I am still experiencing Memorial Day Meat Sweats™ from copious amounts of hot dogs. Please send more hot dogs.

YouTube Obsession

I don’t like to toot my horn about liking stuff before it was cool, but I’m pretty-much always cool and always like stuff before it’s cool. Just saying.

I have been following Tim and Eric’s careers since the Rats off to ya! episode of Tom Goes to the Mayor in 2004 and fell in love with their style of absurdist kitsch. Now I haven’t watched everything they’ve done but I still think Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie is an all time classic and I love Tim Heidecker’s performance in Jordan Peele’s Us.

All that to say that I’m a pretty late comer to Office Hours Live with Tim Heidecker.

The show is funny and it is entirely anti-man-o-sphere comedy. Going so far as to spoof Bill Maher completely. Because ultimately, the conservative comedy trend is just deeply unfunny and disturbingly misguided.

It also heavily features DJ Dougpound, so it’s got my full support.

Watching

My partner and I watched one of their favorite movies; The Joy Luck Club. I really enjoyed it. My partner was raised by women and has two older sisters so I can totally understand why this movie destroys them.

It’s a very emotionally manipulative movie and I mean that in the best way possible. It rarely comes across as cheesy or saccharine. Though I was wondering why it never crossed the line into syrupy melodramatic bullshit like Iron Claw.

A few things stood out to me. First off, it’s all about a cast of characters you don’t normally see: Women. Asian Women. Older Asian Women. Flawed Older Asian Women. Secondly, it is presenting each character’s subjective memory instead of flat objective view of events. It’s showcases these women’s flaws as parts of their character instead of treating them like beats in script. The movie, though it is presented almost like a stage play, is not afraid to be a movie.

Very good movie, deserves all the roses.

MM

Completely by happenchance, later in the week I ended up watching Life is Cheap… Toilet Paper is Expensive.

To me, the worst thing a movie can be is boring. There’s a hundred million stories out there and you can literally show me anything and still, some movies dare to be boring.

Life is Cheap is one of the most energetic, brutal, graphic, depressing, hilarious, un-boring movies I have ever seen. I think the best description of this movie is from this anecdotal Letterboxd review.

This is absolutely a movie that does not care about your feelings all the while able to wrench you through every single one: Fear, joy, suspicion, disgust, awe and nausea. I’m going to leave you with my Letterboxed review so I don’t give away too much before you watch it for yourself.

“Stylish jazzpunk neo-noir that is a darkly funny and a relentlessly graphic look at Hong Kong in the death throws of late-stage capitalism.”¹

But here’s the big blow your mind moment: Life is Cheap and The Joy Luck Club are both directed by Wayne Wang. I had no idea until I saw the credits of Life is Cheap. The same director who so delicately depicts the lives of aging Asian women also made a movie that so brutally forces the violent nature of daily life on to his audience.

Damn I love movies.

Reading

I had to stop reading The Ultimate Evil by Maury Terry as it was getting very deep in the weeds. The red yarn conspiracy connections were tenuous at best and made more ridiculous by misrepresentation of Satanism. By todays standards, being a Satanist is the most wafer thing a person could be; adjacent to being a Libertarian just far cooler and way less conservative.

MM

Would it surprise anyone that I’m still on my non-fiction kick? Well, it’s surprising me.

Judging by its cover I expected UNABOMBER: A Desire to Kill by Robert Graysmith to be -forgive me- bombastic but it’s early chapters at least have been a very well-written and tasteful breakdown of Ted Kaczynski’s early life and bombings.

I’ve really been on a kick of reading about events that happened in my life but I was far too young to understand. I’m sure there will be an OJ book soon, though I don’t know how anything will be able to top The People vs. OJ Simpson. I think I’d be more interested in reading about Johnny Cochrane. Stay tuned.

Playing

After the dismal fallout from Battlefield 2042’s launch in 2021, developer Dice is enlisting it’s fans to playtest very early versions of the game. The hope is that, if you develop a game that players want to play, players will play it. Wild I know.

The leaks from the playtesting are almost daily and Dice seems to be very lax on leaks. Probably because leaks allow for the wider audience chance to give their feed back. And feed back from the community (Reddit) is generally very positive. That is until a most recent leak showed that Dice is currently (this is pre-pre-pre-alpha so any design choices are subject to change.) testing allowing all weapons for all classes. The community is in shambles.

For those unfamiliar with the Battlefield series; Multiplayer classes are fundamental to the core experience. Traditionally: Assault, Recon, Engineer and Support. Assault always had access to med-packs and ARs. Recon, spawn beacons and sniper rifles. Engineer, SMGs and explosives. Support, LMGs and ammo-packs. Engineers can’t run snipers and Support can’t run SMGs, etc. This is an essential balance to making classes unique in BF and gently forcing players to work together.

2042 said “F THAT” by introducing heroes instead of classes and allowed all weapons to be used by every class. This is a huge reason why the game failed out of the gate. It destroyed any reason to work as a squad. Now, a Support can take a sniper and sit on a hill in spawn for the entire map because they now have infinite ammo.

If Dice is really interested in listening to the community they certainly heard the uproar.

That being said, I have been playing a lot of 2042 in response to the hype around the play testing. And it has come a long way since launch in improving it’s dumb heroes system from launch. It’s not perfect but when it is all clicking it feels great.

Listening

I recently read the essays by M. Owen Lee on Wagner: The Terrible Man and His Truthful Art. The essays deal with the philosophical debate surrounding art made by objectively bad people or specifically Richard Wagner. I may do a write up on the essays someday but in the mean time, just read Andrew’s substack post.

Anyway, after reading all about the musical genius of Wagner and what a complete dick he was I figured I should give some of his music a listen. Starting with the 16 hour operatic epic Der Ring des Nibelungen or, as it’s better known, The Ring Cycle.

It has been a journey trying to listen to these. The first time I tried to listen to them I loaded them on YouTube, laid in bed with my earphones in and from the first note I knew it was not going to work. I feel like the work required a better set of headphones so I could have a full appreciation of the music. Mainly because the first note of The Ring Cycle is so slight, I didn’t hear it.

So, my first step is to get a good set of over-ear headphones. If you have any suggestions please put them in the BRAND NEW comments section!

Then I can get into a proprietary music device like Hideo Kojima is always showing off in his posts.

One step at a time.

Other Notables

** Dems plan on spending $20 million to remain out of touch rather than actually have a platform any young person would support. The entire article is filled with cringe lib-talk but my favorite takeaway is the crack team heading the effort:

“Speaking With American Men” is being led by Ilyse Hogue, the former president of the abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America, and John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics and an adviser to Biden’s 2020 campaign.”

** This is someone’s exact kink

1  Yeah I really think I nailed that.