Like the glorious nation of Tropico, elections (primaries at least) are upon us again, my friends. And as usual here's a guide with my hardline commentary recommendations, and if you vote for a republican you should be turned into soylent green.
California (commiefornia AKA fagifornia AKA cantifornia) is at loggerheads again, to decide on the basic tenets of democracy. We all vote, most of us are stupid assholes, and some pair of dipshits head to the final polls.
I have a lot of commentary on the dilution of the Democratic party because of all the weird hippies and morons competing for the same space that will split the vote and lead to Republican nominees but we can talk about that later after they are all dead, and me and you also, since the planet is hurtling towards complete societal collapse and it's not wrong since that means whales and turtles will survive longer than humans.
GOBERNATOR:
Republicans are a fucking joke for higher office in California, but that shouldn't detract from the fact that most of the TWENTY SEVEN fucking candidates in this primary SUCK.
Gavin Newsom and Antonia Villaraigosa are philandering pandering dumbocrats, both of them cucked some dipshits and fucked a bunch of women; Tony put his mistress up in a city job and Gavin just told his campaign manager 'yeah i fucked your wife who actually cares'. Neither of them paid hush money for their discretions, kind of, but you know who hasn't done any shit like that since he's too fucking busy keeping all of us assholes from eating trash? John Chiang.
If you don't vote for John Chiang for Governor then grab ahold of a Terryfold and fuck you, kill your parents.
LT.(smash) Governor:
No one really cares about the lieutenant governor, including Gavin, I dunno either vote for Kounalakis since Kamala Harris likes her or McLaughlin since she's a Bernie Bro and is progressive without outright saying we need to murder every wealthy person in Silicon Valley.
Sec. of State:
Padilla won't give up voter information to the dipshit fatass fascist most of your parents voted for and should be killed, but since he'll get a lot of votes go for Michael Feinstein, the Green that isn't connected to the war profiteer anti-privacy shitty senator Feinstein.
Controller: I don't know what a controller is or does so just don't vote for a republican or I will use Spokeo and kill you.
Treasurer: Fiona Ma displays actual competence rather than the mouthbreathing sycophancy that a "governors advisor" position actually is, which the challenger puts down as a profession. We need a new Chiang, she's smart and knows the complex capitalist math it takes to fix our stupid state.
Attorney General:
Acacia fucking HATES Becerra because he used to be her representative and then became AG since Harris became one of the better senators, but I still say Becerra doesn't suck. She just hates having to vot since I make her do it.
Insurance Commissioner:
Steve Poizner is a fuckin piece of shit Schwarzenegger ally, fuck him. Lara on the other hand used to work for Kevin de Leon so I'm gonna guess they're similar.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- US SENATOR
This is the worst election I've ever seen in California, it's worse than the 2003 recall election, every single asshole is running for office and none of them are Gary Coleman (R.I.P.D.) or a pornstar, so the electorate is gonna be diluted and the shit will wind up rising to the top rather than principled competent candidates that legitimately want to stop us from killing ourselves. Kevin de Leon, rant over. Feinstein is an old conservative dumbocrat and her husband directly profited from the Iraq War and I'm never letting that go.
The Judiciary (LA County AKA Megacity 2): No one is named Dredd so it mostly doesn't matter so I'm gonna post a list of offices and just follow it
Office 4: Sauceda
Office 16: Michel
Office 20: Escalante
Office 60: Cho
Office 63: Lewis
Office 67: Vincent
Office 71: Gibbons
Office 113: Ribons
Office 118: Diamond
Office 126: Gilbertson
Office 146: Spear
SCHOOL SUPERNINTENDO:
Marshall Tuck (aka Fuck) is a charter loving piece of shit that should be beaten to death with ipads. Thurmond is the only real legit choice/doesn't jerk off corporations and blow them and rub ejaculate on his face like Marshall Tuck does.
Assessor: Prang is the only person that's really publicly answered questionnaires and real estate is a scam, property is theft, etc. etc. but all the other people running seem like sharks too since they all work for him, I hope they get fired.
Sheriff:
DO NOT VOTE FOR BOB LINDSAY. Endorsed by Ted Nugent, he's literally a fucking maniac. Fuck the police but fuck this psycho more. Villanueva. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ STATE MEASURES:
68: Yes. If you vote no you literally hate the environment and should just bury your stupid fucking head in the dirt before you vote.
69 (lol): Yes. Stops shithead legislators from looting transit funds, "draw and quarter the piece of shit that owns Foothill Transit" should be the next proposition
70: Yes. We're gonna need it when the planet dies.
71: No. Pointless, stop fucking amending the state constitution with garbage like this it looks like a Simpsons joke at this point
72: Yes. Even the Rain is a great movie with Gael Garcia Bernal, that guy is cool as shit and Acacia is in love with him and would totally cheat on me with him and I can see why.
There's a bunch of local offices and ordinances too, but the funniest one is the pair of Pasadena municipal elections that will determine if that stupid city will allow cannabis stores to sell shit there. I haven't changed my voter registration from Pasadena for a reason, and it's for this, so I can vote to allow pot to be sold in Pasadena so my mom doesn't have to drive far to a store to buy weed, since seeing her smoke marijuana is one of the weirdest and funniest things I've ever seen. She is high as shit all the time when she doesn't have to work now, and if anyone deserves to get stoned and watch Star Trek it's her. I love my mom and she's the reason I'm a retarded leftist abrasive asshole and I would feed anyone that ever tries to harm or upset her into a wood chipper.
