Metal Monday

Welcome back to a full-length Metal Monday. Work is still busy, I just have more desire to write this week.

YouTube Obsession

The is something very special about sports nerds. Maybe I have a reverence because I was raised by a man who could recite the ERAs for every Giants pitcher since 1971 or maybe because the nerd in me, recognizes the nerd in them.

I was introduced to YouTube channel Secret Base by their excellent docu-series on the history and stories of MMA.

I know this is a great documentary because I have zero interest in MMA or (fighting sports in general) but I was fully rapt by this series.

As a passing baseball fan I cannot go further without recommending the history of the Seattle Mariners. Secret Base has a talent for presenting all the stats sports nerds love in ways that reveal intriguing stories. And ultimately, that’s exactly what professional sports are; A medium for stories. All the stats and numbers are just data for the lore machine that is organized sports.

Their series into the Fumble Dimension is a combination of my love of sports and my love of video games.

Sports nerds and their sports games. I’ll be honest, I do not understand sports games at all. The act of playing a sports video game is so far removed from the actual sport that the game is supposed to represent, that my brain constantly fights the logic of the controls. I become so removed from the action on screen that I lose interest entirely. Even the more arcade-y sports games like NBA Jam or NFL Blitz abstract me from the action. I just don’t like sports games¹.

But when sports nerds use sports games to rewrite history or create elaborate experiments, I am fully invested. This is what sports games were made for; pedantic sports nerd arguments and hypothetical sports nerd questions put to the test on a 10 year old XBOX 360 game.

Reading

Pray for me. I just started Infinite Jest. I’ve been a fan of David Foster Wallace’s essays over the years and recently began listening to radio appearances and his speeches. He speaks how -if you’ve read his essays- you would expect him to speak, considered, softly and eruditely. On a radio interview he read part of Infinite Jest concerning Boston Alcoholics Anonymous and it struck me as very accurate and insightful to AA.

So I decided to take a dive into his fiction writing. I have a beautiful, huge and worn paperback copy that my roommate had in prison, so there’s a history to the book before I’ve even read it and that feels appropriate.

Watching

I am so pumped for DUNE Pt 2 that I haven’t even watched the trailer for DUNE Pt 2.

I have no idea what happens in that trailer and that excites me!

In preparation for Pt2 releasing in March 2024, my partner and I watched Pt 1 this weekend. It should shock no one that I have read (and loved) all the Frank Herbert Dune books and I have reverence for the the material. Pt 1 is a great adaptation of the first half of the first book and I love how subtle it is with the world building in the visual medium. Herbert’s original book is meticulous and dense, an epistle written long after the events of the book in an omniscient hand. The restraint Denis Villeneuve shows to allow those expositional moments to remain subtle and not explain everything is a rarity in modern cinema, especially sci-fi. I love how it looks, it’s music, it’s notes of Nietzsche, I love so much of it except…

<marquee>SPOILERS AHEAD</marquee>

It’s depiction of Lady Jessica is just rude. Lady Jessica in the books is one of the coolest characters in literature. Not just like jazz and kung-fu cool, but like femm-fatal, collected cool. Rebecca Ferguson’s depiction is going for more of a “real” character I suppose but ultimately makes Jessica seem a weepy leaf in the wind as opposed to a character with goals and gumption. Hopefully she’ll come into that character in Pt 2 but to me the damage is already done.

Also, the Harkonnens aren’t gross enough. Give me gross dudes.

Listening

I am not a Star Trek fan. I have hazy memories of watching the original series at my Granna’s house after church on Sunday while she made biscuits and gravy. I briefly got into The Next Generation while in college as it was always on SPIKE TV when I had my lunch. (I still associate TNG with my freshman 15.) I have strong opinions about Voyager but the majority of my awareness of the show is purely through cultural osmosis.

I recently became aware of the Newbie Star Trek podcast because of YouTube shorts and the show is 3 friends -of varyingly familiarity with TNG from never seen an episode to casual fan- discussing episode by episode. It’s great to dunk on how idiotic TNG can be while appreciating it’s achievements. It’s evergreen content so I’ve been listening at my leisure and really enjoying the first season so far.

GAMING

Steam Next Fest is always a chaotic time for PC gaming. Always trying to play as many demos as possible for a week without getting overwhelmed. Spoiler, I am overwhelmed. Here’s just a couple of demos I really enjoyed.

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is a “survivor-like” that takes place in the Deep Rock universe. If you haven’t played DRG with a friend, you should. Anyway, I’m a sucker for survivor-likes and I look forward to putting more time into this one.

I am an even bigger sucker for X-COM-likes and Mars Tactics hits all of those notes for me. I will be playing this on day one.

OTHER ITEMS

Jesus Shreds

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¹Exception being Sega Virtua Tennis 3. Damn near perfect game and easily the only “sports game” I’ve ever loved.