think capitalism is circling
the drain need look no further than the
value of Pokémon cards for proof.

Logan Paul, whom you might remember as that Youtube guy who paid millions of dollars for Pokémon cards and-huh? No, you're thinking of Logic, the rapper. There's a distressing number of people paying many times the price of a house for a trading cards. Anyway, Paul, the star of videos of him being a dick to Japanese people, bought some unopened packs, opened them, and found a number of super-rare cards including two holographic Charizard cards worth a total of two million dollars of money.

Above: pretty much the past
twenty years.

Anyway, last night, because the twenty-first century has been an unceasing circus of horror and madness, Paul fought former heavy weight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. in an exhibition match. Paul lost, because he's not a former heavyweight champion (and he even thinks Mayweather may have let him off easy), but the news has been mostly about how he wore one of his Charizard cards, surrounded by diamonds, on a chain around his neck. 

"Well, at least it's tasteful." 

-No one

Because that's what people do, I guess. My personal feelings about speculative collecting of pop culture nonsense aside, what's even the deal with that? Is owning a holographic Charizard card somehow an accomplishment? Anyone with two million dollars of disposable wealth lying around could have bought the thirty-six blind packs. They shoulndn't, I mean, holy shit, there are way better things one can do with that kind of money, but my point is Paul didn't really do anything. 

Mathematical probability seems like the real hero here, and he didn't wear a TI-86 around his neck. So is wearing the card just about ostentation? Like, get me, I'm rich? 

"Get me, I'm rich!"

-A man wearing thirty people's 

student debt around his neck

Pictured: Floyd Mayweather,
living the dream.

Is it really sour grapes when the person whose success I take issue became famous by thrown dead fish at taxis in Tokyo? Maybe (definitely), but in my defense he did wear a diamond encrusted lanyard containing a children's trading card which we, as a civilization, have agreed should be worth a million dollars, around his neck to a pretend boxing match that people paid to watch. Apart from Mayweather, who got to punch Logan Paul, no one here wins.

I don't think I'm too far off base when I say that everything about this is evidence of our collapse, right? Like, I'm not just imagining it?

Pfft, everyone wants something for nothing. Why don't they get real jobs
like celebrity boxing exhibition matches or Pokémon trading card speculation?

Another day, another mass uncorking...

What? He is. Wait 'till you
hear what he said. It's insane.

Hey, you know what's never been a headline ever? "Dozens dead after brutal Swiss Army knife shooting." But do you know what happens on average 1.56 times a day in the U.S.? A regular mass shooting. you know, with guns. Today is the 156th day of 2021 and there have been 249 mass shootings (a shooting in which four or more people are shot). Of those, 141 resulted in fatalities and all told, 287 people died and 1,016 were injured. 25 of those fatalities were in California. And I mentioned this because Roger Benitez is full of shit. 

Benitez, a Federal Judge appointed by George W. Bush and someone I don't think should be trusted to upvote a Reddit post much less strike down an assault rifle ban, overturned California's 1989 assault rifle ban because he just loves assault rifles. Loves them. 

This assault rifle advertisement linking masculinity to gun ownership,
(and for some reason, meat consumption) is a two-page spread of everything wrong with
 America right now. God, I'm so sick of this Tim Allen, Last Man Standing bullshit.

Pictured: An AR-15 assault ri-
wait, sorry, that's a Swiss Army knife.
I always mix those two things up.

In his ruling, he likened the AR-15 to a Swiss Army knife which, I mean, how is he a judge? Oh, right, George W. Bush was President for eight years...

"Like the Swiss Army knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment. Good for both home and battle, the AR-15 is the kind of versatile gun that lies at the intersection of the kinds of firearms protected under District of Columbia v. Heller...and United Staes v Miller...Yet the State of California makes it a crime to have an AR-15 type rifle."

-Judge Roger Benitez, writing 

copy for Colt apparently

Which isn't to say that people who like
assault rifles are Nazis, I'm just saying 
that Nazis didn't not invent them, so...

