Logging off.

The internet used to be a place. You kept it in one room of your house, or one classroom at school. And this was mirrored by each site being its own fiefdom, mostly owned and operated by A Guy, and if you didn’t like one site’s rules or content then you just went somewhere else.

Now there’s like four sites that matter, and all of them allow an angry mob to endlessly harass you if the wrong nutjob speaks your name, and your seven-inch pocket watch will buzz with each notification that someone told you to gargle thumbtacks.

Yes.

Please stop using the word “distracted” in reference to World War 3.

And that’s generally forgivable - if you call it anything else. But naming your thing after a popular thing is a reliable way to get butts in seats, even if you completely bungle the tone, content, setting, and message. It’s how you guarantee “the book is better” instead of “did you know it’s based on a book?”

If you change your whole belief structure because another believer was rude to you, you never believed it, you just wanted to belong to a club.

I mean, probably? There’s a lot of chemicals involved.

An environmental study would have to rule out exposure to fighting games.

Found some comments from last time this was teased:

The core of Metal Gear isn’t this specific goofy storyline… it’s the goofiness. It’s taking video-game parodies of action-movie villains seriously enough to question how reality works. MGS3 has a guy who controls bees and he barely makes the top five weirdest moments in the game. MGS2 has more layers of reality and hyperreality than House of Leaves. All of these games exist as complicated jokes by westaboo ultranerd Hideo Kojima, and every last one of them was intended to be The Last One. The whole story does not matter. Every piece was made-up to serve a purpose.

Magical realism is all that matters. Hollywood does that all the time. All MGS does is gather up the silly concessions like psychic powers and lightning bullets and cram them into one story, wherein the protagonist does not give a single fuck about whether they make sense. Glowing mushrooms recharge batteries? Sure, he needed that. This guy’s bullets ricochet like billiards balls? Well, better watch your cover. Fifty Metal Gears in a row? Aim for the knees.

Metal Gear Solid’s story is a spec-ops soldier sent by people he shouldn’t trust on a mission he’s not informed about with tools he can’t possibly have and enemies he doesn’t understand.

It’s a movie where someone can tell the protagonist, “You have to keep going, or there won’t be a movie,” and the protagonist can only ask what they’re talking about.

These characters were invented to fit a medium. Keeping them would miss the point of adaptation.

If Kojima had a movie deal in the late 90s, he’d still hire David Hayter (hot off Guyver: Dark Hero) to be his Kurt Russel, but he’d write completely different villains. MGS1 is a video game trying to be an action film and highlighting why that doesn’t work. Metal Gear: The Movie would be an action film trying to be a video game and highlighting why that doesn’t work.

We’d get the same straight-down overhead camera in places, providing dramatic irony (the audience seeing around corners) and showing how bizarre that angle really looks. We’d get fetch quests for weird-ass keycards, because the mission is a complicated double bluff ordered by the bad guys. But there is no “player.” There is no “controller.” The passive audience has no input. Highlighting that: Snake could walk straight past objectives and items we know about but he doesn’t. We can’t really empathize with this character because we do not share his experience. We’re helplessly watching it happen. Conversely - there are things you cannot convey through film. A “boss fight” with flying sawblades or poison darts could be trivial to predict, because the character feels the wind beforehand. To the audience they’re just narrowly dodging instant death with clairvoyant gymnastics.

People expecting a straight adaptation of the story are completely missing the point. Most of the Metal Gear games are official knockoffs of other Metal Gear games. They invent whatever they need, in order to highlight the absurdity of the medium, while still taking it seriously enough to maintain tension. Kinda the same niche where horror-comedy lurks.

What we deserve is a movie where the colonel can tell Snake what the passcode to a door is because we the audience saw the bad guy type it in. It’s a movie where the colonel can tell Snake that’s why he knows it now, and Snake the character is not permitted to comprehend that fourth-wall break.

The really fucky stuff would be wandering onto parts of the set that aren’t built yet. Like an unsettling version of a Mel Brooks gag. Snake drags a body into a narrow space off a wide-open courtyard, and when he leans on a brick wall, it wobbles. It’s just plywood. He can see a soundstage through a bullethole. So he grabs a grenade launcher, creeps back out into the open, and fires - barely denting the rock-solid ediface. Because in the wide shot… it’s a real location.

This has to be a movie where sometimes the dramatic depth-of-field is just stuff in the background being blurry. Almost cartoon levels of the bad guys driving a tank toward a hanger entrance, and Snake arriving later to see real tracks in the snow end and be replaced by dark paint on white cloth, leading to a sloppy facade with absolutely nothing behind it. And yet: that’s where they went. He might later hear the hanger door slam shut, and the tank is just there, like it fell out of the pitch-black sky. And then it starts chasing him.

Snake’s eventual grasp of the premise has to hinge on understanding the plot - but not necessarily the medium. His being there and stopping the evil plan is somehow part of the evil plan. So if some guard corners him, unarmed and dead-to-rights, and Snake slowly points his fingers at the guy and yells “Bang!” - it works. That’s what’s in the script: “Snake shoots bad guy.” It does not specify what with. And yet, it may still have a flash of light and a garish spray of blood on the wall. What’s the difference? The actor is fine. It’s only the character who dies.

One of the most unsettling tricks a film could pull is to let cuts run long. Snake leads Meryl down a hallway, and the actress rushes to her mark, and stops. Snake doesn’t. He looks back and wonders what the fuck she’s doing. Then the angle cuts and she’s already running. Like it never happened. Honestly that’s a decent way to end the film. They fly off together in the back of a rescue helicopter, and after the cliche zinger to close out the movie… nothing happens. Nobody has any more lines. The camera has nowhere to go. The music might swell and the credits might roll, and we’re left watching Snake descend into a panic attack as Otacon and Meryl vamp with whatever their last direction was. Laughing at his joke? Seductively leaning on him? Staring out over the ocean? The camera only cuts to black when Snake slowly turns toward the camera, and finally sees the amoral and omnipresent reason for all his suffering: us.

They’re gonna fuck it up. Konami’s gonna have them adapt the story, when the story only exists in service to the vibe.

A proper Metal Gear movie is one where everyone except the protagonist is aware, on some level, that it’s a movie. What we’re gonna get is a movie full of dumb video-game logic. Otacon’s gonna tell Snake to swap controller ports, even though the games themselves already pointed out how the joke doesn’t even work on subsequent consoles.

This is a series where the player character can be directly confronted with the nature of his reality, and all he can do is go - “Huh?” A movie has an even steeper divide than that, because the audience is not in control. Your knowledge has no impact on what the character knows. Sometimes, they will do things you know will fail. But sometimes… things will advance based on nothing you were aware of.

MGS, the game, requires the player to read Meryl’s codec number from the back of the actual CD case. MGS, the movie, should have Snake smell which room the DARPA chief died in.

AWS is primarily a collection of autonomous servers. They’re what generate profit for that business. The thin layer of human beings occasionally touching the hardware are not somehow responsible for the bazillion operations between those interactions. If robotics get a little better then Amazon could manage the same servers with one-tenth as many people, and that does not mean those workers are creating ten times as much value. They just fix robots that do stuff to the computers that make all of the money.

Automating away ninety percent of a workforce is not increasing the value of human labor.

Maybe in 1850, where all machinery required human operation, but we don’t live in that world anymore. AWS alone is just Amazon owning a shitload of computers. It’s mostly autonomous. Sparse human labor only steps in when something goes wrong. They could buy twice as much equipment and hire no additional people, and it’d roughly double their revenue, while nobody does more work and the service stays nearly as good.

A fine endorsement.

First they came for people I don’t like, I assume, and I said hell yeah, there’s no way that will ever be me. Over here, officer. Come for a few more kinds of people I don’t like. Nothing bad ever happened to the French!

Sick to death of this word game.

There’s jobs anyone can start with minimal training - and there’s jobs where you need a six-year degree to avoid killing people.

None of that is why everyone deserves a living wage, or why assholes with money say anyone doesn’t deserve a living wage. Confusing these ideas does not help. Please stop spreading this denial of a gradient in complexity and risk. I want the guy at McDonalds to afford a home and groceries, and that doesn’t require pretending he’s qualified to design a bridge.

How do you feel about SAO Abridged?

“Fuck off” is the only appropriate answer.

Aim it at the right people - but say it loud and clear.

There’s a counter-narrative where the writers’ strike was a convenient scapegoat for a production that was always going to be a trainwreck. IIRC they were going to turn the first season’s titular heroes into villains and have an all-new cast of supers oppose them, and the obvious response of ‘what no ew’ saw them scramble to make up the trainwreck we got instead.

On the plus size, Zachary Quinto’s career took off.

Clerks, the animated series.

The movie Clerks is a no-budget comedy about two schlubs working retail and yapping. Kevin Smith & Scott Mosier pitched a quirky adult cartoon, back when that was reasonably novel. They shopped it around to everybody. UPN offered 13 episodes. Smith went with a surprise offer from ABC, whose audience was mostly children and old farts. They wanted to widen their demographics to young adults. So naturally they did a test screening consisting entirely of children and old farts, who haaated it.

Exactly two episodes were aired, out-of-order, and then it was cancelled. I watched both live and had no idea at-the-time I’d seen the entire broadcast run. The premiere was a fake clip show. All six episodes were dumped onto DVD, then aired once on Comedy Central to fulfill contractual obligations.

Most of the dumb shit in Kevin Smith movies would honestly work better in episodic television. Even people who can’t stand Mallrats would be more amenable to a short format with a sillier tone and no ability to use vulgarity as a punchline. They had the right brand of deliberate stupidity. It’s not mindblowing, but it was a working substrate for several excellent deadpan comedy actors and a writer who cannot shut up. ABC suffered a petit version of the development / broadcast disconnect that saw Fox snuff out a dozen promising shows for not being The Simpsons.

And I guess Korgoth Of Barbaria never got picked up.

Season II.

> Decentralized protocol implemented by Torvalds himself
> Community gravitates around one decent website
> Microsoft buys that website

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Sedentary.