1. Hey, so, we bought a new car over the weekend. I feel like I’m finally an Adult. Yes, we have a child; yes, we bought a house. But now we bought a new car, from a dealership, by ourselves. I’m so terrified it’s going to break! It’s not going to break. BUT WHAT IF IT DOES?
Anyway, yeah, that happened. And I know this is a cliche, but still – that new car smell is no joke. There’s something kinda awesome about that smell. It… smells like victory.
2. Because we bought a new car, I had to take a personal day yesterday and get our parking stickers sorted out, and also deal with some pet/vet stuff. And in between all that, I finally got a chance to watch Blade Runner 2049. My short version: it is a beautifully shot film, and even with its slow pace it’s still more engaging than the original film (which, I’m sad to say, is a film that I respect more than I enjoy). But it’s also a bit problematic with how it shows women (they are either robot love slaves, ball-busting bitches, or trapped in literal cages), and quite frankly I never need to see Jared Leto in anything ever again.
3. Speaking of problematic media, we also finally watched the first episode of the new season of Black Mirror last night – the USS Callister episode. I have a weird uncomfortable relationship with that series, specifically because of Season 1’s “The Entire History of You”, which affected me in an unexpectedly deep and emotionally unsettling way, especially as I was in the process of re-reading my college diaries at the time for an unrelated creative project. (If you’re familiar with the episode, you might understand why a sudden influx of forgotten memories might be emotionally traumatic.) In any event, this new episode was quite good – the twist was genuinely unexpected and the ending was, unusually for this series, quite satisfying. I’m not 100% sure I’m going to watch the remaining episodes, because there’s only so much technological dread I can handle at any given point, but still – it was nice to be pleasantly diverted for a little while.
4. So I finished Nick Harkaway’s “Gnomon”, and even if it didn’t quite stick the landing, it’s an excellent read; he’s a marvelous writer and this is a very smart book. Now up – a 2nd attempt at reading Zachary Mason’s “Void Star”, which from the book’s description is right up my alley, but in practice is a bit difficult to follow. I’m kinda just padding for time – what I really want to read is the new Brandon Sanderson volume in the Stormlight Archive, but I feel like I need to re-read the first 2 books and then the mini-story that connects them to this new one, and as much as I like reading big books, knowing that I’ve got at least 2500 pages in front of me before I start reading anything new is a bit daunting.
5. Game-wise, I’m still in this weird limbo of having this fancy new TV but nothing new to play on it. I’d been putting Forza 7 through its paces, and that’s a fun game in limited doses – and since the last game I’d played in earnest was probably Forza 3 or 4, it’s kind of a neat deja-vu effect to revisit the same courses in radically improved fidelity. Likewise, I saw that Forza Horizon 3 got its own Xbox One X Enhanced patch yesterday, and that game is definitely more up my alley. The graphical enhancements are nothing to sneeze at, either; it looks utterly amazing. Beyond that, I’m kinda half-heartedly going through my backlog, not feeling particularly attached to anything. (Indeed, I keep forgetting that I have a ton of shit to play on the Switch.) The next big AAA release that I have my eyes on is Far Cry 5, which is still a ways off.
That’s what I’ve got, folks. Hope you’re well.
Shouts From The Couch 