First of all, the State of California makes it a crime because California isn't at war which is what assault rifles were invented for in the first place. By Nazis, as it happens. Secondly, a Swiss Army knife has tons of uses. You can open canned food, or file your nails. There's a cork screw and a knife, which, I suppose you could use for home defense, but you can also cut a rope if you're out camping or something. What you can't do with it is murder a dozen people in a movie theatre or forty-nine people in a night club or stalk the halls of a high school shooting kids. 

They can really come in handy
when you need to open a bottle of
-damnit! See? I did it again.

The idea that, oh! Wait, you also can't use a Swiss Army knife to shoot up an IHOP or murder twenty seven teachers and students at an elementary school, or eleven people at a synagogue or sorry, I could go on, but I think what I'm getting at is that no, there is a massive, fundamental difference between Swiss Army knives and assault rifles. A Swiss Army knife is a tool while assault rifles are just for murdering people. Comparing the two is, at best, preposterous and I don't think I'm being unfair when I say Roger Benitez can go fuck himself. 

I don't care how many assault rifles
someone owns, no one looks badass
in khakis and a polo. No one.

And I get that people want to defend their homes. I get that the Second Amendment has been interpreted in such a way that people can have guns with which to do it, but it doesn't say that they can have all the guns. James Madison was talking about muzzle loaders, not AR-15's. They might as well be phasers to him. And I can't, for example, keep an ICBM in my back yard, so clearly we agree that there are limits. Whatever. Fine, guns. But we absolutely have a right to pass laws restricting what kind of guns people can own, and who can own them, and how many. 

That's not unreasonable. Like, it's not the 1800's and if someone breaks into your house we have 911, and police (which, whole n'other issue), and if it comes down to it, and you're that kind of person, there are regular, non-military grade guns that you can get trained on how to use properly. You don't need something that can fire a thousand rounds from a thirty-second story hotel window. This paranoid batshit right-wing fantasy of defending "heath and home" with a personal arsenal is not worth the daily body count.

"You're right, that is a lot of dead people, but if that's the price
other people have to pay for my hobby, I guess I can live with it."

-Gun hobbyists

Faster than the speed of nonsense!

Ok rich people, just try not to look 
shocked when the revolution comes.

At the risk of a hackneyed rant against airlines, I am all for flights being over as quickly as possible. Flying is expensive, stressful, and the industry goes out of its way to reinforce societal disparities. We peasants are crammed into increasingly tighter spaces year by year made more unbearable by the ever-present threat of the jerk in the next row deciding to recline into your actual lap. Meanwhile, first class seats are getting bigger and bigger to the point where some planes now just give rich people hotel rooms. Everything about this is terrible and should stop.

It makes sense then to want to minimize the trauma by making planes faster. Cool. But supersonic? That is, faster than the speed of sound. 

"Flying to Reno ain't like dusting crops boy. Without precise calculations
we could fly right through a flock of geese or bounce too close to
some idiot's Cessna and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"

-Actual concerns I have

Seriously? They had a meeting and
Boom is the name they went with?

United Airlines has ordered fifteen supersonic "Overture" jets from a Denver start-up company called Boom Supersonic and-huh? Yeah. Boom, which I'm sure is a name they hope will suggest a sonic boom--that is, the sound an object makes as it crosses the threshold into super sonic speeds. But for people like me, for whom getting on a plane requires accepting the very real possibility of a fiery death, it just sort of suggests, you know, boom. Like the sound of a plane making an unscheduled rapid deceleration as it plummets to the ground and is consumed in fire.

And yeah, I did say start-up. Because if there's anyone you can to trust with the lives of sixty-six to eighty-eight people (the expected capacity of an Overture jet), it's the kind of people who take risks for a living. And then name that risk Boom. 

"Bussssineeeesss!"

-Business people

Quick! Before someone else has the idea to
take a selfie in front of a recognizable landmark!