There is a worthwhile message buried somewhere in the convoluted and leaden-handed plot of The Circle: a criticism of corporate influence in American politics, the over-reliance of Silicon Valley technologies that they themselves have skillfully interwoven into our daily routine, the dissolution of privacy rights we freely, ignorantly, and unknowingly sign away as lovers of The Product, the monetization of our every waking moments and lives as Capital finds the last resource possible to exploit, for starters. The Circle does not explore any of that. It comes across as a shitty episode of Black Mirror.
Yes, it does attempt to deliver a commentary. On what? I am not sure. What should have been a damning condemnation of the culture of Silicon Valley and the "tech" industry in general turns into a poorly plotted predictable piece of shit that is only interesting due to the casting of actors, and has the depressing distinction of being Bill Paxton's final role before he passed as a man slowly dying of Multiple Sclerosis whose plight might or might not be played for laughs I can't tell.
On that note, let's start this with a breakdown of the eight or so characters that actually have names or motivations, and maybe more than one or two dimensions: Emma Watson is Mae, a naive white trash simpleton protagonist that basically goes whole hog into the creation of a surveillance state.
Her parents are played by Bill Paxton and Glenne Headly, who I finally realize I saw on a bunch of episodes of ER now that the full series is streaming on Hulu (seriously go watch ER instead of reading this or watching the movie). Mae's father is slowly withering away from Multiple Sclerosis although from Bill Paxton's performance I wasn't sure if he wasn't just a drunk, but in his defense there's nothing wrong going out as lit as you want when your body is killing itself from an incurable disease. He pees his pants at one point and I'm not sure what the emotions in the scene are supposed to be. Karen Gillan is Annie, Mae's inexplicably Scottish childhood friend despite Emma Watson's character never having left Northern California, she works for the titular company The Circle and gets Mae a job, which is basically a stupid version of Facebook if it also was able to invent magical Star Trek technology. Tom Hanks is evil(er) Steve Jobs and Patton Oswalt is evil Steve Wozniak respectively, the CEO and COO of The Circle which totally "doesn't" want to "control" the "earth".
Rounding out this murder's row of shitty characters is:
The incredibly frustrating Ty, played by John Boyega, that should have been written differently for the movie to have been somewhat interesting.
And an unconventional looking actor (read: pretty ugly but without charisma) that I learned was played by the Boy from Boyhood, in his unfortunate mainstream Hollywood debut, as Mae's technophobic childhood friend and possibly exboyfriend? It's hard to tell.
I cannot and will not give a complete synopsis of this piece of shit since I do not have the attention span, but basically Mae starts off the movie a a poor person. Working an unfulfilling job as a temp in a customer service position in a bunch of cubicles with the water company, calling elderly people and badgering them for transcribing the numbers on the check they mailed, Annie pulls some strings to help her move on up to become: a Customer Experience team member working with complaints by the lower level of The Circle (aka Stupid Facebook)'s vendors.
The headquarters of The Circle/Stupid Facebook are clearly modeled after Apple's The Mothership: a monolithic construct that offers its mindless drone employees every service amenity they desire; ranging from a gym, daycare, lap pool, social pool, organic farm, clinic, french bocci ball course, helipad, tetherball, trampoline, doga (dog yoga, for you squares) and every other trendy thing millennials could want as they mimic the 90's tech bubble before it identically bursts soon and we're left eating people, hopefully starting with the rich. Mae immediately becomes a customer service drone worker obsessed with her feedback rating, since it's clearly implied it always needs to be 100, to the point her manager encourages followup messages to anyone that rates their experience below 100.
But THEN there's a mandatory meeting with Tom Hanks, in his limited screen time as basically every technology company asshole leader that is secretly(actually) a supervillain obsessed with world domination who introduces a magical fucking piece of technology that is a camera with seemingly infinite resolution and unlimited battery life the size of a pinball that can stick to any material. And now this "amazing" concept called SeeChange can impact every aspect of life but it's ok since we're claiming we can target "despots" and "hostile regimes" in addition to self-policing our fellow citizens.
Then Beck shows up in a private concert and I'm not sure if Beck knew what he was doing. He is a scientologist after all so his motivations are suspect.
See how we're starting to see this is Dumb Black Mirror?
Here we reach the worst part of the movie since it's also the part where there COULD have been the best chance for a multilayered plot happen, but that would have involved well-written characters. Mae doesn't care for the huge dumb concert Tom Hanks arranges to pacify his idiot herd of employees, and she wanders off to the fringes and runs into John Boyega, this mysterious employee that is hanging around the fringes and he has a secret (THE SECRET IS HE IS THE CREATOR OF THE TECHNOLOGY THAT LED TO THE CIRCLE BEING SO UBIQUITOUS, SOMEHOW), and he is acting as a lowly employee that dislikes where the company is heading.
Now, in a GOOD movie, John Boyega would be a company plant, an insert that hangs around on the fringes to draw out loners and iconoclasts, and backstabs them when the individualist thinkers find out the heinous shit the company is doing (He isn't, he's integral to the finale and it's all about exposing the executives).
Instead he's 100% onboard with taking everything down, he just needs more people and luckily Mae is somehow the first person he will share it with even though she's already mostly indoctrinated, and also more shockingly: no one knows what this Ty person looks like.
In the 2010s.
After he singlehandedly created 'TrueYou'.
An identity protection software that somehow ties every aspect of your online life to your personal identity and credit card, and maybe social security number? Surprise they don't go into it that much even though it's kind of a big deal. Maybe The Circle already bought a bunch of senators more than those they buy over the course of this stupid movie. Sure no one knows what this man looks like. Fine.
