Happy Birthday!

To my dear, beloved Futurama, who turns 18 today. And for whom this blog is somewhat ironically named:

“You’re some kind of dumpster Jedi.” – Futurama, not Star Wars. 🙂

Tail As Old As Time

Yes, I saw Beauty and the Beast over the weekend.

Pick Your Intro:

• Hermione Granger and Matthew Crawley make such a cute couple.
• Even in Disney movies, women are forbidden from entering The West Wing without a man’s permission. /joke /politics /joke /joke /joke /etc. /seriously just a joke

And yes, there are going to be spoilers below.

One of the interesting trends of Disney movies in recent years is to try to up-end the magic falling in love and kissing trope to have it mean something else. For instance, in Frozen, finding love in one’s heart is about a sororal relationship and in Maleficient it’s about a maternal one and in Big Hero 6, oh hey, it’s not even there, nor is it in Moana. So after watching the fantastic Honest Trailer for the 1991 Beauty and the Beast, I wondered if Disney would take up the change mantra for the remake.

But no. No, they didn’t. Th Enchantress still demands that Beast love someone and she love him back. There is actually a possible storyline in which this could have been a platonic love. I seriously wasn’t sure until fairly late in the movie if it was going to remain a romantic love.  So score one for the Disney verse keeping to tradition. This isn’t a bad thing, because sometimes love stories actually ARE love stories about romantic entanglement and not everything needs to be updated to put a completely new spin on it.

Besides, there’s enough “new spin.” There are some songs in the movie that aren’t in the original animated film or in the Broadway musical, which is nice. And Belle’s father is a more fully-formed, interesting character who may actually be the best Disney dad I’ve seen… like ever, unlike his animated counterpart who loved his daughter but who was clearly almost as insane as Gaston claimed him to be. Speaking of, Luke Evans is so brilliantly cast as Gaston in this film. His added war/military career element builds him up but he is the absolute epitome of self-absorbed, entitled by ego, and blinded handsome man. Bringing anthropomorphic furniture to animation is one thing, but adding it to a live action animation CGI backdrop is another and somehow it’s all carried off very well. I liked that Josh Gad as LeFou was ultimately a “better” person than he was acting when he was being lackey to Gaston. It’s great that Beast actually isn’t illiterate and comes to the relationship with Belle on a more equal intellectual/academic basis because it makes their ultimate love less about her acting as nursemaid and teacher but their shared interest and compatibility.  Emma Waston is excellent as is Dan Stevens and they play well to each other. The various other characters, who are voiced by so many amazing people, just contribute fantastically to all of it.

This controversy over a gay character is dumb. It’s dumb because there shouldn’t be a controversy at all, but it’s extra dumb because this issue was so not an issue to me that I got to the end of the movie before even figuring out who the gay character was. (Also just because someone is a man with soft and loving tendencies does not make that person gay. /soapbox) It doesn’t harm anything because it’s just how it is. Period. I mean, a man dances with another man. That’s the extent of the issue, first off, so people claiming their children are hurt by this blatant sex are absolutely ridiculous, and second, um, gay people exist and are people. Again, full stop.

Really it’s a fun movie that builds on nostalgia for the animated movie of (sigh) 26 years ago, and has good visual recall to that without being a shot-for-shot remake. It’s akin to how the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie had fun nostalgia for the theme park ride by recreating some of the ride scenes and music without delving too far into it. Though certainly Beauty & the Beast does more of this, it also was given the space to be its own creation. Belle is still brave and adventurous but she’s a little more self-sufficient than her animated counterpart without sacrificing her romantic and soft sides. Beast is still isolated and angry but he’s wittier, more flexible, and able to show compassion. It makes for a wonderful updated act.

I also admit to having tons more fun watching it because I went with my amazing best friend and we sat in those fancy leather reclining theater seats and got fed good food, AND we are both fans enough to be able to sing all the songs unprompted, but I think there’s still a much wider audience who would love seeing this.

Pokemon G(TF)O

A definitive breakdown of everything that Niantic failed to fix when it added Generation 2 to its Pokemon Go game:

1. Tracking, obviously. It works. Kind of. If you consider tracking to the nearest Pokestop to be a tracking system, I suppose that does help over the complete lack of tracking. People have argued that tracking has to be a legal issue, but if this is case, then no app maker would be able to include geotags or directions in their software. Something bigger and deeper seems to be the problem, including the fact that the functionality is clearly there but is only being used by third party cheaters and tool-users who backbone onto it.
2. Gyms. They’re still clunky and silly and easily hacked to the disadvantage of players. Oh,you’re so special aren’t you, cheaters, because you spoof your location and end up putting in 4 2,000 CP monsters into a gym and keeping them there unjustly. Wow, that must net you a whopping 40 coins a day. Good work. But more specifically to complain to the points of Niantic, it’s that the gyms serve no valuable addition to the gameplay. It’s boring to play against an automated opponent, particularly one that was established by cheating. Training in gyms yields nearly no reward and it’s also excruciatingly boring.
3. Trading. The lack of trading in game is supposedly coming but it’s not exactly exciting, since you’ll need to stand right next to someone and use NFC (apparently?) to make a trade in game. Because Niantic is sure that if you were to trade with people on the internet, you’d ruin the game, yet Niantic has no problem with allowing cheaters to continue to prosper in all the other ways they’ve already prospered in the game. Sure.
4. Regional Pokemon. This is nonsense. Especially if you will not make trading more viable. 95% of the players of this game will never be able to complete it because they will not be able to travel to Europe, Asia, South America and North America with any kind of regularity. Removing the regional Pokemon from eggs was also stupid. I won’t even qualify it with a kinder label because it’s essentially setting up players to fail. I understand the purpose of leaving out the legendary Pokemon, but the regional ones are nonsense, especially with their failure to be found in eggs.
5. Step counts. Using the GPS signal to measure step count was somehow supposed to prevent cheating but all it does is allow the game to screw you. GPS drift being fixed means we don’t even get the casual step count increases for it, and instead will walk 3 miles to receive credit for only 1.9 miles in game. Incidentally, my own total KM walked doesn’t even match the number of eggs I’ve hatched. So something in here is broken. Which brings me to:
6. Internal consistency. As just noted, the step counts are wrong and the walking tracker is badly unmatched to the total egg count. But some other stats are wrong, too. I’m the nerd who went through and counted how many of each individual Pokemon she’d caught. I matched that number to the total number the game has recorded in the medals section (which does go up occasionally) and it’s off by more than 3,000. In other words, the game’s total count says I’ve caught 3,000 fewer than I actually have.
7. Geotagging efficiency. This is what causes those annoying errors where you’ve captured a Pokemon but the game suddenly errors out because you’ve moved or, more accurately, it thinks you’ve moved, to some really far away location because the game lost the GPS signal and the geotag is now completely off.
8. Evolution items. Geez. I’ve captured my 7 day streak every week since the game began. I’ve received one evolution item (a metal coat, which I used to make a Scyther into a Scizor) and that is all. The rate is too low. It makes seven of the new Pokemon impossible to get, even with all the candy in the world for them to evolve. (This is where I am right now.)
9. Egg hatch calibrations. It’s great that they took Pidgey and Rattata out of the 2KM eggs entirely. But it’s dumb that Gen2 starters aren’t in the eggs. It’s further dumb that even though they’ve supposedly spaced out the 10KM eggs, I’ve hatched almost exclusively Pinecos from them since the Gen2 monsters arrived. (From various and varied pickups of 10KM eggs from so many different Pokestops, too.) And most of my 5K eggs have been Staryu, Ponyta, and good grief, does that get boring.
10. Endgame value. Come on. At least start making daily or weekly missions or something. This would be a great way to make legendary Pokemon arrive, as opposed to this nonsense about me having to travel to Manhattan to get something that isn’t even legendary but just happens to be rare in game. (I have no Porygon, and it’s the only non-regional locked Pokemon from Gen1 that I do not have and I’ve traveled enough in the US and hatched enough eggs– 480– and have achieved a high enough level — 30— that I think I ought to be able to get the damn thing.)
11. Events. The Valentine’s Day event was great if you wanted to catch a Lickitung where I am, but that’s about it. The walking register was worse than normal during that time, due to the game lagging immensely. My step counter on my phone (which admittedly uses the acceleromater and not GPS) would record 2 miles walked while the game, supposedly on half distance, would record about 1/2 mile. Geez.

So why am I still playing?

I don’t know. Sunk cost fallacy? The fact that I walk a lot, so I might as well turn it on just to capture the steps it does bother to count? The asinine hope that I will get something someday?

I finally, finally, finally spent the money to buy Pokemon Sun. Long story but my 3DS and games (including all my Pokemon games) were stolen last year and I waited a long time to replace the device and still haven’t replaced all the games. But I decided rather than go back and restart X and Y, I’d hop on the Sun & Moon train. Thank god for real Pokemon games, because Sun is fun. And I get a Rowlet.

Friday Night Plights

I watched all of Friday Night Lights. Why? Leslie Knope said it was her favorite show and I’d been meaning to check it for years, so I finally dove in. I wasn’t super into it at first but I liked it enough to complete five seasons in short order. What gets me about this is how common an attitude that Football Is Life comes up in American culture. (And sometimes basketball.) Not every problem, personal demon, or bad life experience can be corrected by playing or watching sports, and while I happen to enjoy sports (though ironically not football) I think this attitude is portrayed far too often in the real world and is here reflected in the show at points. (See: Buddy Garrity.) And yet, I still like it. It avoided some major stereotypes of teen-based television shows. For instance, the families actually exist in Middle America. People are not all absurdly wealthy, the bad experiences the kids have are believable, not hyperbolic, every game is not won, kids who leave for college really leave for college, romances don’t always last, etc.  To that end, it impressed me.

The Americans fifth season premiered last night and I didn’t watch because I started yet another group watching of the show and I have decided to do my very best to wait until they get around to season 5. (We just watched the second episode of season 2 and we only watch 3 a week, so it’s going to take forever.) I’m almost anxious about it, and am choosing to pretend that season 5 has not been released yet. And House of Cards season 5 is still too far away, also (May 30). I’m not really looking forward to the return of Orange is the New Black, particularly because the end of season 4 was going well and then bam! way too ridiculous yet again. So I don’t care that it’s still far away. But the other two things are killing me. So the question right now is What do I watch while I’m waiting to watch? I’m considering The Magicians, but I didn’t really care for the books, so I don’t know what to think about that either. Sigh, when did entertainment become such a hard job?