Hey yall, sorry for the late post, I just got back from a colonoscopy and then a long weekend trip to San Francisco. It was fun! Both the colonoscopy and San Fran!

YouTube Obsession

I know I’m not blowing anyone’s mind when I say I watch Kurzesagt, I’m just like 4 billion other people. However, if you’ve never heard of them I highly recommend their series they been doing on drugs and alcohol recently.

What I hate about most anti-substance media is that it often presents all the negatives without addressing why these substances feel good.

Drugs and alcohol feel good! So few conversations about substances talk about this. If you grew up in the 80s/90s most anti-drug media would have you believe that if you smoked weed you would shoot your mother in her sleep, wreck your car into a line of 1st graders and then die by asphyxiation on your own vomit. It might surprise you, when you finally did try weed it felt really fucking good and nothing bad happened. This is how drugs start with people. If we come from a place of understanding that the substance is addictive because it feels good we can start to remove the stigma that addiction is a moral failing.

Anyway, Kurzgesagt covers a ton of topics and their videos are beautiful and short. I highly recommend.

Watching

Starting with Ghost Protocol, the Mission Impossible movies all blur together in my brain. I really couldn’t tell which movie had the flute-sniper fight in the opera house, which movie had the sandstorm in Dubai or which movie had Simon Peg playing Halo 5 on the most cursed monitor set-up ever.

I literally just watched Final Reckoning and I’m pretty certain my brain is already melding it with the other movies. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s great when a series finds its style, it becomes almost a comfort food to watch Tom Cruise attempt suicide as other characters fellate Ethan Hunt. But FR takes this a bit too far. The first 30 minutes is entirely a “hey, remember when Ethan Hunt did this super cool thing? How about this? That was cool huh? Wow, Ethan really is the best.”

Again, this is fine. It’s the last MI as far as we know and sure nostalgia bait your fans. But the endless scenes of exposition - one while literally looking at a iTunes visualizer- is out of control. The movie just assumes you have brain damage.

Again, again, this is fine. This is the cadence MI fans have come to expect but it comes at the cost of anything inventive. The first MI from 1996 is just a cool ass movie. De Palma coats every scene in this sharp layer of tension and intrigue. John Woo, whether you like it or not, defined the Y2K look in MI:2. Sure it’s goofy and over the top but it is distinctive to say the least. MI:3 elevated JJ. Abrams from showrunner to movie director and all that entails. MI:3 is not good. It’s the worst MI, but again, it tried something new and had an awesome scene with Phillip Seymour Hoffman acting his goddamn ass off.

Which leads the Brad Bird Ghost Protocol and it’s defining MI style. I like GP, even if I can’t remember if that’s the one where a guy falls in giant parking garage to his death, or if it’s the one where Alec Baldwin unknowingly tells Ethan Hunt how cool he is to his face. This would be the style henceforth forever. There’s no style, it is all substance. But that is it’s style and that’s ok.

Playing

I’m really not a fan of “clickers” or idle games but when I’m travelling I have a lot of free time where I have to remain at least a bit aware of my surroundings I really like playing through SPACEPLAN on iOS.

It’s a monkey brain, number-go-up game that has some really cute and funny writing with sleek visuals. Oh yeah, it ends. That’s a plus for me. It’s ending is actually good too.

Other Notables

** AI is a worse bet than renewable energy, but a better money dump.

** You don’t control the rage-bait, the algorithm does.

** “Until It POPs!”