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.

Winding down another year

 ...and, just to get the necessaries out of the way, a happy holiday fuck-off to Russia and Israel.  Hamas, I'm going to stop worrying about for a bit at least - with their leadership getting assassinated in spite of the cease-fire that's supposedly still in place, I think Israel can bear their share of fuck-offitude for a while.

Here in the US, Epsteinapalooza has kicked off, with Trump's Department of Justice attempting to slow-walk and over-redact document releases.  Luckily, whether by ineptitude or sabotage, some of those redactions were apparently done by "highlighting in black", making them trivial to undo, so that's nice.  Between that and the upcoming expiration of Affordable Care Act health-care subsidies, the coming month could be entertaining, at least.  Now, if we can just keep them from unconstitutionally embedding federal controls into state-run elections, we might be getting somewhere.

On the games front... I did manage to finish categorizing and organizing my Steam library.  For a library of several hundred games, at about 1-2 hours a day, it took me about a month to finish.  About 44% of titles ended up being "I'm done with this" (for either possible meaning of that phrase), a further 4% are unsupported by Steam Deck, and 2% are buggy enough to not bother playing until/unless they get fixed.  That'll simplify finding things I actually want to play, especially once the Steam Machine launches (assuming a reasonable price-point there, of course).

Beyond that, it's Steam Winter Sale time, so I've got a few new toys to peruse there... but of course there was a gap between ending my categorization and the sale starting, and I didn't want to play nothing but PowerWash Simulator 2 for hours on end... so I reinstalled Warframe.  Let me tell you, it is nothing but amazing how well that game has held up over the years, as well as what they've managed to do to expand on its basic formula.  If you've never played it, I'd recommend it... and that's about the one free-to-play game that I can say that about.

Once more in the holidays' midst

 Halloween has long since come and gone (although leftover candy still lingers), veterans got their brief nod, Thanksgiving has waddled off for another year (although leftover pie still lingers, but not for long), and Christmas is on the horizon.  And still, Russia and Israel (and why not, likely Hamas as well) can keep fucking off.

Internationally, it's mostly status quo shit show.  Apparently, we're back to trying to carry Russia's water for them when it comes to talks about stopping their invasion (which, of course, they could stop single-handedly by just... stopping).  Israel has its ceasefire with Hamas, so apparently decided that meant attacks in the West Bank and Lebanon were fine (insert Inigo Montoya "that word you keep using" meme here).  We're still blowing up small boats in the Caribbean, apparently using "no survivors" orders that will hopefully find a suitable courtroom one day.  All that, and our president is now declaring the entire airspace of other countries as "closed", seemingly preparing to launch a war with no say-so from Congress (you know, like the Constitution demands).

Here at home, it's a little more interesting.  People are noticing things like groceries costing more, in spite of the gaslighting from Trump's team, and some of those people are starting to figure out that it's not the only thing they've been lied to about.  It's a similar story for people with ties to the immigrant community, noticing the whole "we're only after the violent criminal illegals" line means more like "if you're not white enough, be prepared to have a bad day".  The surprise from this is that, apparently, some Republicans in Congress have had enough, to the point of "retiring early" so they don't have to try and defend all this bullshit through the midterm election cycle... and actually retiring early enough that off-cycle elections could, theoretically, alter the balance in the House at least.  It's not time to be dancing in the streets yet (except maybe as part of a No Kings rally or the like), but big cracks start small and all that.

 So, real-world stuff out of the way, what's up in play-land?  I gave The Outer Worlds 2 a go, and enjoyed it well enough... for a time.  Honestly, it brought to mind a lot of the issues I had with Avowed (see my thoughts on that here), but the world presented isn't as focused (they looked to draw inspiration from a lot of different things, games especially, that I've seen before), and the skill/perk system all but demands a more specialized build to be effective.  On the plus side, it doesn't have the "tiered loot" system Avowed did, they found a way to handle healing with food/chems that isn't a massive chore, and earning character "quirks" through actual gameplay activity was a breath of fresh air.  I didn't like it enough to pay more for it right now, but, like Avowed, it's likely good enough for a sale-price pickup eventually.

