Hollow Knight seems legit.

You want to get my attention, be a metriodvania. You want me to throw money at you, show me your map in the trailer. This certainly looks like the goods. Deep combat, lovely art style, reviews that boast 30 hours or so. That's great, I'm sure I'll probably break down and buy it this weekend. Which is actually today. Hooray service industry!

Legion is the weirdest show since The Prisoner.

So... did Noah Hawley help an FX executive bury a body? Because that's the only scenario in which this show gets made.

This isn't something networks make anymore and when they did the best you could hope for was the production value of a black box theater. At first I thought the pilot was going to be the artsy outlier that transitions into the more expected X-Men vs the world scenario. That... did not happen. If anything the pilot was holding back. This show was getting away with murder before we got to the astral projection of Jemaine Clement doing beat poetry. My buddy who was chomping at the bit to see a big budget X-Men series enjoyed it but gave me a  "Well... that was not... yep." when I asked what he liked about.

That means this is probably going to be a mini series. A second season would be great but I'm not fooling myself into thinking this is something the fans want. This is something I want and I'm insufferable. This is a Kubrickian Twin Peaks with super powers and I can't stop watching it. The dream like dialogue, the anachronistic wardrobe/sets, the torture sequences that are actually torturous, I could go on. This show is the best kind of crazy because it knows how ridiculous it looks (remember Jemaine Clement?) and it doesn't give a good god damn what you think. At the same time it respects the pain of mental health issues and engenders respect for schizophrenia while being  honest about what David has done wrong.

Or you can just tune all that out and treat it like a straight forward psychological thriller. You'd miss out on about 2/3rd's of it's depth, but I wouldn't blame anyone showing up solely for the monsters. The world's angriest boy in the world sure looks like the nightmares I used to have as a 6 year old. And that's awesome.

But not as awesome as this sh*t.

Night in the Woods soundtrack rulz, OK?!!!

Cards on the table, I'm worried that nitw isn't anywhere near the top sales on steam. I'm worried it'll get labeled hipster trash and get lost in the shadow of Horizon: Zero Dawn. Which no matter how good that game may be, I had to use that garbage title to describe it. So nobody wins. We also desperately need to lay off the colons in game titles.

So to get some of you readers in the mood, listen to the music. It's soundtrack helped garden state get a foothold on pop culture and this is a much better written story than that:

That last 2 are covers, but still.

CRISPR.

In light of current events, it's easy to think we're slipping into an age of ignorance. I purpose we are actually in an age of mad science! Well not really, but lets just say Gattaca is eerily close to our own reality right now. The gist is someone found the genes of a virus inside of a germ, which is crazy. The theory was floated that this is a primitive defense mechanism inside the germ and if RNA was written with a specific spacer sequence they could literally rewrite the germ's genes.

This scales up. Way up. Like China has already undergone trials on human embryos and it wasn't a complete disaster. We possess the ability to rewrite genetics. We've had this for months and I'm just hearing about it now. Guys! we could feasibly create a strain of malaria free mosquitoes and... I just realized this is how every post-apocalypse story starts. Still, nothing ventured.

But it's not even my birthday...

Yay, libertarianism. yay.

Chance really likes Night in the Woods. So much so he gifted me a copy saying it had me written all over it. This guy. This guy gets me. I'm in love with the art style and in awe of the dialogue. It hides tremendously depressing details in light hearted, damn funny, small talk. I've seen some critics complain this game outstays it's welcome, but I don't know how that's possible. I want to frikkin' live there. In a lot of ways I already do.

The maladies of the rust belt have a ton in common old southern coal mining towns. I'm really impressed at how light this game is able to make the crushing depression bearing down on everyone stuck in Possum Springs. Also fun fact, a lot of working class background characters have blood shot eyes. They're high on Oxycontin. Bravo, night on the woods. Bravo.

...Neat!

Samurai Jack's coming back. To Adult Swim. Which I find odd for a couple reasons, the saddest of which is that kids 12 years later still aren't that into this show. I mean, of all the CN shows that desperately needed a second chance this was it. Now they have something to show for it:

All right! That's... pretty much the same show, except with a gun. But that gun still makes pew pew laser sounds so that's still pure Tartakovsky. A gritty reboot of Samurai Jack isn't Samurai Jack and I'm realived they arn't going in that direction. At least not too much. Looks like they're going for PG-13 light, which I think is the right choice. In a word, I'm glad this is still for kids. Cept' kids these days watch Game of Thrones and have seen Fury Road so... this can only improve the fight scenes.

Coloring in History

I just got done with a hell of a week. 8 days straight, 57 work hours over 2 jobs. Wanna know how I dealt with it? I cheated. I cheated at Civ 6. I got hammered and played perfect games and I know I should feel a little guilty. But I don't. It was awesome, though I concede I wasn't actually playing Civilization VI.

If I was, every turn would carry a tinge of regret over my decisions mixed with a shudder of fear over Montezuma's troop movements. I can see what you're doing Monty, cut that sh*t out! Civ is stressful it's actually something I love most about it. But sometimes I can't deal. Sometimes I just wanna color in the fog of war and I don't want anyone standing in my way.

I had an ex that loved adult coloring books and that's the closest analogy I can think of. A theater square here, a Chichen Itza there, and soon several calming gaming hours have passed. I can forget about the cloth napkin shortage, the broken freezer crisis, the Camry title card affair, and dead Russian ambassadors. I've turned one of the greatest strategy games ever made* into a zen garden. You know what the funniest thing about it is? Even with all the money, luxuries, oil, and iron in the world; Peter the Great still managed to pull from behind and out-culture my ass. Say what you want about Civ's AI, it's still capable of some pretty cunning sh*t.


*it's already better than Civ V and after an expansion or 2... I can't even imagine.