The Real Thematic Core of Indie Gaming Darling Outer Wilds

****¡SPOILER DANGER!***

 

Outer Wilds is a game that respects your time and your curiosity. Though I’m going to argue the theme is letting go, you should hold on to the experience of playing it yourself before knowing anything and spoiling it! Stumble around blindly like a cool 4 eyed space amphibian, then come back for some thematic discussion.

 

****¡SPOILER DANGER!***

 

All Your Favorite Social Media Channels Are Going To Hell

This year, and I mean This Year, a lot of social media companies, unhappy with merely not capsizing and deflating and disappearing, are going through the unprecendented step of making themselves nuisances. From disenfranchising userbases to creating nonsense features that do nothing, to removing the publically-visible metrics that made their platforms interesting (before algorithms built digital cages so impenetrable that you need an anonymous browser to get anything useful out of them), to making themselves User Only Content, and more—the lions of yesteryear are shittier than ever, and less likely than ever to be replaced with better platforms. Let's face it: all your faved social media channels are going to hell.

Stalker: COP, Fallout 4 and Philosophical Divergences in Design

I've been able to get back into playing computer games after a fairly lengthy absence where I only had Terraria, Starcraft & Brood War (which were/are free), and a great little game called Dungeon Warfare to distract me from professional and other pressures. Of course the first thing I did after a 3+ year absence is get a cheap computer together to play fairly modern games. Of course I started with Fallout 4, because I had only played a few hours on a friend's PS4 and enjoyed it enough to want to give it a full go. Then the Stalker series went on sale, and since I'd been meaning to play a Stalker game since the original was released, I grabbed Call of Pripyat.

Playing both more or less side by side when time allowed has been interesting. There is a real divide in development philosophies between each that is kind of useful for examining the differences in Western and Post-Bloc thought. The differences in narrative style and game mechanics tell a wider story that's kind of interesting to me, and since I almost never blog anymore, and nobody reads this blog anyway, I thought I'd put my thoughts into the internet right now. Plus both games are post apocalyptic in a sense: Fallout in the global sense, and Stalker in the more local sense (already food for thought). There are significant differences between these two 'shoot a gun at a mutant'-type games.

The Borderlands Series in Retrospect: Actually Mostly Bullshit

Borderlands is a computer game series that is in many ways symptomatic of the 'malaise of modern gaming' (which is not 100% true and therefore a theory) especially considering how style has trumped substance (which is a problem modern gaming shares with many other modern things). The gist of a Borderlands game is:

It is a first person shooter set on a richy detailed, busted cyberpunk/post-apocalyptic wasteland/junkyard alien planet with cool monsters and villainous humans and it's also a bit of an RPG (because those are hot right now) in that you have experience points, skills, and criticals (and also a vast, grim, and forboding numerical grind). All weapons and equipment are randomly generated with varying stats, there are multiple protagonists with different powers, persistent account wide bonuses, and a variety of challenges and accomplishments. Also the series likes to use hit songs in advertising as well as in-game!

All of this, and it's arguably less fun than even Doom 1 or 2, which are a million times less complex or intricate. To my mind the Borderlands series is a perfect example of the pretty, lifeless, grindy, downright boring and chore-like video games proliferating in 'serious' gaming. I finished the first game a couple of times (to my eternal discredit) and only played around 8 hours of Borderlands 2 (so far I haven't gotten a single interesting weapon and the fights haven't been fun). So the most important things in FPS games, the guns, are randomized. Generally the randomized guns are excessively useless. The inventory system is yet another terrible console/PC crossover abortion, so good luck selling the random loot guns the game is stingy about dropping.

Hell and Death and Hell in 2017

With everything getting worse and worse and worse, this year was full of fun entertainment products and 'silver linings' that can only be seen clearly in times of darkness, like the edge of the sun during an eclipse. If you thought 2016 was like a dystopian nightmare, 2017 was a goldmine of things verging way past the noxious, from the full-time resurrection of open Nazism to evidence (that never really leads to action) that foreign actors had meddled in other nations' elections. Democracy was already an outmoded farce facing skepticism from even the most foolish fools, but even with the cover blown off things could still get darker and more scary. Amazing.

Technological progress continued onward, but with the exception of a self-landing rocket and reusable cargo spaceship, and maybe electric cars (more than 100 years of not quite getting there), most technology was either frivolous or part of some nightmarish scheme to either replace or fully entrap humanity. From drones to 'assistants' the technology industry seems to want everyone to rat on themselves constantly, and warnings about hackers are just the tip of the iceberg when you consider that everything you do is already probably monitored. The dystopia is real, and we're just waiting on the cyberpunk aspect.

Sexual misconduct was a hotter topic this year than most, thanks to the revelations that just about all of your heroes abuse their power and lack the self-restraint we typically expect from adults. That actor/comedian you loved? Yep. Though that's kind of a good story, ultimately, that outside of financial fraud and rigging elections and misleading the public, at least the people who are sexual predators get their comeuppance. It's just, yeah, it had to take down at least one man you thought was cool. Solution: stop thinking men are cool, like nearly a full quarter of North America's women already do every day, just to protect themselves and not even from spite (which would be equally righteous).

