Older posts. I maintain the right to disavow any opinion I previously held. Because hey, people change.
Thinking Machine
Some weeks ago I heard an ad on the radio where the host was lamenting how some of the questions that toddlers ask are hard to answer — particularly those dreaded whys. Why does this do that, why is the sky blue, why do cars move, so on and so forth. The solution put forth by this ad was a toy powered by a large language model that would talk with your kid and answer those questions for you.…
Faith Movie
Nearly fourteen years ago, when this blog was young (in fact, it might have been before I even bought the URL), I wrote a post on ‘Christian’ movies and how most of them were terrible when they really don’t have to be. It’s been over a decade and it feels written by a different person —as do many older essays, facebook posts, and emails. But I’d be remiss if I said the core point didn’t still work: so many…
Projecting
The newest installment in Rian Johnson’s murder mystery series, Wake Up Dead Man, is out this week in a super limited release. Its predecessor, Glass Onion, was, likewise, only in theaters for a week on account of Netflix wanting to get their movie on streaming quick as possible. Unfortunately, Dead Man’s release coincides with Thanksgiving, making it a hectic time to get to the cinema. In any case, I’ve got tickets to see it tomorrow, so all is well.…
Over It
The thing about a lot of games is that you’ve gotta be able to progress. The goal of Civilization is to dominate the world. In Metal Gear Solid you’ve gotta stop the terrorists from being able to nuke the world. In Shopping Cart Hero you’re doing sick stunts and the sicker the stunts the more upgrades you can give your cart. Along the way you get better, you improve, you win. The goal of Getting Over It With Bennet…
Out And About
No post today, on account of being away this weekend. So this is a post of pictures instead.
A New Story
I was fortunate enough to call New York home for many years and it truly is no hyperbole to say that the city is someplace special. To my immense joy, on Tuesday the city elected a new mayor — one who sees the city much the same way I do, a place where anyone can belong even if they don’t fit into a particular box. Zohran Mamdani, mayor-elect of New York, New York, spoke of a city I wanted…
Board Game Feel
I was excited but skeptical when I first heard about a board game based on Mass Effect. I love board games, I love Mass Effect, but tying the two together seemed a risky endeavor. Board games have a lot to do with their theme — that is, the flavor that surrounds the base mechanics. Monopoly is themed around a lousy simulacrum of rampant capitalism. Pandemic has you trying to stem the tide of rampant disease, Ticket To Ride is…
Dancing About Architecture
Music is something I don’t write about often here mostly because it is something I find really difficult to write about. Which is a shame, because I love music; I just don’t really, well, know what it is. I can talk about video games and game feel and player agency and I can talk about how movies use editing and camerawork to enhance a mood, but music? I don’t know what a measure is, 4/4 time is a novel…
Dave of All Trades
Dave The Diver is ostensibly a game where you dive for fish by day and sell sushi of your catch by night. There’s a light restaurant management sim thrown in there to support the selling of said sushi, and a fish farm to, uh, farm fish for the restaurant. There’s also a basic farming sim — ala Harvest Moon — to grow ingredients. Dave The Diver is also a game with merpeople, a game with seahorse racing, a game…
Go Home, Google
Not much of an essay or a rant this week for various reasons, but rather a quick observation that, wow, Google search has gotten real bad. Like, I can vaguely see how the connection can be made. Forsaken did see the guardian go rogue (renegade, if you will) and had a bit of a Western frontier vibe to it and the Renegades expansion is slated to be explicitly Star Wars inspired, y’know, that space adventure with a Western frontier…
Future Tense
I knew Leigh Brackett as the writer of the first draft of Empire Strikes Back. It was only when I came across an old copy of The Long Tomorrow at a used bookstore that I learned she was a prolific science fiction author as well. The Long Tomorrow is a fascinating read—I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a work of fiction with this many Mennonites, let alone with them as the main characters—and also apparently an outlier from the…
Things Going Wrong
I had a plan in Death Stranding 2. I cleared out a bandit camp then left my truck there while I ran a couple errands nearby. While on those errands I was informed that my truck had been stolen. This threw a wrench in my plans, but nothing insurmountable. So I finished up that errand (picking up some cargo) and headed back to the camp to liberate my truck — Grabby, so named for the pair of sticky cannons…
Open-Ended
After taking my time and enjoying it, I finished Death Stranding 2: On The Beach last weekend. At least the main story of it, I still want to finish a few orders and max out my connection with everyone — but the main part of the game is done. And man, is it excellent. Despite the plot being a little shaggier than the first one, it’s still a moving adventure with a lack of subtext that somehow comes full…
Pokémon Go On A Walk
The year is 2025 and, nine years later, I’m one of the people still playing Pokémon Go. The world has changed since the game came out in the heady summer of 2016. Technology no longer seems to have as optimistic a future as it once did. A worldwide pandemic saw us retreat from each other and shelter in place (only for those efforts to be undone in the United States by a baffling vendetta against public health). I moved…
The Myth of Vegas
I am not a fan of Las Vegas. I passed through it a few years ago and was, well, unimpressed. The Strip struck me as oddly artificial, like a simulacrum of a city like New York. A recreation in a controlled environment without the perceived dangers of a real city, where a visitor doesn’t need to worry about businesses that don’t cater to them and are surrounded by familiar chain restaurants and brands. It is Disneyland but for adults;…
Out of Office (Again)
These are the last weeks of Summer. Or at least, I think they are — an equatorial childhood makes the exact demarcations of the seasons a little fuzzy at best. Anyway, Summer, in my experience, is a little hectic and busy (in addition to, in some places, being unbearably hot). Accordingly, I find myself away from home this weekend and attending a wedding. Instead of spending my days off putting some hours into Death Stranding, I’m spending time Outdoors…
Superhope
Superman feels like an idealistic fantasy born out of a simpler time. A space alien with powers beyond belief grows up on Earth a humble man and chooses to use his powers to help and save humanity instead of conquering or ruling us. Adapting that unbridled optimism for a modern audience outside the bounds of comic books feels naive; we know a hundred times over that power corrupt. An all-powerful being who chooses to act with selfless humility and…
Casual Gamer
Haven’t had much time today to sit at my computer and work on a blog post, been otherwise occupied. I did carve out a bit of time to check out the beta for Battlefield 6, the latest game in that long-running military shooter. It’s, well, it’s fun enough. The game delivers on the premise of the chaos of warfare: I ran towards the objective, a jet roared overhead, a tank blew up the building near me, and I got…
Buying Music Online
Bandcamp Friday was yesterday and I, in accordance with my nature, bought a whole bunch of new music. I’ve taken a real shine to Bandcamp over the last few years, probably because so many other ways of buying music has gotten worse. Spotify’s ascendency has been enshrined: streaming music is the norm — the idea of ripping a CD or buying MP3s now positively archaic. iTunes, the erstwhile standard, has become Apple Music and its focus now on catching…
Why Blog?