Her dad has problems with his MS (now covered for better or worse under this companies health plan) and she decides to go kayaking. Not just kayaking, night kayaking. Breaking into her normal kayak rental place, and taking a kayak out to the San Francisco bay like she has multiple times during the say before, but now this time she gets hit by the waves generated by a cargo ship. Mae somehow is about to drown, despite being able to grab onto her kayak and if alone would eventually paddle into shore, a fascist helicopter shows up and surprise surprise The Circle cameras on a fucking buoy saw her paddling the school canoe and they called emergency services on her.
Instead of getting fired Mae gets promoted by Tom Hanks and she starts being the first person to catalogue every waking and even sleeping moment of her daily life, except 3 minutes for bathroom time, to show how awesome it is for a menial worker to be connected to the internet streaming her life at all times wearing a star trek high definition camera, with the ability for the internet to comment.
Almost immediately she accidentally spies on her parents fucking, since a deal was for The Circle insurance they have to have cameras put in their house, her mom using a Swedish-made penis enlarger to get her dad hard enough for sex due to his MS. It's still streamed on the internet. Ironically the one positive I have for this movie is a nice moment where adults managing to live with a terminal disease still find intimate sexual happiness exists, but for the movie it's clearly for laughs, although at least her parents cut her out of their lives later since they desire PRIVACY.
Even so, Mae still goes all in on being a company shill. Annie has a nervous breakdown since she's jealous of Mae being the surveillance star of the company and is kind of a huge bitch since she's really just jealous of her friend's success that she herself brought into fold, Annie was always high strung but all it took was a small push apparently (maybe her job avoiding government regulations also had a toll, we'll never know since this screenplay is complete trash).
All that leads to two things. Automatic and compulsory voting by making everyone having a The Circle(Stupid Facebook) profile, which is alarming since compulsory voting not controlled by private companies already exists in more developed countries like New Zealand, and the nightmare that is SoulSearch. SoulSearch (SS btw) is The Circle(Stupid Facebook)'s version of that AWFUL CBS Jeremy Piven show about "real-time crowd-sourced crime-fighting". Mae debuts this universal surveillance beyond-1984 software by having users, who are apparently always looking at their phones, catch a fugitive that killed her kids and skipped probation after prison.
SoulSearch uses input from all The Circle users to identify anyone, it takes like 15 minutes and the fugitive is immediately arrested (in the UK) and the crowd wants another so they demand to search for Mae's friend, the ugly friendzone one Mercer, that she accidentally got labeled a 'deer killer' when in an effort to be social with her stupid company Mae shared a picture of a kitschy antler chandelier in her parents house her friend made.
Things only go more downhill.
For starters: I am a conservationist and animal rights activist but collecting antlers/shooting deer for their antlers and meat is completely acceptable. Deer populations are far beyond sustainable levels because we have exterminated the natural predators, I don't know the overlap of conservationists with hunters but with venison it doesn't really matter that much.
Instead a bunch of dipshit vigilantes with smartphones immediately find his truck and cabin as he tries to live off the grid, then he runs out of the cabin and drives off, all on livestream, until a drone flies at his truck and he swerves off the bridge he's conveniently on, and plummets to his doom and you don't even get to see the truck drive off the bridge. Mae shuts herself out from the world (possibly for only 3 days judging from dialogue) and in that time Tom Hanks decides to implement an idea for The Circle car software that will prevent "disturbed males" from doing things like driving off bridges.
There are so many ways this dumb shit could have ended, instead John Boyega runs up and gives Mae all of the bad emails between Tom Hanks and Patton, and she puts it on the internet which somehow solves things.
Not the real problem of that exact same corporation having a sitting senator removed from power and replaced by their puppet.
Not the idea of them having surveillance cameras literally everywhere in the world and considering privacy a lie.
Not the concept of people needing to consent to universal surveillance as contingent on employment or healthcare.
The guys that made this tried something and not only failed at it, but now the tech dipshits can use this as defensive ammunition.
Stupid Black Mirror, if you have friends that liked this I suggest exposing them to more influential, upsetting things that cause real cognitive thought. Like Black Mirror. Show it to your parents if they don't like it you should probably kill them.
Has much of anything gone right this past year? Yes, I graduated from college magna cum laude, but with no idea of what to do next except for apply to work at the beer factory or trader joes as the natural world ecologically collapses faster than I can apply to graduate school, and I got engaged to the woman I love more than anything else in the world even though she barely tolerates my bizarre inane tangents into weird shit. But is there much good left in the world? For example:
Elephants might go extinct even though their psychological reactions to humans have been measured where they think we're cute like a person looking at a puppy.
AND:
It's not legal to saw the heads off republicans with razor wire as they sputter and struggle as their blood spurts onto the white tile and you press your knee into the small of their back to get better leverage as you finally finish cutting the spinal cord and their consciousness fizzles out like a shitty tv signal losing reception and all that you're left with is the infinite eternal blackness of nothing and the end of all things.
I write this in a weird paradoxical situation. I started this stupid blog to dissect and complain about hilariously awful shitass movies, and deliver social commentary on stuff. To be honest, I haven't seen that many movies recently, particularly ones i can go in depth to complain about (aside from Lifetime movies but those are a fun activity between me and Acacia and there's not much to talk about unless you're also watching Stalked By My Doctor starring Eric Roberts). I also am kind of fatigued. I turned 30 this year, and while I don't feel that much different overall, these last few years I've started to look at things more critically. I look at what I've typed and I ask myself "does this really need to be said?".