Boom Supersonic's planes can travel at Mach 1.7 or one hundred and seventy percent of the speed of sound, or 1,304 mph. Which the company says will mean you can go from New York to London in three and a half hours instead of six and a half. You know, incase you really, really need to get to London in three and a half hours for some reason. Wait, sorry, did I say can and will? Because that should be could theoretically travel and could theoretically get you from New York to London, if it were real. Because none of this is. Real yet, I mean.

Pictured: the Concord, seen
here already being a thing.

Well, ok, the Concord was a supersonic jet that operated between 1976 and 2003, so the basic idea already exists, until it was discontinued due to technical problems and general lack of interest. But Boom Supersonic founder and CEO Blake Scholl told CNN in a phone interview that:

"Either we fail or we change the world."

-Blake Scholl, probably overstating it,

I mean, it could be a middling success

But what the Concord wasn't that Overture is--or rather will be assuming it actually happens and doesn't just vanish in the night like so many start-ups throughout the history of start-ups--is 100% carbon neutral. But how? 

"Well, you see, the uh, plane, um, it could you excuse me for just a-"

-Blake Scholl, shortly before setting off

a smoke bomb and running out the back

So it runs on horseshit?

I'm...I'm still not sure I understand how, oh-maybe the website will clear this point up:

"...sustainability means doing things in a way that leads to enduring value and further innovation. It means being mindful of all the impacts of our work and ensuring that we care to maximize upsides and minimize downsides--building something all stakeholders can value."

-Boom Supersonic, putting words together

Boom estimates that by 2030 the airline
industry will run entirely on yoga.

Ah. So the plane will be one hundred percent carbon neutral by being mindful...or uh, did...hey, was that answer just a string of meaningless phrases or is it just me? Some further digging comes up with a section describing Boom's "exhaustive search of the most promising present and future sustainable aviation fuels" and a partnership with a company called Prometheus Fuels that is working on technology that will convert CO2 into jet fuel using clean energy. Somehow. Eventually. 

Don't get me wrong, I am all for zero-emission everything, but it kind of sounds like these people are taking orders for magical planes that fly at almost twice the speed of sound and produce no pollution whatsoever without having a clue as to how to realize any it. Which might actually be how start-ups work, but is definitely not how air travel works.

Above: An artists rendering.

A Mind-Numbing Work of Staggering Why?

You know what movie probably doesn't need to be another twenty minutes longer? Huh? Yeah, I can't actually hear you. That's not how blogs work. It's sort of a one-way street, but I'll just assume you said Super Mario Bros.

Good choice.

"I don't know, you step on turtles, collect 
coins. What do you want? This isn't Hamlet."

-Shigeru Miyamoto

If you'd somehow blocked this out, there was indeed a live-action--adaptation? No, that's no the right word since the film makes only the slightest, vaguest gesture in the rough direction of fidelity to the source material. In fairness it was, at the time, a series of five or six games designed by Shigeru Miyamoto who was actively and aggressively opposed to the concept of story or lore in his games. So the filmmakers were stuck with the task of making up a fictional universe based on Super Mario's universe.

What they came up with was a weirdly literalized and dystopian take on the game's "story" about rescuing the princess from the villain, but it's a passing resemblance at best.

Nestled between the Nintendo Seal of Quality (remember those?) and the 
warning about not dunking your game cartridge in paint thinner was seven sentences
explaining why you'll be running to the right for the next couple of hours or so.

Weird blond hair, rage issues, never
won a popular vote. Holy shit, this movie
predicted President Trump in 1993. 

In the movie it's Princess Daisy and not Peach (or Toadstool if you're old), and the villain is Dennis Hopper as some kind of proto-Trumpian autocrat in a three piece suit instead of a fire-breathing turtle dragon. It borrows the idea that Mario and Luigi are plumbers from Brooklyn, transported to the Mushroom Kingdom through a drain pipe like in the old cartoon series but tweaks it to Mario and Luigi are plumbers from Brooklyn, transported to a dark alternate universe run by fascist dinosaur people.

Is Toad dead? The movie doesn't bother telling
us, so I guess we'll never know. #justicefortoad.

