HOLY SHIT.
LEGO is selling a modern-day version of the Galaxy Explorer, possibly the best original LEGO Space kit they made. This one:
The OG space minifigs were red and white for the first iteration of the Space kits; when LEGO realized they had a hit on their hands they changed them to blue, which is what most people recognize. PUMP THIS DIRECTLY INTO MY VEINS.
I’ve gotten to the point where I’m getting tired of my latest video game. I’ve been playing The Division 2 for several years now, and I’ve replayed parts of it enough that I’m bored with the challenge. So now I have to find another game, something I find very difficult, because I don’t fit the mold of the average player. Most games are set up for online multiplayer and structured so that you can’t go very far without buying extra shit in-game. I like solo games with a good story that I can do on my own; I don’t want to deal with a league or a clan or scheduling gameplay—the majority of my life is ruled by a calendar and I spend enough time on virtual calls; I don’t need to be in another one during my time off, especially not with a bunch of trash-talking fifteen year olds. And fuck any game that demands I buy better gear to advance; I have enough trouble convincing Finn that she shouldn’t spend $10 on an iridescent dragon skin for her Roblox character.
So the hunt is on. I’ve bought a couple of video games that looked good and got great reviews. They start out, like most video games do, in some kind of tutorial. Sometimes these are set up as virtual shooting ranges, and other times, with more clever games, they get you into the action up front but carefully introduce you to harder and harder things so that you can gradually build up your skills. I’ve had several games do very well at slowly ramping the difficulty up so that I wasn’t aware the game had started; the original Halo did this, and Fallout 4 did this very well. Which was important: Halo starts out as one game and somewhere in the middle goes to WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING but by then you’ve developed enough skill through gameplay to pivot to that new tempo. As a result, I played these games a lot. Hours and hours of them. Other games will start out with a tutorial and get you into some gameplay and there’s a gentle ramp-up and then suddenly WHAM they throw five mini-bosses at you with nuclear weapons, but you’re still a fluffy bunny hopping through the meadow and BOOM you’re dead.
I’m not saying I want all games to coddle me like a newborn faun; I just want them to slowly introduce me to their concepts of gameplay instead of throwing three new types of enemies at me while simultaneously sending wave after wave of grunts behind them. Game AI is a tricky thing to code, and everybody does it differently. Some games are built so that the bad guys will run around and try to flank you; The Division does this very well, and it took me a while to develop strategies for this. (I’m terrible at PVP combat, which is basically running around as fast as you can shooting at whoever is in front of you; I have terrible virtual situational awareness in these situations, and so I usually just die.) When games let me figure it out gradually, I enjoy them a lot more.
Other games will do the surprise gotcha thing where you walk through an empty corridor or alley that has no doors or means of entrance, get to the end where there’s a locked door, and suddenly thirty bad guys have beamed in behind you to smoke you while you’re trapped. When you’re used to this bullshit gameplay you can anticipate it, but the first thirty times or so it’s annoying.
Most games these days have introduced huge complicated tiering systems for customizing weapons and gear. Some people get off on spending more time tweaking their machine gun or sword than they do shooting or slicing; hooray for them. I prefer to get in to the game, shoot the crap out of something, and bounce. But to advance in the game you have to dive into these systems or you wind up as the guy with a pocket knife going up against a roomful of Navy SEALS, which ends predictably. One thing I’ve found about all of these systems is that even when the good games teach you how to shoot and play the game, they do nothing to teach you how to use these customization systems. And most of them are more complicated than nuclear physics. Typically you can break down stuff you have to make other stuff better, but they don’t tell you the rules; thus you go and disassemble something really good only to find you did it wrong and now you can’t use any of it. The choice then is to wade through hours of annoying YouTube videos just to learn how you did that one thing wrong, or go have another beer. Against increasingly difficult gameplay I resisted this in Fallout 76 and The Division 2 for as long as I could; I tried and gave up on the former but did relatively well in the latter as a solo player.
Some games are more like moving cutscreens. I bought a cheap copy of the new Tomb Raider a year ago and made it through about the first half hour of gameplay before giving up on it forever. I like immersive gameplay, where I’m in the world and things are happening, and I can react to them and move on. Tomb Raider is about moving from one thing to the next, dying quickly, and redoing that thing over and over again until you do exactly whatever the game designer wants you to do. Laura Croft died about a hundred times until I was fed up, and then I deleted it from my Xbox. I can still hear her screams of agony. Call of Duty Advanced Warfare felt like nothing but one big masturbatory cutscreen; I stopped playing that one after about a half an hour. When the computer continually takes control of my character and shows me doing things instead of letting me play the game, I’m out.