There's a lot of dumb, stupid, hateful, contrarian, divisive shit in the world. People that superficially bitch about how awful the internet has become recently haven't been paying attention and probably shouldn't use the internet in general, but it's not entirely their fault since people with less tact and shame than me have effectively ruined the potential for communication over the internet by exploiting the horrendously shitty and blind ethics policies of the stupid companies that ironically allowed us to connect over the internet.
Facebook, YouTube, ESPECIALLY Twitter, and countless other nameless millennial hangout spots turned into awful primordial pools of edgelord shithead activity by treating every stupid thing some retard says as equal to say, Nelson Mandela's final thoughts. Bee Movie But Every Time They Say Bee It Speeds Up is exactly the same as the current non-nazi Pope delivering a heartfelt speech remarkably similar to agnostic Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot about how we must be more kind to each other, on the only place we can actually call home. I do not hate Bee Movie memes, they're very funny, but for every Bee Movie you have 1000 Pepe shitlords thinking "ironic" fascism is funny.
My stupidass shut-in antisocial fuckup younger brother thinks Pepe is funny since he only communicates with canadian gamers over the internet for his social life and cannot comprehend how ruined Pepe is forever, and he didn't even know the 'Feels Good, Man' meme existed since he's an idiot and probably doesn't see the sun for days at a time. He's not a republican or a nazi since I haven't legit murdered him IRL, he's just tone deaf and incredibly short sighted.
On that note I think the main point of this is an apology for not being very funny this year, and my take on Wolfenstein 2 which I am about 60%ish done with.
I know only like 2-3 people actually read what I write, and it's more a method of purging myself of my psychological problems, but I still feel responsible for delivering an opinion that while overlooked doesn't come from a kneejerk reactionary space and represents my deeper, heartfelt thoughts about things. Yes it's very profane, poorly edited and misguided but it's me, goddamnit; I might not matter in the grand scale of things but in the downtimes I can find to compose myself enough to write this much, it should have some sort of point.
Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is a strangely topical take on an alternate reality where the Axis exploited ancient Jewish mysticism and near-magical technology to conquer the world, and it's somehow not as bad as the world we live in. If anything there's more hope in Wolfenstein 2 since there's the chance that Billy Blazkowicz might be able to actually kill an elderly Hitler and drive a sharpened fire hatchet handle through his skull, and there's certainly nothing like that creeping through Mike Pence's house since the only insidious figure there is his incredibly repressed gay thoughts
I am a short man, barely fit enough to not be called obese, and predisposed to an eventual death by cancer since I lived through it once before, and Billy is clearly a physical avatar designed for me to occupy. His allies are extensions of my thoughts, too. Grace is the fantastic strong black woman that becomes the leader of a rudderless resistance movement group, and she's as obscene as a Tarantino character and clearly modeled after Angela Davis. Horton, the former pacifist catholic priest that shouts bible verses at Nazis about how shit they are as his soldiers gun them down in the streets, is clearly a statement on the problems of passivity in the face of true evil. Horton and Billy get into a fight about how the former was protesting the draft as an extension of a protest against all imperial war machines, while the latter was waging a sadly pointless war against an unbeatable force that inexorably would sweep over his beloved nation and pervert it into its worst thoughts and practices.
Wolfenstein 2 has a haunting and heartbreaking interlude, too. After Billy plants a nuclear warhead inside the secret Nazi base underneath Roswell and badassedly detonates it while driving away on a Nazi motorcyle, he goes back to visit his family farm in Mesquite, Texas, and has flashback to his childhood. In those flashbacks is one of the saddest character interactions I have ever seen, where young Billy meets, and after overcoming his piece-of-shit-asshole-eventual-Nazi-collaborator father's teachings, makes friends with a nice black girl coincidentally named Billie who is the daughter of neighboring sharecroppers in rural Texas.
The two of you become friends, and she teaches you the value of life itself: Billy calls her in to watch a rat that fell into a water-filled milk bucket in the barn and is slowly drowning as it squeaks in a panicked, pointless, helplessness. She tells Billy to save it, and he replies "it's just a rat" as the dying animal cries out in terror of its impending death. Again she urges Billy to get the rat out of the bucket, as it clearly is doomed without outside intervention, but Billy remains stationary, watching the rodent fruitlessly scrabble against the sheer metal walls of the bucket.
An eternity passes, over the course of seconds, and the rat succumbs to exhaustion and begins to sink below the water to meet its nightmarish doom, and Billy is finally overcome with sympathy and kicks the bucket to the ground, spilling its contents.
But it is too late, the lifeless form of the rat spills out, motionless on the soaked dirt floor and she flees from the barn, sobbing over the awful events that have taken place. Billy tries to call Billie back, to no effect, but suddenly the rat coughs, and takes a labored breath, then another, and it laboriously rights itself and runs off to live another day. Billy and Billie rejoice over this resurrection and bond over the miracle, and that's the last you ever see of her. The life of a rat is important and symbolic as a message of hope, since the next interaction is with your piece of shit collaborator dad that shipped your mom off to a concentration camp since he's always been an evil coward and you get to cut off his arm and enjoy the sight of him dying.
There's more to the game but that's the most important part and I really hope some altright gamers were triggered by the nonstop nazi murder, and you should probably report anyone you know like that to me since I'm not saying I'll BJ Blazkowicz murder them but since there's not much to live for it's fun to think up assassinations from my favorite James McEvoy film, Wanted, in a totally satirical fashion.
