One thing about both TFA and TLJ that I really appreciate is how different the jobs they had were.

There were so many details in TFA that feel so natural now, but when seeing it for the first time, were significant, and important to be there. The ways in which Rey’s personality and life are conveyed are elegant and brilliant. The tension before Chewie and Han step on to the Millenium Falcon. The blaster bolt hanging in the air.

TFA had to resuscitate a franchise that was largely dead to me. It had to remind me of the awe I felt when I watched Star Wars for the first, twentieth, hundredth time as a kid. And yet, it had to feel new. Enough. It boggles my mind that they were able to walk that line.

People complained about how it felt like New Hope v2, and yes, it absolutely does. That’s its job. But it also gave us a bunch of new paths into the universe. New characters who were *different* than their New Hope counterparts.

And then TLJ’s job was to really blow that all apart and show us how Rey isn’t Luke, how Kylo Ren isn’t just an echo of Vader. How all the beats that we were expecting could be subverted and repurposed, and for the seeds of the new Star Wars, that were planted in TFA, to grow in their own directions.

I’m listening to the Blade Runner 2049 soundtrack now, and one of the things that I really enjoyed about 2049 was that while it was consistent with the universe, it did the same kinds of things – it continued some of the critical hallmarks, and still forged new ground. It illuminated the original without overshadowing it or subverting it, and it extended a lot of the themes of the original without feeling like it was a slave to the expectations it created.

Maybe that’s why there’s such a backlash among the whining manbabies about TLJ. It’s a story that in large part, doesn’t feel like it owes anything to the fans.

It takes its direction from the story, and its potential for the future. It’s not there to give people what they think they want.

I love that about TLJ. And I massively respect the monstrous task they had with TFA. Both are amazing works of threading impossible needles. To me, they (and 2049) make it through with elegance, delight, surprise – and they honor the source material.

I’d love to see a Denis Villeneuve take on Star Wars.

And it’s not just that mechanically, it sucks. But oh my god mechanically, it sucks. Swat flies with lightsaber. No actual skill involved. Do it for a long time. Have to do it again. End level. From a gameplay perspective, it’s garbage.

But the early parts of the level and the narrative are even more jarring. You’re Luke Skywalker. You’re on a weird planet, so you go exploring. You feel something in the Force. You run into a bunch of Stormtroopers. You mow them down without a second thought.

At some point midway through the level, you come across a member of “Inferno Squad”, the squad the main character is part of. This guy is one of her close compatriots. He’s trapped. So you free him. Luke doesn’t kill this guy. And he asks, “Why didn’t you kill me?” and Luke says basically “I killed those Stormtroopers because they didn’t give me a choice. You did.”

And it’s *insane*. Luke just killed dozens of soldiers literally without a second thought. And then for purely plot reasons, he not only saves this guy, but teams up with him, and then expresses “We’re not getting out of this without each other,” which is *nonsense*. Luke’s an incredibly powerful Jedi. This guy is basically a badass TIE fighter pilot and nothing more.

The whole story is so off the rails and Luke’s behavior is so nonsensical that it’s really disconcerting to me that this is a canonical story. And then for the last half of the level after meeting that guy, you swat bugs. For 10 minutes. It’s terrible.

So this guy’s at least trying to make arguments couched in a kind of intellectualism, which is a nice change of pace. I can even follow his logic in many places, and it seems at least internally consistent.

The problem is that the internal consistency *constantly* just leads back to something along the lines of, “I’m a self-made success, and I deserve everything I have. Everyone who isn’t a success deserves not only failure, but nothing from me.” Basically, it’s an ideology completely codified around being a self-absorbed asshole.

I got mine, fuck everyone else. They failed because they’re unworthy, there’s no system that’s stacking anything against anyone, because *I* succeeded.

I guess it’s better than outright misogyny and racism, but it’s couched in a kind of “intellectual” distance, which is also in a way significantly worse. Like James Damore, there’s a pretense of rationality, but the arguments are hollow and unsubstantiated, they just *sound* better than “waaah black people.” But it’s all the same morally vacant shit.

But let’s say that the internet wins, here. Let’s say IAP is out. Woo hoo! Hey, *I* think that’s a perfectly fine thing. As someone who did IAP for a long time & justified it to myself, I’m much happier not having to think about it. But I like games. And games are $$$$$$ to make.

