What the hell, Nerds?!

Miss Jones, I am so sorry.

Sometimes you're in too deep to see it. You're so happy to meet someone else that's played the dlc to New Vegas that you're willing to look past faults in their character. I'm not a nerd because I play and write about video games. I'm a nerd because I can yell about the Mass Effect 3 ending for an hour straight. I'm incredibly passionate about something that isn't main stream. But I would never be this upset if the new ME crew was all women. And I would never ever think about attacking the actor as if they were responsible.

The fact that the new Ghostbusters trailer is the most hated video on the internet is one thing. The fact that the brunt of the vitriol landed at the twitter account of Leslie Jones is a whole new circle of nerd hell. The fact she's had to quit twitter because of the non-stop siege from anonymous racist cowards is unacceptable. I have been so incredibly naive about nerds and gamer culture in general. They can be echo chambers of hate just as effective as tea party radio. I wish it wasn't so, but here we are. A talented comedian gave a critically lauded performance and all some nerds could think to do was call her a n***r.

That's just f***ing amazing, guys.

I'm... busy.

Sorry about the delay folks. Just haven't been feeling too writey lately. Been picking up some extra shifts, 'cause I got a $1200 dental surgery I don't have the money for. Could be worse, though. it's just the one tooth and the procedure is a grand a tooth. Counting my blessings where I can!

Marco Polo: Mild Horses.

Cut out every scene he's not in and it becomes a better show.

I made it to the end of the second season of Netflix's most expensive show. Most people have no idea it exists... and honestly I can't blame them. There's embers of greatness deep in it's soapy bullsh*t but I did not enjoy the ride a third of the time. So much so, I'm not even bothering to do a formal review.

It's funny when people say game of thrones wouldn't be half as good if it weren't for it's budget. That's now scientifically not true. Marco Polo (which was clearly named "Khan" or something before a suit made them change it) is so maddeningly obsessed with being great that it becomes mediocre. Acting ability fluctuates wildly from character to character and too many of them are pitifully out of their league.

Not that the writing does them many favors but I can now see I'm becoming a bit of a dick. It gets a solid 7 out of 10 but that's only because you can close your eyes and imagine all these pieces fitting together better. The story of the great Kublai Khan should be, and almost is, much more compelling than this.

Sometimes work is the best thing.

Breakups suck, but sweating like a razorback hog at work for 20 hours a weekend is oddly
therapeutic. The lunch rush broke the whole damn bakery today and work related mania is just the thing to keep me out of my head. Which, if done for long enough, means I won't remember what I was so screwed up about in the first place.

Look at this fool:

My save got corrupted a while back and so far the only real difference is that my A-squad doesn't show up in the title screen anymore. A fact that bummed me out until I saw this middle aged Hispanic family man in pony tails and ballerina lace skinny jeans. That just made my whole damn day!

XCOM 2? I'm sorry I yelled.

XCOM 2 is the best game I never reviewed. Because as great as it is, make no mistake it's abso-f**kin-lutly amazing, it ran like crap. Like. CRAP. The gtx 980 was top o' the line and I was pulling 40-50 frames with the fxaa turned off! In layman's terms, the effect that makes edges less jaggy n' ugly was such a prissy performance hog, the forums basically told you to turn it off. That's some beta test version bullsh*t right there.

When the news came out that X2 was coming to consoles I choked on my coffee. This s**t barely ran on a relatively monster graphics card and processor. How in the hell did they get this thing up on what is essentially a couple of 7 year old gaming pc's?

So I checked back into X2... and I am pleased. I mean, I'll need to fork over $450 for a lovely 1070 to get everything running buttery smooth. But this, this is a solid 25% upgrade across the board. I want my nail-biting POV shots to run flawlessly. When my sniper is the last guy to take his turn and he lines up a shot on a faceless barreling toward my panicking medic, I want to be in the moment. The performance level right now gives me that. And thus, I am now content.

Pixar promises to lay off the sequels for a while.

Just one or two or three more hits. Tops.

Pixar has been hitting the sequels pretty hard this decade. While I'd admit that outside of the Cars series not one of those sequels (and even the good dinosaur if I'm honest) are "bad." Hell, I'll defend Monsters University as having one of the most devastating coming of age character arcs... ever. But it seems Pixar's golden years are quickly fading even after coups like Inside Out. Which was tremendous. But the C+'s are staring to out number the straight A's it used to have and I've been worried for years. Disney's chief animation studio, quite frankly, trounced Big P this year with Zootopia. The best film about American racial tension I have ever seen.

We just have to muddle through Cars 3(...nah.), The Incredibles 2 (I'm down) Toy Story 4 (No. Why?!) to get to P's solemn pinky swear it will try as hard as it did in the beginning. Hey, I get it. If I was a creative company with a payroll I'd seriously consider sure bets like Toy Story sequels to keep the great Disney beast fed. But since Disney can stand on it's own 2 feet now, I'm so jazzed Zootopia did as well as it has, Pixar now has the means to fight  the war to win the world's imagination. Again.