Carlos let me back into his house this weekend so I could play with his big pussy again. After he got mad at me for too much heavy petting, Carlos and I watched Willow for the first time in 15 years for some reason (which was fun and enjoyable and infinitely better than the last movie I tried to write an entry on (Assassin's Creed)). Once the movie finished things took a turn for the usual and he showed me his (C)1976 Starship Troopers board game again, which I had forgotten he had.
He'd never played it, as no one should, since like many SF board games it was clearly written by and for autists with approx 4-5 hours needing to be spent just on learning the goddamn rules for starting the game. This is pre-ironic Starship Troopers, btw, so imagine a time back before Paul Verhoeven was able to make it a palatable satire of fascism. Centimeter-sized cardboard hexagons with confusing numbers on them, yellowed sheets of paper for the players (no one) to jot down the strength of their Terran or Arachnid armies, a multi-piece gameboard with hexes that looked more like a shitty beehive, the works. I read through the rulebook and called him over since I discovered someone had started to underline things so his copy was no longer 'mint', and sadly discovered that the highlighting of what you would think are important rules wound up filling almost the entirety of the first 5-6 rules pages, pages that cover simply how the fuck you're supposed to go about performing a turn in that game.
You know when you get a used textbook and the previous owner tried to highlight the useful passages, and like Reese in Malcolm in the Middle ended up just underlining every sentence on every page? Like that.
We also discovered that whatever poor soul used to own this thing had written notes in the campaign sections of the book. Copious notes in the first few missions, noting which side received which units, then lesser marks as the missions grew in number and complexity. The last few scenarios had zero notes. Either this poor bastard had run out of friends willing to try to crack the enigma of a terrible game and discarded it out of frustration, or they made a blood pact to rid their lives of this waste of resources collectively. I refuse to consider something even more sad happening, this wasn't some estate sale of a dead relative since it's barely used for good reason. No love is attached to this game.
At this point, I specifically began to make fun of the extremely amateurish depictions of Robert Heinlein's power armor (or as the rulebook refers to him "the dean of science fiction writers". The old crusty dean, IMO, worth far less than the institution gifts him. Prove me wrong, I've read everything from The Roads Must Roll to Friday. Stranger in a Strange Land fucking sucks nowadays. Fuck you.). I get that initially the concepts and imagery of science fiction were difficult to convey and depict, but it was 1976. Kubrick had ultimately proven 8 years earlier that science fiction was art, goddamn imagineers under Disney's whip had already churned out countless memorable and imitable futurist designs of civilization we'd never reach. By 1976 you shouldn't professionally have things that look like some 7th grader's notebook doodles where your supposed immensely powerful Mobile Infantry are clothed in what looks like the Michelin Man's ghetto cousin. Where the fuck are servomotors supposed to be located in a shitty segmented anthropogized marshmallow holding what looks like a cardboard cutout of a 1st grader's idea of a gun?
ALL this culminates in my main point of the night, where Carlos told me that he had all 5 Halo games for his xBone, and asked if I wanted to play with him. And I did. I played with him good, to the point he had to go change his laundry, and left me alone to play with myself. And now we all have to hear about it. I'm going to start this chapter with a story.
*I have a personal note here I excised because it's sappy and not hilarious, but it's merely a complaint about my own health circa 2002 and is meaningless to how much this story winds up sucking.*
There are multiple books written of the Halo universe, which I owned, hardcover, (most of which are not bad) that delve into the backstory that Bungie kind of tried to insert into their games, half-assedly, kind of, mainly relying on dumbass nerds. There's even a spinoff called Halo: Reach(don't play it). Bungee kind of tried to half ass their way into making the definitive shooter videogame of this generation, and they did, and it's all their fault. Redpills, gamergates, all the toxic shit that spills out of /pol/, it's all on them, since it's doubtless a single piece of shit hasn't ever played a Bungee game.
We played through the first 4 Halo games, some were remastered (Halo CE stunk, Halo 2 was good to the point of possibly being extraneous) Halo 3 was not remastered and more entertaining because of being able to play with the Arbiter and the nostalgia but more for the fun of melee attacking grunts with that bladed Brute weapon (brutes suck and are terrible). Carlos then had me play the beginning of Halo 4 and it... well first off made no sense since how the fuck is the opening level supposed to start with the quasi-interesting possibility of a stranger trapped in a strange land but then devolves into the Master Chief fighting the same enemies once again, except this time some of them are enemies with teleport powers.
Then he had to go get his clothes out of the dryer, and I started Halo 5. Halo 5 sucks. I've only played the first level and it's trash. The opening cutscene is sub Avengers 2 level, daring anyone to continue watching an invincible army of armored Hitlers effortlessly eliminate a confusing army.
What's WORSE is what happens after the cutscene. Carlos almost tricked me to starting the game at the last level and it's only slightly less confusing.
COMPLAINTS: Halo plots 2, 3, 4, & 5. Only the first Halo is not met with any significant criticism regarding its storyline. The continued Halo story is proof of stupid fuck morons with less pigment than talent having a distressing amount of influence on nothing of consequence mattering. Every Halo story after the first obe makes little to no sense, and the endings are so emotionally unsatisfying it's like Lost: the bideo gaem. They create mystery, and actually accidentally invent a cool culture behind the Covenant, and then do NOTHING with it. And somehow, Halo 5 is at the bottom of the garbage bag and is soaked in gross-ass stinky water that condensed out of the other turds you dumped in there and forgot to take out for multiple trash days. And you know the biggest problem? The Halo series could have gone somewhere, and been actually good.
