What On Earth is Bethesda Softworks Up To? : An Addendum

Armed with somewhat more knowledge and the time, experience, and distance to not just be astonished at what I feel was a weird lack of business savvy from a multi-million if not billion dollar company, and some news stories that help explain things I can perhaps offer a guess at what was going on at Bethesda that they released a Fallout show without a single hint even of a game from the same IP capitalizing on the hotness that only a streaming series can deliver in this day and age.

I think it can be traced back, given all the news stories about studio closures, to Microsoft itself. With the recent studio closures being the talk of the gaming world this past week, a new vista opened up that suggested extreme pressure, duress, and managerial issues probably responsible IN PART for the boring space game and the lack of any project 'on deck' for launch or reveal with the show's debut.  

(I myself have always had ideas for a more rogue-like Fallout game where you set out from the same town or vault, your character can die permanently and is randomly chosen, you can play as mutants or ghouls or robots in addition to humans, and levelling up and character builds are fast and fun. It could be modded onto Fallout 4, by the skillful and talented professionals who made that game, in about 8 months granted effective organzation and leadership and vision.) - [I am available for creative direction at frankly irresponsibly low prices, if anyone from Bethesday is reading this, leave a comment with your email let's make a hit]

As BSG is part of Microsoft XBox Games Studio (?) now, and was probably being banked on to quickly drop a genre-defining game in support of the console, the recent releases start to make more sense and their shift into more lucrative attempts (Fallout 76, real money shop stuff) at software can be explained as being tied to the balance sheet that investors froth at the mouth about. 

That same dedication to the financial aspect of making games has pretty much cratered the entire industry in the past 10 years and has also led to a lot of sloppy behaviour from big companies that should know better but have a fiduciary responsibility (yes this is a reference to real life, but also the game streaming series Fallout!) to make poor decisions that pay the maximum posssible return to investors and shareholders. 

It's why EA became a piece of shit, it's why Activision Blizzard lost all the goodwill either non-agglomerated company ever had, and it's part of the drawing of blood from the stone of reality that delusional capitalism excels at. EVs are greenwashing writ large, cap and trade was a noxious scam to steal from the public while polluting at an equal pace, NFTs were such a baldfaced scheme they sunk without a whimper, eCommerce is designed to empoverish all communities more rapidly than even Reagan's most based neoconservatism, and AI is mostly an orobourous generative scam built on the promise of esoteric, exploitative technologies of the future that is specifically designed to appeal to the sci-fi fantasies of computer understanders, but if you want to see the deleterious effects of capitalism, the bona fide premium examples have always been in video game entertainment, since E.T. in the 80s at least.

Still, let's not suggest it's all just due to the meandering will of a division of a 3 trillion dollar company, Bethesda have their own issues. In my opinion they've been making straight up pabulum since Oblivion, and as a Morrowind head (who first played Oblivion in 2010) I didn't find that game particularly  compelling. Skyrim had typoes, broken quests, and dozens of other design issues and bugs that put me off of it. Plus it was gorgeous but utterly boring, and I had played Mount and Blade by that time, a game with bugs, design issues, and actually interesting gameplay.

The Bethesda-era Fallout series started Oblivionesquely with Fallout 3, which was outstanding and stunning if you played it right then. I found it janky and kind of boring, and beat it one time and never went back. New Vegas was broken and buggy but an absolute treat to play and explore. Even the shitty DLCs each had something interesting to offer or examine (including, and I shudder, Old World Blues—the lowest of the low).

Fallout 4 was really a step forward in so many ways, from the presentation to the moment to moment gameplay. The first 10 hours with that game were revelatory and so compelling I just couldn't stay away. And yet FO4 was also a step backwards in terms of narrative, writing, systems, and long term appeal. Everything was there for a good game and then they had to smash their dumbass railroaded storytelling and quests into it, while making it a more open-ended experience could have made it an all time great. I don't understand how the masters of open world games fail to understand the premise and make players start each playthrough in a 15 to 45 minute tutorial. By the 11th hour doubts crept in, and by the end of the game the shitty conclusions of the quests and frustrations had me feeling not just crestfallen but really bitterly disappointed. The game world seemed like the hollow place it was, with no reason to return.