Names and elements from the game are there, but are just arbitrarily applied to characters. Like, Toad is in the film, but he's folk singer instead of a mushroom (which is also not a toad I suppose). He gets arrested, sentenced to de-evolution, and then we never see him again. Big Bertha, a giant fish in Super Mario 3, is here, but she's a human woman whom Mario gropes and then robs (no, really). She gives the Mario brothers pneumatic boots that allow them to super-jump. Because, one assumes, cocaine.

Maybe Disney's hesitation had 
something to do with all the strippers?

Anyway a new, extended cut of this 1993 goat rodeo of a movie was assembled by an editor called Garrett Gilchrist who drew from old VHS tapes, leaving us all to ask "why?" The new version is called "The Morton-Jankel Cut" (thanks a lot, Zach Snyder...) which is weird because Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel were the original directors and I don't think either of them were involved in this version. Although according to Morton, they weren't involved in editing the theatrical cut either thanks to studio interference from Disney, who'd bought the rights.

Pictured: Iggy and Spike rapping
"Koopa: the Party Poopa" before getting
hauled off by the dinosaur stasi.

You can watch this--you know, if you want to for some reason--on the Internet Archive. I fast forwarded through some of the changes and-what? I'm not paid enough to sit through this entire movie again. Or at all. Anyway, from what I scrubbed through, I can confirm that Gilchrist's cut restores the subplot about rival plumbers and some more of Scapelli's leering at Daisy. There's more of the club scene with Mario and Big Bertha's S&M flirtation, as well as Iggy and Spike's treasonous rap. Oh, and he put back a scene in which Koopa murders some guy. 

So I guess it's not really a director's cut, but more of a fan-edit which raises several questions. Questions such as: Wait, there are Super Mario Bros. movie fans? and more importantly, There are people out there who believe that Morton and Jankel's artistic vision was worth restoring after nearly thirty years in the DVD bargain bin?

Pictured: auteurs Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel,
seen here discussing whether or not they included enough
strippers in their movie about a kid's video game.

No, I stand by it. He is.

You know who's a real piece of shit? Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Sorry, I mean, I don't usually start off so bluntly, but he is.

What? He is. 

Pictured: Republicans.

Yesterday, the Texas House of Representatives were getting ready to vote on Senate Bill 7--another bill designed to make it just miserable for people who aren't rural Republicans to vote--when the Democrats walked out. The move left the House without a quorum and is now, for the moment, dead. Cool, right? Yes. But then Governor Greg "Real Piece of Shit" Abbott tweeted out that he's going to withhold paychecks from legislators unless they come back and let the GOP steal all future elections forever.   

Won't that also cut the Republican's pay?
Man, they must really want to steal elections.

Abbott, taking on Donald Trump's mantle of "Threat Tweeter" had this to say:

"I will veto Article 10 of the budget passed by the legislature.

Article 10 funds the legislative branch.

No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities.

Stay tuned."

-Gred Abbott. Tweeting. Haltingly.

Oh. Right.

The bill, designed to combat the rampant voter fraud that Donald Trump made up--and why would he lie?--would, among other things, curtail mail in voting, reduce voting hours, and allow partisan poll watchers (and this is Texas, so I'm guessing armed partisan poll watchers) to get right up in voters faces. Well, ok, it just says they can get close and only as long as they take an oath not harass voters. And if there's one thing I definitely trust Republicans to do, it's not try and interfere with the democratic process.

But am I being too harsh when I call Greg Abbott a piece of shit? Am I the jerk here? I don't think so. I mean, he's the one threatening to withhold people's pay. And I'm pretty sure the House Democrats were fulfilling their responsibilities by not letting the Republicans get away with this nonsense. So I say again, Greg Abbott: what a piece of shit.

"One way or another we're going to pass this SB 7 and finally put an end to the
zero cases of voter fraud that happen every never. Sure, opponents say it could
disenfranchise millions of Democratic voters, but that's a price we're willing to pay."

-Greg Abbott, noted piece of shit