In the article to which I allude in the title I made certain comparisons to Rage Against the Machine - the high energy, non-mainstream yet mainstream, politically and emotionally charged with the caveat that Death Grips does not give a damn about anything approaching meaning or protest. Their protest is of sanity, an interesting type of protest in a world that's arguably getting more insane by the year, where it would no longer matter if, say, most of its inhabitants were exterminated (by their own complicity, appetite for violence, and indifference) in some kind of terrifying schizophrenic drug apocalypse. In a sense the apocalyptic vision is much more compelling to the apathetic drop-outs of the post 90s than 'fighting the man' since that fight doesn't seem fair or winnable, especially when its old champions were themselves arguably under the thumb of the same corporate America they claimed to despise.
But I digress. In the post I didn't write so much about my personal approach to Death Grip's music, which I felt had to be remedied in an addendum. I do so not only because the other post got a decent amount of hits (which is rare for me), but that I didn't examine the music so well, and I have always had contrasting opinions on it. It was incredibly interesting in 2012, and kind of dicked around with half-baked albums and moments of glory since then.
On the one hand there is something laughable in the balls-to-walls insanity of any Death Grips album. MC Ride screams unintelligible lyrics with the odd half-yelled statement (some of which hints at greatness, most of which was too cringey for non-headphone listening) while on the other hand the track parallels his delivery with high energy percussion, warped samples and effects, and breakneck pace and, at its best, compelling inventiveness. On Exmilitary (in my opinion their most interesting album) the energy was pushed as far as it could be and the very good use of a sample ('Rumble', a song with an interesting history which was clearly being channeled for a purpose) really caught my attention. I loved the production because it was insane and very intriguing with samples and effects and at their best the lyrics matched that.
So I got the instrumental version of Exmilitary (then titled: Black Google) and finally I got to listen to the production and was very enamored of it. 'Spread Eagle Cross the Block' was the song that first really caught my attention but, for me, the lyrics only rarely improved it - stripping out the insane vocals made it easier to admire the production. Since that time I've loosely followed the band and they've had a couple of good moments where lyrics and production were briefly perfectly in sync, but by and large I've been disappointed. The instrumental album Fashion Week brought me in to take a closer listen but failed to hold any attention. It was interesting and at times pretty good but lengthy and kind of derivative and exhausting to listen to, especially as it seemed to confirm my view of the band as one that worked simply because it was a mainstream breakthrough for more aggressive sounds in a time just before bigger acts broke the seal.
It's hard for me to keep caring about most groups and artists if they release the same album a dozen times and disband (Linkin Park with their eternal cycle of remixes, late Wu Tang where its importance was only because it was Wu Tang and we were empathetic to their plight of never releasing a relevant album again, RATM which I loved when I was young and now find kind of funny [though the ROCK is still primo], and so forth). I will keep listening if I like the original idea enough that it doesn't bore me later on (Drum and Bass when I was younger, chamber pop like Prefab Sprout now) or that is flawlessly executed or completed by its flaws. Most of the time I am not overwhelmed, which is why I've always been on the skeptical side regarding Death Grips. Being transgressive, outrageous, and loud has value but kinda pales if used to ring the same note time and time again. Eh.
Then I chanced upon Interview 2016, which is all instrumental, way more focused than Fashion Week, and actually piqued my interest again. On first listen it was lively, a bit chaotic, but controlled enough to remain coherent enough to demand a second listen (and be pleasurable to the ear). And so, I suppose, my final judgment is that it's alright, what do I know? Basically nothing. I'm a sloppy blogger and Death Grips has at least ten thousand fans and probably they make a good amount of money and get to play big shows and fuck around with the media by releasing free albums and making incredibly dense aggressive music as a counterpoint to mainstream, sort-of-depressing, flaccid shit like new Kanye and even new Chance where twelve years of gospel stylings and samplings are recycled into deep nonsense that is praised for reasons I will never comprehend. I can't go on in this wasteland without making people angry at me, and that querulousness is why it doesn't matter how I feel, but I'll be damned if I won't write something after all this silence.
Showing posts with label consumerism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consumerism. Show all posts
4/12/16
Steam Marketplace and Authenticator: The End of Fast Steambucks
In the past, I had written a little about the decline of the Steam Sale as related (at least in part) to the availability of 'free money' (more of a working discount system) via the Steam Marketplace, where users of the service could sell digital tchotchkes for pennies or dollars (as market forces would dictate). Very low-priced games stopped appearing in sales, prizes stopped appearing, and discounts became pretty shallow, predictable, and unexciting. The high point of the 2011 Christmas Sale would never again be seen, and the blame is mostly on predatory users that couldn't leave a nice thing alone without trying to break it. This attitude, unsurprisingly, caused a lot of problems in the marketplace. Time passed. Inundated with security breaches, lost accounts, trading skullduggery, and service tickets, Valve decided to make their product's product marketplace more secure. Ok...
But it's so god damn annoying. Let me explain. I'll do my best. In the old days of Steam Marketplace, you logged into the service, checked your inventory, and listed an item at a value you set, and it was instantly put up for trade. If your price was a bit lower than the average asking price a bot would buy it almost as soon as you listed it, you would have your 6 cents or 15 cents or 10 dollars. You could trade immediately and use the money immediately - good for making quick money for a sale item when you didn't want to use your credit card. It was pretty simple. It worked. And I made almost a dozen dollars from it, which I used to buy several games, and I liked it. I didn't use it often, but every now and then I checked into the marketplace, and if I saw a good margin on an item I would sell it, and during sales I would buy a cheap game, get the cards, and make a tidy 1 cent profit or whatever, and realized that it didn't matter much. Basically the scheme worked because the gains made from trading went into your Steam Wallet as actual currency. I like to call it Steambucks. [ I have used Steam for nearly 12 years and I have never put actual money into my Steam Wallet, because that's so insane that I can't understand why someone would do it. It's essentially a feature to give money to your kids, because no other sane person would take real money and let it sit on Steam. The crux of this problem is because accounts with Fat Steam Wallets were getting ganked like crazy. ]
As anybody who has even a remote understanding of the internet will understand: this simple and effective system turned into a huge problem and led to many unfortunate people getting ripped off and targeted by scammers and the whole fucking thing became such a nightmare for Valve that they introduced a phone app and multiple layers of security so that people would stop bothering them and stop (Valve hoped) being so goddamn stupid. Well that was all fine and good. You could use the mobile app or not, and trading went on as usual for a while.
The whole thing came to a head earlier this week? Last week? I don't trade much, but sometime in the last two months it became essentially mandatory to use the Steam Mobile App to authenticate the trade or else suffer a 15 day hold on any item you list. Plus you get boned if you delist an item (which you want to do if the market surges or collapses in order to get your value for it) by having your trading account frozen. All of this is because of hacked accounts and all of those are because people with little to no knowledge of the internet, computing, and basic online security got phished, scammed, and hacked and lost all their precious internet shit. Oh, and people who complained about legitimate trades and demanded returns. So much for the marketplace, and therefore Steambucks. I get it, Valve, but I want to belong to a different tier of uses: the ones who don't fuck up and who never gave you a problem, who didn't expect the world, and just wanted things to stay mostly the same.
The whole thing is dumb anyway, and it's more of an annoyance than anything, but the userbase has been up in arms about it. Pro and contra camps have created a 2000 page thread in the Steam discussions forums that is filled with seething rage and skunk-like defensiveness. Smells like millennial spirit. It's true that downloading one free app is a not a vast and cruel cost, in order to have normal access to your free money. It's true that Valve HAD to do something to protect the credulous and simpleminded and give pause to the over complaining elements of their userbase. Steam users got the solution they deserved. It still rankles me a bit.
I hate apps, and I hate having to register for additional services on top of a service that used to work. I hate having to verify a million things through email, too – it's not just apps. I also hate having to jump through hoops, and I hate when a simple and effective thing that works gets screwed up by people who are predatory and the people who always fall for shenanigans. I hate 'security features' because I keep my computing simple and anonymous for a reason - to be unnoticed, to go unmolested, and to not be bothered or have to bother anyone else. Simple. Never got hacked. I hated two factor security when Blizzard did it for their notoriously noobish, unworldly, immature, and credulous WoW userbase (the cutesy security video forced on everyone as the security features spilled over brought me to the realization that the company I had grown up with had been functionally dead for a while) and seeing Steam go the same way is just depressing. And so very, very annoying, and so very rigidly authoritarian.
Therefore, being forced to wait two weeks to sell an item I used to sell just as safely in two seconds, on a service where I've never caused problems or suffered them, is kind of a kick in the teeth. I used Steam for 12 years and never got hijacked. I never used the Steam Wallet because any sane and reasonable person saw that keeping 'real' money in it was a bad idea and did nothing to make purchases easier or safer. Now the whole thing is getting so complex that even I, a most casual and disengaged user, am actually slightly worried. I mean I knew that Valve could legally shut down and completely deny me any access to the products I've bought through Steam, but I never thought they'd become the type of company that would even think about the possibility. In a sense all these restrictions and half-steps and annoyances are a sign that Valve is being serious and trying its best, but I don't know. It doesn't put my mind at ease either. So I guess I'm selling everything in two weeks, taking the money, and forgetting that Steambucks were ever a thing. Goodbye to an OK era.
Well, Valve is allowed to protect itself from legal action and the Steambucks belonged to them from the start, so it's their call. It's just very disappointing to see it happen like this. Every company is trying so hard to get my phone number or sell me extra apps these days, and I sit here waiting until the day Facebook defriends me for not giving it up (or Google, etc) but Valve is my videogame dealer, and I thought we had an understanding that this was a no-phone arrangement, casual but secure, and that was the strength of it. The internet ruins all things, yea, even itself, and that is known and has been known...
... but still. Damn. Shaking my damn head... it seems there is nowhere to hide, and that indifference is the only thing separating me from insanity. But it seems even I am not immune to writing about the thing and responding to it. It's just another case of dumb people getting fucked by bad people, with the majority caught in the middle wondering sadly why these things never change, why you can't protect the digital dumbasses from the hard knocks everyone has to take. The whole thing is stupid, and it's stupid of me to step into it, but the annoyance and disgust need a way out. Thank you for reading, and good luck.
But it's so god damn annoying. Let me explain. I'll do my best. In the old days of Steam Marketplace, you logged into the service, checked your inventory, and listed an item at a value you set, and it was instantly put up for trade. If your price was a bit lower than the average asking price a bot would buy it almost as soon as you listed it, you would have your 6 cents or 15 cents or 10 dollars. You could trade immediately and use the money immediately - good for making quick money for a sale item when you didn't want to use your credit card. It was pretty simple. It worked. And I made almost a dozen dollars from it, which I used to buy several games, and I liked it. I didn't use it often, but every now and then I checked into the marketplace, and if I saw a good margin on an item I would sell it, and during sales I would buy a cheap game, get the cards, and make a tidy 1 cent profit or whatever, and realized that it didn't matter much. Basically the scheme worked because the gains made from trading went into your Steam Wallet as actual currency. I like to call it Steambucks. [ I have used Steam for nearly 12 years and I have never put actual money into my Steam Wallet, because that's so insane that I can't understand why someone would do it. It's essentially a feature to give money to your kids, because no other sane person would take real money and let it sit on Steam. The crux of this problem is because accounts with Fat Steam Wallets were getting ganked like crazy. ]
As anybody who has even a remote understanding of the internet will understand: this simple and effective system turned into a huge problem and led to many unfortunate people getting ripped off and targeted by scammers and the whole fucking thing became such a nightmare for Valve that they introduced a phone app and multiple layers of security so that people would stop bothering them and stop (Valve hoped) being so goddamn stupid. Well that was all fine and good. You could use the mobile app or not, and trading went on as usual for a while.
The whole thing came to a head earlier this week? Last week? I don't trade much, but sometime in the last two months it became essentially mandatory to use the Steam Mobile App to authenticate the trade or else suffer a 15 day hold on any item you list. Plus you get boned if you delist an item (which you want to do if the market surges or collapses in order to get your value for it) by having your trading account frozen. All of this is because of hacked accounts and all of those are because people with little to no knowledge of the internet, computing, and basic online security got phished, scammed, and hacked and lost all their precious internet shit. Oh, and people who complained about legitimate trades and demanded returns. So much for the marketplace, and therefore Steambucks. I get it, Valve, but I want to belong to a different tier of uses: the ones who don't fuck up and who never gave you a problem, who didn't expect the world, and just wanted things to stay mostly the same.
The whole thing is dumb anyway, and it's more of an annoyance than anything, but the userbase has been up in arms about it. Pro and contra camps have created a 2000 page thread in the Steam discussions forums that is filled with seething rage and skunk-like defensiveness. Smells like millennial spirit. It's true that downloading one free app is a not a vast and cruel cost, in order to have normal access to your free money. It's true that Valve HAD to do something to protect the credulous and simpleminded and give pause to the over complaining elements of their userbase. Steam users got the solution they deserved. It still rankles me a bit.
I hate apps, and I hate having to register for additional services on top of a service that used to work. I hate having to verify a million things through email, too – it's not just apps. I also hate having to jump through hoops, and I hate when a simple and effective thing that works gets screwed up by people who are predatory and the people who always fall for shenanigans. I hate 'security features' because I keep my computing simple and anonymous for a reason - to be unnoticed, to go unmolested, and to not be bothered or have to bother anyone else. Simple. Never got hacked. I hated two factor security when Blizzard did it for their notoriously noobish, unworldly, immature, and credulous WoW userbase (the cutesy security video forced on everyone as the security features spilled over brought me to the realization that the company I had grown up with had been functionally dead for a while) and seeing Steam go the same way is just depressing. And so very, very annoying, and so very rigidly authoritarian.
Therefore, being forced to wait two weeks to sell an item I used to sell just as safely in two seconds, on a service where I've never caused problems or suffered them, is kind of a kick in the teeth. I used Steam for 12 years and never got hijacked. I never used the Steam Wallet because any sane and reasonable person saw that keeping 'real' money in it was a bad idea and did nothing to make purchases easier or safer. Now the whole thing is getting so complex that even I, a most casual and disengaged user, am actually slightly worried. I mean I knew that Valve could legally shut down and completely deny me any access to the products I've bought through Steam, but I never thought they'd become the type of company that would even think about the possibility. In a sense all these restrictions and half-steps and annoyances are a sign that Valve is being serious and trying its best, but I don't know. It doesn't put my mind at ease either. So I guess I'm selling everything in two weeks, taking the money, and forgetting that Steambucks were ever a thing. Goodbye to an OK era.
Well, Valve is allowed to protect itself from legal action and the Steambucks belonged to them from the start, so it's their call. It's just very disappointing to see it happen like this. Every company is trying so hard to get my phone number or sell me extra apps these days, and I sit here waiting until the day Facebook defriends me for not giving it up (or Google, etc) but Valve is my videogame dealer, and I thought we had an understanding that this was a no-phone arrangement, casual but secure, and that was the strength of it. The internet ruins all things, yea, even itself, and that is known and has been known...
... but still. Damn. Shaking my damn head... it seems there is nowhere to hide, and that indifference is the only thing separating me from insanity. But it seems even I am not immune to writing about the thing and responding to it. It's just another case of dumb people getting fucked by bad people, with the majority caught in the middle wondering sadly why these things never change, why you can't protect the digital dumbasses from the hard knocks everyone has to take. The whole thing is stupid, and it's stupid of me to step into it, but the annoyance and disgust need a way out. Thank you for reading, and good luck.
1/28/15
Let's Talk About Mental Health, But Let's Not Say Anything Meaningful About It
End the stigma. End the persecution. End the long decades of rotting lives at the bottom being forgotten and ignored. But whatever you do, don't point out how mental health has been adversely affected by the modern world, because that's where we make our profits. Let's not stigmatize the status-obsessesed, the oversharers, the internet addicts, sociopaths, borderline sociopaths, the narcissists, the identity fetishists... in short let's just change the perception by stating that it's not the ill person's fault they're ill, and give them a modicum of respect, and continue on our deranged way. Some day we'll all be mentally ill, if we aren't already.