So what happens? The audience doesn’t instantly double in size. Yet some companies right now are making 50%+ of their revenue in IAP. So you cut out 50% of revenue. What happens next? The execs lose out on their huge-ass bonuses? Sure. That’s part of it. But then cut down the development budget of your future game, and make it a lot higher risk for a company to make a big bet.

What’s the result? Smaller and *more conservative* games. More things that riff on existing successes. Less willingness to take chances. Will it be a heyday for smaller devs? Of course not, don’t be stupid.

But it will make fulfilling the ever-increasing expectations and entitlement of the AAA-gamer crowd more and more difficult, more risky, etc. I think the internet thinks that this means that devs will be free to work on premium games without IAP. I think they’ve just traded one devil for another.

We’ll see.

That is, I *love* the NaNoWriMo stream-of-consciousness model for “shaking ideas out”, but it results in a terrible *story* because it’s just essentially a long string of pseudo-random events, and I’d never developed enough structure for the stories to be interesting or meaningful beyond whether any random event was interesting or meaningful.

Whereas my favorite stories are all a distillation of a single idea, and that idea pervades everything about the story. So about five (?) years ago, I was thinking about what I wanted to write for NaNoWriMo, and it was a story about someone who woke up in unusual circumstances, and had lost their memory (cliche so far, I know), but was face-blind.

And the whole point of this was that as they unraveled what was happening, the way they perceived other people would change. The story would start with everyone looking like those blank drawing mannequins – literally no distinguishing features, so that the audience has no distinguishing features to pull from. But then as they discover things about what is happening, they start to see everyone as representations of a celebrity that embodies that “thing” – whatever it is. But *everyone* looks like that person. It’d be kind of like Being John Malkovich, but the fact that it’s John Malkovich in the moment is a reflection of something specific, and the person changes from scene to scene. The idea was that I wanted people to be recognizable as someone, but for that someone not to really mean anything other than acting as a symbol for an idea. If this were a movie, though, it wouldn’t be like Being John Malkovich, where it’s all digital replacements. You’d have to find just a shitload of lookalikes. Different in subtle ways, but in ways you wouldn’t pick up on unless you were really observant, and even within a single scene of the main character talking to that person, the actor might change every cut.

As they circle in on things, and start piecing things together, they realize that the character elements within the celebrities that are who they’re seeing are indicative of ways in which they have interacted with the world by giving those things away. They’re too passive. They’re too agreeable. They’re too accommodating. They do this maybe in part because of their condition, but they also do it because this is what a lot of society conditions us to do – to give ourselves away to fit in, and this is essentially the extreme version of that. The character is face-blind and can’t distinguish anyone from themselves, but functionally, no one could distinguish who *they* are, either, because they have no distinct personality of their own.

At some point (and this is where things really start to escape me), the pieces of those personalities would come together, you’d grow to understand that those things are the distinctive person that this person *is*, and you’d start to get a clearer picture of who they are. And of course, in true Film Noir style the person at the center of whatever this mystery is is themselves, who they saw in a reflection but thought was someone else, because they can’t recognize themselves by sight.

And the story probably ends with that – they’ve begun to figure out who they are, but their condition doesn’t change, and because of that condition they can’t themselves solve the mystery, even though the reader can. But the progress & growth for the character is they do begin to understand who they are, and that journey of self-discovery is what leads them to the solution, they just never get the satisfaction of feeling it.

It sucks. But I want to know. I don’t want to stick my head in the ground & get to appreciate their work on the pile of bodies they leave in their wake. Some people can separate an appreciation of the work from appreciation of the person, but I can’t. I understand the connection between appreciation of the work, money, and the resulting power they receive as a result. I can’t appreciate the work and *enable the abuse* as a result. I can’t do it.

So it’s gonna suck, but air it out. All of it. Get the people responsible for the abuse, the misogyny, the racism, the homophobia… all of it. Get them out. Throw their work in the garbage, and pay the price of doing the right thing. Enable better creators. Enable them to make the things that I will love next, and let me support people whose character is accurately reflected in the quality and content of their work.

The second was a blazer. I’m not normally a blazer person, but this jacket fit *perfectly* and was just more stylish and well made than any piece of clothing I’d ever owned. It was also more expensive than any piece of clothing I’d ever bought, and so I tried it on, thought a lot about it, then sent it back.

