On the Gilded Age of Disappointment

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.