Happy Memorial Day! I am currently eating hot dogs and potato salad at an extremely faggy pool party in the DEEP the southern California valley.

YouTube Obsession

It’s definitely hyperbolic for me to say the everything I post in this section is an obsession but I can honestly say that I am obsessed with these clips from the live-action Sailor Moon.

They really capture the essence of cunt from the anime, ya know? The greenscreen effects and Video Toaster graphics awaken a camp demon inside me. I absolutely love LOVE these clips.

Watching

I like to bash on Dario Argento and his brand of Italian Gallo films but I’ll be god damned the guy has an eye for drama. The Church from 1990 is not directed by Argento but you can feel his presence in every frame.

But with Argento visuals comes the usual Argento bullshittery. Characters are introduced, given way too much screen time and killed or they are never brought up again. Plot is entirely secondary and deus ex machinas are feature, actually.

Then comes the weird fetishizations of Asia Argento, Dario Argento’s daughter. I haven’t seen all of the Argento movies that feature Asia but I have seen this one and The Stendhal Syndrome and both of them feature Asia as a sexual object. Unfortunately, this takes me out of the movie knowing that her father is directing. Once is weird and twice is establishing a pattern. I know you want to use your power to nepo your baby into stardom but have them play a role that isn’t a rape victim for once. Could you do that please?

Reading

I’m continuing my non-fiction spree by reading the book that kicked off the satanic panic of the 80’s and 90’s: The Ultimate Evil: The Search for the Sons of Sam By Maury Terry. This book should be read with a truckload of salt mainly for it’s gross misunderstanding of Satanists, the occult and Aleister Crowley often lumping those very different things together under “evil.”

What the book does really well however is explain the air of weirdness around the murders of the .44 Caliber Killer and absolute chokehold they had on New York City. It also details a very obvious mishandling or potential misleading investigation by the NYPD. One cannot come away from the book believing David Burkowitz was the sole “Son of Sam”.

Regardless of its veracity regarding its laughable understanding of Satanism, especially in the modern sense, it is a very entertaining book.

Playing

Geeze I really want to like survival games like V Rising more than I do. There just always seems to be a progression gate that just stops all fun in its tracks. This isn’t just Rising’s problem its part of every survival game, so it must be part of what people find so enjoyable about the genre.

What I want to like about these games are exactly what I want to like about Souls games. I love starting with nothing and working my way up the progression ladder. I, most likely to my detriment, love starting Souls games with the most under leveled class. Every item is a win, every new weapon is an upgrade, every level is extremely meaningful.

Then, with survival games, there comes the inevitable progress gate¹ . An item you need is locked behind grinding a certain area or enemy for a couple hours. All progress stops. The fun thing you’ve been enjoying the entire game, progressing, just stops. It’s an interesting design choice that feels like an “arcade era” hold-over where game-time to value is paramount to design. This is also because V Rising is a multiplayer game that needs to slow down the best players so they don’t reach uber-levels while someone else is just figuring out how to build a wooden ax.

One game that does survival progression so well that I still love to play it every 6 months or so is Minecraft. Every recipe in the game is available from the start so long as you find the right ingredients. Sure, better tools will help you get those ingredients faster but they’re not locked to you until you complete some task the designers have laid out.

Other Notables

** More headlines from our dystopian present: On a remote Australian island, the birds are so full of plastic they crunch.

** Biden’s Cancer

** Japan rules and it’s not even close

1  Souls games, at a certain point don’t really have progress blocks they just get too tedious.