And some games just kind of suck. Red Dead Redemption, a game people raved about Back In The Day, got shitcanned after I couldn’t finish a fucking timed horse race. Yeah yeah, I should be able to ride a horse, but the mechanics sucked and I got fed up quickly. It’s also 12 years old, so my expectations weren’t high when I got it at the thrift store for $2.
The latest game I bought is one called Titanfall, which was $1.50 on Amazon used, and featured a big mech on the cover blowing stuff up. Sweet, I thought; mech games are fun. Run around in a big robot and blow shit up. I loaded all 20GB of it up and started playing the tutorial as…a human. It took me a good hour of gameplay to even get the mech powered up, and then I used it for about three minutes before the game made me dismount and run around as a vulnerable fleshbag again flipping switches. Then I was faced with a standoff scenario, where the game designer locked my fleshbag in a room with about thirty NPCs and a bunch of exploding beach balls that I couldn’t kill fast enough. I’m supposed to be able to clear the room and then get to my mech, but after about twenty attempts over two days I gave it up in frustration, because they never showed me those things before, I don’t have the right weapons, and they don’t make the right weapons available to me. I can see why it was $1.50 now. It’s worth about $.75.
So the hunt is on; I think for the time being I’m going to step back and play some Fallout 4 until a new interesting game shows up on Amazon used for pocket change, and I’ll give that a try.
I’m not a farmer, but I come from a family of farmers; my Dad graduated from the agriculture program at Cornell by shoveling horse manure between classes. One of my subscribed YouTube channels featured a segment this spring where they revived an abandoned tractor and a bunch of planting equipment and put corn in on their fields in Iowa. Well, it’s harvest time, so they dragged a 50-year-old combine out of a barn and brought it all in. Mechanical equipment like this is fascinating to me; luckily they chose to use a combine that ran two years ago instead of trying to refurbish a completely broken-down unit, so things went smoothly.
I picked up some inexpensive watch bands from an outfit called cheapestnatostraps, and finally found a strap that makes my Vaer diver look better. The straps it shipped with are pretty garbage in terms of style: a black rubber dive band that takes cues from the crappy rubber bands of the 60’s, and a thick nylon band in a khaki-adjacent color that never felt right and didn’t look very good. I got a leather NATO strap in a medium tan that pairs well with the face, and after trimming about 3/4″ from the end with an X-Acto it fits perfectly. They’re currently out of the color I really want, a darker distressed brown, but this will do nicely until that comes back in.
I’ve been playing with different way of brewing coffee for the past couple of weeks, and I haven’t found the right science yet. At the risk of sounding like an insufferable coffee asshole, I’m trying pourover with some French paper filters, and so far the results haven’t been that great. I’m looking to get a better flavor than the dishwater a French press has been providing, even though I’m paying a premium for good beans, but I haven’t figured it out yet. I’m using a plastic funnel in place of a $50 Chemex coffeemaker, but it might be that I need better filters. I did learn that my water wasn’t hot enough and that I need to let the funnel breathe as I pour; next I’ve got to grind the beans differently. More experimentation is required.
The CR-V is back on the road and running happily, but we’ve got a Maintenance light on the dashboard, which could mean any one of a number of things. Typically this means she’s reminding us to change her oil, but that was done less than 1500 miles ago and the alert shouldn’t be coming back up. I figured I’d bite the bullet and buy a cheapo OBD2 scanner to hook up to the car and see if it threw any codes; in typical Amazon fashion I ordered the unit over morning coffee and it arrived later this afternoon. Plugging it in to the car, it took a minute to talk to the car and revealed no codes. It is probably just the oil maintenance light coing back on, in which case I can reset it in 10 seconds; knowing it’s not about to explode for other reasons is a good thing.
In the car on my way home from karate this evening we heard about Bitcoin dropping in value because of some exchange doing something or another, and Finn asked what Bitcoin actually was. I started out by asking her about the concept of money, and then explained government-backed securities, and stocks, and then tried to explain Bitcoin to the best of my abilities. I think I got it about 60% correct, and ended with an explanation of what a Ponzi scheme is, which I figure at least puts me in the ballpark. Finn listened and answered questions and was very interested to know if all of our bank accounts were FDIC insured. Defector did a very good explanation of what all the fuss is about, and I suddenly understand a lot more about what NPR had been reporting on.
One of my favorite podcasts, You’re Wrong About, did a format change last year when one of the hosts, Michael Hobbes, left for greener pastures. I like the other host but I don’t dig her new format all that much, so I ended my subscription. He’s now doing a new podcast called If Books Could Kill, which reviews single-serving pop nonfiction books you see in airport newsstands. The first episode is about Freakanomics, and it’s an excellent takedown of a factually bullshit narrative. As someone who has made a big part of his professional life about producing and promoting factual scientific information, I found this fascinating. Subscribed!
