YouTube Obsession

Fighting games baffle me. I’ve never quite understood how the button inputs work or had the patience (or skill) to learn them. Though I used to love fighting games for their beautiful sprite work.

You can trust that the first lap top I owned had hundreds of these GIFs on the hard drive. So naturally, I resisted the transition to 3D art in fighting games and have completely lost interest in the genre as a result¹ .

Anyway, I find the scene interesting enough to get in lost in a content hole every once and awhile and usually I watch jmcrofts.

Esports are like regular sports in the way that they are just vessels for stories. Crofts does a good job of explaining why this moment is important gives me a deeper appreciation for the fighting scene in general.

Oh and the Diago Parry is one of the coolest video game moments ever put to film.

Watching

Ever since I saw RoboCop (at like 7yo lol) I have been a huge fan of Director Paul Verhoeven. Total Recall terrified me and I loved Starship Troopers first as a straight up military action movie and then as the subversive critique of fascism.

Then there’s Showgirls. Which I didn’t see until I was in my late 20s. Mostly because it was purposefully made as a NC-17 film and because it was almost impossible to find anywhere for a decade.

My base thoughts on the film are first, that it’s beautiful. I’m not sure what Verhoeven is doing to get this neon sheen that coats the film but even denim jeans look like they’re radiating energy.

Secondly, it’s not a sub-textual movie, it’s all there. It’s decidedly explicit. And thirdly, it’s unintentionally camp in a way that only queer people can truly appreciate.

Now when I first saw Showgirls I was alone in my apartment watching it on my 42in TV. My most recent re-watch was at the Hollywood Forever cemetery with about 500 other people and truly, that is how this film is meant to be seen.

All the ridiculousness of the film is heightened by the collective cheering and glee of a live audience.

Reading

I started Hansen Shi’s The Expat last week and decided it wasn’t for me. Partly because I found the main character boring but mostly because John Le Carre has ruined me for 90% of spy/espionage novels.

The main character isn’t bad mind you, he’s just boring. I think if I enjoyed a certain “emo” quality that abounds in his character I could have stuck with it but it just didn’t do it for me. George Smiley, the ever present link in all of Le Carre’s novels is a pitiable cuck who is almost devoid of emotion. Yet, he is compelling because his personal life is a fun house mirror to his competence in spy craft.

Shi’s main character by comparison is naïve to the point that his incompetency to realize he’s in an espionage plot is almost 4th wall breaking. It’s kind of like when the big breasted bimbo in a horror movie does goes into the very obvious murder basement.

Anyway, I am a proponent of STOP READING THAT™. So I just returned to the library and moved on.

Playing

Been mostly playing Battlefield 2042 multiplayer so that’s not too exciting. However, they did just drop the strangest content in recent memory:

And, for me, this is just weird timing. When was the last Mass Effect game? like 10 years ago almost? Idk, makes me kinda hopeful they’re gonna drop some news on a new ME soon. But I won’t hold my breath.

The update did however add a new game mode that is very popular which includes some unexpected but welcome updates to the BF formula. Usually when you’re downed and waiting for a revive you are stuck in place, with this new mode you can crawl to a safer spot. This one change alone would be worth buying a new BF game. Not to mention they added teammate spectating when waiting to redeploy (a feature the community has been asking for since 2011) and some much needed buffs to some underutilized weapons.

For a game that “EA Abandoned” it sure is getting a lot of love recently from Dice.

Other Notables

** “You sound real corny being scared of the subway.”

** Low gay bar traffic and spike in pizza deliveries before strikes boost theory on Pentagon activity during invasions

** The meth induced psychosis experience.

1  You could hear my heart break when Marvel vs Capcom 3 was revealed.