I can justify a New Vegas playthrough and I think about doing one—the build I'd try, the new perk to examine, the factions to align with, the quests or companions to pursue—about once or twice a year. I haven't gone back to that game in a bit over a decade but I still think about it and then the idea of modding it into stability and figuring out my Nexus password again just kills my desire, but the game itself draws me back... wait it's not time for an unarmed explosives survivalist run! I'm getting distracted.

What does this have to do with what's currently going on at Bethesda? Well, good question. It seems I got carried away doing some sloppy blogging. But it's only possible to see some cultural shifts in terms of one's own experience of it, and use that perspective as the guide. What happened to the company that led to less interesting titles was its success and growth. Larger teams were making larger and more technically impressive games that with each iteration strayed from the very open-world principles that (with Morrowind specifically) launched their success and gained them the interest, admiration, and money of a large audience.

Then they released Fallout 76, which was a Games as a Service product and also horrifically and well-documentedly a terrible release. The product was yanked out of the oven like the Fire Giant in Nausicaa and forced to do battle only to melt sadly after one big belch of radioactive sales. Since, I'm told that the game has been improved and fixed, and it works more or less properly, and some people even like it. I'm like I'm good, though, I played FO4 and I don't need more of the same. 

The grand freedom which allowed a new player to jump over the entire island of Vvardenfell and die on the landing is gone, it's flown the damn coop even. You can't abuse crafting or spellcasting or potionmaking to briefly become a demigod anymore in any game of Bethesda's. You can't even levitate anymore. 

The freedom is over. But that's not just for the player at one end, it's also true for the designer, the programmer, the maker on the other end, and that's not just a capitalism problem, or a sickness of success, or a super uncritical audience of gamers (who are so easily parted from their money that it's sad and also why institutional money moved in on games so predatorily),  it's a problem of management, of seeing easy money and guaranteed fat paycheque or bonus, of company culture trending towards a flat plateau, of being risk-averse, uncreative, uncritical, bloated, and too big and confident to switch tack on anything.

And the audience has rewarded it every time. This is why they got a boring space game rushed out the door, because when they sold a slightly more expensive version so they could do final beta testing and play three days early, they bought it and forgot about the game a week or two later. The business moves according to the cardinal rule of any over-financialized industry: risk not the investor's dividend and ye shall be rewarded. The only problem is, that was never true at all. 

Massive layoffs seem to happen whether or not games are successful and seem to have more to do with labyrinthine internal politics. Profits have skyrocketed, the industry is worth more than it ever was in the past, and those profits are funnelled ever more aggressively into the hands of people who did none of the work. (And they say capital gains taxes put innovation at RISK, one could cry from laughter if it wasn't so sad). And in the case of Arkane Studios, they were sabotaged by upper management and lost a lot of their more senior and talented people which led to the collapse of a recent project not even worth a vampirically circumspect mention. 

Senior and talented people are more costly because they have earned the right to ask for more, having experience, and having built success and generated profits for their employers. In traditional work-capital relations, these people are afforded more responsibility by an upper management that values loyalty, and then rewarded by increased salaries for their efforts and successes. In the hypercapitalism of today, where accountants run pretty much everything, the price of talent and experience are unconscionable. 

Replace them with idealistic and youthful people who can be ground down through overwork, poor management, and synthetic crises and thrown out before they get senior enough to affect the bottom line—or when they burn out. This isn't just true in games studios, it's true in every sector from advertising to zebra husbandry. 

So while I can certainly scoff at Bethesda and speciously ask why they make pabulum, it's probably healthier and more realistic to see them as a victim of the free market, one who will probably become yet more bloated, and release less remarkable games, until the original core of people are shuffled out and replaced and it too collapses and is scrapped for IP value, because outside of independent or private companies, that is the only future now.