Apparently Jane’s Addiction is touring with the Smashing Pumpkins this year into the next, and there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that Eric Avery is back with the band; apparently they worked out their differences again, and providing everyone doesn’t turn into a dick they can continue to make music together. The bad news is that Dave Navarro has long COVID and isn’t touring with them, thus negating any reason to see them. This would have been a dream tour up until about fifteen years ago but I have no desire to see Smashing Pumpkins anymore—I’ll hang on to my memories of seeing them in their prime, thanks—but it would be cool to see JA live before they have to detune the songs another full step to account for Perry’s aging vocal cords.
I finished reading Heat 2 last week, and I have to say, after a bit of a slow start, I did enjoy it. There’s an obligatory catch-you-up at the beginning that could have been left out; it reads like a fanboy reading bits of the script to another fanboy, and it’s all cringe. Once past that stumble, the story picks up right where the movie ended, following the only surviving member of the criminals and the detective chasing him. The novel is split into sections, a what-came-before story and a what-came-after, and of the two I think I enjoyed the former more than the latter. Michael Mann’s screenplays often feature a driven male who falls in love with a powerful female—OK, fine—but the second half of the story here reminds me a bit too much of his remake of Miami Vice. The story is meticulously researched and tightly plotted, and I enjoyed how he wrapped up the action on both threads, as well as how we get to see some familiar characters return. Overall I’d love to see this adapted into a movie or series, though I have no idea who they’d get to play these roles.
OK, Pitchfork released a “250 Best Songs of the 1990’s” list; as with many of these lists I have concerns. The top five songs are:
5. Missy Elliott: “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)”
4. Liz Phair: “Fuck and Run”
3. Aaliyah: “Are You That Somebody?”
2. Björk: “Hyperballad”
1. Mariah Carey: “Fantasy (Remix)” [ft. Ol’ Dirty Bastard]
Missy Elliot: sure. The Liz Phair track is absolutely a top five, for what it says and what it meant for women in the early 1990’s. I don’t know much about Aaliyah; the song is OK, I guess. There are better Björk tracks to choose from—”Human Behaviour” and “Army of Me”, for starters. And then there’s Mariah Carey.
In a note describing how the list was put together, Pitchfork’s editor explains their reasons:
…because our understanding of it changes the more we learn; because there is still a thrill in discovering something we didn’t know about (or quite get) before; because taste evolves and grows, enriched by the passing of time.
Their previous list, from 2010, ranked the top five as
5. Wu-Tang Clan “Protect Ya Neck”
4. Radiohead “Paranoid Android”
3. Dr. Dre [ft. Snoop Doggy Dogg] “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang”
2. Pulp “Common People”
1. Pavement “Gold Soundz”
Five bands featuring posturing males either bragging or complaining; not a woman in sight. So yeah, I support re-examining these lists, and putting them through new lenses; I just don’t think I would have put Mariah Carey/ODB at the top here. Especially as the original version of Fantasy is better anyway.
I fell down a Paper Girls rabbit hole this week and rewatched the series; SO GOOD. Fuck Amazon for canceling it before it even aired (that’s pretty much the gossip online; apparently they cut the approved budget before filming started, so it was a scrappy production to begin with). I then went back and reread the comic series. Looking at Cliff Chiang’s artwork in this book is inspiring. He’s an incredible draftsman, and the usage of color is exquisite as second and third layer information. Characters look different from each other, and his command of facial expressions is perfect for a story that requires a lot of subtle detail not included in the dialogue. I’ve been reading a lot of comics online lately, and it’s pretty amazing how lousy some artists can be at everything but drawing identical spandex weightlifters.
Finley was ambivalent about reading it early this year, even after I’d reserved the first two books from the library. I put the trade paperback in my Amazon cart to be purchased with our next order; I’ll wear her down.
And speaking of the library, I got an email that notified me my hold on the ebook of Heat 2 was available. Heat is one of my favorite movies—it was probably the second or third DVD I bought, back when they were $40—so I was very excited to hear Michael Mann was writing a prequel to the movie. By all accounts it’s a good read, so I’m anxious to dive in and see where it goes.
Fucking hell. Amazon apparently canceled Paper Girls, even though it was a hit with critics. I guess they didn’t meet some kind of viewer metric. They say they’re shopping it around to other streaming services; I hope to hell they can find a new home for it.
I’ve talked about the comic Paper Girls here before, and I just started watching the series on Amazon Prime this week. Overall it’s really good! I’m enjoying the dialogue and direction, and I think they got the casting of the four leads 90% right. (When I see the actress they got for Mac all I can think of is squeaky Edward Furlong in T2). I have NO idea how they’re going to pull off the wider crazier future-world aspects of the story if/when the series gets renewed, but I’m hopeful they can do it justice. And, the music has been excellent so far—there’s a needle drop moment with an LCD Soundsystem song that is perfect, and now this song is stuck in my head: