Weekly Update 4.27.22

Damn, that's a comprehensive list of suggestions. Thank you!

Hi David! Since you always seem to be asking for new video topics, I'd thought I'd compile a list of cool stuff you might be interested in. I've been meaning to send for a while, but I've been super busy with classes this past month. But now I'm finally getting around to it! As always, don't feel pressured to follow any leads if they don't particularly interest you. I hope you'll find this list helpful and that it'll get the creative brain-juice flowing. And I hope whoever is reading this, you get a kick out of it too! 1. Titan Chaser. - You know that mystical feeling you get when you're alone at night? It's that time of night where everything is completely still, and you feel like you might be the only person awake for miles. A strange mix of a little eerie, but tranquil at the same time. Roald Dahl called it "the witching hour" his book The B.F.G.. I had to read that book for class as a kid. I remember the main girl, Sophie, felt such joy at being able to roll herself in a blanket and walk the quiet Orphanage halls. That sort of feeling has actually only struck me a few times in my life: walking the college dorm hallways that had the floor lighting like a spaceship out of the movie Alien, driving home at 2AM from my dishwashing job in downtown, being up all night on the computer for the first time and watching the sky turn teal as the sun comes up, or when I'd wake up super early as a kid at my Aunt and Uncle's place, and I'd stalk to the kitchen and make as little noise as possible while trying to pour myself a bowl of Rice Krispies cereal. That kind of extremely-specific feeling is kind of hard to communicate. I don't think you can force it either, there are emotional components of it . It's something you have to experience in order to get it. Titan Chaser is a non-violent walking sim by developer Stas Shostak. The town is perched right on the border between the woods and suburbia. And like any town perched on the edge of civilization, large beings beyond the scope of man occasionally walk through the midnight fog. That's where you come in. You're hired by the city to be a Titan Chaser, using your flashlight and municipal manual on cryptids to shoo dragons off the satellite arrays and guide giants away from the powerlines. This is a perfect "night-shift" game. If you ever wanted to experience the joys of being alone at night and doing things on your own schedule, without *actually* having to work a night shift, this is the game for you. I don't way to say too much. is a game that needs to be experienced. Words don't do it justice. I feel I should point out that the developer of this game, Stas Shostak, is Ukrainian. Now this game actually came out in 2021, before the Russo-Ukrainian conflict happened, but needless to say the war has greatly upended his life. Stas has spent most of his time since then doing relief aid and volunteering to help people affected by the conflict. You can read more about this on the game's Steam page, I don't have the space to recap it here. Point is, now is a great time to help out Stas if you want to support his game. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1290170/Titan_Chaser/ 2. Ecofascism - Pyrocynical's video on the TV show, Utopia. - I sat through this video on double-speed instead of watching the actual show. I don't follow Pyrocynical, but this video was new and it popped up in my recommended, so I thought what the heck, I'll give it a shot. The show's antagonists are a cabal of evil billionaires who want to solve overpopulation through involuntary sterilization. They develop an infectious mutation that will cause each subsequent generation to have a lower and lower birthrate, ushering in a slow "Children of Men" situation. They plan on using their money and influence to put this mutagen in every vaccine on earth, and then crop-dust anywhere else they can't get to easily. Ohhhh, so it's Ecofascism, the show. Now I get it! The heroes are going to point out that this is all bullshit based on Mathusian ideas of overpopulation, and that this was debunked plenty of times by now. But uh... no! Nobody in this universe seems to have a response to overpopulation. I mean, yeah the good guys point out that it is NOT cool to sterilize people without their consent, obviously. But they also imply... that maybe the evil billionaires have a point? Like the show goes out of its way more than once to go, "Yeah! These genocidal maniacs running the world really do have a point! What are we gonna do about global warming and overpopulation?" You're telling me at no point did these billionaires pay people to research if their thoughts on overpopulation were true? They really think their best course of action to stop the apocalypse is forced sterilization? Then who's going to be the exploitable underclass that keeps the machine going? Capitalists *need* exploitable labor! Wouldn't reducing the population size be like billionaires shooting themselves in the foot? Why would they do that? I feel like nobody in this world is able to think outside of Capitalism! There's just... so many things to address here that I don't know where to start. Maybe this show's writers just don't understand political ideologies and economics enough outside of half-baked centrism. Maybe this show's politics are too dumb to even talk about. I just felt like it was driving me crazy while watching this, I had to tell somebody. 