Canada's 2021 COVID-19 Special Edition Snap Election

It's the big day in Canada this September 20th, 2021, as voters decide who will govern the nation through whatever the next years have in store. Oh yeah, and there's a big pandemic. And literally everyone is going crazy. There's anger, bitterness, and increasingly unhinged people all over the streets, the internet comment sections, the sidewalks outside of hospitals and the sidewalks outside of restaurants. Trudeau got gravel thrown at him, and a lot of abuse, at several campaign stops. Libraries aren't even safe. People are getting run over on the side of the road, like animals. The stakes have never been higher, and yet nobody knows what the hell, and even the smart money's confused.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for an election mere weeks (was it weeks? really?) ago there was a collective late-summer sigh in the air, as Canadians of all political stripes wondered why the hell he couldn't wait until after the global pandemic had subsided a bit more. The last election was only two years ago, in October 2019, which feels like a million years ago, so there's strategies at play here that most won't be able to grasp until the dust settles. The reason Trudeau called the election? To cement a legacy that his backers hope will keep Canada on the path forward... to the future! For everyone! (We have our doubts, too.)

Officially Dying Blog Gains Interest of Automated Surfing Computer

Hi NSA, I can see you too.

Hi Google, thanks for having my back.

FBI? I don't think so but maybe you're snooping on the behest of one of those evil corporations I always talk about despising. In which case [redacted].

The mystery continues, but one other detail needs to be included and that is that all of the incoming 120 that happened in one hour, probably almost instantaneously, they were running Chrome and their OS was Linux. Fairly certain all the hits came from the USA but I can't get accurate stats about that.

Linux and Chrome is what I'd call a power combo. Definite non-pleb computer user.

What the hell kinda thing happened there? That's too many views to be human.

Plus humans don't care about me. You don't need to understand stats to be kinda surprised at that.

This is a dying blog. I haven't been relevant or trending since the Jesse Navarro thing in 2010.

Well automated crawler, I hope you found what you were searching for.

Put me in the search engine as 'dying and irrelevant blog with really good writing and a cool perspective'.

Do my SEO? Help monetize? I will write speeches for your bosses and their bosses, too.

Maybe you'll leave me a spam comment about NFL jerseys and were actually acting out of China.

Who are you? Give me a shout sometime and lend me your organization's computing power. 

We will have fun and maybe help take down some miscreants.

Save the world. Crash Facebook permanently. Fire that blowhard millionaire guy from his own company.

I have other good projects around in my head that I can dig up...

Canadian Politics Update: Justin Trudeau wants to Sell Marijuana to Your Children

If I were more of a bettor and actually had money to risk, the current political atmosphere of Canada would be the most entertaining and fruitful place for small bets on unexpected outcomes. For about a year now things have been less depressing than usual and... well that's not strictly true but there's an awful lot of shit going on. From the Rob Ford crack scandal and his chances of winning the mayoralty again, to the number of days until 'Justin Trudeau' robocalls go out to Canada's Children with probably the best deals on weed outside of B.C.

Then there's the odds of Canada getting politically motivated enough to do something more courageous and insightful than perpetuating a natural-resources based economy which has been the de-facto source of jobs and state monies since the fur trade, since even the fishing of cod by vikings in ~700 A.D. Of course, after more than a thousand years of viking-related overfishing, those cod stocks look worse than Thomas Mulcair's chances of becoming Prime Minister. In springtime, when winter psychosis has set in firmly with most of the population, Canada gets a bit squirrely and a bit speculative,  small parts of it go on to smash all comers at Olympic Hockey, and still more Canadians in the Winter Olympics put on great, and often heartwarming, showings.

Economically, the Branch Plant Bet (also referred to in some circles as NAFTA) has managed to keep Canada in the black without solving the problem of the Rust Belt, or the overreliance on natural resources, or the productivity and skills gap. Unemployment is such a problem that many larger corporations have had to bring in foreign workers in order to have anyone to heartlessly terminate. The Canadian banking sector is 'the envy of the world' (their words – not mine), and experts estimate a Citigroup-level superbank to form in Canada in the next twenty years, which ought to make quite the splash in international banking. Why are Canadian banks international superstars? Easily, by being diligent businesses and selling only the finest and least dangerous financial services to their customers. That and sitting on large piles of money... I mean seriously, how was anyone surprised that Canadian banks did OK in the recession? They get money from the public for free, with less grumbling than the tax man faces, and they charge service fees sometimes. It's basically a foolproof industry anywhere it's not run by pure-strain greed (and even then the profits flow, as they must).

Februrary 2014: I Will Not Miss You

Jay Leno left the Tonight Show earlier this week. Could've been yesterday but I have been inundated with reports about Sochi 2014 - most of them concerning a little thing called the Winter Olympic Games. Already, the biggest opponents have attempted to hijack a plane in order to put some heat on the organizers... the odds of some kind of crazy shit happening in the open (let alone the stories we won't hear till March or later) are high enough to keep everyone placing money on the most outrageous tragedies, disruptions, and events. The Vancouver 2010 luge death might end up looking like a mild sprain, when all is said and done in Sochi.

An entire unit of the Russian Army is patrolling the Georgia/Russia border, and the stuff those guys are getting up to is no doubt quite interesting and compelling, but their opponents have sworn to engage in the sort of chaos-terrorism that military action has not yet been able to completely prevent. I am not reporting this to be gleeful or glib, but dozens of years of military retribution have only managed to stoke the flames of resentment. Even the Cossacks have been called in. While the hijacker/bomb-threat guy is getting beaten up by security personnel and interrogated to within an inch of his life, and incarcerated in a post-gulag gulag, the games must go on. Bookies are refusing to take bets on terrorist activity, citing a worldwide surveillance apparatus and generally bad odds of anything major going wrong (the latter excuse seems questionable to me).

Surely they will, but there is more trouble than just the threat of violence and bomb blasts. There is also bad press, blistering social media output, and international confrontation. A major ideological schism has haunted the Sochi Olympics since last year, and that is the spectre of Russian homophobia, which is not quite so much a regional thing in Sochi. For a while, in late 2013, it seemed as if a few countries might boycott the games, but abandoning the athletes on human rights principles was ultimately considered unthinkable. I am not an expert and I have not been following the issue closely, but I don't think a single country ended up boycotting the games for the beaten and dead gays of Russia.

The Character Assassination of Robert B. Ford

It was, all in all, a great week for Toronto. The possibility of a downtown casino had been quashed by the premier, another condo development had been announced (this one will replace the aging, unsightly, and low-density Fort York), and the numbers proved what citizens had known for ten years: public transit was highly popular, perhaps too popular. All the city needed was another news story or an influx of tourists, and the golden summer of 2013 could begin.

Nobody could have expected that the greatest news story of all time would descend, causing a vortex of mad news that would spread across the world. A truly world-class story would emerge from the general rubbish of Toronto news (three parts middle-class entitlement to one part crime/poverty stories) and take the world by storm – even better: it would lead to worldwide news coverage.

Noteworthy Rob Ford hater and inveterate populist newspaper The Toronto Star had been at the forefront of research into the newest Rob Ford Media Fiasco. However, when the story became too hot for the Canada/US border it was broken by a New York based internet company, Gawker. One gets the impression of a sweating editorial meeting at the Star, shirtsleeves and pantsuits, the editor in chief wearily smoking a cigarette and shaking her head - 'They scooped us, Jesus Christ, that was our story! One more fuck up like this and we're done!' Never mind, of course, that if the Toronto Star had reported on the story first it would never have become a world-class piece of news.

It was the hottest piece of Canadian hearsay since that fuddle-duddle about Laureen Harper, which many still do not know and got to be so hot it involved the RCMP. Even the Laureen Harper rumors failed to capture the world's attention – most likely since they only existed in Ottawa, where they were firmly proved, before the media was scared with warnings about tangling with the Prime Minister's Office and the RCMP. Well, move along, old story. Here's a golden one: Rob Ford smokes crack. Allegedly, because the drug dealers who have the video aren't letting it go for less than $100,000 at least, and double that for U.S. media outlets. Nobody's bought it yet, but those young entrepreneurs are proving that you don't need education or ethical high ground to make the news! Truly they are sending a good message in the Recession Era for self starters everywhere.

What do you think of that? That's absolutely world class, and the media is acting like it's shameful. In a country where senators are getting away with fraudulent misuse of taxpayer money, and the government generally looks down on the populace, the private enjoyment of privately-funded crack cocaine by a family man and Mayor of Toronto seems to be the Goliath of news. In reality it isn't even that newsworthy at all: Canada is a real country and things happen outside of Toronto. However, there is an element of schadenfreude in all this: Canada hates Toronto and the most vocal parts of Toronto hate Rob Ford. Everyone wins with a story like this.

Toronto should embrace this man, but establish firm limits on his ability to gut downtown or mass transit. Rob Ford is a brilliant statesman in the new mode: what matters is politics as a game. Promise the people what they want and then go forth, and do what you want. Words to live by. In America he would be a millionaire CEO, a Senator, or a Governor. Since it's America, he probably wouldn't have strayed far from powder cocaine. In Canada he is a Michael Bloomberg - a Canadian Billionaire and a Mayor, and possibly a Man Who Smoked Crack. This is truly world class, and Toronto owes him for his services, for the media exposure, and for the good times.

Most importantly, Rob Ford is a tenacious fighter and a winner. He has faced incredible backlash since before he was Mayor. He was the dissolute son of a rich man, they said, and just another byproduct of the broken North American Democracy. They thought he wasn't built of the right stuff, but as it turns out, Rob Ford is. Every failure of optics has been overcome, from the anger management issues, to the balance issues, to the aggressive cameraman issues. Nobody in Canadian politics is man enough to deal with Ford, and that fear is what contributes to the largely biased and negative coverage.

In a daring show of solidarity with the poor addicts of the world, Rob Ford smoked crack. He is rich enough to enjoy powder cocaine, but he wanted to let the world know that rich people can get down with rocks too, we're all generally the same - some of us are just rich enough to govern the rest. Isn't that the American Dream come to life in Center-Right Socialist Canada? Rob Ford is truly a contender in politics, unlike generally all other politicians, he isn't afraid of crime, drugs, or poor people. If his people are smart enough to spin this story the right way, he will be Prime Minister in ten years, and then the fun can really begin!

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.

User Comment Rodeo: Point vs. Counterpoint.

Everybody's heard the story. I probably don't need to go into it, and I don't really want to. It's a chilling one. This post and ripost say something about when and when not to point fingers or ask for collective reflection. It's not even so funny.

The bottom-most post is kind of the numbskull post, or the comedic foil. Whoever posted that doesn't really have anything to say, but wants to say it. Hello 85% of comment boards, peanut gallery fucks, and general idiot populace who don't do the rest of us a favor by keeping to themselves. No empathy, just a sense of indignation that a potential sociopath managed to cleverly avoid the same security that allegedly asked for their name prior to leaving the country. Pro-tip: next time don't use a travel agent. Your inconvenience is completely unrelated and unimportant to this tragic story involving the death of a young expat student. If you're trying to make a joke: fuck yourself. Get away from anything serious, and never consider a job in comedy because you're about as funny as a bag of grass clippings. Next, the rejoinder to the above middle post:

Yes, fine, sure. Way to speak for all of Canada. Somewhat thoughtful, and you're definitely right that it was not the time to reflect on our cultural or societal values (which include ATTENTION GETTING, SELF-WORSHIP, THE REDUCTION OF HUMAN LIFE, GREED, DESENSITIZATION TO VIOLENCE VIA ALL MEDIA AND OVER-REPORTAGE, and PUBLICITY). But to be fair I don't know what the first poster wanted us to examine in modern society. The post could've been about anything. Mentally-ill people aren't ostracized to the point where they commit crimes. The committed 'insane' live shitty lives, but some of them are kept from society for a reason.