Instead they castrated themselves by insisting on focusing solely on the extremely short timeframe of the Master Chief as he travels between Sci-Fi adventures of murdering hundreds of thousands of aliens with their own weapons. My biggest problem is that they for some reason use the likenesses of the fucking voice actors as the characters. Do you know what's interesting about animation? That I can recognize a voice coming out of a character that is in no way a copy of someone . There's no fucking point for Nathan Fillion or Luke Cage to actually BE Spartans, particularly since they shouldn't ever have their stupidass helmets off, anyway. The point we've reached in culture where we're required to have our voice actors mocap themselves so people can recognize them is depressing and stupid. Halo 5 is only a few years after the Master Chief defeated the greatest threat the universe has ever known and he & Cortana sacrificed themselves, doomed to live on a derelict ass-half of a spaceship for hypersleep eternity.
If you wanted to make a GOOD Halo you'd have fucking restarted the series hundreds of years after the end of 3. A trilogy ends for a reason, it's supposed to give us some sense of closure and finality, and instead Master Chief resets to shoot new villains rather than new protagonists that might actually be antagonists fulfill the actual point of the Spartan project, which was ensuring the iron fist of the interstellar fascist dicatatorship. THEN they accidentally come across the prehistoric Master Chief, and everyone realizes what they're created for shouldn't be what they wind up accomplishing, and it turns out the new AI based off Dr Halsey is actually the bad guy.
Instead all we get is a shitty interactive movie where the Spartans are so ridiculously huge they look like Gods of Egypt characters. Seriously, the new Spartans are so inhuman they don't look like augumented homo sapiens, but a completely alien species which is ironic since the new Spartans are already adults when they enter the program. Fuck you. Carlos swipe right.
The fleeb contains all of the fleeb juice. Fuck donald trump.
Phineas Q. Fucklesnake’s good-time all-natural guide
to participating in a corrupted fetishized obligation to elect the next round
of oppressors to represent us
Newsflash,
for people that have apparently never
observed anything ever, the American political process is kind of shitty
flaming garbage. It’s almost like we’re a society that for decades has with
reckless unchecked abandon run roughshod over the lower classes of the world.
Latched vampire-like to the available resources of the planet, endlessly
consuming and devouring with no thought of reason or purpose. A singleminded
motivation to spread and dominate and consume, like a phage rapidly
outstripping the productive capacity of the cell that it has infected and will
soon cause to lyse open, a gushing spew of cytoplasmic fluid and endless copies
of the virus washing over its neighbors.
I’ve been watching The Matrix too much. But my point
still stands. There’s so much goddamn whining and complaining and shock about
how we’ve got where we are like it was a mistake and not the direct result of
the climate created by our political process for DECADES. And yes, while both
main parties are at fault and are two sides of the corporatists imperialist
coin, ONE SIDE in particular is several orders of magnitude louder, shittier,
and more poisonous to the overall health of the planet and potentially
universe.
Yes, republicans. This is a scientific fact but since they hate all science
that is not ballistic or explosive I won’t delve into it because I don’t want
to wear out my keyboard.
And so, we are led to this point in our lives; where
we have to find the goddamn time on a fucking Tuesday of all days to make our
way over to the stupid polling place that always, ALWAYS smells like farts and
stale French fries, and cast a ballot on offices and propositions that it is
our civic duty to give an opinion on, including the SEVENTEEN propositions of
which there are TWO about plastic bags for some goddamn reason. I’m going to split
this vivisection into two parts, people and non-people. There’s joke that Trump
should go into the non-people section and yes ha ha you’re right that would get
confusing and needing to type his name too much will make me want to p;unch my
computer so I’m not going to do that.
First up, and most interesting and important, are thepropositions.
Haha I tricked you into reading this part first. Some of these I care a whole
lot about, some I don’t but I’ll still give a reasoning behind supporting them
or opposing them or suggesting you throw a bag of snakes into your polling
place and leave.
51:Some dumbass measure where we magically create
money for schools so kids can learn to read good and do other stuff good too
I
initially was highly supportive while reading this particular measure, because
instead of shoveling gargantuan amounts of money into Americas military furnace
to burn, why not shovel it into our educational furnace to burn instead since
at least that’s likely to kill slightly less people? HOWEVER: 51 is a
reacharound from the legislature that Governor Moonbeam already shot down. And his
reasoning is solid, the state legislature needs have a better proposal for how
to fix our crumbling school infrastructure (as well as make sure it goes to the
neediest, brownest most impoverished schools instead of a fucking charter or
lily-white expensive ZIP code). Fuck white people. NO
52: Amendment that defrauds the federal government and
funds Medi-cal and also benefits hospitals
Here’s another bizarre world experience,
when you started seeing those goddamn political commercials in SEPTEMBER I was
all “oh fuck no I’m not signing off on these faux-caring hospital shits that
just want me to line their health insurance pockets.” Instead it turns out this
is a continuation of a genius measure that the state has been doing for a while
now. It’s complicated but basically the state gets matching funds from the federal
government for its Medi-cal program, and the money is effectively laundered
through hospitals that then pay it back to the state. It steals money from the
federal government and goes to service the neediest and most vulnerable among
us. Fuck the federal government, less money to give to Lockeed executives for lap jobs.
YES
53:Direct democracy at its finest, making sure everything goes as wrong as possible.
Ok so funnily enough, most bond measures don't exceed more than $2 billion, except ironically enough the one above us right now and that goddamn train that we voted on 8 years ago and has left us with a noticeable dearth of trains. However, we voted on that, and on this, oh would you look at a trend? It's almost like we ALREADY vote on the really large huge initiatives and this is a measure supported by those Howard Jarvis anti-government cocksuckers who endeavor to make sure the government does as little as possible that doesn't involve making sure they contribute as little to society as possible.
