Mussings

So I've had an interesting past half year or so with my cell phone and app experiences and I wanted to share some of my thoughts.

This started about a year ago I started to notice that I spent a ton of time watching youtube videos on my phone that had a frustrating number of ad breaks and/or were 20 minute long rambles about a subject that had 3 minutes of actual content and/or just… ate my time, grinding my attention to dust for someone else's benefit.

I started by purging my subscriptions down to content creators I felt gave me videos which valued my time.

Then I removed the app from my phone. Then, basically every social media app (although I did add Bluesky, and kept TikTok and Discord).

I was still using my phone 6-7hrs a day, typically, and often (mostly) video apps.

Earlier this week I put a handful of new books on the Kindle I have floating around and I had some just... extremely pleasant evenings listening to music and reading, which is basically how I spent my free time as a teenager and college student.

So I just pulled all the video apps off my phone.

Lately, given the 'political' climate, the late-stage capitalism drive to squeeze every penny I make into some C-suite pocket, and the skinner-box-ification of using attention as a commodity to be spent by others, I've felt a stronger and stronger sense of dread that everything is spiraling out of control and, more specifically, my personal existence out of *my* control.

I'm trying to put the genie back into the bottle, I guess. Take more control of my life, live with more intention. My phone should be nothing more than a utility device and a music player.

I re-watch Star Trek as my... comfort watch, I guess? Cycling through the series every few years, and watching some things with my wife on her first time through.

I've just recently made it all the way around to ST: Discovery for my second time through and a noted a few things while going back through season 1:

1) The first season is a lot better than I remember - BUT, I think a lot of my change in opinion stems from knowing a few of the plot twists that made some of the more uncomfortable 'doesn't feel like Trek' decisions early on more understandable (e.g. Lorca's origins and his tactics/attitudes). A dropped hint to the audience would have probably really helped with this, at least. Also, although it remains The Michael Burnham show, they spend more time with other characters than I remembered. I think what probably stands out to me the most significantly is when they go way out of their way to structure a scene where two characters say 'fucking cool' to point out that "THIS AIN'T YOUR DADDY'S STAR TREK WE'RE BAD BOYS WHO CURSE NOW." It's still uncomfortably violent for Trek and full of change-for-the-sake-of-change (e.g. the backpedaled Klingon redesign, I would argue the Spore Drive, Burnham being Spock's sister for no reason, etc.).

2) I stand by my assessment that ST:D is inherently too narrow and isolating in its plotting and story construction. The USS Discovery is the Only Ship That Can and Michael Burnham is The Only Person Who Can. There's no sense of a broader universe - or characters as more than set dressing - with very few exceptions. The season arcs also tend to be too narrow and too vague at the same time, e.g. the 'red angel' in season two. There's a lot of faffing about and hiding the ball to draw out suspense where the whole season is focused on one overarching mission rather than the traditional episodic but with continuity that Trek typically dealt in. Again, the narrowness feels stifling.

I tend to have days where I just... don't feel great emotionally and very little seems exciting or pleasant, so I spend a lot of time listlessly cruising the net or... whatever.

Is it just me or does capitalism feel a lot worse now than it did when I was growing up (90's)?

Everything feels less like an attempt to offer something in exchange and more like a brazen attempt to take your money for a little as possible in return.

Today, the first of the 'New Trek' series ended.

ST:D premiered in September 2017 - shortly after Trump, not that far before COVID - as the first Trek television in 12 years. It was, more-or-less, a 'reboot' - but not in the sense of retreading familiar ground with a new perspective.

Rather, ST:D was an effort to 'modernize' the Star Trek television serial for the streaming era. It did it by - in first season, at least - being Star Trek in name only. Action forward, focused on 1 or 2 characters entirely and eschewing both the ensemble format and parable/morality tale roots of basically every show before it, ST:D was both trapped in broader continuity by being set in the in-universe timeline between existing properties and breaking the same continuity by introducing new characters and technologies that had never been mentioned before. It was trying to have its cake and eat it, too.

The end effect is Star Trek trying to be Star Wars in scope and not succeeding. They were criticized for it, too. From the second season forward ST:D feels a lot more like Star Trek, but the course corrections (more focus on characters other than Michael Burnham, updates to Klingon makeup, blatant reference to Starfleet as a family and the wonder of exploration and camaraderie) feel heavy handed to say the least.