I’ve been keeping this blog for over a decade now, posting something I’ve written most every week. Over those years, blogs have faded from prominence on the internet — the steady pivot to video that was already taking place a decade ago has firmly ensconced with video essays and whatever it is that’s raging on TikTok’s algorithm. Blogs are quaint, writing isn’t a way to get views or shares. Enter generative AI. Large language models like ChatGPT have burst…
Social Stranding
Sometimes I wonder if social media was a mistake. I say this with my tongue firmly in cheek. Over the years, it’s allowed me to keep up with old friends scattered across the world, sharing pictures and life updates. When Facebook was ascendent, it was a hub where everyone was (for better and worse) that made it so easy to connect with people. Of course, that didn’t last long. Companies needed to make money, ads made money, and people…
Hiking Game
When I was in Arches National Park a couple years ago I hiked a trail without a path. Figuring out the route meant keeping an eye out for cairns and following the footsteps of those who’d gone before — which was easier on the dirt than it was when scrambling along rock formations. The hike became a mild puzzle where I knew where I was trying to go and had to navigate a route towards it. That process of…
Box People
In what feels like a pretty transparent attempt to rile up controversy, the New York Times ran an article yesterday about Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani identifying as ‘African American’ in an application to Columbia University (archive link). There’s a lot to unpack with this article, from the question of the motivation behind running a nearly-1500 word article about a fifteen-year-old application to the primary source of the information being not only leaked, ostensibly private admissions information but one…
Of Ballerina
Ballerina, the new John Wick movie, came out on my birthday and it feels like a movie made just for me. It is, as in the tradition of all the John Wicks, a slick-as-anything action movie with a strong emphasis on cool stunts, staging, and fight choreography. Ballerina also strips away a lot of the lore to get right at the franchise’s ass-kicking heart and instead of Keanu Reaves we now have Ana de Armas as our vengeful fighter.…
Unapologetically Itself
One of the reasons I stopped rating movies on those movie-rating sites is because I kinda stopped caring about the difference between a good movie and a good movie. I don’t know if Commando is a good movie, especially if you compare it to contemporary action movies like Die Hard or The Terminator. But Commando is a great time: it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger hamming it up in a cheesy, over-the-top action movie involving endless one-liners and a ridiculous machismo. Whether…
Remember This: Try
No post today due to being busy today with Other Things. If you’re in the mood to read something then, for no reason at all, I suggest checking out this post on Andor and revolutionaries. Just seems the sort of day for it.
But The Story
I finally checked out Hotline Miami (and its sequel) after buying it on Steam nine years ago. And, who’d have guessed, the game that came highly recommended to me way back when is really good! It’s a hyper-violent, top-down twin-stick shooter that rewards bold strategies and improvisation as the player shoots, punches, and clobbers their way through various levels where one wrong move quite literally means death and a restart. The result is a tight, fraught game that harkens…
What’s Next?
Ever since the second season of Andor wrapped up a couple weeks ago the show has been stuck in my head; every now and then I think about it and how just so very good it is. Andor feels like a singular work in the movies and TV of Star Wars. It zeroes in on the undercurrent of political tension that’s been present since A New Hope and foregrounds it, unpacking all the themes of Empire and Rebellion into…
Yosemite
I’m spending the long weekend in Yosemite National Park. Since half the fun of living in Southern California is being able to drive out to National Parks on weekends like these. Nothing pithy or meditative to say, just that the park is gorgeous and that the National Park Service is easily in my top-two US Government Agencies (the other one is the Postal Service).
Flavors of Star Wars
The original Star Wars is a weird movie. You’ve got a pair of silly robots bumbling about a desert and a young man finding the charred remains of his caretakers. An old man and a half-robot man fight with laser swords until the old man disappears. A farmboy flying a fighter jet uses space-magic to aim a missile that destroys a planet-destroying weapon. There’s a lot going on and yet somehow it works. That flexibility of Star Wars permeated…
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Essays, Not Rants! 