If this statue passes it's highly likely any bond project over 2 billion dollars would get broken up and passed as multiple smaller bonds, and inevitably lead to cost overlaps and then look you fucking idiots you wound up spending more money than before.
NO.
54:Obstructionist measures designed to continue the climate of gridlock and impotence down to the state level
Fun fact: it's already possible to view bills the legislature plans on voting on ahead of time on the internet, and the legislature also is recorded and it's the most boring, soul crushing possible thing you could watch this side of Fuller House. This is again a measure by as certain group of people that frame the measure as a common sense, more transparent way of governance when in reality it's specifically designed to prevent legislation from being passed. 3 days is a long time, and this prevents even a typo from being fixed without resetting the clock. It's like Pacific Rim, but instead of it being fun and exciting and no one going to see it, no one is going to see it and that's it.
NO
55:Fuck rich people.
The most insulting part of this was learning that the state income tax rate is the same for individual incomes ranging from $60,000 to $250,000. That's a really huge goddamn spread and there's a gigantic difference between those ends of the spectrum. Q_Q rich people oh no you can't afford everything all at once. Eat shit or kill yourself and let the state get your assets.
YES
56: Are you smokin' yet?
Simple. I support this because it will finally start taxing e-cigarettes, and I hate vaping more than actual smoking. That's not water vapor you're exhaling you caterpillar from alice in wonderland-looking fuck, stop blowing it in my face on sidewalks.
YES
57:Law & Order: Stabler's nightmare.
This makes sense. Making parole for nonviolent offenders and leaving it to a juvenile court judge on whether or not to charge a minor as an adult rather than the prosecution. I'm aware that not all of these people made mistakes and are sorry for their actions and are rehabilitated (like that fuck that stole my bike), but whatever. It's better to extend a hand in friendship than punch them in the face since you might cut your hand and then it gets infected and since obamacare will get repealed you'll die of a preventable disease.
YES
58: So many groups to marginalize, so little time.
So back in the 90's we were hell-bent on hating people different than us and decided "fuck those wetbacks, I don't want them mixing with my pure white children" and passed prop 222 (or something) that basically segregated schools based on language so the spanish-speaking children trying to learn were separated from their english-fluent counterparts, and we ALL know that the best way to learn a language is not to be immersed in it but to be isolated and alienated from the culture that speaks it. Duh. Except it was a huge mistake.
This makes sure we don't go back to that, and is much less hateful than the alternative.
YES
59:Do you oppose the Supreme Court's decision on Citizen's United and support it being overturned?
If you answer no to that question, you're an asshole and/or/and the ghost of Antonin Scalia, i am so happy that man is dead.
YES
60: A specific charity run amok, effecting the way we watch people fuck
Rates of STD transmission are greatly lower among the adult film industry than the general population, for starters. Yes, there is a lot to talk about regarding sex work, but guess what retard overregulation shit like this and measure B that makes liberals look bad isn't the way to start. Also the AIDS Healthcare Foundation is the Komen Foundation of the STD world and does more harm than good and is run by an insane man that is also opposed to Measure M because he hates trains and buses.
NO
61:If you think you should vote no on this you've been bamboozled by the manufacturers of your prescription for Bamboozlen(R). Brought to you by human target Martin Shkreli.
The only, ONLY way this would raise prescription drug prices is if the pharmaceutical industry decides to raise drug prices on the VA since this would force the state to only accept the rate paid by the Department of Veterans Affairs. 1/5th of all spending in California has been on the no campaign for this because the pharmaceutical industry is terrified of states growing a pair and not wanting to be bled like a stuck pig, and every single pharmaceutical executive would better serve the world by being liquidated and converted into soylent green and distributed to the hungry.
YES.
62: Are you a bad enough hombre to fix a broken flawed puntitively useless system of state murder?
The death penalty doesn't work. It doesn't prevent crime, it makes the state a sanctioned murderer to end a human life, as wretched and useless as that life is. By signing off on that authority we are no better than killers.
There's the ethical argument to it. The pragmatic argument to it is the last man we executed was Tookie Williams, a convicted murderer who used his position inside prison to advocate against the gang lifestyle he himself created and dedicated the rest of his life to make sure no one ever wound up where he was. WHOOPS. Also it costs a shitload of money and the prison guard union loves the death penalty since it means you can sit on your ass watching a computer screen and draw triple overtime or whatever.
It doesn't work. If you want a death penalty, then make sure The Punisher can walk free. Since only in the fantasy world of comic books does moral absolutes, black and whites exist.
Oh also innocent people have been executed before. Watch the Trial By Fire Frontline episode and fucking dare to disagree with me.
YES.
63: Guns, guns, guns.
Gun fever is still too hot a topic to debate. No matter how many kindergarteners are gunned down it will always be too hot to debate, because we are a broken murderous society obsessed with elevating the individual above all else.
However, shooting a gun is also really, really cool, and fun. Unfortunately since a certain black president took office, insane people have decided he's apparently the second coming of the British government and is hellbent on taking away all of our guns and replacing them with pots and pans and sending them to Kenya for his marxist brotherhood radical islamist terrorist transgender brothers. This initiative basically does two things: it makes California legal guns look even more hilariously stupid and cute with their tiny nonremovable magazines that you have to reload round by round like Tom Hanks on the beaches of Normandy, and when you buy ammunition the seller has to google your name and if it comes up with "terrorist" you're not allowed to buy ammunition. If it doesn't you can buy ammunition like normal. (Note: for some reason if you're white it always says "not terrorist", we don't know why).