3. The Batman (2022) - Look, everybody is singing the praises of this movie. But I have yet to see anybody talking about how this film is a camp *Masterpiece.* This is 100% a film that knows it takes itself too seriously. I watched this with my friends at a Drive-In Movie theater, and we were talking the whole time about how over-the-top this movie was. It's like the actors and director were constantly dropping hints that they were aware how ridiculous this situation was, but never broke character to point it out. Spoilers in this paragraph! There were a bunch great little jokes peppered throughout the film - Penguin in ankle-cuffs being forced to waddle, Riddler's vlog to his fans, the copious amounts of Robert Pattinson in dark eye-makeup, totally eating shit after jumping off that building, the silly of-key Ave Maria, the brooding monologues, and the puns, oh god the great puns! It's some of the greatest dry humor in a blockbuster film, and it's there the whole time. I really like that the film can poke fun at it's own self-seriousness, and respects the audience's intelligence enough to hide a lot of subtle details and jokes in the film. And whenever it's not doing that, it's just a genuinely compelling detective mystery with inventive action scenes you've never seen in film before! What a breath of fresh air! Yeah the politics they kinda drop the ball on in the last third, Kay and Skittles did a great video on that. And sadly, the film does end with copaganda saying we gotta, "change the system from within by weeding out the bad apples." Which, yeah, gross. But everything else? Outstanding! I can't praise it enough. Even if you're reading this and you're not a video-maker, you'll leave this movie with something to talk about. I recommend seeing it with people you can laugh with! 4. Smiling Friends - Remember that video about Doki-Doki Literature Club and Meta-Modernism? Smiling Friends is the latest example of that. In the midst of the Doomer phenomenon, Smiling Friends is a weird return to genuine moral values for a generation that has no money, no future, and existential dread. There's already video essays on why the comedy works, or how it was made by two prolific internet animators, or how the show addresses nihilism. But there's something nobody's talking about! And I don't mean that one episode with the Latino/Chicano stereotype, though, yes, that is gross, don't want to gloss over that! But I meant how the show's response to nihilism is focusing your time on helping other people. The show actually follows a format of a children's cartoon, kind of akin to something you'd find on PBS. Some character has a problem, the friends Pim and Charlie try to help out this person, hijinks ensue. Only in this case the problem of the week is a man with a gun to his head after losing his job, kids and wife, or helping a shut-in get back with his ex-girlfriend, or rehabilitating the public image of a violent, drug-fueled celebrity. Why not? It's an Adult Swim show. Eventually the two arrive at a solution, solve the problem, impart a moral and they make the person smile. Musical sting, ding on the smile, end-of-show laugh, upbeat music, roll credits. At first it seems like this is a parody of the "morality tale" format, I mean, it's exactly what you'd expect from a show called "Smiling Friends." I think at this point we're conditioned for these shows to go in a cynical direction. Like the message of the show would say, "Hey, nothing matters, we're ambivalent to this, consequences apply to us and don't matter," you know, the classic sitcom ending. But this answer isn't useful to us as an audience. We can't just go back to our lives and say, "Yeah, nothing matters," because to us things *do* matter! We care about this world and the people inside of it! The people who people who do try to adopt that worldview are either depressed, constantly anxious, edgy above-it-all snobs, or assholes. I was! I think a lot of us were, or still are in some small ways. So, what *do* you do? Well, when you're problems are as big as heartbreak, suicide, or disappointing the people who look up to you, you ask for help. You call a professional. You reach out to a friend. Or both. If you don't have one you can call, that's what these Friends are there for. The problems on the show are insane. The outcomes, absurd. But the people in the show feel real - they don't give up hope. They take things one day at a time, and come back the next day trying to make the world a better place. It's saccharine, maybe even sappy, yes. But right now? That's what we kind of need. I mean, when faced with people who need help - what else do you do? UrickSaladBar has a great video on Smiling Friends, but I highly recommend everyone check it out for themselves first. It's 9 episodes, about ten minutes each, and it's all available online for free. Thank you for reading this far, and I hope this was useful to you - and I mean everyone, including you, the person reading this - and that you'll be able to go out there and embrace the next day. As for me, it's time I get some sleep.

Christopher Roger Simons