So let's have a mental health awareness month, a couple corporate-backed mental health awareness movements every year, some nice infographics, some nice ads, some good progressive and compassionate copy. Let's take some real steps, let's end the crisis before it gets worse, or at least make a pretty big deal about acknowledging it. Just let's not pry into where it's coming from, or why more people than ever are getting ill. Keep condemning the suicides and the silence. Don't look over there at the causes: that way lies madness.
Poverty, mental illness, illiteracy, substance addiction, lifestyle addiction, non-normative sexuality (itself a freaky frontier that's easy to support especially if you want nothing to do with it but want to appear a progressive and compassionate person), and megatons of other stuff. It's no longer anybody's fault. Those who declare it a function of individual responsibility, as well as those who declare it a function of societal responsibility, are entrenched in ideology. The truth is far simpler than anyone wants to acknowledge: they're all Bad Things. Mental illness is just a Bad Thing, that needs Attention, and requires Awareness. The problem is that mental illness not photogenic. It doesn't respond well to attention. It's really, really ugly and it's got deep roots and deeper pockets.
Health in general in decline. Increased incidences of diseases of affluence, first world problems like anxiety, a weakening breed finding new ways to pity itself. Dementia rears its ugly head. Cancer from years of worry-free high-living catching up to us. The natural, polluted world with its natural conclusions. Let's keep consuming so the economy doesn't falter. Let's not ask questions. Let's never wake up from our nightmare as it gets darker and darker.
People are less mindful than ever. Overconnected to everything via the internet. Bombarded with images of opulence and excess that they will never know, for which they are programmed to have an insatiable lust. Lost in meaninglessness, with false meaningfulness leading them astray. Conditioned to worship at the altar of Mammon. Real vs. VR. Terrorism vs War. Inequality is Solved. Internet sickness. Quality of Life. 12 Steps to a Better You. Fired by Text Message. 10 Cute Cats That Will Cure Your Blues. The Babylon System is winning, the world is changing, nobody seems to give a shit. Money rules everything, people with money call the shots, and most people believe their half-truths. Meanwhile a million unchecked distractions clamor for everyone's attention, and the individual (despite the hype of optimists) has never felt so insignificant in a world of Social Networks, Big Ideas, and Batshit Maniacs. There's no fucking respect, I'll tell ya.
In my opinion it's no mystery why people are getting all fucked up and sick. They can't police their own thoughts, they can't control their government and corporate sanctioned addictions to legal substances and activities, they can't escape without losing their future. People are generally more separated by technology than they are brought together by it. A whole generation is living a shitty, loveless, poor existence wrought by their elders and blamed on them – and I'm sure they'll turn out fine and well-adjusted despite this, but they take a sickening amount of shit from a world so unfair it's parodic. Suicides everywhere... a sinking quality of life, urban hellscapes, the decline of the natural world and a bunch of insane technofucks claiming we should divorce ourselves further from our roots, as if our current divergence isn't at least partly at fault for the insane clusterfuck we've wandered into. Jargon rules the day, but it never saved one life.
And the isolation. Alone in a sea of identity, tired of the cult of identity, feeling like nobody and nothing and stumbling through a life ruled by the pleasures of others and the whims of the greedy, powerful, and detached. Faces are masks, genuine humanity is in decline and retreating to the quiet places. Hope is dying along with mental healthiness. There is nobody to talk to, but everyone wants to speak out about how it isn't shameful to be mentally ill. Of course not, but the cure isn't in reinforcing the status quo, just like how all the cures to all of what ails us as a species are not in keeping things comfortably similar to 'how it is'. We don't want to look into what's harming us, like the obstinate addicts we are. Maybe things seem worse than they are, maybe I'm a shitty blogger and an alarmist, but things're bad enough and breeding vast populations of stunted narcissistic sociopaths incapable of human emotion or connection – populations in all age groups, not just the young tech-savvy millenials who already have tons of opprobrium piled onto them coupled with an increasingly grim outlook.
The world is increasingly soulless and irreal. Appearances have replaced qualities. Abandon all hope, because nobody gives a shit anymore. The pressure to succeed can only be met by dishonesty and combativeness, the competition is severe, the world is at the edge. Don't ask any questions. Don't step out of line. Don't live - exist. Just repost the memes, make those donations happen, and keep ignoring the people you know who are sinking, the people you pass on the street who are already sunk... keep your eyes on the newsfeed. Let the internet do the good works for you. This is the least self-aware era and it needs to be ripped violently in half by a comprehensive, blood-thirsty, no-prisoners satire before we destroy everything of value and premise our future on misery, ignorance, and disgust. The time to wake up is fast approaching, and a world of comatose automatons will greet it with indifference.
So let's have a mental health awareness month, a couple corporate-backed mental health awareness movements every year, some nice infographics, some nice ads, some good progressive and compassionate copy. Let's take some real steps, let's end the crisis before it gets worse, or at least make a pretty big deal about acknowledging it. Just let's not pry into where it's coming from, or why more people than ever are getting ill. Keep condemning the suicides and the silence. Don't look over there at the causes: that way lies madness.
Poverty, mental illness, illiteracy, substance addiction, lifestyle addiction, non-normative sexuality (itself a freaky frontier that's easy to support especially if you want nothing to do with it but want to appear a progressive and compassionate person), and megatons of other stuff. It's no longer anybody's fault. Those who declare it a function of individual responsibility, as well as those who declare it a function of societal responsibility, are entrenched in ideology. The truth is far simpler than anyone wants to acknowledge: they're all Bad Things. Mental illness is just a Bad Thing, that needs Attention, and requires Awareness. The problem is that mental illness not photogenic. It doesn't respond well to attention. It's really, really ugly and it's got deep roots and deeper pockets.
Health in general in decline. Increased incidences of diseases of affluence, first world problems like anxiety, a weakening breed finding new ways to pity itself. Dementia rears its ugly head. Cancer from years of worry-free high-living catching up to us. The natural, polluted world with its natural conclusions. Let's keep consuming so the economy doesn't falter. Let's not ask questions. Let's never wake up from our nightmare as it gets darker and darker.
People are less mindful than ever. Overconnected to everything via the internet. Bombarded with images of opulence and excess that they will never know, for which they are programmed to have an insatiable lust. Lost in meaninglessness, with false meaningfulness leading them astray. Conditioned to worship at the altar of Mammon. Real vs. VR. Terrorism vs War. Inequality is Solved. Internet sickness. Quality of Life. 12 Steps to a Better You. Fired by Text Message. 10 Cute Cats That Will Cure Your Blues. The Babylon System is winning, the world is changing, nobody seems to give a shit. Money rules everything, people with money call the shots, and most people believe their half-truths. Meanwhile a million unchecked distractions clamor for everyone's attention, and the individual (despite the hype of optimists) has never felt so insignificant in a world of Social Networks, Big Ideas, and Batshit Maniacs. There's no fucking respect, I'll tell ya.
In my opinion it's no mystery why people are getting all fucked up and sick. They can't police their own thoughts, they can't control their government and corporate sanctioned addictions to legal substances and activities, they can't escape without losing their future. People are generally more separated by technology than they are brought together by it. A whole generation is living a shitty, loveless, poor existence wrought by their elders and blamed on them – and I'm sure they'll turn out fine and well-adjusted despite this, but they take a sickening amount of shit from a world so unfair it's parodic. Suicides everywhere... a sinking quality of life, urban hellscapes, the decline of the natural world and a bunch of insane technofucks claiming we should divorce ourselves further from our roots, as if our current divergence isn't at least partly at fault for the insane clusterfuck we've wandered into. Jargon rules the day, but it never saved one life.
And the isolation. Alone in a sea of identity, tired of the cult of identity, feeling like nobody and nothing and stumbling through a life ruled by the pleasures of others and the whims of the greedy, powerful, and detached. Faces are masks, genuine humanity is in decline and retreating to the quiet places. Hope is dying along with mental healthiness. There is nobody to talk to, but everyone wants to speak out about how it isn't shameful to be mentally ill. Of course not, but the cure isn't in reinforcing the status quo, just like how all the cures to all of what ails us as a species are not in keeping things comfortably similar to 'how it is'. We don't want to look into what's harming us, like the obstinate addicts we are. Maybe things seem worse than they are, maybe I'm a shitty blogger and an alarmist, but things're bad enough and breeding vast populations of stunted narcissistic sociopaths incapable of human emotion or connection – populations in all age groups, not just the young tech-savvy millenials who already have tons of opprobrium piled onto them coupled with an increasingly grim outlook.
The world is increasingly soulless and irreal. Appearances have replaced qualities. Abandon all hope, because nobody gives a shit anymore. The pressure to succeed can only be met by dishonesty and combativeness, the competition is severe, the world is at the edge. Don't ask any questions. Don't step out of line. Don't live - exist. Just repost the memes, make those donations happen, and keep ignoring the people you know who are sinking, the people you pass on the street who are already sunk... keep your eyes on the newsfeed. Let the internet do the good works for you. This is the least self-aware era and it needs to be ripped violently in half by a comprehensive, blood-thirsty, no-prisoners satire before we destroy everything of value and premise our future on misery, ignorance, and disgust. The time to wake up is fast approaching, and a world of comatose automatons will greet it with indifference.
10/6/14
What the Rich Know that You Don't
You have to be rich to 'get' rich, if you know what I'm saying, and if you don't, you're probably a poor person. Here's some tips and ideas to get you started on becoming rich, because there is definitely enough for everyone on earth to be super annoyingly wastefully wealthy, and anyone telling you otherwise is a communist or loser.
How they're different from you: They're different, in qualitative ways, from people who are not wealthy, such as the middle class. Why is this? Read the linked article and get back. I can wait... So the point is obviously that the rich are simply a different breed, not plagued by the fear and uncertainty and the mentally-sapping contretemps of poverty.
You see, the world is actually quite fair if you're rich, so you can afford to make big gambles, wake up every day feeling confident, and do things that would make lesser mortals quiver with poverty-related fear and incompetence. It's not a function of exceptionalism written by a wanker kiss-ass, the article is trying to help you understand that you're poor because you're not as good.
They're different, end of story. The naysayers are a bunch of anxious and impecunious babies who like having their hands held by oversized governments and loudmouth hippies. Some day, hopefully, private security armies will give them what-for, and they'll realize they have to work and strive to be wealthy, and not spend their money frivolously.
Join the Culture: Do your time, immerse yourself in the culture, and be prepared to fight for your profits. Before long you'll be salivating at the announcement of layoffs and mergers, certain that the money being gouged out of the wealth of your country (nationalism is an outdated concept that only the middle class poor believe in) will end up in your bank account, ready to be moved offshore as soon as Big Brother turns his back. Information is your best ally, and you want the RIGHT information.
The mentality of fear is one that belongs to the underclasses, anyway. When you've got a yacht more than 60 feet long and a helicopter, do you really think some schmuck in a Corolla is going to be able to touch you? Not unless you get your town car snared in midtown traffic, and unless a big account is at stake, you shouldn't be there to begin with.
Do Your Research: You gotta help yourself first. You gotta understand certain things that poor people just don't seem to get, even after multiple applications of crippling poverty, minimal prospects, and curative destitution. Imagining that the cards are stacked against you is a fearful response not worthy of those worthy of riches. Seriously, if people just stopped being lazy and afraid, everyone could be wealthy. It's astoundingly simple and there are lots of books about it that were not written by snake-oil salesmen.
But, hey, you'll probably just sit there on the couch feeling sorry for yourself and imagining there's a certain way the world's run where decent living conditions are magically withheld from %80+ of all of humanity. Okay there, you red marxist fuck, why don't you go post on Tumblr about the %1 being a bunch of pathological parasites. See where that gets you, while the smart get going on a fantastic journey to wealth, power, and respect.
How they're different from you: They're different, in qualitative ways, from people who are not wealthy, such as the middle class. Why is this? Read the linked article and get back. I can wait... So the point is obviously that the rich are simply a different breed, not plagued by the fear and uncertainty and the mentally-sapping contretemps of poverty.
You see, the world is actually quite fair if you're rich, so you can afford to make big gambles, wake up every day feeling confident, and do things that would make lesser mortals quiver with poverty-related fear and incompetence. It's not a function of exceptionalism written by a wanker kiss-ass, the article is trying to help you understand that you're poor because you're not as good.
They're different, end of story. The naysayers are a bunch of anxious and impecunious babies who like having their hands held by oversized governments and loudmouth hippies. Some day, hopefully, private security armies will give them what-for, and they'll realize they have to work and strive to be wealthy, and not spend their money frivolously.
Join the Culture: Do your time, immerse yourself in the culture, and be prepared to fight for your profits. Before long you'll be salivating at the announcement of layoffs and mergers, certain that the money being gouged out of the wealth of your country (nationalism is an outdated concept that only the middle class poor believe in) will end up in your bank account, ready to be moved offshore as soon as Big Brother turns his back. Information is your best ally, and you want the RIGHT information.
The mentality of fear is one that belongs to the underclasses, anyway. When you've got a yacht more than 60 feet long and a helicopter, do you really think some schmuck in a Corolla is going to be able to touch you? Not unless you get your town car snared in midtown traffic, and unless a big account is at stake, you shouldn't be there to begin with.
Do Your Research: You gotta help yourself first. You gotta understand certain things that poor people just don't seem to get, even after multiple applications of crippling poverty, minimal prospects, and curative destitution. Imagining that the cards are stacked against you is a fearful response not worthy of those worthy of riches. Seriously, if people just stopped being lazy and afraid, everyone could be wealthy. It's astoundingly simple and there are lots of books about it that were not written by snake-oil salesmen.
But, hey, you'll probably just sit there on the couch feeling sorry for yourself and imagining there's a certain way the world's run where decent living conditions are magically withheld from %80+ of all of humanity. Okay there, you red marxist fuck, why don't you go post on Tumblr about the %1 being a bunch of pathological parasites. See where that gets you, while the smart get going on a fantastic journey to wealth, power, and respect.
12/3/13
Is Death Grips this Era's Rage Against the Machine?
[citation needed] Apart from the heightened requirements for being considered legit anti-corporate and the fact that Death Grips isn't that political, it almost seems possible. Time moves in cycles, and it has been a while since there was a Rage Against The Machine-esque group in or near the mainstream, that I know of, but Death Grips seem to be the perfect candidate. Behind the facade, they don't even have coherent words to get an agenda from... actually this whole thing is falling apart: the new Rage would obviously be a New Sincerity band.
However, I get this sense from Death Grips that they're projecting an even bigger identity than what they actually possess. It's like how Rage was part of the 'Che Guevara T-Shirt era' of counterculture, a largely corporate construction referencing or alluding to deep things like a Tibetan monk on fire or how bad racism was. Death Grips is the new counterculture, which may be more legit, but has even less coherence.
As far as I know only Death Grip's tendency to release their albums for free is solidly anti-corporate or at all activist, and they don't really project any leftism or rightism in their lyrics at all. They more exist in a great, drugged out realm where politics can't claim them for its own insidious purpose. The idea that they are not just dudes making music, and instead dudes getting paid a lot to make music for some kind of viral marketing project, is very tempting mostly because I'm a hugely cynical skeptic.
The machine has won. Rage was one of its products and the crowd that used to listen to them sincerely have all moved on, mostly towards being yuppies. Death Grips exists in the absence of hope or progress, an aesthetic the group wallows in, as if to prove there is nothing left – a statement powerful enough to put it on equal footing with the largest, least counterculture countercultural movement of the 1990s.
It all relies on the idea that maybe Death Grips is saying something by screaming incoherently about drugs and paranoia and lust, but I know for a fact the group's listeners do not wear Che Guevara shirts. I have my ideas about their fans, in particular I think a lot of them are anything but as hardcore and mentally unsound as the music suggests, and the music writes a bigger cheque than Rage ever did because it seems to mostly be balls-out insanity.
Note that both groups were signed to Epic Records Co. Death Grips is no longer with them due to self-releasing albums and other rebellious things that Rage never did at all. Rage did manage to get a very comprehensive listing as 'questionable music' in the wake of 9/11, when any actual radical had not listened to them for nearly a decade. Ultimately very idea of counterculture 1990s is either very scary or incredibly laughable so I would put the two groups in different categories at least temporarily. I don't think the distinction would help either band and to be honest I don't think they have anything in common at all.