Outside of that game, well... Herdling was a nice evening's worth of game, not too complex and very what-you-see-is-what-you-get.  Stellaris certainly looked like a good way to consume your life with 4x space-empire building, if that's your thing.  But my main takeaway (as in I was willing to buy it to keep playing after Game Pass expires) is PowerWash Simulator 2, a follow-on to the 2022 game I briefly mentioned here - it's basically the same game as before (maybe slightly easier?), making it perfect for an hour or so here and there, and it's been long enough since the last one that the sting of that one's last level has faded a bit.

So now what?  Well, I'm in my annual "buy for others, not for me" phase, and I've come up with a mad scheme.  I found the "list games by playtime" section of my Steam profile, and I'm going to work my way up from the bottom, trying out and categorizing old games in preparation for the launch of the new version of the Steam Machine.  No, I'm not going to do detailed reviews or anything like that... but, the first game of any substance I found this way was a copy of Fallout that I got who-knows-when and never played... or before Steam started doing play-time tracking (yet more proof that I've become Old).  I'll just say that it both works surprisingly well on my Ubuntu box, and still seems surprisingly fun to play nearly 30 years later (it released in 1997!), just don't try to run it windowed on a modern screen.

Stopped clocks, lowered expectations, and all that

 Never let it be said that I won't give credit where credit is due.  Somehow, since last I wrote, team Trump has managed to get a (technical) ceasefire going between Israel and Hamas that hasn't fully fallen apart yet.  Also, in the Russian invasion of Ukraine matter, they've managed to not swing back to their earlier stance of fellating Putin yet, so good job there.  Still, the fuck-off tally for Russia, Israel, and Hamas keeps going up for now, although the last two could be coming to an end if things keep improving rather than falling apart.

Of course, things holding steady or marginally improving overseas doesn't mean the same is happening closer to home.  There's more bonkers pardons (including a Bitcoin mogul) and sentence commutations (including George fucking Santos), more attempts at installing federalized troops in various predominantly-Democratic cities (thankfully mostly held in check by the courts so far), and more trade/tariff insanity (like cutting off trade talks with Canada over the airing of a commercial including Ronald Regan's thoughts on tariffs, of all things).  I'm sure there would be a lot more, but, currently, the government is "shut down" because the Republicans tried to force a funding bill down the throats of the Democrats in the Senate, and they didn't take kindly to that, but the Republicans won't back down - something about the bill allowing tax cuts to expire and make health care significantly more expensive for average Americans, but they're not wealthy donors, or something like that.  The end result of which is that there's a lot of "non-essential" spending that, legally, can't be done right now.

Of course, that doesn't stop team Trump from plowing forward.  Sometimes, that's in readily-defensible ways like trying to reroute existing Department of Defense funds to pay military paychecks (because unpaid troops are one path to a revolution nobody wants to see).  Others, not so much, like tearing down a wing of the White House (!) to make room for a ballroom funded by private donors.  Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd see the day where the "Epstein memorial ballroom, sponsored by Amazon" could possibly be a thing.

Well, enough about that real-world bother.  Last I wrote, I was getting into Visions of Mana, and I can happily report that I liked... the first half of the game.  Finding out that the whole villager sacrifice thing was basically an emergency response to changing world(s) conditions that just gradually became "that's how it's always been done" was a bit more true-to-life than I've come to expect from this genre of game.  Then, I hit the "betrayed former hero" trope, which could have been something interesting, about the same time I got reminded that this is a NetEase game, a company that's been doing questionable things to Western developers in recent years, and I went from "let's play it through" to "let's see what Wikipedia has to say about the story going forward".  Simply put, it didn't really resonate with me (especially bits about people getting a happy ending "in their next life"), so I stopped.