What could be more fun than the above? How about a proxy war that's created a cholera outbreak and killed thousands of children? Not sad enough for you? Record numbers of murders in South America due to That Drug Problem still not being solved. If you liked natural disasters, this was a fairly average year for those, and they still managed to be astoundingly destructive. Got any more wars, 2017? Of course you do, we're just too exhausted to pay attention anymore.

On the internet I'm sure a bunch of things happened. People complained. Hashtag slacktivism continued to invalidate its own arguments, and the all the nefarious and alienating filter bubbles (which both me and Barack Obama warned about at different times, with my warning several years earlier) came to the surface dispensing gallons of fetid gaseous idiocy and half-baked numbskullery. Delightful! The internet didn't get any smarter but it did manage to make most of us even more stupid and lazy. Plus the internet of things... what a dumb bunch of dumb dumbness. The field of product design managed to shit out a billion turds that all inexplicably connect to the internet to do stupid shit, spy on you, fail to work, and brick once they're no longer supported. And they said the Snake Oil Salesman died in the 1920s!

And if that wasn't enough, the future of America's internet (from which providers across the rest of the free world take their cues) got extremely uncertain and frighteningly extra-dystopic. But 'feminism' was the word of the year, so I guess it all balances out with social media battles being won at the cost of all freedom, decency, and promise in the future.

It was, however, a great year for music, with literally too many future classics being released. So many, in fact, that we'll have trouble looking back to them simply because there were so many and music is such a fractured field dominated by large entities overshadowing interesting efforts from smaller ones that it's like... hell man. It's like hell out there I'm sure.

Essentially, if you were what's referred to as a normal person, odds are this was a year where you went along feeling like your day-to-day was unchanged but everything around you was a nightmare. So you retreated into the filter bubble. Who could blame you. You retreated into whatever refuge you had and waited for the bad dream to pass, for the world to awake and come to its senses. But it didn't. So then you probably decided: well, fuck it, let's drink. Can't blame you there. Maybe you turned to religion. Maybe you killed yourself. That might have been the smartest move of all, given our dismal outlook for the future.

Well. Here's to another year of Hell Lite, overblown vacillation and unrestrained hyperbole. May 2018 be a little less hellish, and may the screeching outraged idiots and their sinister puppet masters all shut up and let the rest of us can get back to the business of improvement.

The Miss: Is 'The Mist' This Summer's 'Under the Dome'?

IT was such a big movie that I haven't seen it, but I have heard of it. I've seen the memes. The memes are OK, and I watched the 80s movie which is frankly a pretty effective if silly horror movie. Stephen King is doing alright lately. But for every good media product, there is a subpar product created as reaction. Stephen King has provided society with a fair amount of media products as his bestselling books regularly get reconfigured into television and film, and that makes sense: King is a prolific writer with a huge audience. Sadly, his admirers often fail to elevate the material, and a recent case is all the example we need.

Today, we are gathered at this sloppy blog to discuss and explore The Mist - the 2017 Netflix special. Apparently it started its sad life as a new series for Spike TV. Spike TV's last major show was MXC and that was over a decade ago. You're going to ask something about why I would watch a show made for Spike TV. Because, let's face it: I should've known better, right? Let me answer for my actions: sometimes you know the trainwreck is coming and you just have to make sure you see it happen. I saw it on Netflix (where it had been dumped fairly quickly for an American exclusive), knew it would be pretty bad without any research, and dove right in.

I vaguely recall a movie of The Mist released in 2007, based on Stephen King's novel by the same name (at this point I won't read it anytime soon). The movie had weird bugs that the protagonists had to shoot when they were in a supermarket. Big things loomed in the dark. Were they dinosaurs? Then, at the apportioned time, the mist blew out of town, and everyone had endured personal struggles, survived, and grown as people. I assume this TV series is aiming to do the same, but since it was written by committee with little regard for coherence or impact, I also assume it will kind of spin around in annoying circles for 10 episodes.

All you need is a coping mechanism, and you can watch this show.

It opens, kind of like Under the Dome did, with the destruction of an animal. In Under the Dome it's a cow that gets split into two steak-like halves, in The Mist it's a dog that gets eviscerated. And a soldier wakes up without any memory of what's going on... oh yes, friends, you've entered a zone of mass entertainment you've probably stumbled over before. The dead dog looks a lot more realistic than the dead cow, though. If you have Netflix, you can see for yourself. Actually I'll spare you the trouble:

Big mystery: who did the dog piss off to get done like this? Also: nice one, SFX people.

The same team is responsible for The Mist as made Under the Dome. I'm sure that the key people are unchanged. There's a deep connection between the shows. I can sense these strange coincidences... the casting seems similar. The locations seemed to have been scouted the same ways. The special effects: again I'm getting some deja vu. The writing is what really seals its fate. Something about the situations and the handling of characters and the bizarre missteps they have to take in order to make plot lines viable just reminds me of the 8 or so episodes of Under the Dome I watched.

Alt Nerd Rap Dispatch

"I went to school to become a philosopher 

but dropped out to be a sober Kid Cudi imposter."

Milo is a rapper, notorious by his nerdity, and nearly absurd by the fact he has rapped about the time he (might have, allegedly) cried on an internet message board due to real world awkwardness. He exists somewhere in the altstream of rap, in the neighbourhood of Open Mike Eagle, Billy Woods, and Busdriver (there's a strange proximity to Kool A.D. with less psychedelia).

Milo's verses are accomplishments in multisyllabic delivery, and if his vocabulary isn't as large as Aesop Rock's, he's closing the gap at an alarming rate. He may well represent the pinnacle of that most critical subgenre, Nerd Rap. He might also represent alt rap's great hope – a sublime counterpoint to everything that ever buried intelligence in favor of style.

Not to say that Milo is the answer, that an answer is needed, or that mainstream rap are necessarily unwoke. Milo is a rap moniker or nom de rap for Rory Ferriera, born in Chicago, raised in Maine, and lately an L.A. [un]based vegetarian, touring at the time of this writing. Seems to like Vonnegut, definitely read his philosophical tracts at some point, and pointedly represents the defiant vanguard of rap. Nerd territory stuff.

Why My Attitude to Emoji Did a 180

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I mean, the above is basically the essence of my turnaround. For many years I was of a much different opinion about emoji – I thought they were pointless, stupid, and I would have never used one even in a T9 text. On the internet I used the voraciously, though, but they were known as 'smilies' and seemed a totally different thing – plus most of them depicted smilies electrocuting each other or shooting guns or humping or spilling beer instead of : ) or ; ) like weirdos and dummies in chats might use. I suppose it's a pointless digression, but to me smilies and emoji are conceptually different things that share a similar purpose.

I didn't think about smilies/emoji much from 2005 (when the last forum I enjoyed browsing shut down) to 2013. In that time I still considered them childish things undeserving of a serious mind, fripperies that only made the appearance of communicating anything, creating a muted shorthand for the illiterate to toy with.

Then I picked up a relatively more modern phone and starting using apps and stuff (I am a very late and reluctant adopter of social media) and I found myself using them more and more. The famous emoji 'Face with Tears of Joy' rose like a monolith, and the rest is history. Now I catch myself wanting to use emoji in Facebook, texting emoji to friends who never abandoned a distaste of them (mostly to annoy them and amuse myself), and doing wicked Snaps with emoji making half the point.

I gave in. I joined the merciless social media march. I sold my credibility and the security of being a Skeptical Person, and dove begrudgingly in. Being simultaneously out of touch and trying to decide what 'in touch enough' was for me made for some strange years, which are ongoing. There is a surreal quality to using five different apps and platforms regularly to communicate with friends. It's bizarre to me. To the old me it would have been unthinkable, a grave and simultaneously frivolous mistake, to waste my time in such a way or even to care.

But it did change. And now, instead of wondering whether to write anything at all or which word to delete, I spend actual time to throw an emoji into a text. It's both weird and funny to me. I guess it's more fun to use them, even if only in a sneering way, but they are useful to provide connotations - they can even make sarcasm fly in text form, which is actually quite an elegant solution to a real problem.

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Notes on Being the Worst Person I Know

I suppose it wouldn't surprise many people to know that I, a sloppy blogger,  consider myself, by a wide margin, the worst person I know. I guess I could take the optimist's way out and say that I'm blessed to know a lot of good people and fortunate enough to not be surrounded by shitty people, which is why I'm the worst. I guess that's a way I could take this.

Millennials For Bernie and Other News From The Modern Gutter

Wow 2016 has certainly been a year, between celebrity deaths, political chicanery, imminent race war with shooting-a-day news, terrorists wilding out everywhere, a surprise coup in Turkey, and the grand return of Pokemon combined with augmented reality, the Age of Indifference seems poised at the cusp of its Golden Age. It's almost possible to forget the insanity of the first four months of the year based on the last three months of the year. It's almost possible, even tempting, to think that we are at an all time high of crazy happenings


But things have been shitty for a very long time, haven't they? And it's probably our fault. In fact it is certainly our fault. We've done this. Some of us try to do better, some of us try to fuck things up, and the majority don't care. I like to think I fall outside of all these groups. I don't care; but I do. I want to do better; but I don't. I never really considered the option of making things worse... it seems there are plenty people on each side of every confrontation who can do that better than I could ever hope to.

So I was trying to come up with a good overview of the past ten months or so but there are so many squawking heads yakking about it that it doesn't matter. Plus, I'm a piece of shit idiot with nothing new to add or a redeeming perspective. Suffice it to say I get it: everything looks pretty grim. Things looked bad in 2003, and they look roughly as bad now, except there is more bad stuff? (I'll look into this after I kill myself, because fuck making that graph.) But there's also good stuff: like consumerism! So I'm going to recommend some pretty good stuff that'll help you get through July without killing yourself or fantasizing about killing every last human in an insane laser drug apocalypse in a doomed attempt to fix Earth and right all the wrongs.

4 Media Products Recommended by the Sloppy Blogger in Lieu of Depressing Screed About Modern World