However: this does not mean that Death Grips is not this era's Rage Against the Machine. Epic Records execs must have seen the same underground/indie/counterculture buzz in both bands in order to want to sign them. Nobody cares that much about either band right now, but Death Grips is alive at least. Death Grips did not get the over-mainstream cool people and instead nabbed the indie nerds who are too cool and self-aware for horrorcore but into something similar, to the eternal chagrin of the Execs, who then dumped DG after finding or making a suitable excuse. I know they were part of the corporate overlords' plans somehow. Just like Rage. More the fools us.[citation needed]
However, I get this sense from Death Grips that they're projecting an even bigger identity than what they actually possess. It's like how Rage was part of the 'Che Guevara T-Shirt era' of counterculture, a largely corporate construction referencing or alluding to deep things like a Tibetan monk on fire or how bad racism was. Death Grips is the new counterculture, which may be more legit, but has even less coherence.
As far as I know only Death Grip's tendency to release their albums for free is solidly anti-corporate or at all activist, and they don't really project any leftism or rightism in their lyrics at all. They more exist in a great, drugged out realm where politics can't claim them for its own insidious purpose. The idea that they are not just dudes making music, and instead dudes getting paid a lot to make music for some kind of viral marketing project, is very tempting mostly because I'm a hugely cynical skeptic.
The machine has won. Rage was one of its products and the crowd that used to listen to them sincerely have all moved on, mostly towards being yuppies. Death Grips exists in the absence of hope or progress, an aesthetic the group wallows in, as if to prove there is nothing left – a statement powerful enough to put it on equal footing with the largest, least counterculture countercultural movement of the 1990s.
It all relies on the idea that maybe Death Grips is saying something by screaming incoherently about drugs and paranoia and lust, but I know for a fact the group's listeners do not wear Che Guevara shirts. I have my ideas about their fans, in particular I think a lot of them are anything but as hardcore and mentally unsound as the music suggests, and the music writes a bigger cheque than Rage ever did because it seems to mostly be balls-out insanity.
Note that both groups were signed to Epic Records Co. Death Grips is no longer with them due to self-releasing albums and other rebellious things that Rage never did at all. Rage did manage to get a very comprehensive listing as 'questionable music' in the wake of 9/11, when any actual radical had not listened to them for nearly a decade. Ultimately very idea of counterculture 1990s is either very scary or incredibly laughable so I would put the two groups in different categories at least temporarily. I don't think the distinction would help either band and to be honest I don't think they have anything in common at all.
However: this does not mean that Death Grips is not this era's Rage Against the Machine. Epic Records execs must have seen the same underground/indie/counterculture buzz in both bands in order to want to sign them. Nobody cares that much about either band right now, but Death Grips is alive at least. Death Grips did not get the over-mainstream cool people and instead nabbed the indie nerds who are too cool and self-aware for horrorcore but into something similar, to the eternal chagrin of the Execs, who then dumped DG after finding or making a suitable excuse. I know they were part of the corporate overlords' plans somehow. Just like Rage. More the fools us.[citation needed]
8/27/13
The Vat-Grown Future
I can understand the recent hullabaloo about vat-grown beef (even though the price of a few grams is tens of thousands of dollars): the current system used to raise and prepare a majority of beef is equal parts cruel and insane. You don't have to have a soft heart to lament the existence of factory farms and feedlots, unless you're the kind of person who pretends to be a total badass (maybe you were molested as a child, I don't know). If you think making animals stand for hours in ankle deep shit or live entire lives in tiny cages is cool you're probably also a psychopath or at least pro-prison sociopath. Vat-grown meat is a step in the right direction, since the idea of feeding the world with naturally-grown protein is getting to be really, really laughable. Still, it's kind of useless as a solution, and favors the armchair-ethicist over the realist: a counterproductive situation 'progressive movements' are often haunted by.
Fisheries are collapsed, hunting is no longer a way of life for the overwhelming majority, and factory farming is a soulless practice of agribusiness that stains the world in unhealthy shit, diseased blood, novel human/animal illnesses, and misery – not to mention fast food and all associated problems. Anyone who says differently is a corporate shill, an unapologetic ecocidal turd, a Scientific OptimistTM , or plainly ignorant. So, basically, the idea of further separating the populace from its food is the only one that wins out, and few people see the problem with it, as long as it prevents the cruel and bloody deaths of cute animals (which are often not that cute and generally die a sterilized, clinical death after a life of perfect, almost middle-class indolence and occasional active cruelty).
Meanwhile, we could source all of our protein, cheaply and very efficiently, from insects. We can still have a good cut of beef or chicken, but insect protein can cover, say, Monday to Thursday, and cheaply. It is a solution that has been staring us in the face since the dawn of time, but at some point our phobias overruled common sense and we stopped eating bugs. Now, in the 11th hour of a crisis hundreds of years in the making, we have once again proven that we can be smart, but never reasonable.
Easy living has eroded any sense of pragmatism we had, and instead of taking matters into our own hands we have pushed food further into the corporate fold and away from our own hands, which we are generally afraid to get dirty. Ethical neutrality is not worth the price, beyond which lies the fact that agribusiness is not going anywhere. Animals will continue to suffer for as long as they are profitable, agriculture will continue to desiccate and toxify the earth and 'pests', as well as anything nearby or downriver. A small cost to pay to ensure nature doesn't get anything intended for ourselves. But we're not selfish, and thinking otherwise is 'not realistic', sorry. Don't think about the dead lakes and rivers, or the dying oceans. Listen to the greenwashing machine and damn well heed how it is telling you not to worry. Or listen to the deafening silence of pop culture, I mean, who gives a fuck?
Then, when the rape of the earth has eliminated the chance of raising edible animals, food will move completely out of the reach of the populace and into the security of corporate production thanks to research potential generated today. Does it amplify the horror enough to know that not only are living creatures processed into competitively-priced foods, but that the process of raising the animal itself can be bypassed? Or is that ethical, to cut out the animal's contribution, while still eating of its flesh? Even the borderline sadistic systems in place today still have a beating heart, and the symbolic act is still committed, even though shrouded by the mystery of NDA contracts and secure facilities. Needless to say, vat-grown appeals to the people who can't stomach the current model. It stinks, though. If GMOs are freaky frankenfoods then Vat-Grown is undead zombiefood. No double standards.
However, that's life as an omnivorous mammal: you sometimes kill to eat. Then, because of a healthy omnivorous diet which includes hunting and foraging activity, you gain the mental acuity and leisure to reflect on the act of killing. You turn it into an art and thrive. Then, twenty thousand or more years later, you get to the point where the idea has been so over-thought, and the act so over politicized and perverted by industry, that it is no longer palatable or acceptable ('unless you stop worrying and start enjoying!'). Since it is the modern world, and a healthy respect for nature is not an option, the only cure remaining is to develop the technique of growing meat in a bloodless, clinical way, so that it dies apart from any animal, so that the vast stocks of commercial livestock can go into the history books and possibly extinction while we grow our mega cities and hoard terabytes of data per second and eat our ethically sourced protein loaves. The only thing better than eating beef once a week, shutting down most fast food outlets, and finding better sources of living protein is to make an undead mockery of flesh in a lab because we're too infantilized to give up our excesses and face the reality of cost and value.
Madness is what it is. The plan seems to be to abolish the cycle of life or at least further commodify it. Plants are living things that we kill all the time, without seeming to care a bit, and we also gorge ourselves on their sex organs, and that's acceptable – but killing a dog to eat is cruel and/or worthy of mockery? Eating ants, roaches, slugs, spiders... any of the bountiful and varied insect species is crazy, absurd? When the oceans are emptied, the air is full of cow farts, and land covered in pig and chicken shit? Farming insects cheaply, each house producing a few dozen pounds a month, each apartment growing a few pounds, plus enriching soil... no that's crazy. It's as crazy as razing the suburbs and growing traditional food there. What we need, obviously, is bloodless, ethical, lab-grown meat – it's never going to play into corporate or political power fantasies.
There is a parallel to this in drone warfare. Pure logic founded on historical fact (hahahaha) would assume that if a global conflict was not worth risking a soldier's life, it was not a conflict worth engaging in (hahahaha). If it was not popular enough to sustain casualties, it was not popular enough to be conducted by a democracy. But, you see, take out the aggressor's wasted lives, and the populace no longer has the ethical high-ground it is used to enjoying. Now, having made war bloodless for your country (and even more infuriating and hopeless for another) you get to kill with impunity, and the rage you generate can be explained as the unenlightened reaction of religious fanatics. The dissenters, domestic or otherwise, can be explained away as "DISLIKED POLITICAL GROUP" or "BIASED RABBLE ROUSER" while the insane reality of the situation continues to make life unpleasant or untenable for the rest.
"Why drink water when you can have a tasty Coca Cola? Probably because you're a mindless consumer – the New Livestock. Have we got some fantastic new products for you!"
Textual Note:
Hi there, I've been a little shrill, I admit, though I don't apologize for it. If the future of where and how humanity sources its food does not matter to you, you won't understand why I take the tone of alarmism. Obviously the whole thing is a bit sensationalistic... but so is the 'sustainability is for faggots' crowd, who are a bunch of despicable, small-minded wretches. Also, I think I've proven I have a great affinity for hyperbole. But please do remember that there are actual problems and that the future is uncertain, and that the current model of a disinterested public eating food created in a vacuum away from their sight is kind of fucked up, and could be changed for the better. Sorry if it wasn't funny/insightful/verified enough - I admit I am off my game. That is all, thanks for reading as always, and stay true to the game.
Fisheries are collapsed, hunting is no longer a way of life for the overwhelming majority, and factory farming is a soulless practice of agribusiness that stains the world in unhealthy shit, diseased blood, novel human/animal illnesses, and misery – not to mention fast food and all associated problems. Anyone who says differently is a corporate shill, an unapologetic ecocidal turd, a Scientific OptimistTM , or plainly ignorant. So, basically, the idea of further separating the populace from its food is the only one that wins out, and few people see the problem with it, as long as it prevents the cruel and bloody deaths of cute animals (which are often not that cute and generally die a sterilized, clinical death after a life of perfect, almost middle-class indolence and occasional active cruelty).
Meanwhile, we could source all of our protein, cheaply and very efficiently, from insects. We can still have a good cut of beef or chicken, but insect protein can cover, say, Monday to Thursday, and cheaply. It is a solution that has been staring us in the face since the dawn of time, but at some point our phobias overruled common sense and we stopped eating bugs. Now, in the 11th hour of a crisis hundreds of years in the making, we have once again proven that we can be smart, but never reasonable.
Easy living has eroded any sense of pragmatism we had, and instead of taking matters into our own hands we have pushed food further into the corporate fold and away from our own hands, which we are generally afraid to get dirty. Ethical neutrality is not worth the price, beyond which lies the fact that agribusiness is not going anywhere. Animals will continue to suffer for as long as they are profitable, agriculture will continue to desiccate and toxify the earth and 'pests', as well as anything nearby or downriver. A small cost to pay to ensure nature doesn't get anything intended for ourselves. But we're not selfish, and thinking otherwise is 'not realistic', sorry. Don't think about the dead lakes and rivers, or the dying oceans. Listen to the greenwashing machine and damn well heed how it is telling you not to worry. Or listen to the deafening silence of pop culture, I mean, who gives a fuck?
Then, when the rape of the earth has eliminated the chance of raising edible animals, food will move completely out of the reach of the populace and into the security of corporate production thanks to research potential generated today. Does it amplify the horror enough to know that not only are living creatures processed into competitively-priced foods, but that the process of raising the animal itself can be bypassed? Or is that ethical, to cut out the animal's contribution, while still eating of its flesh? Even the borderline sadistic systems in place today still have a beating heart, and the symbolic act is still committed, even though shrouded by the mystery of NDA contracts and secure facilities. Needless to say, vat-grown appeals to the people who can't stomach the current model. It stinks, though. If GMOs are freaky frankenfoods then Vat-Grown is undead zombiefood. No double standards.
However, that's life as an omnivorous mammal: you sometimes kill to eat. Then, because of a healthy omnivorous diet which includes hunting and foraging activity, you gain the mental acuity and leisure to reflect on the act of killing. You turn it into an art and thrive. Then, twenty thousand or more years later, you get to the point where the idea has been so over-thought, and the act so over politicized and perverted by industry, that it is no longer palatable or acceptable ('unless you stop worrying and start enjoying!'). Since it is the modern world, and a healthy respect for nature is not an option, the only cure remaining is to develop the technique of growing meat in a bloodless, clinical way, so that it dies apart from any animal, so that the vast stocks of commercial livestock can go into the history books and possibly extinction while we grow our mega cities and hoard terabytes of data per second and eat our ethically sourced protein loaves. The only thing better than eating beef once a week, shutting down most fast food outlets, and finding better sources of living protein is to make an undead mockery of flesh in a lab because we're too infantilized to give up our excesses and face the reality of cost and value.
Madness is what it is. The plan seems to be to abolish the cycle of life or at least further commodify it. Plants are living things that we kill all the time, without seeming to care a bit, and we also gorge ourselves on their sex organs, and that's acceptable – but killing a dog to eat is cruel and/or worthy of mockery? Eating ants, roaches, slugs, spiders... any of the bountiful and varied insect species is crazy, absurd? When the oceans are emptied, the air is full of cow farts, and land covered in pig and chicken shit? Farming insects cheaply, each house producing a few dozen pounds a month, each apartment growing a few pounds, plus enriching soil... no that's crazy. It's as crazy as razing the suburbs and growing traditional food there. What we need, obviously, is bloodless, ethical, lab-grown meat – it's never going to play into corporate or political power fantasies.
There is a parallel to this in drone warfare. Pure logic founded on historical fact (hahahaha) would assume that if a global conflict was not worth risking a soldier's life, it was not a conflict worth engaging in (hahahaha). If it was not popular enough to sustain casualties, it was not popular enough to be conducted by a democracy. But, you see, take out the aggressor's wasted lives, and the populace no longer has the ethical high-ground it is used to enjoying. Now, having made war bloodless for your country (and even more infuriating and hopeless for another) you get to kill with impunity, and the rage you generate can be explained as the unenlightened reaction of religious fanatics. The dissenters, domestic or otherwise, can be explained away as "DISLIKED POLITICAL GROUP" or "BIASED RABBLE ROUSER" while the insane reality of the situation continues to make life unpleasant or untenable for the rest.
"Why drink water when you can have a tasty Coca Cola? Probably because you're a mindless consumer – the New Livestock. Have we got some fantastic new products for you!"
Textual Note:
Hi there, I've been a little shrill, I admit, though I don't apologize for it. If the future of where and how humanity sources its food does not matter to you, you won't understand why I take the tone of alarmism. Obviously the whole thing is a bit sensationalistic... but so is the 'sustainability is for faggots' crowd, who are a bunch of despicable, small-minded wretches. Also, I think I've proven I have a great affinity for hyperbole. But please do remember that there are actual problems and that the future is uncertain, and that the current model of a disinterested public eating food created in a vacuum away from their sight is kind of fucked up, and could be changed for the better. Sorry if it wasn't funny/insightful/verified enough - I admit I am off my game. That is all, thanks for reading as always, and stay true to the game.
4/8/13
The Walking Dread
I've seen and heard a lot of shit talking about the recent Season 3 finale by a lot of self-satisfied idiots and I've got to say a few things in defense of the show AMC's The Walking Dead really is. I remember when a metal kid tried to sell his collection of Walking Dead comics to me after I mentioned to him I'd seen the first episode. I remember the person who introduced me to the show saying "It's fantastic" and showing me the first three minutes before his wife told him to shut it off so we could watch Secret American Boss or something decadent and ridiculous. Spoilers upcoming.
Whenever zombie media is brought up, I have to mention Night of the Living Dead. It's the de-facto best zombie movie. The only one worth watching twice (except maybe Shawn of the Dead which is worth a second viewing to catch references and if you're really stoned maybe a third viewing). Now, that night didn't spawn the end of the world, the movie resolved in fatalistic horror beyond anything, and before established tropes made 70's and 80's zombie movies predictable and half-satisfying (aside: media consumers are zombies and require FRESH ENTERTAINMENT TO CONSUME - cold corpses just won't satisfy bottomless appetites and stunted taste).
