works of wanderlust

Category: screens & pages

When I watch or read or play something worth writing about, you may find those writings here.

  • flick: idiocracy

    I jumped on the bandwagon and last night I watched a flick I haven’t seen in almost twenty years: Idocracy.

    And, boy, does that hit differently these days.

    You’ve seen the meme shitposting, no doubt. “Idocracy wasn’t an instruction manual, guys!” At least people are screaming it into the void on my social feeds as kind of the defacto answer to every other news article gurgling out of the fetid swamp of american politics these past couple months.

    I risk devolving into political rants here myself if I’m not careful.

    The crux of the film hinges on the opening sequence where—even before Luke Wilson and an almost unrecognizably vanilla Maya Rudolph (she’s really honed her vibe and her craft so well lately, don’t you agree) are hibernated into the grim and stupid future—two characters named in IMDB as simply “Yuppie Wife” and “Yuppie Husband” stand in for rational america opting to hold off having kids meanwhile the literal trailer-dwelling mouth-breather characters standing in for stupid america are breeding like its a race to the bottom.  There is no subtly or hinting that director Mike Judge sees some kind of devolution of humanity occuring by raw natural selection at work. Selection of the stupid by sheer overwhelming numbers.

    Jerry Springer eat your heart out (while may you rest in peace.)

    Fresh out of a biology undergrad and back when I first watched the flick back in 2006 or so I probably could have explained the genetics a little better, and maybe even argued against the premise using big science words. I wouldn’t be so lame these days. Satire as this was intended is meant to show us extremes… and extremes we are shown. 

    Spoiler: the dough-brained inhabitants of the remnants of twenty-sixth century america are watering their crops with off-brand gatoraid and wondering why there aint nuthin grownin. Plot ensues.

    Back in the twenty-first century real world we’re not quite living in idocracy, but the government seems to be filled with reality television personalities, irrational “i researched it mu-self” antivaxxers are arguing themselves into letting their own kids die of preventable diseases, and the stock market has become little more than a roulette wheel where the chips are crypto coins (that by the way are generally understood by the average person in a way best summed up by my father-in-law who legit asked me if he needed to download Minecraft to get started in bitcoin.)

    Idocracy is not an instruction manual indeed, guys.

    When it came out I laughed this goofball comedy off as ridiculous absurdist science fiction. Gawd, tho, if it didn’t hit like a sledgehammer smacking a warning gong when I watched it last night. Not an instruction manual, but satire-come-documentary of the moronic twenties perhaps.

  • media review: fallout

    Oh wow, I’m about a year late to the party but nothing says desperate for clicks like binge watching the latest streaming show and pumping out a ham-fisted review fifteen minutes later, huh?

    On the other hand, after my third playthrough of Fallout 4, dusting off the Fallout Shelter mini-game, and pondering if I would ever find anyone to play the Fallout TTRPG game I bought and for which I 3d-printed and painted a milkcrate full of minis, I finally settled into the couch to watch the streaming show starring Purnell and Goggins that debuted nearly a year ago now.

    If I still have to mention I am a bit of a Fallout fan here you haven’t been reading very carefully at all.

    And too, I’ll spare you the plot recap.

    There have been no shortage of universe-extending cross-over flicks and series this past decade or more. It used to be that video games were regarded as something of a culturally broke medium when it came to rich storytelling, so much so that I recall multiple times trying to justify playing them for story and citing the narrative complexity of titles like Final Fantasy VII and—um—maybe that was the only one there for a while. I’m sure there were more, but that was my go to. No, video games can tell complex stories and still be interesting as video games.

    Fallout, I do believe, started as a pretty bog standard franchise back in the first couple iterations, but the nuances of a retro-futuristic world of absurd atomic era fancies and frustrations was embraced with vigorous as more and better titles emerged. And some would argue with the release of Fallout 4 the series hit peak style, locking in a vibe and a backstory and a completeness of universe lore that exceeded even the higher bars for acheivement in this award category.

    I love Fallout. I will admit. The groove that it etches in your mind, a tragically optimistic juxtaposition of economic cynicism and techno-optimism. One is thrust into a world where war and corporate greed have been pushed to their very extremes, and where morality is blurred into a green and bloody smear as a result.

    It was with this sensibility locked into my skull that I pressed play on the television series. It had two jobs: mantain the vibe and tell an interesting story.

    A few minutes after I watched the end credits roll on the last episode of season one, I turned on my Playstation and loaded up Fallout 4. Again. The series had the energy of the game and I wanted to revisit the world, to spend a few more minutes poking around that crazy alternate universe. If that’s not a ringing endorsement of both, I don’t know what is.

  • book reviews: may the forth

    (…be with you!)

    It’s Star Wars day and I haven’t done much of anything intergalactic, but I have been doing a lot of reading lately.

    A lot of science fiction, too. So. Almost?

    Worse than my neglect of Star Wars, I checked out a bunch of library books and in such a flurry that a couple have expired before I even got part way through them. I could be here writing a bunch of different reviews if it were not for my distracted self bopping and hopping between titles, I guess.