I think, ultimately, that it's the ubiquity of the alleged perpetrator of this murder that should give us pause. There are many young men and women 'on the get' who do whatever is necessary to get whatever they want. They have infantile minds and dangerous ideas, they hold very little value in life and too much in material. They are everywhere and they run banks, deficits, companies, governments, the law, and society in general. And yet we are not afraid. And yet when, say, a regional economy is dismembered and sent in bloody pieces around the world, its ex-employees festering in neglect and despair, a similar crime is not perceived to have taken place.

Maybe it's all rhetoric, but maybe it's not. Maybe the poster posted a dumb question on the old message boards, maybe the poster wasn't thinking. Maybe the poster hates society. Maybe it's just a simple story made complex by the ideas people are injecting into it. Then again, it's Canada's Most Insane Crime of the Season, and every sensationalist will jump onto it with an agenda. All those agendas will end up burying the very point of the story: the victim. And it always happens that way. Maybe we should take a goddamn minute to think about how these things come to pass, and how they may not reflect merely one diseased individual.

Or maybe we should get back to feeling good about our society because it does not literally encourage malice.

90s Science: Demolition Man vs. Judge Dredd

Science fiction movies in the 90s were all over the map. One year you might see gloriously well-presented dinosaur melodrama, the next year you might give up in distress and learn to appreciate art or literature. In many ways, the inconsistency of the past carried into the future. Some people talked about how the 'movies these days' were full of 'special effects', except in that time special effects were something rare and spectacular that tended to be applauded. That or they were incredibly shitty and overused. In many ways, nearly two decades later, things are similar.

90s movies had a certain quality that no longer really exists in the medium. Many of them were totally unwatchable wrecks, many of them aged horribly, and there was much lazy writing and gnashing of directorial teeth. Such is life. I post here today to summarize my experience with two Sylvester Stallone, marginal, action/sci-fi movies from the 90s. Abandon all logic and subtlety, ye who would be so foolish as to follow me. The movies are Demolition Man (1993) and Judge Dredd (1995).

Demolition Man is an insane movie. Stallone jumps out of a helicopter and explodes an entire building before the title sequence. Everything else after that is awesome, but muddled in a stupid, obtuse, poorly-written version of the future. But none of that matters because that future exists only so Wesley Snipes, playing a gleefully violent criminal, can fight Sylvester Stallone, who accidentally killed 20 children when he exploded the building from the beginning of the movie. Both of them were frozen in time because that's how sentencing worked in 1993's idea of 1996.

Demolition Man has an agenda so broad, and so stolen, that even dogs raise their eyebrows when they see it. The future is a utopia, peace and calm reign, but society atrophies because there is no aggression, no uncertainty, no explosions, and no action. Death is by natural causes, spicy foods are outlawed, and people get fined for swearing. It's the original Campy Darwinism. Sandra Bullock and company say shit in the opening half hour that sounds so hideously, hilariously, clumsily out of place that the only explanation is that a computer was given the scenario and two hours to write it. Apparently only intellectual-sounding words would make the future enough of a gutless wimp for two 90s badasses to thoroughly work it over.  "Info assimilated." "Mellow greetings."

In this future, which exists out of sheer laziness, society is childish, naive, and inherited by total fucking infantile eunuchs with too-large vocabularies. But it's still fun. Things get shot up. Wesley Snipes taunts everyone and shoots everything. The whole plot is a weird mixture of old utopia/dystopia books such as 1984, The Time Machine, and Brave New World mixed with basically every science fiction/action film up to its point. It's not particularly smart, or achingly funny, and the satire is dull, but nobody cares. Ten minutes in you know this movie doesn't care. You shouldn't, the movie told you not to. And there's just enough quality action, gun-play, and insanity that you feel okay when you watch it. This was the model for mediocrity. These days it seems awesome only because our current mediocrity is even more slick and bland than the future proposed in Demolition Man. The future-colloquial dialogue is feeble and stupid while trying to make a point about how weakness, pacifism, submission, and herd intelligence are related. Wesley Snipes' awesome action kicks, dozens of quality explosions, at least ten snappy one-liners, and all the swearing make this movie worth it. 1993 was probably just a simpler time.