The old irony, which used to be a joke and is now itself a shambling corpse of a joke, is that the zombie outbreak scenario has itself become zombie-like. Except it can't be killed at all. It's been shot in the head (lost cultural relevance and profitability) and it's gone right on (until culturally profitable) without changing too much. Movie after movie, book after book, comic book after comic book, concept album after concept album, and finally TV show. AMC's The Walking Dead really debuted at the exact cultural moment (zombies were trending, yo), and had a sense of grit and human drama that pulled in millions of dedicated viewers, some of which told me how good it was every time I'd see them.
Anyways, after months of not watching the show I got tired of hearing about how good it was. Anyone worth a damn knows about Night of the Living Dead is the only zombie thing that will ever be a timeless classic. I am just putting that out there so that tasteless hacks shut up about the #YOLO of zombie entertainment. However, I am willing to concede certain things about AMC's The Walking Dead.
Firstly, the production values are readily apparent. The presentation is not half-assed, and outright better than most movies. The gore is fantastic and the zombies look downright good. There are no cut corners. It's a fantastic effort on the visual front. Abandoned city scenes in a TV show, shot in an actual city? People listed the production values a lot, 'most expensive show ever' etc... and I can't say how true it is but it seems right. This got people thinking that the show could only go up, as if an insanely talented and well-supported group of people could carry the show just by making it look good.
Second, regarding plot. The show stems from a comic book series but isn't an entirely faithful adaptation. This annoyed some people. Well one of the first things I noticed as I watched the first season was how torturously stretched every episode was. It helped for tension, and undeniably hooked an audience, and was admittedly a smart way to set up a 6 episode season. But let me spoil the show for you: it doesn't stop stretching the plot out. That much never changes, and lots of people who bitch about it now are idiots who never saw this habit for what it was. Entire episodes go by (even in season 1) in which some minor thing becomes a huge deal and everyone talks about their feelings for twenty minutes, then there is some shooting and another surprise. It works fine for season 1, annoyingly enough, but the show was new and there was nothing else quite like it. Gritty.
The characters are alright. In the first season especially you'll find that a lot of time is spent exploring how humans and society would deal with the changes of a zombie outbreak. It's pretty cool, and the characters have depth, so what flashbacks there are are not entirely annoying. Cringeworthy moments happen anyways, but for the most part it's eminently watchable zombie television. I won't say the writing is outstanding but it's better than average. Let me spoil the show for you: the writing never gets good enough to justify the stretching. Some characters get tiresome - most do. There is lots of agonizing and less action as time goes on. Entire episodes go by where maybe three zombies are killed. It takes creeping minutes for people to die, say what they mean, or act on their impulses (hah). Hope you like dialogue exploring the sometimes complicated nature of human interaction in a post-apocalypse.
In seasons 2 and 3 the show has settled as the cast has found safety and settled. This slowed the pace and justified all kinds of stretching and lollygagging. Writers had to keep tensions high and inevitably things got a bit less lively and a bit more sentimental. The most tense moments resolve themselves in multi-episode character arcs that tend to end messily. Well. What are you going to do, write the show out of a corner yourself?
Third: commercials. People bitched about this, especially for the recent finale. Nobody likes commercials, alright already: just cool it. Let me be perfectly clear: you're a stupid fuck if you don't think your outrageously popular and successful show with huge ratings is going to be used as a goldmine by its broadcaster. Got that? A stupid fuck. Success has a price (or rather a value) that is non-negotiable.
Fourth: plausibility. This isn't a can of worms worth opening, even if you were using them to catch the largest, tastiest fish in the lake. But between the inconsistencies, the unrealistic portrayals of gunfights, the loose ends, the implausible locations nobody in their right mind would try to shack up in, the outrageous conflicts... not worth it. This is a show about zombies based on a comic book. I know it looks super real but you honestly can't expect any team of TV writers to actually make it an impenetrably realistic depiction, right? Just use your imagination, don't worry about filling in all the blanks – this isn't highschool, nobody is grading you for being sharper than the total colossal dimwit idiots who write for a multi-million dollar TV series.
Let's fast-forward a bunch. The third season has concluded and anyone who has read a book or watched a TV show could tell you what was likely to happen. The whole season varied wildly from tense and exciting to bloated and mawkish. There were some good moments and the whole thing was building up to a huge bastard of a shootout, despite a determined pacifist angle. This more or less got stretched out over multiple episodes, some unrelated, in which everyone was getting guns and soldiers and preparing for a fight. It was annoying but shouldn't have surprised anyone with the attention span sufficient to remember what the first, or second (holy stretches) seasons were like.
AMC's The Walking Dead season 3 finale wasn't super-duper great by any stretch of the imagination. Lots of things were stretched out and painful, there was a weird bit of genocide, and it didn't really resolve to anyone's satisfaction. It left a lot open for the next season, which makes sense because the show is still zombie-popular. There was some heartfelt stuff, and even if it wasn't satisfying, it tied up a few loose ends. Idiot viewerships missed the point, which is funny but kind of sad, as the show isn't really that complex. In general the show delivered what it was going to deliver, based on past seasons, and it was exactly what the viewership deserved. Comic book readers still look down their noses at it.
The writing isn't total shit and the show isn't a piece of shit. People got really into this, just like with any successful TV show, and it didn't deliver perfection. It didn't quite manage to exceed the hype. Entropy, maaaan. Nothing's going to get better. Your biased memories and hopes are generating expectations that cannot be met by a human production. It can't be easy to maintain a juggernaut of a show like that, either. I'm sure the challenge of getting it done on time and keeping the production team together cost a bunch of really good episodes and a better show entirely. Whatever, though, it's TV. It's TV's only zombie show, so with your utter lack of alternatives you will watch anyway.
There it is. It's good television gone slightly wrong, but it's not a big enough deal and not enough has really changed to the point where you can say it's like old/new Simpsons. Don't make the mistake of looking around to see what people think. You'll know when you watch this imperfect bit of zombie television, guilt-free. Just do yourself a favor and watch the real stuff. Then you'll see that getting upset over the show is hardly anything. The theme hasn't progressed much, if at all, because it is undead. Then go out and watch World War Z, and moan about that too. You'll either ignore it or consume it, but as a consumer either way; and as part of the problem, you're not owed a damn thing.
Whenever zombie media is brought up, I have to mention Night of the Living Dead. It's the de-facto best zombie movie. The only one worth watching twice (except maybe Shawn of the Dead which is worth a second viewing to catch references and if you're really stoned maybe a third viewing). Now, that night didn't spawn the end of the world, the movie resolved in fatalistic horror beyond anything, and before established tropes made 70's and 80's zombie movies predictable and half-satisfying (aside: media consumers are zombies and require FRESH ENTERTAINMENT TO CONSUME - cold corpses just won't satisfy bottomless appetites and stunted taste).
The old irony, which used to be a joke and is now itself a shambling corpse of a joke, is that the zombie outbreak scenario has itself become zombie-like. Except it can't be killed at all. It's been shot in the head (lost cultural relevance and profitability) and it's gone right on (until culturally profitable) without changing too much. Movie after movie, book after book, comic book after comic book, concept album after concept album, and finally TV show. AMC's The Walking Dead really debuted at the exact cultural moment (zombies were trending, yo), and had a sense of grit and human drama that pulled in millions of dedicated viewers, some of which told me how good it was every time I'd see them.
Anyways, after months of not watching the show I got tired of hearing about how good it was. Anyone worth a damn knows about Night of the Living Dead is the only zombie thing that will ever be a timeless classic. I am just putting that out there so that tasteless hacks shut up about the #YOLO of zombie entertainment. However, I am willing to concede certain things about AMC's The Walking Dead.
Firstly, the production values are readily apparent. The presentation is not half-assed, and outright better than most movies. The gore is fantastic and the zombies look downright good. There are no cut corners. It's a fantastic effort on the visual front. Abandoned city scenes in a TV show, shot in an actual city? People listed the production values a lot, 'most expensive show ever' etc... and I can't say how true it is but it seems right. This got people thinking that the show could only go up, as if an insanely talented and well-supported group of people could carry the show just by making it look good.
Second, regarding plot. The show stems from a comic book series but isn't an entirely faithful adaptation. This annoyed some people. Well one of the first things I noticed as I watched the first season was how torturously stretched every episode was. It helped for tension, and undeniably hooked an audience, and was admittedly a smart way to set up a 6 episode season. But let me spoil the show for you: it doesn't stop stretching the plot out. That much never changes, and lots of people who bitch about it now are idiots who never saw this habit for what it was. Entire episodes go by (even in season 1) in which some minor thing becomes a huge deal and everyone talks about their feelings for twenty minutes, then there is some shooting and another surprise. It works fine for season 1, annoyingly enough, but the show was new and there was nothing else quite like it. Gritty.
The characters are alright. In the first season especially you'll find that a lot of time is spent exploring how humans and society would deal with the changes of a zombie outbreak. It's pretty cool, and the characters have depth, so what flashbacks there are are not entirely annoying. Cringeworthy moments happen anyways, but for the most part it's eminently watchable zombie television. I won't say the writing is outstanding but it's better than average. Let me spoil the show for you: the writing never gets good enough to justify the stretching. Some characters get tiresome - most do. There is lots of agonizing and less action as time goes on. Entire episodes go by where maybe three zombies are killed. It takes creeping minutes for people to die, say what they mean, or act on their impulses (hah). Hope you like dialogue exploring the sometimes complicated nature of human interaction in a post-apocalypse.
In seasons 2 and 3 the show has settled as the cast has found safety and settled. This slowed the pace and justified all kinds of stretching and lollygagging. Writers had to keep tensions high and inevitably things got a bit less lively and a bit more sentimental. The most tense moments resolve themselves in multi-episode character arcs that tend to end messily. Well. What are you going to do, write the show out of a corner yourself?
Third: commercials. People bitched about this, especially for the recent finale. Nobody likes commercials, alright already: just cool it. Let me be perfectly clear: you're a stupid fuck if you don't think your outrageously popular and successful show with huge ratings is going to be used as a goldmine by its broadcaster. Got that? A stupid fuck. Success has a price (or rather a value) that is non-negotiable.
Fourth: plausibility. This isn't a can of worms worth opening, even if you were using them to catch the largest, tastiest fish in the lake. But between the inconsistencies, the unrealistic portrayals of gunfights, the loose ends, the implausible locations nobody in their right mind would try to shack up in, the outrageous conflicts... not worth it. This is a show about zombies based on a comic book. I know it looks super real but you honestly can't expect any team of TV writers to actually make it an impenetrably realistic depiction, right? Just use your imagination, don't worry about filling in all the blanks – this isn't highschool, nobody is grading you for being sharper than the total colossal dimwit idiots who write for a multi-million dollar TV series.
Let's fast-forward a bunch. The third season has concluded and anyone who has read a book or watched a TV show could tell you what was likely to happen. The whole season varied wildly from tense and exciting to bloated and mawkish. There were some good moments and the whole thing was building up to a huge bastard of a shootout, despite a determined pacifist angle. This more or less got stretched out over multiple episodes, some unrelated, in which everyone was getting guns and soldiers and preparing for a fight. It was annoying but shouldn't have surprised anyone with the attention span sufficient to remember what the first, or second (holy stretches) seasons were like.
AMC's The Walking Dead season 3 finale wasn't super-duper great by any stretch of the imagination. Lots of things were stretched out and painful, there was a weird bit of genocide, and it didn't really resolve to anyone's satisfaction. It left a lot open for the next season, which makes sense because the show is still zombie-popular. There was some heartfelt stuff, and even if it wasn't satisfying, it tied up a few loose ends. Idiot viewerships missed the point, which is funny but kind of sad, as the show isn't really that complex. In general the show delivered what it was going to deliver, based on past seasons, and it was exactly what the viewership deserved. Comic book readers still look down their noses at it.
The writing isn't total shit and the show isn't a piece of shit. People got really into this, just like with any successful TV show, and it didn't deliver perfection. It didn't quite manage to exceed the hype. Entropy, maaaan. Nothing's going to get better. Your biased memories and hopes are generating expectations that cannot be met by a human production. It can't be easy to maintain a juggernaut of a show like that, either. I'm sure the challenge of getting it done on time and keeping the production team together cost a bunch of really good episodes and a better show entirely. Whatever, though, it's TV. It's TV's only zombie show, so with your utter lack of alternatives you will watch anyway.
There it is. It's good television gone slightly wrong, but it's not a big enough deal and not enough has really changed to the point where you can say it's like old/new Simpsons. Don't make the mistake of looking around to see what people think. You'll know when you watch this imperfect bit of zombie television, guilt-free. Just do yourself a favor and watch the real stuff. Then you'll see that getting upset over the show is hardly anything. The theme hasn't progressed much, if at all, because it is undead. Then go out and watch World War Z, and moan about that too. You'll either ignore it or consume it, but as a consumer either way; and as part of the problem, you're not owed a damn thing.
2/5/13
Advertiser's Bowl: 2013 Edition ft. Existential Ennui
I don't have anything against the Super Bowl. It's a good reason to drink and eat too much and a great excuse for feeling like shit on Monday. What always puzzles me about it is how the Super Bowl Ad has become this huge event. Over the next week there will be Superbowl Ad Top 10s, reviews, and news segments. Most media output about the Super Bowl Ads will have the self-awareness of a gnat. I haven't been paying enough attention to say anything with certainty, but I think it's not really a high mark for society if the high-priced overpowering sports event of the year gets spectators who care more about the high-priced commercials and overpowering half time show. Ravens fans get to feel good, but then again: Baltimore's still going to have its problems, as will we all.
Each year, lately, people get psyched up for the Super Bowl's pricey, overblown, ridiculous commercials. Newscasts neglect problematic, boring stories for the innocent pleasures of the advertisement adventure. Meanwhile grown men have been sacrificing their bodies for... shit tons of money and a good start at fame. The themes seem to run together. There are always some 'innovative' ads, in the loosest sense of the word, but getting excited about innovative advertisement is like getting excited about a new model of taser. It's like getting excited about being in pro sports, but realizing that you may go to shit in the process: we should be so lucky to waste ourselves for such a prize.
For all their expense, commercials are generally devoid of value, promote unhealthy ideas, reinforce stereotypes, lie, cheat, flatter (in the basest sense) and bully the populace. Innovation? Most don't even have the good grace to be entertaining. This year Dodge released a high-quality, high-concept pro-farmer commercial so exceptionalist and baldly desperate that it almost touched the heart – but then again: Dodge is only another part of the dust bowl. What do farmers even matter when the whole proceedings only preach dust bowls?
In spite of all that craziness, I think by far the worst Super Bowl memory I have isn't an advertisement or the spectacular failure of a deserving team. No, my personal darkest moment is when Undercover Boss premiered after Super Bowl XLIV. It was stunning. What a brilliant PR move, but how absolutely disgusting to see something like that and then the uncritical, even positive response. This evil show was embraced. People were and still are enthusiastic about it. Advertainment, another slick evasion of issues such as predatory zero-sum business practices, income inequality, and the Recession. The smug laughter that inevitably results.
I think it's the kind of show that is okay to hate. I don't use the term evil lightly. Evil is a shared burden and all that, but it is okay to despise this goddamn show. It's toxic, terrible, manipulative and the lack of popular critical response is a sad fact. It showed that soft power knew no bounds: it could take criminals, crooks, bullies and turn them into angelic, benevolent, personable superiors. I have no doubt the executive class is generally not evil, but their culture is not a healthy or positive one. I'm not an idealist to the point where I will deny the fundamental importance of business or industry, but the mere plight of the average modern person unsettles me. The way the earth – life – is used has gone far beyond the point where we can be unthinking and proud about it.
