Metal Monday

First off, thank you to Andrew for covering my vacation last week. And just for the record: I only had pink-eye in one eye.

But seriously folks, I was visiting family back in Indiana last week. So this week will be a lighter update as I regather my energy.

YouTube Obsession

I’ll admit, this is a weird one for me. I don’t play Call of Duty Warzone but like a lot of people I watched streams of the game during COVID lockdown. Since then the game has been a huge segment of streaming and gaming in general. I don’t even like Battle Royal as a genre; So why do I love “exposing WZ cheaters” videos?

I’m not going to post any of the actual videos because they are… not bad per se but definitely COSTCO quantities of cringe¹ . One of the creators uses the same 3 minute clip of Kick-Ass with their branding smudged over it every video.

These videos are a perfect storm of schadenfreude. First off, catching cheaters in their schemes is an evergreen pastime and is always fun to see in any category.

Secondly, it’s a game I consider inferior to the many, many, other battle royal multiplayer options available to players. So the rage, time and energy creators put into these videos crack me up. Why so serious for real. It’s COD, dude² .

Lastly, these videos expose the absolute glut of streamers who latch onto popular games for the views. I get it, its a job for these people but I wonder how many folks would actually stream Warzone if it wasn’t popular on Twitch?

I could classify my love for these videos as “hate watching” and I think that’s fair.

Watching

While flying out to Indiana I watched my go-to long flight movies, the Mr. Show box-office failure but ahead of it’s time Run Ronnie Run and the equally monetarily dismal Kids in the Hall movie The Wrong Guy.

Not only are these movies incredibly underrated, they are so unloved that they are perpetually free on YouTube.

I watched a few other movies while on break so Ill be updating my Letterboxd all week so follow to stay in the loop.

Reading

Turns out when I don’t work, or have access to video games or my email, I read a lot.

Though I did not plan it, Biography of X by Catherine Lacey and Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov turned out to be philosophically very similar books. I’ll do a more thorough write up on them soon because I’m still digesting (and probably need to re-read) the truly unique construction and “story” of Pale Fire.

The First Heretic by Aaron Dembski-Bowden, the umpteeth book in Games Workshop’s Horus Heresy series. As all 40k books, it’s self-serious and grandiose fun. A great read after a couple heavy books.

The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett is probably my favorite of his books and the easiest to follow³ . I would recommend this to beginners to Hammett’s style.

Other Notables

** Great write up on AI music generators and my one and only song from my prompt “nu metal beast boy and robin are in love”

** Interesting numbers from Neilson ratings

1  One popular channel has obvious problems with women that surpass cringe and veer into incel behavior. Let’s be clear: Referring to women as “females” is always a red-flag

2  I understand this is contradictory of me considering I complain about cheaters in Escape from Tarkov regularly. Fine, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.

3  Though this might be because my favorite Coen Brothers movie is Miller’s Crossing which is based heavily on The Glass Key.