Fact Blackout Day

Fun fact: the internet is nebulous and strange and sometimes even in the space of a few hours it can change considerably. The use of the internet to distribute intellectual property freely, known colloquially as piracy, has attracted numerous smear campaigns, intimidation campaigns, and lobbying campaigns. Governments are full of boomers who don't know very much about the internet, so the lobbyists have an easy time because they represent moneyed interests and bellyache about the rampant theft of video, audio, and data property.

Today a number of internet entities, most notably Wikipedia, have opted to protest upcoming US legislation that vaguely confronts the threat of internet piracy, copyright infringement, and intellectual property theft. Full understanding of the legislation is available to nerds, lawyers, and people with too much time on their hands. So far as I can simplify it: another step down the road to internet nationalization, censorship, and the death of free information.

The anti-theft team is as powerful as the net-neutrality/free-internet movement is popular. Most people don't really care either way, as long as they can get to Facebook and/or email. Most people also don't really understand the internet, or care if it gets cut up into various national zones. Who in America wants to read a Finnish webcomic, or a Chilean blog? That's a waste of time. But Finns and Chileans want American entertainment, so it's best to cut the audiences away from each other and limit the odds of pirated material being available online.

In the past, powerful entertainment corporations have volleyed multimillion dollar lawsuits at 15 year old pirates, but that Napster-era policy is outdated because nobody liked it and there is no way a teenager is going to afford legal defense fees. The new approach is preventative and cautious and roughly as imperative as the old one, but instead of going after the users of the internet or even consulting them, it just pressures the gigantic blind beast known as national government into various overbearing measures that will change the internet for the worst.

Or so I am told. The internet is already somewhat nationalized, mildly censored, and it's so full of nonsense that even if 80% of it were deleted, banned, and forgotten, there would still be far too much of it to control or monitor. So the state of the internet is that all the bluster of the last decade regarding IP laws and censorship and nationalization is actually going to come to some kind of action. For my part I have serious doubts about the usefulness or fairness of the proposed measures, and I wish all opponents of a cut-up, abused internet a conclusive victory.

But the crowd is ignorant and the corporation is indignant. That is why awareness drives like today's are important, to ensure that any lies surrounding this sordid business are dispelled.

Conan Attacks the Youth, DC Comics

I had to laugh at the Thursday episode when I caught it on the web just now. Somebody points at Conan and he points back, then a whole row of audience members point back, and it begins a thing. Leno does the high-five thing and contributes the flu, everyone claps, but Conan O'Brien consistently involves the audience some types of chicanery. Not all types of chicanery, of course.

Then Conan actually, if you'll believe this, told a member to point at the stage for the entire show. I don't know if it's just me, but when Conan said "That's what's wrong with your generation." I laughed but moreover, was deeply offended. Nobody can hold up their arms that long... it's discouraging to see him promoting this kind of angst just about finger pointing.

The entire DC Comics segment was great. The criticism of various lame superheroes and Conan even made the artist laugh. Or payed him to laugh. Either way, the criticism part made laugh heartily, though it was as heartless as his assault on the youth during the opening. Sarah Silverman is the kind of guest who is bound to act funny and kind of steal the show, and Michio Kaku is the intellectual twist and obligatory science guest. Sounds like a good Thursday night to me, except, well, the e-show delay. It's still good a day later.

Obligatory science guests, in this case speaking about sacred quests. Bit of rhyming. Really a good guest though, you really don't hear enough about Unified Field theory these days.

EDIT: If you look right now (Sat, ~4 AM EST) on the film & animation section on YouTube you can see a large amount of trailers posted for the new Transformers movie, and to be honest the number is not what you'd expect after Transformers 2. This fan enthusiasm has to be synthetic as the robot monster it has become.