I don't get how such a transparently biased, exploitative show can still be on the air two years later. It is readily apparent that nobody has learned anything in the meantime, and that executives are just as wealthy and powerful as ever, what with the labor market wheezing and slumping like a dying hobo while the screaming middle class sinks. All you have to do to mask the dark side of capitalism is: videotape your choice of 'boss' talking about or doing awkward unsatisfactory work, in a sanitized and tightly scripted environment, edit to taste, pick some compelling underprivileged or overworked employees, wrap it up with a heartwarming situation, some cash prizes, and a teachable moment or two. Because the bosses do care: and no drudge's futile trudge through wage-slavery goes unnoticed and unrewarded.
Like any commercial, Undercover Boss delivers bias and sells misinformation. It meets minimum thresholds for propaganda. It portrays one point of view faithfully, and damn the rest – like the Simpsons, and many other fictional television shows. For instance: I joked some years ago about the five thousand dollar suit. Oh, hell. This is likely show money, which the boss gets to give out in order to humanize them (via #rotecharity). Sometimes an additional prize of changed terms of employment are entered into the bargain. Then tears. Let me tell you something about pathos: dollars alone don't make it convincing. The bosses cry crocodile tears, and the employees cry about the smug charity that will hopefully better their lives by some obscure fraction.
I tell you of such scenes, not because I follow the show religiously but because I earnestly believe that that sort of indoctrinating pablum should be reserved for what are explicitly aired as advertisements. Undercover Boss contains enough slick reality-TV features to pass as a show, but that's a mask for what is really an advertisement for the same broad attitudes which have time and time again put the majority in the corner and the minority in comfort. At the end of each episode money changes hands, and nothing significant changes. The landscape of exploitation remains the same, and objecting to it still results in a defensive reaction from the world's largest, wealthiest, most powerful guilty party.
We keep worshiping opulence, and when it inevitably fails and bankrupts us, we find that consumerism is a sweetened abyss anyway. Everyone is sick with it. The rational mind knows* it is madness to overproduce, to hoard, and to waste – nevertheless: it's a race to the bottom and nobody can afford to miss out. There is only one way down.
(*or ought to, if it is at all thoughtful)
Each year, lately, people get psyched up for the Super Bowl's pricey, overblown, ridiculous commercials. Newscasts neglect problematic, boring stories for the innocent pleasures of the advertisement adventure. Meanwhile grown men have been sacrificing their bodies for... shit tons of money and a good start at fame. The themes seem to run together. There are always some 'innovative' ads, in the loosest sense of the word, but getting excited about innovative advertisement is like getting excited about a new model of taser. It's like getting excited about being in pro sports, but realizing that you may go to shit in the process: we should be so lucky to waste ourselves for such a prize.
For all their expense, commercials are generally devoid of value, promote unhealthy ideas, reinforce stereotypes, lie, cheat, flatter (in the basest sense) and bully the populace. Innovation? Most don't even have the good grace to be entertaining. This year Dodge released a high-quality, high-concept pro-farmer commercial so exceptionalist and baldly desperate that it almost touched the heart – but then again: Dodge is only another part of the dust bowl. What do farmers even matter when the whole proceedings only preach dust bowls?
In spite of all that craziness, I think by far the worst Super Bowl memory I have isn't an advertisement or the spectacular failure of a deserving team. No, my personal darkest moment is when Undercover Boss premiered after Super Bowl XLIV. It was stunning. What a brilliant PR move, but how absolutely disgusting to see something like that and then the uncritical, even positive response. This evil show was embraced. People were and still are enthusiastic about it. Advertainment, another slick evasion of issues such as predatory zero-sum business practices, income inequality, and the Recession. The smug laughter that inevitably results.
I think it's the kind of show that is okay to hate. I don't use the term evil lightly. Evil is a shared burden and all that, but it is okay to despise this goddamn show. It's toxic, terrible, manipulative and the lack of popular critical response is a sad fact. It showed that soft power knew no bounds: it could take criminals, crooks, bullies and turn them into angelic, benevolent, personable superiors. I have no doubt the executive class is generally not evil, but their culture is not a healthy or positive one. I'm not an idealist to the point where I will deny the fundamental importance of business or industry, but the mere plight of the average modern person unsettles me. The way the earth – life – is used has gone far beyond the point where we can be unthinking and proud about it.
I don't get how such a transparently biased, exploitative show can still be on the air two years later. It is readily apparent that nobody has learned anything in the meantime, and that executives are just as wealthy and powerful as ever, what with the labor market wheezing and slumping like a dying hobo while the screaming middle class sinks. All you have to do to mask the dark side of capitalism is: videotape your choice of 'boss' talking about or doing awkward unsatisfactory work, in a sanitized and tightly scripted environment, edit to taste, pick some compelling underprivileged or overworked employees, wrap it up with a heartwarming situation, some cash prizes, and a teachable moment or two. Because the bosses do care: and no drudge's futile trudge through wage-slavery goes unnoticed and unrewarded.
Like any commercial, Undercover Boss delivers bias and sells misinformation. It meets minimum thresholds for propaganda. It portrays one point of view faithfully, and damn the rest – like the Simpsons, and many other fictional television shows. For instance: I joked some years ago about the five thousand dollar suit. Oh, hell. This is likely show money, which the boss gets to give out in order to humanize them (via #rotecharity). Sometimes an additional prize of changed terms of employment are entered into the bargain. Then tears. Let me tell you something about pathos: dollars alone don't make it convincing. The bosses cry crocodile tears, and the employees cry about the smug charity that will hopefully better their lives by some obscure fraction.
I tell you of such scenes, not because I follow the show religiously but because I earnestly believe that that sort of indoctrinating pablum should be reserved for what are explicitly aired as advertisements. Undercover Boss contains enough slick reality-TV features to pass as a show, but that's a mask for what is really an advertisement for the same broad attitudes which have time and time again put the majority in the corner and the minority in comfort. At the end of each episode money changes hands, and nothing significant changes. The landscape of exploitation remains the same, and objecting to it still results in a defensive reaction from the world's largest, wealthiest, most powerful guilty party.
We keep worshiping opulence, and when it inevitably fails and bankrupts us, we find that consumerism is a sweetened abyss anyway. Everyone is sick with it. The rational mind knows* it is madness to overproduce, to hoard, and to waste – nevertheless: it's a race to the bottom and nobody can afford to miss out. There is only one way down.
(*or ought to, if it is at all thoughtful)
1/10/13
The Nerd Bubble and its Inevitable Collapse
It seems as if every contemporary identity conforms tightly to passively consuming the dismal excretions of this benighted age. Wherever you look, there are people insisting that what they are consuming is correct and necessary to a happy life. There is always the insistence that 'my kind need X too' (as if it were a surprising epiphany) and other ridiculous rhetoric such as inherent uniqueness. These beliefs have always been enthusiastically embraced, ruthlessly mocked, or completely ignored depending on the relative wisdom and maturity of the observer. There is one sort of contemporary identity that excels at absorbing all others and is generally 'on the make' as they say.
In 2007 there began an incredible shift in the behavior of Ur Hipsters, and/or they were found to possess certain interests and traits that, innocently enough, bordered the long dormant cultural powerhouse sometimes referred to as 'nerd culture'. Suddenly the coolest individual at the bar who liked the right music, played on the most epic amateur sports team, fucked the most attractive people, and partied the hardest was busy painting W40K miniatures as a hobby, played D&D on Sundays, and knew how to code. By 2013 there is a weird sense in the air that 'nerdy' pursuits and habits are necessary just to communicate.
It is as a certain bad 80's movie had prophesied. Like any decent historical inevitability, the rise of nerd culture was complex and in many ways self-fulfilling. The smart, awkward kid getting bullied in the 70's and 80's grew up into a normalized yuppie or yupster or suave po-mo individualist making good money doing engineering work or intense research or crucial computer work. Good or bad, they acted as the lifeblood of modernity. Their progeny, the current generation of 'young nerds' and/or the current 'nerd wave' movement, is an entirely different animal. Arguably, despite the surprising population of well-adjusted and balanced nerds, there is evidence to suggest that the much of the modern wave is quixotic, dysfunctional, and generally disinterested in aging measures of success such as social popularity, physical fitness, conformity, and party intensity.
I always get the idea that the mainstream nerd movement left the rails completely in the early 2000s. I get this idea because of the link posted above, wherein (and you might have missed this) a reality TV show tailored to nerds actually existed. The comicbook-style text boxes were so tasteful, so apt. There never was a nerd movement as such (as it was anecdotal to many other factors), but the word itself has gained such traction with increasing numbers of people, that one might rightly be said to exist at this point. And to be perfectly blunt, from the perspective of the modern identity fetish, it was probably a long time coming. Also completely inevitable. Mind you: I am no expert on nerd history, nor would I ever claim to be one.
In 2007 there began an incredible shift in the behavior of Ur Hipsters, and/or they were found to possess certain interests and traits that, innocently enough, bordered the long dormant cultural powerhouse sometimes referred to as 'nerd culture'. Suddenly the coolest individual at the bar who liked the right music, played on the most epic amateur sports team, fucked the most attractive people, and partied the hardest was busy painting W40K miniatures as a hobby, played D&D on Sundays, and knew how to code. By 2013 there is a weird sense in the air that 'nerdy' pursuits and habits are necessary just to communicate.
It is as a certain bad 80's movie had prophesied. Like any decent historical inevitability, the rise of nerd culture was complex and in many ways self-fulfilling. The smart, awkward kid getting bullied in the 70's and 80's grew up into a normalized yuppie or yupster or suave po-mo individualist making good money doing engineering work or intense research or crucial computer work. Good or bad, they acted as the lifeblood of modernity. Their progeny, the current generation of 'young nerds' and/or the current 'nerd wave' movement, is an entirely different animal. Arguably, despite the surprising population of well-adjusted and balanced nerds, there is evidence to suggest that the much of the modern wave is quixotic, dysfunctional, and generally disinterested in aging measures of success such as social popularity, physical fitness, conformity, and party intensity.
I always get the idea that the mainstream nerd movement left the rails completely in the early 2000s. I get this idea because of the link posted above, wherein (and you might have missed this) a reality TV show tailored to nerds actually existed. The comicbook-style text boxes were so tasteful, so apt. There never was a nerd movement as such (as it was anecdotal to many other factors), but the word itself has gained such traction with increasing numbers of people, that one might rightly be said to exist at this point. And to be perfectly blunt, from the perspective of the modern identity fetish, it was probably a long time coming. Also completely inevitable. Mind you: I am no expert on nerd history, nor would I ever claim to be one.
11/19/12
Identity and its Discontents; Exceptionalism and You
There was a time I'd have considered someone a hipster just for using the word 'bromance'. That day is long past, but the feeling remains that too many people dance a bit close to the sociocultural archetypes they claim to hate. Not that I'd care about it at this late juncture. It's just one of the few calming thoughts I'm allowed each day. Goddamn, but I'd let them have it. And there were plenty of girls who, as soon as you and her boyfriend were smoking pot together three times a week, or playing some stupid console game together, would pronounce the entire thing a 'bromance'. It was embarrassing each time. It was just a word that had caught far too much momentum, but I never quite managed to get away from it. It was always there, lurking in someone's brain where it was least expected.
Then the term hipster gained an insane amount of weight overnight. One day it was limited to the actual people one would term hipsters, and the next day it was in everyone's mouth, like saliva. Years of ubiquity and overuse have made this word so resonant that it doesn't even really mean anything anymore. This is partly because the original hipsters died more than a century ago, for the most part, and this tenth wave lacks coherence. Nobody can say that Oscar Wilde wasn't a hipster and he wasn't even [critically un-hip] England's first. Dandies were probably third-wave hipsters, even. All of which goes to say, the term is misused constantly even by people who should know better, and the critical ignorance surrounding the term or its history (1950's highpoint anyone?) just makes it an embarrassing statement on our era's ideas concerning identity.
Mostly hipster is a brand thing, now. If you think the epitome is Vice you're probably right, but then again if you didn't know that you are part of the problem. Rich people have already invested in it, celebrities pay huge sums to appear more 'hipsterish', politicians probably use 'hipster' as shorthand for politically disengaged drunks and 'creatives'. There is an aggregate concept of an hipster. He typically wears flannel and, if nothing else, a mustache. She is typically wearing one piece of denim and often a toque. Everything else is overstated but vague. Random. Hell. It's not the worst social camouflage. These days you could get by on it. But of course, no matter who you are, you are going to be called a hipster by someone you know. It doesn't matter how carefully you cultivate your interests and it can happen even without a record player.
There are few things so fearsome as the current accepted models of politics and their adherents. Anarchists are largely undisciplined and immature. Conservatives are all gerontocrats, paternalists, and varying shades of militarist. It goes without saying that almost everyone is infatuated with or ignorant of the implications of continued statism. Liberals are preoccupied with everything, like they're cats and personal rights and privileges are catnip. But really these archetypes don't exist anymore. Probably they were never true, but everyone needs some reductionism or else things become difficult to consider. You have: people who are angry, people who are downtrodden, people who are doing what they are told, half-assed people, people who have disconnected in various ways, and people who think they know what the fuck is even happening and I don't know who to blame. I don't particularly like anybody's spiel right now.
Heh, Israel pounds Gaza would be a sick name for an anarchist-hipster occupist punk group. It's cool to different people to champion one group of people fighting another. This is sometimes referred to as tribalism. This concept is followed by 'exceptionalism' which is, as it sounds, an exceptionally important type of bullshit. People with doubts about the situation that created recent global tensions: be ready to be called an anti-Semite, another term watered-down and thrown around a lot. It's like how 'fascist' used to be, in the 80's, when neoconservatism was indoctrinating its brood, fattening its captains and psychopomps, and massacring its foes in many colorful and atrocious ways. It's easier to ignore these ugly spectacles, but they still affect people. Imagine a tiny explosion, inside an aquarium that is constantly getting hotter, smaller, and busier. Imagine all the stupid things the fish would be telling each other about this explosion while the water drained out.
Yeah there's still albums to review. There's still tens of page views per day to aim for. Giving up hope is stupid and there's no grain of truth in the suggestion that the world will end on Dec 21, 2012. The Pope even said it wasn't going to happen. There are jokes. Laugh about it. Things will go on. We will not get away from the problematics of our time so easily. Maybe we'll go back to patting ourselves on the back for doing the right thing, for buying one less gadget a year, for putting one kilo less matter into a landfill, for backing 'the good guys' while appreciating the plight of the underdog, for voting, for altruism, for proselytizing our beliefs, for not giving up, for getting up earlier to exercise, for calling mom and dad because they would like to hear from you, for slapping a friend's smartphone away from them when they're not paying attention, for giving a brutal douchebag a hard time, for not shouting down our opponents, for... &c. We're going to feel good about ourselves and we're not going to think about it because feeling anything else is unthinkable and the worst kind of suffering. We are not going to become self-aware, so in some ways we are going to continue to approach disaster. I don't think we're too close yet, but that is really just hope, not expectation.
But don't for a moment forget how truly expensive all this free entertainment is. Better yet, think about that while you're out Christmas shopping and you get frustrated because you're uncomfortable standing in a slow line, helping to outsource your country's economy, or having trouble finding a parking spot.
Then the term hipster gained an insane amount of weight overnight. One day it was limited to the actual people one would term hipsters, and the next day it was in everyone's mouth, like saliva. Years of ubiquity and overuse have made this word so resonant that it doesn't even really mean anything anymore. This is partly because the original hipsters died more than a century ago, for the most part, and this tenth wave lacks coherence. Nobody can say that Oscar Wilde wasn't a hipster and he wasn't even [critically un-hip] England's first. Dandies were probably third-wave hipsters, even. All of which goes to say, the term is misused constantly even by people who should know better, and the critical ignorance surrounding the term or its history (1950's highpoint anyone?) just makes it an embarrassing statement on our era's ideas concerning identity.
Mostly hipster is a brand thing, now. If you think the epitome is Vice you're probably right, but then again if you didn't know that you are part of the problem. Rich people have already invested in it, celebrities pay huge sums to appear more 'hipsterish', politicians probably use 'hipster' as shorthand for politically disengaged drunks and 'creatives'. There is an aggregate concept of an hipster. He typically wears flannel and, if nothing else, a mustache. She is typically wearing one piece of denim and often a toque. Everything else is overstated but vague. Random. Hell. It's not the worst social camouflage. These days you could get by on it. But of course, no matter who you are, you are going to be called a hipster by someone you know. It doesn't matter how carefully you cultivate your interests and it can happen even without a record player.