Since then, well, more No Man's Sky, and I had enough "play later" entries in my Game Pass queue that, since Outer Worlds 2 is getting good press and coming to the service later this week, I upgraded to the new-and-more-expensive Ultimate tier a bit early.  The only backlog game that's stood out positively to me so far is Wheel World, a bicycle racing game with some bike crafting and world-saving thrown in for flavor.  Definitely a "look at a video, you'll know if it's for you" sort of game.

I'll try to let you all know what I think about Outer Worlds 2 next time, as well as other good Game Pass backlog titles I get to.  I'd say the same about improvements in real-world conditions as well, but that's not the trend-line I'm seeing right now.

What a month

 For starters, Russia, Israel, and Hamas, kindly fuck off, keep on fucking off... you know the drill by now.

You know, I remember a time when I'd hear some government pronouncement or other, and, at worst, my reaction would be "well, I don't like it, but I can see what they're trying to handle."  These days, it seems like every time I hear something, it elicits a "fuck off" or "fuck you" reflexive response, and that's just plain not healthy.  But what else am I supposed to say, when the Supreme Court says racial profiling is OK when ICE does it, Congress is delaying swearing in a newly-elected member for nakedly partisan (Epstein files) reasons, and the President and his team are a non-stop shit show?

Of course, that's all the expected fun of the current (hopefully to continue without shenanigans) election cycle.  Then, you get wildcards like the Charlie Kirk killing coming into play to add spice to everything.  For anybody blissfully unaware, Mr. Kirk was a rabble-rouser whose shtick was going to college campuses to try and get people to "prove him wrong" on topics of his choosing, where he came prepared with cherry-picked data and a willingness to say pretty much anything to defend his chosen ground.  Because of that, he's got a wealth of quotes about things like (to paraphrase) empathy being a made-up term that does damage, and gun deaths being an acceptable cost for the Second Amendment.  That alone makes me feel justified in finding it fitting that he died from a gunshot at a rally he was holding while trying to shape a gun-violence argument in terms of gang violence.  Frankly, for all it came at the hands of a gent of questionable stability, the fact that he won't get to profit from the world he was trying to create pleases me greatly.

Naturally, that's not how Mr. Kirk's allies see things.  Rather, he gets called a hero and a martyr, while bringing up a shadowy "them" as being responsible, with revenge needing to be taken - and that's just from the President and his team!  No surprise then that when the late-night comedians started weighing in, Trump's head of the FCC decided to take the opportunity to try and force one off the air, in this case Jimmy Kimmel.  A couple of the larger station-owners (Sinclair and Nexstar) played along, performatively scheduling a Kirk memorial in place of Kimmel's ABC show, and Disney got the message, "indefinitely suspending" the show.

Amazingly, given this timeline, people at large decided this was a step too far, and responded by canceling their Disney+ memberships.  Long story short, Disney relented, the station owners relented, the FCC head is making noises about how he really wasn't trying to censor anybody, and Disney's shareholders are now demanding info on how Disney's actions were in their best interest, which is all lovely to see.  As for me, I don't own Disney stock and didn't have Disney+ to cancel, so it's purely spectator sport for now.  Of course, if Nexstar's attempted acquisition of Tegna (which owns my local CBS affiliate) goes through, I'll have to delete those channels from my over-the-air channel list, but that's about it.

Whew.  Well, that's enough about the shit state of the real world, how about a game? I've been tooling around in No Man's Sky, but I decided to give Visions of Mana a shot, since it came onto Game Pass.  I like what I've played so far, although the background theme of "villages cheerfully offering up sacrifices to keep things stable" is more than a little jarring - I really want to see how things play out there.  Well, that, and getting a cat-folk party member that's not a cat-girl (with all the baggage that comes with that) is kind of entertaining, although seeing him triple-wield daggers by involving his tail is a bit over the top, really.