Fred and Loathing on The Internet

A thirty minute situational comedy made for broadcast television is the subject we will be talking about. A proverbial TV sitcom. In actuality, twenty-two’ish minutes is the average amount of recorded content for each episode. The other eight’ish minutes are reserved for words from the commercial sponsors. Within those twenty-two minutes of intended content, you should expect a ‘laughable’ quip every few seconds. For most of the TV sitcom’s existence, the laughs are recorded right into the show’s audio, letting you know when a joke just landed. If you find yourself watching a scene with more than thirty seconds between expected laughs then it's likely a more emotional or dramatic scene.

The TV sitcom has likely already been dissected enough on this blog. I do not recall the specifics. The concept definitely gets a lot of play on this blog. I searched the bigram ‘sitcom’ just now on the blog’s search bar. Sixteen results returned.

I originally searched for the bigram ‘cold war’ and got twenty-one hits. Seeing how far ‘cold war’ is in the lead in the frequency charts convinced me that yet another about a cold war topic would have to break the routine. Yet another post about a single-volume history book touching upon the Cold War could become monotonous. To keep the editorial pace fresh, talking about yet another book about the half century long fight between Western Imperialists and Eastern Commies required some sort of literary self-review. That special...

This blog post will be logged as a ‘book’ critique in the current data model. In said data model, I believe there are plenty of secondary fields for categorizing each post. I have not built a web UI to add them, so rarely does a post get all those filled out. At this moment, each blog post gets one and only categorical bucket to fit into. Each blog post has to be mostly about one ‘thing’. Some days I go through the backend to reach that deeper data model, tagging blog posts directly with more than one category. Until then, this post’s singular bucket will be ‘book’.

The book getting the categorical spot is The Revolutionists by Jason Burke. A fantastic book. Recent publication. Fabulous, absolutely fabulous. The author did a fine job delivering an even handed report of the people perpetrating the airplane hijackings, rather than the causes that indirectly fed these radical acts. Had you not a firm awareness of the political hot button issues of the post-WW2 half of the 20th century, then this book would have landed like a 600 pages newspaper reporting on a decade of sensational terrorist acts.

The Revolutionists book offers a thorough chronicling of the vital players making a name by hijacking commercial jet airliners for political bargaining. The main political leaders in control of nations or of national importance are mentioned, and in great numbers. So once again, a familiarity with late 20th century geopolitical movements and escapades is...

We will try a double header approach to the blog this time. Two video games. A battle of design choices and gaming ethos. Hashing out the pros and cons of two artistic efforts into one blog post. Very few readers enter. Even fewer will finish!

Both video games being talked about today are pretty new ones. Gee, come to think of it. A review of an old video game would be a novelty for our reputable publication. We’ve touched on old movies, books, and an embarrassingly sized plethora of sitcoms. Among those blog posts, plenty of video games have been talked about. Many as that may be, not one game reviewed was made before the late 2010s. A mental note has been made for the editorial staff. The likely product of this quick rumination will be about some game Nintendo classic available through the Switch 2.

Let’s get back on track to talking about two contemporary video games. The first of today’s two is Warno, a game that had been talked about here on the blog a few months back. Warno has clearly usurped Satisfactory as the video game timesink of choice. Speaking of Satisfactory, the once clear personal favorite of mine on Steam for years. In the past few months I had tried to revisit my factory (which would be my third one since starting to play in late 2023) a few times. Getting started on any project there felt akin to a job related task.

All the romance I once had for arranging inputs and outputs through transit lines has ebbed away. I believe...