There are few things so fearsome as the current accepted models of politics and their adherents. Anarchists are largely undisciplined and immature. Conservatives are all gerontocrats, paternalists, and varying shades of militarist. It goes without saying that almost everyone is infatuated with or ignorant of the implications of continued statism. Liberals are preoccupied with everything, like they're cats and personal rights and privileges are catnip. But really these archetypes don't exist anymore. Probably they were never true, but everyone needs some reductionism or else things become difficult to consider. You have: people who are angry, people who are downtrodden, people who are doing what they are told, half-assed people, people who have disconnected in various ways, and people who think they know what the fuck is even happening and I don't know who to blame. I don't particularly like anybody's spiel right now.
Heh, Israel pounds Gaza would be a sick name for an anarchist-hipster occupist punk group. It's cool to different people to champion one group of people fighting another. This is sometimes referred to as tribalism. This concept is followed by 'exceptionalism' which is, as it sounds, an exceptionally important type of bullshit. People with doubts about the situation that created recent global tensions: be ready to be called an anti-Semite, another term watered-down and thrown around a lot. It's like how 'fascist' used to be, in the 80's, when neoconservatism was indoctrinating its brood, fattening its captains and psychopomps, and massacring its foes in many colorful and atrocious ways. It's easier to ignore these ugly spectacles, but they still affect people. Imagine a tiny explosion, inside an aquarium that is constantly getting hotter, smaller, and busier. Imagine all the stupid things the fish would be telling each other about this explosion while the water drained out.
Yeah there's still albums to review. There's still tens of page views per day to aim for. Giving up hope is stupid and there's no grain of truth in the suggestion that the world will end on Dec 21, 2012. The Pope even said it wasn't going to happen. There are jokes. Laugh about it. Things will go on. We will not get away from the problematics of our time so easily. Maybe we'll go back to patting ourselves on the back for doing the right thing, for buying one less gadget a year, for putting one kilo less matter into a landfill, for backing 'the good guys' while appreciating the plight of the underdog, for voting, for altruism, for proselytizing our beliefs, for not giving up, for getting up earlier to exercise, for calling mom and dad because they would like to hear from you, for slapping a friend's smartphone away from them when they're not paying attention, for giving a brutal douchebag a hard time, for not shouting down our opponents, for... &c. We're going to feel good about ourselves and we're not going to think about it because feeling anything else is unthinkable and the worst kind of suffering. We are not going to become self-aware, so in some ways we are going to continue to approach disaster. I don't think we're too close yet, but that is really just hope, not expectation.
But don't for a moment forget how truly expensive all this free entertainment is. Better yet, think about that while you're out Christmas shopping and you get frustrated because you're uncomfortable standing in a slow line, helping to outsource your country's economy, or having trouble finding a parking spot.
9/19/12
North American Politics Redux
That the governments of North America function as ears into which special interest groups pour their bile shouldn't surprise a single thinking person. The best part is the most worrying: there is no more point in even pretending to aim for a government which serves the people. The best one can hope for is a government that serves corporate interest, foreign investment, itself, and its elites and prays earnestly for that service to trickle down into the cracks where dwell the invisible, rotten peons which they have struggled to get away from.
In this era, where the American dream could be dismantled for the pernicious, self-destructive, blind and ignorant mess that it is, there are entire groups of people with frothing mouths trying to blame anyone for the demise of their beloved ideal. Instead of doing the American thing and hardening up and finding something better and smarter, they still worship the car cult, the sprawl cult, and the consumption cult. Bridges are fabricated in China and assembled by foreign labor in America. Nobody can do a goddamned thing about it, no matter how shameful it is, because American manufacturing and labor have been gutted in the interests of iPhones, service-industry, and the downright vampiric finance industry (which, rightfully, is more of a quack cottage industry, as its very nature is antithetical to true industry, which creates products of value).
A populace distrustful of its government moves apathetically to cast its meaningless votes into the mire of corruption and ineptitude that will bring them an even more degraded government. Someone says he doesn't care about roughly half of a country – well of course, nobody ever has, or will, and if this percentage would only dream the right dream of wastefulness and satiety then they could pull themselves out of poverty and darkness.
Meanwhile democracy is a dead byword, remembered by some, but truly forgotten by all. We have several hundred statist, nationalist, authoritarian and totalitarian pieces of shit running the world. All of them are lackeys to the 'real players' who wish, respectfully, not to be named or pointed at. Yet we consume their products each day. It's harder to farm food than it is to process it into unhealthy products to sell to masses, which it poisons into leprous lumps which look forward only to the faded idiotic 'leisure time' involving yet more consumption and little else.
Big bad governments pass hundreds of laws and amendments in so-called 'omnibus bills' which politicians are too lazy and inept to read and understand. All sorts of toxic policy are passed into law without so much as a cursory glance, and the culprits are paid and pampered, travel around the world, and don't even bother to defend their use of public money or trust in such a despicable way. The instigator even allows that it is undemocratic and scary, but continues doing it anyway, because god damn doing work you are paid and trusted to do. Revolutionaries, under these pressures and more, are still branded as idealists, idiots, and heretics. The placid horde feeds on scraps from the table and licks its chops contentedly, smiling at the less fortunate.
In some considerable and old parts of the world, a potentially faked video has caused a number of deaths because it portrays a prophet in an unfair and unkindly light. Free speech is cited and forgotten, and outrage is the rule of the day. If only outrage was the rule of the day, and apathy didn't rule, where truly important and existential affairs are concerned. As we pass into the twilight of this era, hoping for a better tomorrow, we would do well to remember the words of one J.J. Rousseau. That is, if any among us can remember them.
In this era, where the American dream could be dismantled for the pernicious, self-destructive, blind and ignorant mess that it is, there are entire groups of people with frothing mouths trying to blame anyone for the demise of their beloved ideal. Instead of doing the American thing and hardening up and finding something better and smarter, they still worship the car cult, the sprawl cult, and the consumption cult. Bridges are fabricated in China and assembled by foreign labor in America. Nobody can do a goddamned thing about it, no matter how shameful it is, because American manufacturing and labor have been gutted in the interests of iPhones, service-industry, and the downright vampiric finance industry (which, rightfully, is more of a quack cottage industry, as its very nature is antithetical to true industry, which creates products of value).
A populace distrustful of its government moves apathetically to cast its meaningless votes into the mire of corruption and ineptitude that will bring them an even more degraded government. Someone says he doesn't care about roughly half of a country – well of course, nobody ever has, or will, and if this percentage would only dream the right dream of wastefulness and satiety then they could pull themselves out of poverty and darkness.
Meanwhile democracy is a dead byword, remembered by some, but truly forgotten by all. We have several hundred statist, nationalist, authoritarian and totalitarian pieces of shit running the world. All of them are lackeys to the 'real players' who wish, respectfully, not to be named or pointed at. Yet we consume their products each day. It's harder to farm food than it is to process it into unhealthy products to sell to masses, which it poisons into leprous lumps which look forward only to the faded idiotic 'leisure time' involving yet more consumption and little else.
Big bad governments pass hundreds of laws and amendments in so-called 'omnibus bills' which politicians are too lazy and inept to read and understand. All sorts of toxic policy are passed into law without so much as a cursory glance, and the culprits are paid and pampered, travel around the world, and don't even bother to defend their use of public money or trust in such a despicable way. The instigator even allows that it is undemocratic and scary, but continues doing it anyway, because god damn doing work you are paid and trusted to do. Revolutionaries, under these pressures and more, are still branded as idealists, idiots, and heretics. The placid horde feeds on scraps from the table and licks its chops contentedly, smiling at the less fortunate.
In some considerable and old parts of the world, a potentially faked video has caused a number of deaths because it portrays a prophet in an unfair and unkindly light. Free speech is cited and forgotten, and outrage is the rule of the day. If only outrage was the rule of the day, and apathy didn't rule, where truly important and existential affairs are concerned. As we pass into the twilight of this era, hoping for a better tomorrow, we would do well to remember the words of one J.J. Rousseau. That is, if any among us can remember them.
8/25/12
Deleted Reply to Facebook 'Ecocide Prevention' Status
It's too late to prevent ecocide. Fisheries are depleted, global ecologies are unbalanced and in disarray, and fracking will ruin whatever clean, mass available groundwater North America has left. The Rest are being exploited without any consideration for the future by the global plutocrat class and their lackeys. The oceans are dead zones compared to what they were an hundred years ago and anyone telling you different is trying to catch the remaining 10%, even octopi are becoming social pack animals under the pressure, and cephalopods are not social creatures. In a few thousand years they will crawl from the sickened seas and destroy the traces of our weakened civilization. Apes are in decline and we were the best of them.
Hicks will go on telling you the water's worth drinking while they accumulate gargantuan tumors public healthcare will have to pay for. Special interests will keep on telling you that anyone opposed to exploitation is a communist, radical feminist, or pathological environmentalist liar. Oil is reckless. Car culture is stupid. Earth is under intensive, exploitative attack for the last hundred years in the name of a flawed standard of living that nobody in the West will give up without a fight. Everyone who isn't already suffering from pollution-induced disease has been fooled and when cancer and dementia peak we'll be out of any legacy money and forced to die in the streets like forgetful, hateful animals, drinking plastic leachate garbage water from the sixties, estrogen refuse from the sexual revolution, and antidepressant pollutants from the 80's. We will feel nothing as we decline. Nobody in the west has given up on waste. Waste is killing our chances of survivability. Our weakness is killing our remaining odds. Consumerism is a rampaging lion with no serious opponents.
We fucked ourselves and being hippies is not an answer. We are going to pay for our complacency and the nature nuts will smirk at our dependent corpses and rotting cities, no matter how righteous we feel for being consumers. Then they, too, will succumb to the poison. And life will continue without us, thinking "good riddance". So go out and protest and go home, drive to the gym, and feel like a good person. You are just another sellout caught in a bad deal, another animal caught in the natural process of population peak and decline. Your impotent fury at the truth, or lack of truth, will not outlive the diseases waiting to waste you.
Hicks will go on telling you the water's worth drinking while they accumulate gargantuan tumors public healthcare will have to pay for. Special interests will keep on telling you that anyone opposed to exploitation is a communist, radical feminist, or pathological environmentalist liar. Oil is reckless. Car culture is stupid. Earth is under intensive, exploitative attack for the last hundred years in the name of a flawed standard of living that nobody in the West will give up without a fight. Everyone who isn't already suffering from pollution-induced disease has been fooled and when cancer and dementia peak we'll be out of any legacy money and forced to die in the streets like forgetful, hateful animals, drinking plastic leachate garbage water from the sixties, estrogen refuse from the sexual revolution, and antidepressant pollutants from the 80's. We will feel nothing as we decline. Nobody in the west has given up on waste. Waste is killing our chances of survivability. Our weakness is killing our remaining odds. Consumerism is a rampaging lion with no serious opponents.
We fucked ourselves and being hippies is not an answer. We are going to pay for our complacency and the nature nuts will smirk at our dependent corpses and rotting cities, no matter how righteous we feel for being consumers. Then they, too, will succumb to the poison. And life will continue without us, thinking "good riddance". So go out and protest and go home, drive to the gym, and feel like a good person. You are just another sellout caught in a bad deal, another animal caught in the natural process of population peak and decline. Your impotent fury at the truth, or lack of truth, will not outlive the diseases waiting to waste you.
8/7/12
Fast Food versus Sexuality, Orientation
Only in America would a divisive, manufactured 'political issue' come to a head at a fast food chain. I don't use the quotes to say that gay rights aren't an issue, or that marriage equality is jokes bro, but the issue is blown out of all proportion by one or both sides and it's annoying to see what was once a great country turned into a hobbled caricature of itself. Political issues should deal with good governance, any country mouthing anything or pointing fingers about poverty, hate, and human rights should have solved its own problems before sallying forth into other countries. But that's a lost battle, and the USA is far from alone in offending those of us who prefer politics to revolve less around identity, distraction/division, brand; and more around effective, efficient, consistently improving policy. And, oh, I don't know: honesty, transparency, good governance, and other foolish little things that have been largely forgotten and are outsourced to the drudges of bureaucracy.
That digressive aside aside, the whole fried chicken fiasco is about as insane as you'd expect. Dan Cathy openly admitted to having a specific belief in marriage, supposedly Christian, which determines that it can only involve one man and one woman. This has been the de facto form of marriage for something around two thousand years. It has been strictly enforced for maybe one thousand, and it has been a hysterical point of order for the last 40. It's more or less a distraction meant to separate and confuse people. It works really well, as it turns out, at doing that. Dan Cathy isn't the enemy; he's just the enemy's unwitting pawn. He's already purchased a certain existence that he feels is fair to him and those he loves, and how others feel about his overblown comments will not bother him. Was the entire event even heartening to see? Photos and videos suggest there's some kind of super-important event that's worth swarming a franchise restaurant about, like voters in the third world traveling hundreds of miles only to wait in the dust to vote... except:
This mindless wasteful dumb herd is all the satire this divisive issue needs. They have been crafted into satires of themselves. Clearly America is in trouble, and for the smug rest of the world: you're no better and believe in the same fundamental lies. It's in so much trouble that many people can't even walk to a fast food restaurant (priding itself on exceptional quality and service), to make clear how they feel about what other people do, in the privacy of their own lives. This kind of shit causes traffic problems. It will get to the point where the difference between fries, a burger and a shake will mean life or death for thousands. Except, well, it already means financial destitution, factory farming, environmental destruction, and pure unadulterated wastefulness. But those, of course, are small issues compared to the love a homosexual individual may feel towards another homosexual individual.
So burn your gas waiting in line with the AC cranked and your favourite Kid Rock album on the stereo, or sweat in the heat singing hymns with your friends, or stand a few feet from all of that and kiss your sweetheart in protest, or just protest. Wave your flags. Just... don't for a second question your existence and what it's come to, your material or social privilege, and all the myriad things you take for granted in the equation. Never change, America. Never change until it's too late, and the chilling reflection occurs to you that all of that bullshit you thought was so important and worth suffering and fighting and hating for isn't going to mean anything when the cannibals come knocking in the middle of the dark night of hunger. Your leaders will be done pulling you around like puppets, and some of them will even be safe, and don't go asking to join my inclusive non-hate survivalist gang. We were recruiting even when you bought into the fried chicken hysteria of 2012 – you just didn't care. You had bigger chickens to fry.
Fast food politics. Let's not get too afraid of what this means, but let's not forget about this anytime soon. I'll give 5 dollars to the first person willing and able to make a satire about this and I'll pay 50 to the network who broadcasts it.
That digressive aside aside, the whole fried chicken fiasco is about as insane as you'd expect. Dan Cathy openly admitted to having a specific belief in marriage, supposedly Christian, which determines that it can only involve one man and one woman. This has been the de facto form of marriage for something around two thousand years. It has been strictly enforced for maybe one thousand, and it has been a hysterical point of order for the last 40. It's more or less a distraction meant to separate and confuse people. It works really well, as it turns out, at doing that. Dan Cathy isn't the enemy; he's just the enemy's unwitting pawn. He's already purchased a certain existence that he feels is fair to him and those he loves, and how others feel about his overblown comments will not bother him. Was the entire event even heartening to see? Photos and videos suggest there's some kind of super-important event that's worth swarming a franchise restaurant about, like voters in the third world traveling hundreds of miles only to wait in the dust to vote... except:
This mindless wasteful dumb herd is all the satire this divisive issue needs. They have been crafted into satires of themselves. Clearly America is in trouble, and for the smug rest of the world: you're no better and believe in the same fundamental lies. It's in so much trouble that many people can't even walk to a fast food restaurant (priding itself on exceptional quality and service), to make clear how they feel about what other people do, in the privacy of their own lives. This kind of shit causes traffic problems. It will get to the point where the difference between fries, a burger and a shake will mean life or death for thousands. Except, well, it already means financial destitution, factory farming, environmental destruction, and pure unadulterated wastefulness. But those, of course, are small issues compared to the love a homosexual individual may feel towards another homosexual individual.