Seasons 3-5 are fascinating because they explore a show that was hauled off the rails by the objections of its viewer base. ST:D never quite manages to break free of being the Michael Burnham show - but it *feels* like Star Trek in a way the first couple seasons simply don't, even if it feels way too overt about it. Flinging itself into the far future - dealing with 2024's scientific speculations and extrapolations (programmable matter, etc.) truly broke new ground with Star Trek as a property and pushed itself further forward from where the series timeline officially ended (and the technological forecasting stagnated) - the nearly unbearable 'Star Trek: Nemesis' movie.

It's important to remember that ST:D predates 'The Mandalorian,' 'The Orville' (which is really quite good in seasons 2 and 3), all the Star Wars shows, Amazon Prime picking up 'The Expanse' - in fact it predates every prestige sci-fi show made for streaming platforms. It made the idea of sci-fi television a *thing* again.

ST:D was often bad, starting far too grim and bloody minded and ending up a bit too fluffy and cheesy. It was sometimes also extremely good - often in spite of its ambition. It was Trek trying not to be Trek but quickly finding out that Trek is so cherished and praised because it *is* utopian, it *is* about people, and that it can't be divorced from its morality tale roots. ST:D feels like it was often flailing because it probably was: the inherent series premise simply didn't work with the property is was in, so it had to change what it was about very, very quickly, and pulling a handbrake that way leaves you in a spin.

I think Discovery is most meaningful because it made all those other properties possible. I don't think, in isolation, that it stands all that tall on its own - I, for one, didn't watch it until Strange New Worlds was coming out and I wanted background on the new series.

Time is a flat circle.

Somehow, via HEALTH and noise rock and waify-sounding female Irish singers, we’ve arrived back at trip-hop and it’s 1998 again.

Heart Under is brilliantly executed ambient, noise-rock influenced trip-hop; equally driving and lulling; a lullaby with screeching guitar and a down-tempo but unrelenting beat.

And that’s… really all there to say. It’s good and it tickles the ‘almost-but-not-quite-familiar’ nodes of the brain.

I'm here but I feel like maybe that shouldn't be allowed.

I think it might be mostly old bigoted republicans who saying 'caring is for the young.'

Has any band out there that really went for the long haul been good longer than they weren't?

Aside from the 'giant gap in the career' groups like TOOL or FAILURE.

Anyway. Smashing Pumpkins have been a dull/bad band longer than they were a good band.

I think that's where most bands end up unless they Flaming Lips or Wilco and have a late resurgence in some transformed format.

Ever since Billy Corgan forgot how to sing quietly there's not been much good music out of that camp.

I feel like late emo rock and baroque pop like MCR and Panic! made off with the Smashing Pumpkins angsty-teen tiara right after the White Stripes made garage popular in the early 2000's and the emo/scene-kid world exploded with mall friendly internet tinged interpretations of 80s gothic ennui and wan-ness.

I'd be interested to see Smashing Pumpkins take a swing at an emo record.

I realized today I know next to nothing about the trends in rock music before about 1991 the way I do about the 90s on up.

I’m part way through season 2 and here’s some thoughts:

*SPOILERS?* I'll try not.

This was always going to be a lightning hunting expedition where they handed out bottles to everyone, because, hey, the first guy did it, I'm sure we can, too.

Turns out you can't capture lightning in a bottle, twice. Shocking. *rimshot*

Backbone is beautiful, poignant, disaffecting, atmospheric, stuffed with a bulged, farting-and-whistling-at-the-rivets-with-pressure amount of ideas, and criminally short.

Too many loose threads, not enough explained - a kiddie pool 20 feet wide.

I’ve been lucky to have no major bugs or glitches as I’ve been playing.

This game is primo Eurojank as released, but it also gets the core elements of what makes CDPR games so well praised: the writing, characterizations, depth and spread of all the things to do, and atmosphere of the world are head and shoulders above anything similar.

But, like proper eurojank, bugs abound and everything beyond the core CDPR goalposts is sort of a mess. They definitely needed a couple more years of development to really fill things in.

There are obvious indications of cut and stripped back content EVERYWHERE, from the close-to-meaningless life paths, '6 months later' Jackie montage, to the AI pathing/traffic, to the cars all feeling identical (and poor) to drive and lacking a customization option that had been promised, to the lack of re-spec options, no clothing preview, poor looting/weapon system (i.e. the big DPS # is usually useless for stealth builds), poor crafting implementation, crappy radiant AI, useless food and bar vendors, very little actual sex for a super sexualized world, few romance options (generally only one per a masc/fem character config)... etc.