If anything, maybe the prices of goddamn .22 ammunition will finally go down since the insane hoarders won't want the government tracking them and they'll stop buying ALL of it, and I can finally go target shooting with my nice wood frame ruger .22 rifle that I've wanted to use for forever and won't have to worry about my student loan payments while doing it.
YES.
64:Smoke weed every day when it is responsible and appropriate to do so only for those over 21 and probably closer to 30 and if you can afford it.
No war but class war. End the drug war. Let me learn how to grow plants in my yard and experiment with genetics.
I don't even do weed because it fucks with my head and I get really depressed and paranoid since I have serious psychological problems, but there is no reason to continue this ridiculous prohibition on jazz cigarettes especially since it's so easy to kill yourself with the current legal drugs.
Also I like hemp and we can replace the almond industry with hemp here and start churning out biobutanol fuels for cars which has the same combustive power as gasoline but can grow in shit soil and not steal food from the hungry.
YES
65:Why are we voting on plastic fucking bags?
In theory i would support this. However since the plastic bag industry wrote this specifically to invalidate the 67 ban on single use plastic bags it requires a strategic vote of no. Also it'll probably pass anyway it just needs less votes.
NO
66:Kill 'em all, let God sort them out.
The anti-62. Speeds up the death penalty process by forcing court-appointed attorneys to take death penalty cases even if they aren't trained for it, exempts prisons from existing regulations regarding how and where you obtain your lethal injection drugs (mainly since no one makes the drugs designed specifically for murdering humans anymore). Oh gee can you see the cruel & unusual punishment problems with this amendment?
If you really want the death penalty, then YOU go kill them. Go to the prison, request a meeting, and kill them if you care so much.
NO.
67:The Better Bag Measure
Bans single-use plastic bags statewide. Guess what libertarians, LA banned plastic bags and nowthe California tumbleweed went extinct. No longer is the lone Ralphs plastic bag floating in the wind across the highway, being filmed by some asshole with a camera and a nazi dad.If 65 gets more votes it invalidates 67, which is why you have to vote strategicallyhere. Trust me, please, as someone in preparation to become a conservation biologist, this matters more.
YES
PEOPLE
President: Marry, fuck kill.
There are only three options. Johnson doesn't count since the mentally handicapped cannot consent. There is only one right answer and it's because Jill Stein really pulls off that librarian haircut, although you have to have her CD on while you do it that's no problem since you can tune it out.
If you know anyone voting for trump, you should probably kill them, then vote however you want. Unless it's for trump, in which case kill all of them then yourself.
US State Senate: Literally the worst debate I have ever watched.
I commented on this before but I wondered why there was such a huge police presence at my school that didn't involve a protest around non-white lives. Turns out Harris and Sanchez were there to debate in the auditorium I took genetics in. Both candidates are fine, per se, and if this was Feinstein retiring I wouldn't care. But since we're losing Boxer in the senate, and I observed both of these ladies' public speaking abilities, I have to give it to Kamala Harris tobe able to listen to for more than 2 minutes.
That debate was fucking awful. Harris was dying of thirst and refused to drink water before she spoke, and Sanchez was a bizarre shotgun of speech patterns and ideas.
HARRIS, just because.
US House of Representatives
In the 27th district, again Judy Chu since Orswell is a turdand every 2 years insists on running and making South Pasadena look like it's relevant.
CHU
IN Chelsea's 32nd District: It looks like you're the victim of our hilarious 2 past the post primary system. Napolitano looks like a solid representative, and is apparently concerned about important issues like women's reproductive rights as well as the environment. You could do a lot worse, and frankly her challenger Hernandez is cut from effectively the same cloth. Flip a coin or vote based on your personal preference it's one of the easiest choices to make this year.
EITHER
State Senator 25th District:
This is for some reason a really visible election between the incumbent Anthonty Portantino who is an old man that is not really shitty garbage, and county supervisor Mike Antonovich who I disagree with on many political points as well as the way his campaign has been hounding me. I'm a registered no party preference and these assholes assume it means im a republican that is unwilling to admit it. Stop calling me on my cell phone Antonovich, I said no.
PORTANTINO
Judges don't matter this time since there aren't any insane people running (with 1 exception). I don't even care that much, I mostly looked at personal history and endorsements.
11 Archuleta
42 Molina
84 Townsend
158 Berger (this one matters since the weird crypto-fascist american independent mailers i've been getting endorse Nguyen. I don't know why)
State Assembly: I'm Holden my cards
for my 41st district Holden hasn't betrayed me yet by being shitty.
In Chelsea's district 48it's an open race for the seat occupied by Hernandez who's running against your congresswoman. Rubio is a better choice than Ellenson since she didn't publish a letter describing how much she isn't a politician, which Ellenson did. It's a very bad year to align yourself with a specific person that prides himself on not being a politician and bringing "fresh ideas" to government which in actuality are all of the old ideas but with a stupid red old man hat on.
RUBIO
Supervisor 5th District: Arguably the most important race in this ballot. CountySupervisor is an insanely influential office. LA county supervisors determine a multitude of things ranging from parcel tax rate to voting rules and are often referred to as "little kings". Hence why it's important to NOT follow in the path of Antonovich with Barger and choose someone that doesn't stress market-oriented solutions to things since guess what the market doesn't functionally have any sense of morality or ethics and prizes profit above all else.
PARK
The end.
Also the end at least for another year and a half of bullshit and i can graduate and start looking for employment and grad school in peace, goddamn.