So burn your gas waiting in line with the AC cranked and your favourite Kid Rock album on the stereo, or sweat in the heat singing hymns with your friends, or stand a few feet from all of that and kiss your sweetheart in protest, or just protest. Wave your flags. Just... don't for a second question your existence and what it's come to, your material or social privilege, and all the myriad things you take for granted in the equation. Never change, America. Never change until it's too late, and the chilling reflection occurs to you that all of that bullshit you thought was so important and worth suffering and fighting and hating for isn't going to mean anything when the cannibals come knocking in the middle of the dark night of hunger. Your leaders will be done pulling you around like puppets, and some of them will even be safe, and don't go asking to join my inclusive non-hate survivalist gang. We were recruiting even when you bought into the fried chicken hysteria of 2012 – you just didn't care. You had bigger chickens to fry.
Fast food politics. Let's not get too afraid of what this means, but let's not forget about this anytime soon. I'll give 5 dollars to the first person willing and able to make a satire about this and I'll pay 50 to the network who broadcasts it.
7/30/12
This Moment's Most Hypeable Movie
Out of nowhere I see this movie trailer on YouTube. It's about the David Mitchell novel. There was one part of it I have read, the futuristic cyper-punk dystopia, which I thought was pretty sharp on a few levels, both as genre fiction and social observation. So the trailer, to me, makes the film look like it's the next Inception. Except potentially more confusing.
So Tom Hanks is in this movie, they've got 'Outro' by M83 playing in the trailer, and the words "EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED" show up on screen at one point – really exciting stuff. In a five minute trailer I've seen a bunch of stuff out of the movie. They've referenced a bunch of concepts: metempsychosis (this one's about to trend, trust me), love, action, dialogue, narrative exposition... if you watch the trailer you will discern a dozen more. Considering the nature of the trailer, I wonder if I've seen a condensed version, which also makes me wonder, taking the unfinished book into account, if it's going to be a must-see.
It sounds like the sort of achingly metaphysical and deep movie that will keep people thinking until they reach their cars or have walked for a half hour. It definitely looks cool, and you can forgive any foreseeable cliches and laziness by the sheer variety of settings. It just seems like the trailer generously lays the movie out and, really, how hard is it to pair the movie with a neat little conceptual trailer, even if it has to be half as long?
It's got me thinking all existentially, even at this moment, and for me this is the most hypeable moment of this particular upcoming film release. Really there's always a reason to cheer when a book is turned into a movie, or concerning movies anything that's not a sequel, prequel, remake, or franchise reboot. I just wonder if Cloud Atlas will suffer in the same way Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy did.
Anyways it's a cool trailer. It starts out with ethereal music and then kicks into more tense music and then goes insane. Dudes on horses, clones in a future dystopia, inspiring quotes. Then an explosion and a moment of silence and M83 and some more inspiring material. It's hard to resist, and in just a few months we get to see if it meets or exceeds expectations.
So Tom Hanks is in this movie, they've got 'Outro' by M83 playing in the trailer, and the words "EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED" show up on screen at one point – really exciting stuff. In a five minute trailer I've seen a bunch of stuff out of the movie. They've referenced a bunch of concepts: metempsychosis (this one's about to trend, trust me), love, action, dialogue, narrative exposition... if you watch the trailer you will discern a dozen more. Considering the nature of the trailer, I wonder if I've seen a condensed version, which also makes me wonder, taking the unfinished book into account, if it's going to be a must-see.
It sounds like the sort of achingly metaphysical and deep movie that will keep people thinking until they reach their cars or have walked for a half hour. It definitely looks cool, and you can forgive any foreseeable cliches and laziness by the sheer variety of settings. It just seems like the trailer generously lays the movie out and, really, how hard is it to pair the movie with a neat little conceptual trailer, even if it has to be half as long?
It's got me thinking all existentially, even at this moment, and for me this is the most hypeable moment of this particular upcoming film release. Really there's always a reason to cheer when a book is turned into a movie, or concerning movies anything that's not a sequel, prequel, remake, or franchise reboot. I just wonder if Cloud Atlas will suffer in the same way Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy did.
Anyways it's a cool trailer. It starts out with ethereal music and then kicks into more tense music and then goes insane. Dudes on horses, clones in a future dystopia, inspiring quotes. Then an explosion and a moment of silence and M83 and some more inspiring material. It's hard to resist, and in just a few months we get to see if it meets or exceeds expectations.
4/25/12
Well, No, Actually... Pt. 1
News is, at heart, a predictable beast. Whenever news stories follow the deranged, subnormal individuals of the deranged species known as humankind, there is a certain amount of inexplicable posturing and bristling. So a forty year old woman almost died eating a hamburger that weighed in at almost 10,000 calories, or enough food energy to feed two normal human beings for a week, or keep one, at minimum, alive for three weeks.
Excess is nothing new. Billions are spent on dumb, unwholesome, or dangerous things each day. Governments don't blink at billion dollar stealth fighters, million-inmate prisons, or corporate welfare. It only makes sense that governments such as spend money and run incredible deficits are propped up by fat, ungainly, mentally inadequate wasters who waste money in a similar manner.
The metaphor is clear: social arteries are hardening from lack of vigor and surfeit of fatty junk expenditure. We don't want to help the poor, at all, because it's their fault that society failed them and they're addicted to drugs or gambling or they're mentally ill. Meanwhile soft-hearted activists agitate for safe-injections sites for addicts. All of this means that the destitute and drug-addled are left to rot and roundly despised for being filthy, druggy pieces of shit with no redeeming features - mini politicians who would shank a much better individual for twenty dollars and change.
All these stories are seemingly designed to destroy my ability to sympathize. I can no longer approach many stories with pity or empathy or understanding. This woman should be burned for energy, or thrown into a diamond mine, or made to prepare her own food. The story cited here suggests that the problem is that people 'eat out' too often and that they should be encouraged to eat healthily and at home.
Fine. Or we can write these dumb pieces of shit off and stop supporting them at all. No hospitalization, no news stories, no free food for fat fucks. If we let some addicts rot, we should let them all rot. There is no obesity crisis: certain people are destroying themselves. Let them. They will not be missed.
Also, there is no obesity crisis. Some people are actually bound to be fat. Fat people exist outside of the caricature of fast-food swilling, eat-while-they-drive, cankle-waddling shits. It's similar to how thin people exist without bulimia, cigarettes, starvation, or the modelling industry.
Of course a sensationalist has to jump in and report the unreportable. This isn't news. It's social pathology that nobody pays attention to, because the reporters, when they can spell correctly, can hardly be expected to imagine that all of this might mean something.
Excess is nothing new. Billions are spent on dumb, unwholesome, or dangerous things each day. Governments don't blink at billion dollar stealth fighters, million-inmate prisons, or corporate welfare. It only makes sense that governments such as spend money and run incredible deficits are propped up by fat, ungainly, mentally inadequate wasters who waste money in a similar manner.
The metaphor is clear: social arteries are hardening from lack of vigor and surfeit of fatty junk expenditure. We don't want to help the poor, at all, because it's their fault that society failed them and they're addicted to drugs or gambling or they're mentally ill. Meanwhile soft-hearted activists agitate for safe-injections sites for addicts. All of this means that the destitute and drug-addled are left to rot and roundly despised for being filthy, druggy pieces of shit with no redeeming features - mini politicians who would shank a much better individual for twenty dollars and change.
All these stories are seemingly designed to destroy my ability to sympathize. I can no longer approach many stories with pity or empathy or understanding. This woman should be burned for energy, or thrown into a diamond mine, or made to prepare her own food. The story cited here suggests that the problem is that people 'eat out' too often and that they should be encouraged to eat healthily and at home.
Fine. Or we can write these dumb pieces of shit off and stop supporting them at all. No hospitalization, no news stories, no free food for fat fucks. If we let some addicts rot, we should let them all rot. There is no obesity crisis: certain people are destroying themselves. Let them. They will not be missed.
Also, there is no obesity crisis. Some people are actually bound to be fat. Fat people exist outside of the caricature of fast-food swilling, eat-while-they-drive, cankle-waddling shits. It's similar to how thin people exist without bulimia, cigarettes, starvation, or the modelling industry.
Of course a sensationalist has to jump in and report the unreportable. This isn't news. It's social pathology that nobody pays attention to, because the reporters, when they can spell correctly, can hardly be expected to imagine that all of this might mean something.
4/5/12
User Comment Rodeo: Canada's C-10 Bill
I miss Jack Layton more than ever lately. Politics have not changed at all from the bland regressive mess they've been, the Canadian populace is still a comatose rabble with vaguely confusedly libertarian/socially-fiscally-liberal/rationally-ideologically-conservative opinions that lead nowhere. The world's premiere first world country, hamstrung with voter apathy, political landslides, corruption, fraud, authoritarianism, paternalism, and every kind of stupid fucked up downright dangerous problem.
Oh but on paper, according to the UN, and if you're from anywhere else it looks like a fantastic country. The countryside is clean (hah!), there is hope and work around each corner (for therapists, social workers, and morticians), the economy is booming (incentives and make-work, stat! and don't worry about any funding cuts), and the political system is sound, popular, and fair. Voters are engaged, and everyone has a place at the table, and access to whatever information they need.
Phone lines are buzzing. There are even allegations that America has been making a rather large number of methodical calls to certain individuals, etc... But what's hearsay, anyway?
And recently the country was certified as the safest place on earth, filled with the happiest, most drug-free, productive and intelligent human beings in history. From the happy, well-integrated ethnic stereotypes; to the happy, well-integrated aboriginal stereotypes; to the happy, well-integrated generic stereotypes, it's a country on the rise. You might as well refer to it as the planet's 'chilly, under-appreciated paradise'.
It's also rife with potential for political skullduggery. You should see the sort of discourse an omnibus crime bill generates. Therefore I am reviving the User Comment Rodeo from hibernation, and the effects of the omnibus crime bill will be on display. Today it seems to suggest that posting the best possible user comment first would be advantageous, so here it is, the winner, the king:
Moderates are really the best, especially those with sharp analytical skill. The rating has been downvoted by, probably, the massive crowd of idiots that generally constitute the internet. Marijuana, or pot, enthusiasts also clicked the old thumbs-down button. The 15 votes in favor could have come from any side of the argument. It's truly the crown jewel of the show: gateway drug analysis, great line spacing, impeccable writing... and the youth-stoner shout out at the end is masterful. This seemed, to me, like the rationale of... a prescription drug fiend. Or an abstinence fiend, or any kind of fiend. But at least a fiend, and somewhat independent-minded, and not an ideologue.
Oh but on paper, according to the UN, and if you're from anywhere else it looks like a fantastic country. The countryside is clean (hah!), there is hope and work around each corner (for therapists, social workers, and morticians), the economy is booming (incentives and make-work, stat! and don't worry about any funding cuts), and the political system is sound, popular, and fair. Voters are engaged, and everyone has a place at the table, and access to whatever information they need.
Phone lines are buzzing. There are even allegations that America has been making a rather large number of methodical calls to certain individuals, etc... But what's hearsay, anyway?
And recently the country was certified as the safest place on earth, filled with the happiest, most drug-free, productive and intelligent human beings in history. From the happy, well-integrated ethnic stereotypes; to the happy, well-integrated aboriginal stereotypes; to the happy, well-integrated generic stereotypes, it's a country on the rise. You might as well refer to it as the planet's 'chilly, under-appreciated paradise'.
It's also rife with potential for political skullduggery. You should see the sort of discourse an omnibus crime bill generates. Therefore I am reviving the User Comment Rodeo from hibernation, and the effects of the omnibus crime bill will be on display. Today it seems to suggest that posting the best possible user comment first would be advantageous, so here it is, the winner, the king:
Moderates are really the best, especially those with sharp analytical skill. The rating has been downvoted by, probably, the massive crowd of idiots that generally constitute the internet. Marijuana, or pot, enthusiasts also clicked the old thumbs-down button. The 15 votes in favor could have come from any side of the argument. It's truly the crown jewel of the show: gateway drug analysis, great line spacing, impeccable writing... and the youth-stoner shout out at the end is masterful. This seemed, to me, like the rationale of... a prescription drug fiend. Or an abstinence fiend, or any kind of fiend. But at least a fiend, and somewhat independent-minded, and not an ideologue.
1/2/12
Steam's Holiday Sale 2011: Achievement Hunting, Coal, and Spite Purchases
Valve is a legendary computer game company responsible for Half Life. Now they're a monolithic entity which is known for its online distribution/other platform, Steam. Every year Steam is the meta-location for sales where the prices are low enough to trick you into buying games you will play for five hours then forget. Steam includes a library that tallies up the amount of games you have, and the amount of hours you have wasted on each.
In late 2011, Steam began its ambitious Holiday Sale/Contest Event. The premise was simple but awe-inspiring: users would complete various trivial/useless tasks (known as 'achievements' in gamer parlance) in order to win various paraphernalia including games, coupons, and chances to win further prizes which were cunningly disguised as useless bits of coal. This was the first time in history that I witnessed and experienced achievements having an actual purpose, and an actual real-world benefit. This is the sort of thing that will either be forgotten in the dismal future of gaming, or will inspire a great upcoming era where interesting games are buoyed by thoughtful, interesting distribution.
The event got people to replay old games for the sake of a small chance at winning something. Each day there were a handful of new things to do, and once again the participants would be heartbroken to receive a free copy of a game they already owned, a useless piece of coal (which could be crafted into heartbreak), or a coupon which would be valid into March 2012. Now it was a generous decision to allow participants to finish achievements until the last minutes of the contest.
Well the event finished, and there is a draw which will take place on the 3rd of January, 2012. The winner takes every game available on Steam. Other prizes exist but are vague and generally related to wishlist fulfillment. I will say that it was an interesting and largely successful event, though when it started there were some hiccups with the Steam service and at times the company's servers were swamped with download requests and purchases.
Valve clearly means to be good to both the industry and its consumers, as events like the Christmas Sale 2011 show. Publishers sell a lot of units on the basis of sale pricing, and customers tend to buy things they would otherwise ignore, because the price (and season) warrant a bit of curious purchasing. Everybody enjoys themselves and content producers profit. On top of that win/win situation, Steam offered an interesting contest event which encouraged users to replay titles they may have forgotten about, in the exciting pursuit of prizes. Looking back, it was perhaps the best Steam sale thus far.
In late 2011, Steam began its ambitious Holiday Sale/Contest Event. The premise was simple but awe-inspiring: users would complete various trivial/useless tasks (known as 'achievements' in gamer parlance) in order to win various paraphernalia including games, coupons, and chances to win further prizes which were cunningly disguised as useless bits of coal. This was the first time in history that I witnessed and experienced achievements having an actual purpose, and an actual real-world benefit. This is the sort of thing that will either be forgotten in the dismal future of gaming, or will inspire a great upcoming era where interesting games are buoyed by thoughtful, interesting distribution.
The event got people to replay old games for the sake of a small chance at winning something. Each day there were a handful of new things to do, and once again the participants would be heartbroken to receive a free copy of a game they already owned, a useless piece of coal (which could be crafted into heartbreak), or a coupon which would be valid into March 2012. Now it was a generous decision to allow participants to finish achievements until the last minutes of the contest.
Well the event finished, and there is a draw which will take place on the 3rd of January, 2012. The winner takes every game available on Steam. Other prizes exist but are vague and generally related to wishlist fulfillment. I will say that it was an interesting and largely successful event, though when it started there were some hiccups with the Steam service and at times the company's servers were swamped with download requests and purchases.
Valve clearly means to be good to both the industry and its consumers, as events like the Christmas Sale 2011 show. Publishers sell a lot of units on the basis of sale pricing, and customers tend to buy things they would otherwise ignore, because the price (and season) warrant a bit of curious purchasing. Everybody enjoys themselves and content producers profit. On top of that win/win situation, Steam offered an interesting contest event which encouraged users to replay titles they may have forgotten about, in the exciting pursuit of prizes. Looking back, it was perhaps the best Steam sale thus far.