About a year later, my company got acquired, and as a present to myself, I wanted to buy that jacket. But I didn’t know anything about it. I hadn’t thought to look at the manufacturer. So I got in touch with the folks at the company that sent it to me (Trunk Club), and they both found the manufacturer (Sand Copenhagen) and sent out the “current style” of the jacket. This was different – it was a beige houndstooth, it had elbow patches, and instead of a bananas vibrant insanely colored lining in an otherwise very straightforward jacket, it had a gold paisley lining.

It became my favorite jacket. It’s not flashy when you look at it – looks pretty bland & professorial. But it’s got interesting details. Subtly different buttons on the cuffs. An orange metallic paisely lining under the collar. That gold interior lining with bright pink detailing. I loved that about it.

But over the last 5 years, I’ve gotten fatter, and it hasn’t fit in a long time. Still fits great in the shoulders, but the chest/waist just don’t fit anymore. I brought it to the tailor (the first time I’ve been to a tailor in … ever? Other than when I’ve bought a suit & had it tailored before delivery) to see if they could let it out, and the problem is the way it’s cut, there’s no extra fabric. Figures.

*sigh*

So the jacket’s moving on, to someone who will hopefully give it more use.

But it’s strange. I’m not a clothing guy. At ALL. But this, for some reason, is sort of an aspirational thing. I can find other jackets, I’m sure, but I want to hit some sort of milestone, and I want to get another jacket by this company. I know I can’t get the same style, but that combination of outwardly staid but inwardly outrageous – I *love* that about this jacket, and the quality of it is so far beyond anything I’ve seen in other clothes.

Someday I’ll find its successor. Until then, I suppose it’s a goal.

I’m not talking necessarily about some market elements for how we get things. A lot of capitalism works better than other systems that have been tried, blah blah blah.

But re: income inequality, the more I think about how money translates to power, the worse it all gets.

Why do we have people like the Mercers – billionaires backing Trump, or the Koch brothers & Sheldon Adelson, who’ve fueled the GOP for ages? What right do they have to have this *wildly* disproportionate impact on our country & our government & our rights? This is so far removed from any rational definition of a democracy that it’s absurd, and what’s it come down to? Money.

I read about folks like Jennifer Lopez giving a million bucks to the relief efforts in Puerto Rico, and I think, “That’s awfully nice of her, but why does she have the *ability* to give a million bucks to PR, and why should anyone have the power to make a call with that much impact arbitrarily?”

It’s not just the folks I don’t like who are doing things I don’t like. It’s folks that I do like, doing things I do like. Why should so much power rest in the hands of folks like Mark Zuckerberg, or David Benioff? They aren’t humanitarian experts. They aren’t policy folks, or community experts. I’m glad they’ve done some of the things they’ve done, but it’s *insane* to me that we’ve given them the power, effectively, of *millions of people* and concentrated it in the hands of just a few folks.

I keep going back to the idea someone said of, there should just be no way for any person to have more than $X. Where X was floated at 100 million, but I’d suggest could *easily* be lowered to $10 million with almost no practical impact on capitalism other than we cut off the top top top end of concentrated wealth/power *without* disincentivizing say, the materialism that drives folks to amass more and more.

What happens beyond $10M? I dunno. Maybe it’s just taxed at 100%, and it’s all funneled into education or infrastructure. I’m sure there are folks that have better plans and models that show how these things could work.

But what is the *point* of someone having more than $10M? It’s practically-speaking more than most people can spend in their entire lifetimes, and it guarantees a level of indefinite financial security. Particularly if we get to some sort of universal healthcare. And it’s even a fairly absurd number, right? It protects the fantasy that people have that one day they might hit it big, but reins in things that are fundamentally absurd. Can you say, realistically, that boy, cutting me off beyond $10M really negatively impacts my…? Anything? Ability to buy a private island? Great. You shouldn’t be able to have a private island or private beachfront property. Fuck off if you think you should own that shit.

But yeah. I dunno. It’s just weird. Celebs donating giant piles of money to causes – that power shouldn’t rest in the hands of individuals. Jackasses funding bigotry and hate? Why should your ability to say, run a hedge fund let you basically control abortion rights? It’s nuts.