    That said, the last couple weeks I’ve read:

    Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis

    I don’t know if you’d call Ms Ellis a film maker, reviewer, or an influencer, but it turns out that she’s a helluva author. I’ll be honest, I put this book on my list way back when the algorithm was dropping her video essays into my feed with more frequency and yet my lazy, distractible reading brain took over four years to clamber this clever first-encounter-kinda story to the top of my book stack. But the story sucked me in from the start when I finally started reading it, twisting through the tale of a young woman who finds herself at the centre of an alien government entanglement. It evoked emotions. And it left me adding the sequel to my reading list (though if I’m continuing the trend of being completely honest, it may take me another couple years to finally get around to that one.)

    I Want To Go Home by Gordon Korman

    And speaking of algorithms, whatever secret formula was recommending me digital titles in the Libby app connected to my library account must have pegged me as a middle aged Canadian and realized that I, like a million other Canadian kids who grew up in the 80s, lived on a steady diet of Korman’s goofy stories. I have a whole writer-origin story that revolves around this guy that I’ll happily share in detail to anyone who asks, and so by the way that algorithm might have been onto something. Yeah, this is a kids book and yeah it was a still a little corny like it was when I read it forty years ago, but there is something about the over-the-top silliness of a kid trying to escape sleepaway camp that evoked not only memories of my own childhood reading this same book until the pages were falling out, but the aching familiarity of a youth spent in scouts and church camps I would have fled were I more resourceful. A quick read, but I won’t begrudge the algorithm for taunting me with my lost youth.

    Wool by Hugh Howey

    A different sort of algorithm sucked us into watching the Apple TV adaptation of this decade old collection of linked dystopian science fiction novellas, more plainly called Silo. I had read Wool, the first in the trilogy that is the basis for Silo, waaaaaay back when it first came out and have been telling people to read it ever since. It’s a fantastic story, particularly if you like dark science fiction driven by strongly developed and complex characters. I had told all sorts of people to read it, but sadly I had never read it since. Nor had I read any of the sequels. Having finally caught up with the show, then, I loaded it up and decided to work my way through all three books. I finished Wool this very evening and was reminded of just how much I like this story. I mean, I may let it breath before I jump into book two, but like months. Only months. Not ten years this time, I promise.

  • book reviews: april flowers

    I just posted about my newfound enjoyment of walking and reading and so I figured now may be as good as time as any to start doing some light logging of the books I’ve been reading while out and about.

    Is it any surprise that two of those books are literally books about walking?

    How… um… on point.

    A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

    I’ve never actually read a Bryson book. I think it must be the kind of thing that appeals to middle aged folks who find themselves compelled to read travel stories from their aging counterparts. Or maybe that’s just what I am now and I’m projecting. Whatever. I’ve seen his books all over and had this kind of edging towards curiosity about them, but—well—I had other stuff to read first, y’know. But then the digital library recommended this one and I bit. Bryson has a vibe, I’ll give him that. He’s a storyteller and can turn a months long hike through the wilderness into a compelling dramatic narrative of a frustrating bro relationship. I could feel the pain of the walk, but also the pain of tolerating someone who is glumming on your good time. I got it. I soaked it in. I read the thing in three days. I’m not ready to hike the trail, but I definitely felt like going for a long walk alone afterwards.

    The Witcher: Blood of Elves by Andrzei Sapkowski

    To be completely fair, I’ve been trying to read this book for at least two years. I bought the box set on a boxing day sale in like, I wanna say 2023–but I’m pretty sure it was 2022. I was into the game on my playstation for a while and the lore struck me as wild, so, ka-ching. It’s been sitting on my nightstand with a bookmark one chapter in for all that time, always somewhere about third or fourth in the stack. Always. But it was available to borrow immediately from the public library as an ebook the day I unwrapped the new Kobo from its box and so it was pretty much the first book I loaded onto the device. I mean, sure, paper copy… but I actually read the digital one. That said, it took me until about half way through to really get into it. There was so much damned lore and backstory that I was trying to piece it altogether in my head for a lot of the opening chapters. Somehow it’s written both simply while tying itself in knots. I liked it in the end, but that first bit was a slog to be honest.

    In Praise of Paths by Torbjorn Ekelund

    Ok, so as far as philosophical essays on the joy of travelling through space and time while on foot goes, this is the book they could sell at Ikea and it would fit right in on any of the Kallax or Lack shelves. Yeah. Right. I know. Norway is not Sweden, but the vibe from those Scandanavian countries is all mashed together in my head and sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong place. I like Ikea and I like this book and the ideas is spurred to life in my head. It made me yearn for that last bit of icy snow to melt from the paths around here so that I could get back out on the trails and go for a stupidly long walk. Long walks were on my bucket list for when I took my career break and sometimes while I’ve been out wandering I do feel like I’m wasting time when I should be sitting at a desk writing something or coding something, so getting a swift kick in the reminder that sometimes the walk is the whole point made this a worthwhile read.