11/26/11
Black Friday
I decided to do a commercialism/consumerism bit because in the United States of America it is Black Friday, which is a day when the bottom falls out of consumerism and people draw blood for 20% discounts on dishrags and various goods manufactured overseas. The obvious problem is that Black Friday is not patriotic. If you want to see how eager the average citizen of the world is to sell out their country, you just have to search YouTube for Black Friday videos. It seems most people would bum-rush the secret service for a $20 doohickey or polymer-based thingamajig.
What really sickens me is the subliminal vibes I get from the videos. There are literally herds of consumers. Yes, they are consumers at that point and, to the people advertising at them, not humans. They forget themselves in a strange orgy of incompetent and overloaded greed. I see that as degradation. There are a few news stories about it each year but no gigantic outcry.
Well, I think that Black Friday makes explicit the implicit degradation of consumerism, in which every bit of human potential is swept up in a subhuman madness to get the most for your money - from corporations to the individuals who mimic their behavior. There are no particular individuals to blame for a pathological, systematic problem. I don't hate consumerists. I don't even pity them. They are just bums with money, and in this era being a philistine is completely acceptable, so they work towards the next holiday, the next sale, the next iPhone, et cetera...
Despite facile attempts at being ethical and ecologically friendly, consumerism is more and more a bald lie that people chase because there's little else to do in the modern world but buy things, favourite things, attend things, unbox things, use them, show them off, and throw them out when they become outdated or broken. Oh and if you don't fit into this system there are labels for you: from communist to hobo to slob to snob. This goes beyond the differences between a pedestrian and a highbrow activist. I don't want my and my descendant's future sold to the highest bidder and sold at inflated prices to a mindless horde. I have to wonder if the bottom has fallen out of consumerism, but despite scenes of insane lemmingism I feel it will continue to be a powerful force in the world. Smug capitalism laughs, because this is all a useful distraction.
I find it sickening. Others might see it as fun or harmless, but consumerism guts economies and degrades not only the planet but the human spirit. For all that, spineless millions are unable or unwilling to give up the endless chase and (almost all) world leaders are curiously quiet on the matter. If commercial reform is going to happen, it will have to start with the literate consumer and work its way down the food-chain. Greed is a powerful and addictive drug, next to which cocaine looks like baby powder. This habit is going to leave our species on a truly heartbreaking comedown, and the more we snort the harder we will fall.
And I'm not innocent. Nobody is innocent, and I admit that we need things. However there are currently too many things and not enough reasons for them to exist. Production quotas could be fairer to natural resources and manufacturing does not have to be concentrated in coastal China. There are a lot of things that could be done, and our deluded quality of life might have to change, but if it doesn't, it's only a matter of time before herds of North American Consumers are fighting not for deals, but for livelihoods, to say nothing of consumers, producers, and bums across the world. So in the end I have to give it to Black Friday: thanks for showing how disgraceful we really are at our cores, and hopefully we notice this and do something about it.
What really sickens me is the subliminal vibes I get from the videos. There are literally herds of consumers. Yes, they are consumers at that point and, to the people advertising at them, not humans. They forget themselves in a strange orgy of incompetent and overloaded greed. I see that as degradation. There are a few news stories about it each year but no gigantic outcry.
Well, I think that Black Friday makes explicit the implicit degradation of consumerism, in which every bit of human potential is swept up in a subhuman madness to get the most for your money - from corporations to the individuals who mimic their behavior. There are no particular individuals to blame for a pathological, systematic problem. I don't hate consumerists. I don't even pity them. They are just bums with money, and in this era being a philistine is completely acceptable, so they work towards the next holiday, the next sale, the next iPhone, et cetera...
Despite facile attempts at being ethical and ecologically friendly, consumerism is more and more a bald lie that people chase because there's little else to do in the modern world but buy things, favourite things, attend things, unbox things, use them, show them off, and throw them out when they become outdated or broken. Oh and if you don't fit into this system there are labels for you: from communist to hobo to slob to snob. This goes beyond the differences between a pedestrian and a highbrow activist. I don't want my and my descendant's future sold to the highest bidder and sold at inflated prices to a mindless horde. I have to wonder if the bottom has fallen out of consumerism, but despite scenes of insane lemmingism I feel it will continue to be a powerful force in the world. Smug capitalism laughs, because this is all a useful distraction.
I find it sickening. Others might see it as fun or harmless, but consumerism guts economies and degrades not only the planet but the human spirit. For all that, spineless millions are unable or unwilling to give up the endless chase and (almost all) world leaders are curiously quiet on the matter. If commercial reform is going to happen, it will have to start with the literate consumer and work its way down the food-chain. Greed is a powerful and addictive drug, next to which cocaine looks like baby powder. This habit is going to leave our species on a truly heartbreaking comedown, and the more we snort the harder we will fall.
And I'm not innocent. Nobody is innocent, and I admit that we need things. However there are currently too many things and not enough reasons for them to exist. Production quotas could be fairer to natural resources and manufacturing does not have to be concentrated in coastal China. There are a lot of things that could be done, and our deluded quality of life might have to change, but if it doesn't, it's only a matter of time before herds of North American Consumers are fighting not for deals, but for livelihoods, to say nothing of consumers, producers, and bums across the world. So in the end I have to give it to Black Friday: thanks for showing how disgraceful we really are at our cores, and hopefully we notice this and do something about it.
4/23/11
Prefab Sprout, The Case Of
Musical consumerism is deadly business. I can think of little else these days. I see reality TV shows and some I watch eagerly and there is a moment when I think I can blog about them. Later I act on that impulse to my discredit. Even a reality television show perpetuates musical consumerism in some small way, funding hacks and their inane side-projects for one possible example. I am confident the world would be a worse place without professional musicians. There is really no choice, and therefore the best choice is pretending that you don't have a choice. Hence Prefab Sprout, who are so intelligent as to be tunefully respectful of your lack of choice.
When at least one part of a song is done compellingly it is interesting at least. Novelty of course is important, but not always crucial. Authenticity is severely hyped at times, and there's almost no point in wanting to win that fight – it must be regarded as unessential, because even good songs get played out, and you've got to replace them with some tune or lyric that sticks in your mind. Obviously a good mix of tune and lyric are necessary, and which is more important is subjective if not rhetorical.
When at least one part of a song is done compellingly it is interesting at least. Novelty of course is important, but not always crucial. Authenticity is severely hyped at times, and there's almost no point in wanting to win that fight – it must be regarded as unessential, because even good songs get played out, and you've got to replace them with some tune or lyric that sticks in your mind. Obviously a good mix of tune and lyric are necessary, and which is more important is subjective if not rhetorical.
2/28/11
Sorrowful Regrets from the World of Gaming
Thanks to Steam I regret buying games all the time. Years ago, when I had to travel to a store to buy a game, I occasionally had regrets as well, but I bought fewer games because stores never have sales, never have anything in stock, and Do you really want to be seen entering or leaving a computer game store? Steam solved all these problems. Of course, it also introduced new ones.
I regretted buying Left 4 Dead 2 after I learned it is not allowed to play without a microphone to scream into, and that if you try death squads will be sent to your house and your game will be sabotaged. Fortunately, in December 2010 (a much simpler time) the game was on sale, so I only spent 4.99 to shoot zombies with computer controlled idiots. I am not spending the minimum of 29.99 for a decent headset, or even 8.99 for a decent desktop microphone. I don't like to hear squeaky-voiced nerds and apathetic stoners when I play games. I don't like to get involved in defending girl-voiced game players from creeps. I just want to play a goddamn game and enjoy it for its own sake, with at most an optional social aspect. This is why I never played WoW, and also why Blizzard can suck it.
I bought Blue Shift, the Half-Life add-on, because it was cheap and I wanted to savor the nostalgia of the old Half-Life engine, which brought me so much fun when I was young. I regretted that purchase as soon as I entered a suicide elevator and had to check the internet to see how to progress further. You can search for Blue Shift + Suicide Elevator on Youtube and find out what I mean. It took 2 hours to beat, but was honestly worth the low, low price because I just wanted to hear the old sounds, see the old models, and die the old deaths while shooting the old guns.
I kind of regret buying Borderlands, but it was enjoyable enough for a while. It's just that the game has so little character or anything that I question playing it all. Will it make me bland? It doesn't help that Borderlands is also linear as hell but still makes you run around like a little cockroach – which is interesting, because it blends the worst aspects of linear and non-linear games, proving once and for all that the openness of a game does not really matter unless the game is generally superior anyway. It also has the worst, blandest, simplest, most annoying bosses since Dungeon Siege.
Then, this weekend, I had the ultimate temptation. Steam had 75% discounts on all Command and Conquer games (made since 2007 by EA, not Westwood [R.I.P]). Now the detail that they are all newer games is what made me question my urge to consume all of the games without thinking. Red Alert 3, when I researched it, had shitty animation, shiny graphics, and slick, soulless 3D nonsense. At 4.99 it might have been worth it.
But instead, I got Command and Conquer 3. Tiberium Wars. Sounds good, right? It looked marginally better than Red Alert 3, and I want to know how the series was doing in undeath (it ended sometime between 2003 and 2005). Well I've sobered up and thought about it and Fuck that stupid game. I regret it, and I regret being gullible enough to believe for a fatal minute that it would be enjoyable to play.
The cutscenes are for a dramatist to critique, and only serve to make the game more expensive to produce. The music is a steep let-down from what CnC used to offer. The interface is so hideous, bland, uninformative, finicky and featureless that I barely know how to repair or sell a structure. There are twice as many buttons as there need to be, none of them look like they do anything, and they're hard to see properly among all the action.
Oh there's the second point. The game is so busy with everything that you get the feeling it is holding your hand and pulling your leg at the same time. Even the main menu has a hundred moving parts and very small buttons to click upon. Objectives are presented in clumsy video clips, with wobbly 'recon' camera shots. Special effects take over half the screen, so you lose units all the time, and the color scheme makes it even harder to find anything. The cursors look like they were stolen from a Win95 theme pack. All of the buildings have moving parts and wheels and shit, and in a CnC RTS too much movement means that an older gamer, like me, is constantly thinking that one (wheeled) building is a tank, and that my tank is an enemy, and that I'm going blind or am visually retarded. The game is busy.
This is obviously a game from way back when gaming really started to get retarded, opulent, and unplayable. Generals was kind of distracting, unclear, overproduced and annoying in exactly the same way. What is so strange is that the gameplay really hasn't changed, but the interface and presentation make the game harder to play. The default shortcut keys are sadistic and unresponsive and unhelpful. An expensive and carefully planned attack goes to shit in seconds and all I see is smoke and little bastard missiles flying all over the place. When did every other attack have to be a missile? Why do I need to buy 6 riflemen in a group? This is not Command and Conquer, this is Generic RTS for the generation who can't chew with their mouth closed but can run three different computers at once while social networking.
This is my latest regret. I could've gotten drunk, or close to drunk, for the same money I spent on a game (and expansion!) that will continue to annoy me if I play it, and continue to bother me if I don't get entertainment out of it – and all the while I will think that I had enough games and enough regrets last week and I even knew better than to buy a game I was pretty sure would be a disappointment. So it's unfair for me to say "Fuck Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars" and I should say, "It's a game that is disappointing, annoying, and a botheration as well as of limited entertainment value. But you might like it, you cretin."
Nothing feels right when I play this game. Five or six missions later I can't even defend my base properly, and I get angry and go to my blog to complain. I was never great at RTS games but a few years ago I could play well enough to finish campaigns. I never had a problem with Red Alert 2 and it has a lot of annoying missions where all kinds of trickery and attacking and action take place and you have to deal with things. Who killed this series? When did every game get so self-involved and joyless?
I regretted buying Left 4 Dead 2 after I learned it is not allowed to play without a microphone to scream into, and that if you try death squads will be sent to your house and your game will be sabotaged. Fortunately, in December 2010 (a much simpler time) the game was on sale, so I only spent 4.99 to shoot zombies with computer controlled idiots. I am not spending the minimum of 29.99 for a decent headset, or even 8.99 for a decent desktop microphone. I don't like to hear squeaky-voiced nerds and apathetic stoners when I play games. I don't like to get involved in defending girl-voiced game players from creeps. I just want to play a goddamn game and enjoy it for its own sake, with at most an optional social aspect. This is why I never played WoW, and also why Blizzard can suck it.
I bought Blue Shift, the Half-Life add-on, because it was cheap and I wanted to savor the nostalgia of the old Half-Life engine, which brought me so much fun when I was young. I regretted that purchase as soon as I entered a suicide elevator and had to check the internet to see how to progress further. You can search for Blue Shift + Suicide Elevator on Youtube and find out what I mean. It took 2 hours to beat, but was honestly worth the low, low price because I just wanted to hear the old sounds, see the old models, and die the old deaths while shooting the old guns.
I kind of regret buying Borderlands, but it was enjoyable enough for a while. It's just that the game has so little character or anything that I question playing it all. Will it make me bland? It doesn't help that Borderlands is also linear as hell but still makes you run around like a little cockroach – which is interesting, because it blends the worst aspects of linear and non-linear games, proving once and for all that the openness of a game does not really matter unless the game is generally superior anyway. It also has the worst, blandest, simplest, most annoying bosses since Dungeon Siege.
Then, this weekend, I had the ultimate temptation. Steam had 75% discounts on all Command and Conquer games (made since 2007 by EA, not Westwood [R.I.P]). Now the detail that they are all newer games is what made me question my urge to consume all of the games without thinking. Red Alert 3, when I researched it, had shitty animation, shiny graphics, and slick, soulless 3D nonsense. At 4.99 it might have been worth it.
But instead, I got Command and Conquer 3. Tiberium Wars. Sounds good, right? It looked marginally better than Red Alert 3, and I want to know how the series was doing in undeath (it ended sometime between 2003 and 2005). Well I've sobered up and thought about it and Fuck that stupid game. I regret it, and I regret being gullible enough to believe for a fatal minute that it would be enjoyable to play.
The cutscenes are for a dramatist to critique, and only serve to make the game more expensive to produce. The music is a steep let-down from what CnC used to offer. The interface is so hideous, bland, uninformative, finicky and featureless that I barely know how to repair or sell a structure. There are twice as many buttons as there need to be, none of them look like they do anything, and they're hard to see properly among all the action.
Oh there's the second point. The game is so busy with everything that you get the feeling it is holding your hand and pulling your leg at the same time. Even the main menu has a hundred moving parts and very small buttons to click upon. Objectives are presented in clumsy video clips, with wobbly 'recon' camera shots. Special effects take over half the screen, so you lose units all the time, and the color scheme makes it even harder to find anything. The cursors look like they were stolen from a Win95 theme pack. All of the buildings have moving parts and wheels and shit, and in a CnC RTS too much movement means that an older gamer, like me, is constantly thinking that one (wheeled) building is a tank, and that my tank is an enemy, and that I'm going blind or am visually retarded. The game is busy.
This is obviously a game from way back when gaming really started to get retarded, opulent, and unplayable. Generals was kind of distracting, unclear, overproduced and annoying in exactly the same way. What is so strange is that the gameplay really hasn't changed, but the interface and presentation make the game harder to play. The default shortcut keys are sadistic and unresponsive and unhelpful. An expensive and carefully planned attack goes to shit in seconds and all I see is smoke and little bastard missiles flying all over the place. When did every other attack have to be a missile? Why do I need to buy 6 riflemen in a group? This is not Command and Conquer, this is Generic RTS for the generation who can't chew with their mouth closed but can run three different computers at once while social networking.
This is my latest regret. I could've gotten drunk, or close to drunk, for the same money I spent on a game (and expansion!) that will continue to annoy me if I play it, and continue to bother me if I don't get entertainment out of it – and all the while I will think that I had enough games and enough regrets last week and I even knew better than to buy a game I was pretty sure would be a disappointment. So it's unfair for me to say "Fuck Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars" and I should say, "It's a game that is disappointing, annoying, and a botheration as well as of limited entertainment value. But you might like it, you cretin."
Nothing feels right when I play this game. Five or six missions later I can't even defend my base properly, and I get angry and go to my blog to complain. I was never great at RTS games but a few years ago I could play well enough to finish campaigns. I never had a problem with Red Alert 2 and it has a lot of annoying missions where all kinds of trickery and attacking and action take place and you have to deal with things. Who killed this series? When did every game get so self-involved and joyless?
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