Fred and Loathing on The Internet

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...

Today we have a blog specialty. On today’s program we are talking about another forgotten sitcom. One of the topics we do often here on the blog. Sitcoms that are forgotten enough that no one among the writing staff can find anybody who has heard the TV series in question. Despite being classified as ‘forgotten’ by our anecdotal research, the show we are talking about today is one that should be remembered. And I mean statistically, not just the personal feelings we have for it.

This show won awards during its lifespan in the 1980s. Got multiple seasons year after year, among a media environment with few peer shows that have as many seasons. This show was popular enough to warrant them, and revivals of sorts years after the last season. All those accolades and accomplishments yet this series is still forgotten years after its last fan-requested gasps.

So is life. All sitcoms, even the greatest ones, eventually only get remembered by bored people writing barely read blog posts about their impact on the writer’s life. Not just sitcoms. All things. The most acclaimed movies, books, paintings, songs, fart jokes will only go as far as the people enjoying them. Shows that make a small impact are just forgotten quicker. I think I talked about this with that blog post about Judd Hirsch’s lost sitcom (see blog post #119).

If this TV show had any impact on the life of the progenitor of this blog, the majority of that impact would be very recent, relative...

I tried to finish a 700ish page history book about the European Revolutions of 1848. (For the record, that book is Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark. Published in 2023) I had heard such good things about it. So, so many. I can feel guilt weighing down my inner intellectual street cred. Knowing I stopped at page 300 on a juggernaut among recent history non-fiction book critics. The critics are right in giving accolades to this book. It is an excellent book as long as you are very very interested in every single European nation 's history in the years 1848-1849. I thought I might have been but there were more nations that I could fit inside my brain’s bandwidth.

It was my own fault for thinking a 700 page book would give me the survey level view of this event. Or that it would stick mostly to Germany, which was the area where I had the most queries. I did not find a ‘Germany’ chapter. Rather they were chronologically distributed. My own faults in book reading would not matter as much if the writer did a better job at telling a riveting story instead of stating so many facts in a sludgy staccato of names and places.

Instead, what is getting reviewed is ostensibly about political revolution. The target for today is the second volume of the 2000’s Ghost in The Shell anime series Stand Alone Complex. AKA The 2nd Gig. The twenty or so episodes of this 2nd Gig had a political revolution as the big plot that the episodes worked around. This evolving...