I wonder when they'll implement the trains that they've run rails all over the city for. They're even on the map screen.

Also I'm expecting a DLC to use the giant stadium you can't get into by any route.

*shrug* this game promised the moon and was forced to release by the purse-string holders before it was done. I also think the expectations (unfortunately encouraged by CDPR) were unreachably high, and all the high profile PR boondoggles haven’t helped/

If you dig all the way back into my tumblr history, to the first few posts I wrote, you’ll find some musings on the genre of cyberpunk and how we’re really living it (and the future is boring, which is a trope). I’ve read and watched and mulled over the different ways to look at it for over a decade - probably longer. Suffice it to say, when I heard that CD Projekt Red was making a Cyberpunk game - a huge open-world mess of an RPG at that - I was excited.

Self-admittedly I have not played nor do I know a lot about Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk TTRPG. I’ve read some lore and the source books, and there’s this definite feeling that it’s something I would have found really edgy and cool at 12yrs old.

I’m a big chunk of hours into the game. Here’s my two biggest  (non-spoiler) takeaways:

1) Cyberpunk 2077 is simultaneously far too serious and nowhere near serious enough. There’s this tongue-in-cheek exaggeration of American problems, silly gangs, slightly carnival-esque violence everywhere so let’s have fun, goofy slang and this slight air of camp that’s hard to escape. But it’s all played po-faced, straight and committed, there’s no wink or crack of a smile. Pushed farther this game would easily be cyber-GTA (a comparison it should get anyway) - a farcical almost Idiocracy style send-up. I think this would be fine route to take considering the source material has a gang that genetically alters themselves to look like circus clowns.

Simultaneously, it could go even darker - no silly anything, death and blood and everything horrible in your face and unrelenting. No heroes to meet, no fun in gun fights - only pain and survival. AKA leaning more into the Deus Ex frame, though without all the whack-job illuminati conspiracy theories. Considering how ‘high technology, low life’ cyberpunk is at its genre roots, this sort of where I’d like it to go, all blood and guts and life-is-nasty.

In either case, the tiptoeing between silly and serious, while kind of refusing to acknowledge the silliness, sort of doesn’t work for me. It’s got a very odd Evil Dead vibe where you’re wondering if it’s supposed to be funny but nobody is laughing.

2) CD Projekt Red is a studio that was given a bit of a gift with the lightning in a bottle of the Witcher. Comparing against their past work, Cyberpunk 2077 is simply not as good a game as The Witcher 3 is. They are markedly similar games in a few respects - particularly how they drop you in medias res into the world and don’t hold your hand, and the loosely explained character optimization.

But the fact is that the things TW3 excelled most at - deep characters, gentle but deep world-building, a brutal and frequently fatalistic theme in a trope reversal from normal fantasy, incredible quest design, and meaningful consequences to your choices... well, only two of those made it Cyberpunk for sure, and another is yet to be determined. The quest design has been outstanding so far, and the world is brilliantly brought to busy and chaotic life. Whether my choices matter... will be determined later.

Something about TW3 and it’s characters felt organic, lived in. And Cyberpunk hasn’t managed to do that.  Some of it is that it is very much the opposite of a trope inversion - cyberpunk is built on stereotypes. Some of it is that the characters don’t have history or pre-existing relationships with V, and that they feel... simpler, more one-note. Some of it is that V is far more of a blank slate than Geralt, more of an unknown to Night City. The life-is-cheap-and-nasty vibe I adored about TW3 doesn’t feel as serious here (see above). It’s a living world, absolutely, but it just doesn’t feel as... lived in, I guess. What this screams to me is that the source material MATTERS, and that the Witcher is just better source material.

There’s also less variety to the gameplay, sort of. There are many more practical ways to build a character than in TW3, but they also demand far more specialization. Some of the most interesting things in TW3 were the monsters and the different ways you could choose to deal with them or had to approach them. In Cyberpunk, to be effective, you have to pick your build early, and since a lot side quests basically amount to “go to the place and neutralize the dudes who are hostile to you,” you end up approaching most missions the same way. TW3 at least forced you to mix things up. It could also be that I’m spending a LOT of time doing radiant world-quests, which would also explain my out-of-balance high street cred rating.

Cyberpunk 2077 is and will be an important game. A huge, sprawling, delightful mess of an RPG with so much to do it astounds, a gorgeous look into excess and dark futurism.