YouTube Obsession

Every spring I get the urge to do two things:

1. I do meticulous research into buying a motorcycle.

2. Play a baseball video game.

This year to help quell the urge to play a baseball game I will ultimately get frustrated with, I have been watching TmartTn play through MLB The Show 2025.

He plays through the career mode every year as Dirk Dingers (An excellent baseball name). He has fairly good baseball IQ and is just fun watching him talk shit.

Watching

My roommate is on a big cyberpunk binge so I suggested the 1995 Kathryn Bigelow thriller Strange Days. It’s a great scifi film and features Bigelow’s gritty style and James Cameron’s most cynical writing and social commentary. It has a great trailer that has no footage from the movie¹ .

It is far from perfect. The last climactic scenes are drawn out separately rather than being intercut adding about 30 extra minutes to the run time. And the overall 90s liberal vibes of knowledge equals activism and the masses can’t handle the truth is a little hard to swallow today in the wake of all too common on camera police executions.

Also, the movie features one hell of a performance from an absolutely shredded Angela Bassett² .

So yes, this lead to my partner and I to re-obsessing with Angela’s performance in Waiting to Exhale also from 1995.

ICONIC. This is not camp, this is not so bad it’s good, this is just excellent acting. She is acting! I feel her here, she is scorned. I can’t get over it. When she says “Get your shit! Get your SHIT! And get outta here!” I am almost always in tears.

Anyway, go watch Waiting to Exhale.

Reading

In Ascension by Martin MaCinnes couldn’t have come into my life at more coincidental time. Like spooky coincidence. Here’s why; The book is about discovering new microbial life at the bottom the ocean and how that leads a group of scientists travel in space to make contact with an intelligent(?) lifeform. And this week, the James web telescope has proven to 99.7% that there is life on another planet. Basically the gasses in the atmosphere of the distant planet coincide with chemicals produced by sea algae.

Weird huh?

Anyway, the book is good. A fairly slow start with heady personal drama that develops into a large scale action. Though, the entire plot is very similar to Carl Sagan’s book Contact, the story is it’s own.

The book spends some time talking about the implications of finding life at a lower stage of development on another planet. Implications that arise from the Fermi paradox. Basically the paradox asks if we assume life is so plentiful and trillions of extraterrestrial civilizations could possibly be millions of years ahead of us technologically speaking then: Where are they? Why have we not even seen a hint of their existence?

Well one popular explanation is that life might be very common but at a certain stage of development hits a wall, so to speak and therefore makes life beyond that stage very rare. These are called “Great Filters”. That at some point, almost all life cannot make it past this great filter or more horrifyingly filters. One possible filter is multi-cellular life or even consciousness itself.

If we find life at a lower stage of development then we can narrow the field to a few hypothesis: Humans may have already passed a filter that prevents most lifeforms reaching consciousness and spacefaring. Life in the universe may be plentiful, but consciousness might be rare.

If we find more advanced life then the implications are far more horrifying. Fist off, why were they quiet? Secondly, if life can become more advanced then our Great Filter must still be ahead of us. Nuclear war, rampant AI or nano machines or maybe it’s so far away that we can’t even imagine what future technology will be a great filter.

Whatever the answer is it is horrifying. We are alone or we are not.

MM

I love cyclopean architecture in media. That is definitely why I like most of Warhammer 40k fiction; Entire worlds made to be tombs, 4 kilometer long spaceships etc. I love when fiction makes me feel small and insignificant. My favorite shot in all of the entire Star Wars movie universe is this shot from Rogue One…

A star destroyer hovering in atmosphere must cost 80 billion dollars a second and they are doing it because you do not matter. That is the feeling I get from giant architecture. And that feeling is the core horror of the manga BLAME! by Tsutomu Nihei.

The detail artwork is also good.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a right-to-left manga so take it with a grain of salt when I say that I almost always found the action to be confusing and hard to follow. Which is ok because the manga seems to be mostly ‘encounter of the week’ and not really concerned with a contiguous story.

Playing

Well it’s that time of year where I replay a Dying Light game. This time it’s Dying Light 2 from 2022. The game didn’t launch in the best state but over the years they really have stuck with the community and improved it significantly. The latest update -and it’s last according to developers- implemented even further changes to animations and gameplay to a place they are happy to leave it.

Upon picking it back up I instantly felt the changes. The game feels faster in almost every way and the combat is the best -and most violent- it has ever been. Combat feels fun to encounter as it was always a chore before. I highly recommend playing it now especially since you can pick it up for cheap these days.

MM

I also got accepted into Marathon Closed Alpha somehow? Not that the process was super rigorous I might add but cool none the less as it is the first closed Alpha I’ve ever been a part of. I signed up on their discord and answered a survey about my familiarity with extraction shooters. Considering I have over 500 hours in Escape from Tarkov you could say I am familiar with the genre.

So….how does it play?

TLDR, slow and I mean that in a good way.

I was expecting it to feel like Apex but Bungie is really trying to slow down the pace by forcing the player to make strategic decisions. In many ways because the AI combatants are very aggressive and impressively smart. They will use cover, they will flank, they use grenades to flush your positions, they will press when they have the numbers and because they are tanky the player has to take them seriously. The most tense moments are when I am fighting AI and I retreat to heal up or reload and I hear them stomping towards me.

My experience in Tarkov isn’t useful either because this is a completely different game. is far less hardcore and more team based. Maybe its because it is a closed alpha but I’ve really enjoyed the interactions I’ve had with players so far so being paired up with randos hasn’t been the crap-shoot I’ve expected.

I like that you can only do one quest at a time. It prevents me from over-planning a run like I can sometime do in Tarkov. One thing is that when I am looking for screws in Tarkov, I know what to look for because I have seen screws before; In Marathon when I am looking for a Syntech 2.0 Fabric Converter I have no idea what I am looking for so I have to slow way down to read what things are. Can be frustrating but that’s also part of learning a new game.

Anyway, bottom line: I want to play more. It has something and other than a few minor UI tweaks I have no doubt they can deliver a polished game with a fun loop. The art and sound design, including the voice acting, is top-tier. And while I

As it is, no, Marathon is not the next big thing. Even if it does improve before 1.0 it will not have a major impact on the industry. Considering that Tarkov accidentally created the extraction genre almost 10 years ago and still hasn’t figured out how to make it a complete game, I highly doubt that Bungie can nail it out the gate.

Other Notables

** The White House seems to be trying to claim several extremely contradictory things. First, that COVID-19 was a bioweapon that escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China in 2019. Second, the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed was a massive success and saved the world by fast-tracking a vaccine for the virus. But, third, COVID-19 is as harmless as the common cold and masks aren’t necessary. -Garbage Day

** Honestly never thought I would be siding with Harvard on anything but this is exactly what every major institution should be doing. And the democrats should love this ‘revolution through the proper channels’ activism. Hopefully with is a new trend.

** Just iconic pizza behavior

1  A favorite technique that I wish more movie trailers would embrace.

2  You might be old enough to hear the “right here, right now” and know it is used in the Fatboy Slim song of the same name.