Fun movie, bad theater

 It's been years since I've stepped foot in a movie theater - the last post I see here that attests to me being at a theater was from 2011.  I'm sure I must have seen something else in a theater in the meantime (maybe Everything Everywhere All at Once?  Great film, by the way), but I couldn't swear to it.  However, I got a Regal Cinemas gift card for Christmas, and found something worth giving a go over the weekend, so away I went.  Sadly, there's nothing like years of absence to make enshittification stand out when you do eventually return.

First things first though, the movie... Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die was both different and better than I could have ever expected, given the setup.  A man shows up at a diner, looking like the prototypical paranoid homeless guy, ranting about being from the future, where things have gone horribly wrong due to social media and AI, and he's looking for team members to change how it all goes.  This is one of those movies that's better to go into blind, so I'll just say it's a little dark, a little gory, and supremely silly.  I giggled several times throughout, and not in an "it's so bad it's good" sort of way.  I heartily recommend it.

In contrast, we have the Regal Cinemas experience.  I mean, I know theater chains are struggling, but some of this shit is downright abusive.  I've still got credit on that gift card, so we'll try another of their theaters in town for my next experience for a compare-and-contrast, but some of it is outside of any one theater's control.

I knew I was in for disappointment as soon as I went to order a ticket through their phone app.  Yes, I'm sure there's some way to use a gift card without the app, but I'd already accepted that modern inevitability and set things up prior there, so it's not like the app itself is all that terrible, if you set aside the popup ads that get in the way of doing what you came to do, of course.

Anyways, I pick my seat, select an adult ticket, and go to checkout... and they hit me with a $2 booking fee on top of the ticket price.  A booking fee, on their app, for their theater.  If I were paying cash, I might well have noped out at that point, but somebody else already paid for this, so what the hell.  Continuing on, as soon as the purchase is complete, I get no fewer than four "special offers" from various services that I have to decline before I can get the QR code for my show.  At this point, I'm wondering whether the convenience of the app beats just showing up at the theater and buying a ticket.

I get to the theater about 10 minutes before the posted showtime.  The first thing I notice is that the ticket booth is entirely unstaffed, humans replaced by touchscreens, so I fully expect the local purchase pattern to mirror the app.  That's not my problem for the day, though, so I head up to the ticket taker (or whatever their job is called now), get scanned in, and head off to the theater - no time to stop for concessions, right?

As I arrive, the ads are already playing, so I find my seat.  Turns out, whoever's in charge of arranging seats here has some airline experience.  I mean, there's plenty of legroom (because the layout of the concrete steps dictates it), but the fold-down arm rests are close enough together that I couldn't comfortably sit with one arm squarely on each (never mind the one-arm method they must be envisioning).  And of course, those armrests are also too short to lay an arm down, without your hand sitting in the drink holder - very convenient, if you have a drink, I'd guess.  I'd get one, but the show's about to start.

Of course, the show wasn't about to start.  From at least 10 minutes before showtime, to more than 20 minutes after, the ads continued to flow.  They eventually shifted to mostly movie previews, as expected, but not entirely - there was one of those superbowl AI ads thrown in the middle, which was kind of funny in hindsight given the way the movie goes.

Eventually, the ads end, the movie shows, I have my fun, then I creakily lever myself out of the seat and go home.  I will say, what was in the control of the local staff seemed to be fine - everything was clean and in seemingly good repair, and no hiccups from the projection and sound equipment were noticed - but, if this is the standard across theater chains for how they treat their customers, I'll stick with streaming, thanks. 

Coming up for air

 So, what, a month-and-a-half since my last post?  Sure feels longer than that.  The world at large is fairly quiet, maybe in part thanks to the Winter Olympics going on.  The AI bubble may not have popped quite yet, but it sure is looking wobbly.  Best of all, the U.S. hasn't started any new shit in the world at large as of yet, although we're definitely making moves that say beating on Iran a bit is a matter of when, not if.

Why might that be?  Well, it's because things inside the country have taken enough turns to keep the baddies occupied.  ICE did their best "occupying power" imitation in their Minnesota surge, up to and including executing citizens, but, amazingly, the citizenry neither cowered nor exploded into the violence needed to act as an excuse to impose martial law.  Things got bad enough on that front (for the baddies) that they had to replace the guy in charge on the ground, who eventually announced that they're going to pull back.  Of course, given the track record of truth in announcements from this group, that's a definite wait and see.

Meanwhile, Epsteinapalooza continues apace.  Having released about half of the total documents, with significant mis-redactions,  the Department of Justice (hah!) wanted to declare everything required by law to be released as released and move on.  Funny enough, Congress didn't see it that way.  The most recent visual stuck in my head on that is the head of the DoJ in a Congressional hearing doing three things:  contemptuously attacking congresscritters from a cheat-sheet, refusing to look at the victims seated behind her, and ranting about the Dow Jones Industrial Average hitting an all-time high (as if that had any bearing on her performance of her job).

Of course, those are just the headline items.  There's plenty of other smaller-but-not-less-important items, like the baddies trying to find a way to nationalize the next elections, because they're projected to do so poorly in them that they're willing to try and strip that Constitutionally-protected function from the states to protect themselves.  The clock is ticking, and I think it's sinking in that their New Reich plan is coming apart at the seams.

On the topic of waiting for things to come apart, can that AI bubble finally pop, or at least significantly deflate?  It's interfering (in a definitely first-world-problem sort of way) with me getting a Steam Machine and revamped Steam Controller!  The controller's the most important part of that batch, since it would let me play a few games I've been itching to play from my couch (I could make something work for the rest of the gear).  But Steam is apparently waiting on some clarity or stability on things like memory prices before they launch their latest batch of hardware, something I honestly don't expect to see this year.  But I wants them!

 While I wait, I'll mention that I've gotten some good mileage lately out of Reus 2.  It's really more of a re-imagining of the original game (which I wrote about back in 2013) than a sequel, but whether that's an improvement or not will be mainly a matter of personal preference.  I do like that it's no longer a timer-driven affair and a fair bit less fiddly, but you lose things I liked from the original like biomes interacting with each other.  All in all, I think I like it better myself, although there is a fair bit of "min-max your way to victory", as I put it in my original writeup.

No more finger-wags from me for a while

 Time for another milestone on the "I never thought I'd see the U.S. do this in my lifetime" track.  Proving once again that "America First" means "I get to do what I want, and none of you will stop me", yesterday Trump unilaterally invaded another country, attacking their military, abducting their leader, and declaring that the U.S. is now in charge there until he says otherwise.

Now, there's a lot of people who are actually happy about this state of affairs, since the country involved was Venezuela.  A lot of exiles like it, because the ruling party there has a history of disappearing people it doesn't like, and many are thinking it's the beginning of the end of their exile.  Some people in the oil industry are doubtless very happy, since they're looking at getting back assets that Venezuela nationalized some decades back.  And of course, Venezuela has been all to comfy with Russia for quite some time, so I'm sure there's some people who are putting this up as a "win" on their tally boards for international influence.

But all of that ignores a few things, starting with the whole "invading a country without declaring war" thing.  I mean, that's basically what I've been pissing and moaning about Russia doing to Ukraine for the past few years (and, incidentally, is a fine example of what happens when the quick, surgical strike doesn't pay off as intended).  As far as the rest of the world is concerned, in one stroke, we've gone from "their current leader is a bit unhinged, but we can work around that" to full-on mad dog status.

Why didn't we declare war?  Well, that would have meant getting Congress involved, since that's one of those "only Congress can do it" things in the Constitution... and of course, Trump didn't want to ruin the surprise, so he just... didn't.  As of this writing, the response of the Congress critters has been along party lines, which is simply insane - Trump prevented you from having any input, and you're somehow fine with that?  He just pulled a Pearl Harbor on Venezuela, and that's hunky-dory by you?

Well, as one lone American, all I can say to the rest of the world is sorry.  Don't feel too bad about treating any promises we make in the worst of faith from here on out, and definitely don't feel bad about needing to set up anti-U.S. alliances to contain our madness.  Russia, Israel, apparently we're one of you now, so I won't be asking you to fuck off for the foreseeable future, until we get our own shit straightened out.  And of course, lest I forget, China, I won't even bat an eye if you decide to finally invade Taiwan at this point - we've proven that we're in the age of "strength means more than civilization" now, and, at the very least, you've got territorial claims there that we didn't when we decided to eat Venezuela.

As for me, I long ago swore a pledge of allegiance that included the line "and to the Republic for which it stands," so I'm going to be doing the bare minimum in support of this country until and unless we have a functioning Republic again.  Of course, there's that other oath I swore about defending the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic... we'll just have to see whether anything aligns to force action on that oath in the days and years to come.