Further Thoughts on Brooklyn Nine-Nine

It was a week of comfort watching due to ailments and family events. I started rewatching Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and as weird as it was to finish the show in 2021 it was much weirder to restart the show.

First seasons are notoriously bad, and often short - Seinfield, Parks and Rec and The Office are the immediate examples - the audience doesn’t know who the characters are, the writers haven’t gotten a perfect feel for the actors, you are still operating on the assumption that the people you think are bit players will still bit players (Thinking of Woody from Cheers). Some of the big notes I’ve had watching half of season one

It’s a very good thing that they dropped the Rosa/Boyle romance. It is possible this was always meant to distract us from them serving us the Jake/Amy halfway through the season, but since Jake having feelings for Amy kicked off in the same episode that Boyle got to deliver the great line of “When you go out with me, and you will it will be because I do the things Charles Boyle does.” which feels like too good of a walk away line to not have any plans for, but there was nothing there and Gina/Charles was much better.

The show does not get any easier to stomach if you have any reservations about a cop-comedy. Within ten minutes of the episode, we learn that Terry is removed from Field Duty because he is concerned about his safety and this concern has led him to have an itchy trigger finger where he massacres a mannequin when taken by surprise. The joke doesn’t play well if you’re already in your head. A lot of things don’t play well, as the writers will use police brutality and flaws in the system as jokes, not in a scathing critical way, but as a laugh and move on. 

The last season does have numerous callbacks to the first, perhaps as part of a make-good on the writing approach. Jake’s suspension in the last season came from a similar action he made in the first season, namely arresting someone and putting them in holding. The difference being that it was of course the right call in season one, naturally the perp he arrested with only a gut feeling was guilty.

A thing I’m torn on: the decision to make Rosa’s voice. I forgot she started with the higher voice, which is I think the actor’s normal speaking voice, at least it’s the one she used in her Modern Family guest spots, but I was so used to deep voice Rosa I thought her voice in the guest spots was a put on. Both voices work, it fits the character to have the lower register. We could have gone on a series-long journey of Rosa coming to terms with the fact that she has a naturally high voice, because so many of Rosa’s jokes are her rejecting things that are “girly” or “weak.” it also fits that she would just change her voice to appear stronger.

Jake is always the central character, but the ensemble is stronger as time goes on. I really hate Jake in the first season, he’s selfish and arrogant and the show is his journey to being a somewhat responsible human being… that was thrown away in the last season where he falls into many of the same habits he had in season one (not working as part of a team).

The character work is still great. It is touching to see Scully and Hitchcock brodown. 

I fall back on the workplace as a vehicle to deliver character moments and isn’t the actual star of the show, but that is probably excuse-making. Still, it was a weird week, and visiting characters that were familiar and funny was a comfort. It doesn’t hurt anybody and there are too many things trying to hurt us in life to feel too guilty over our preferred sitcoms.


The Problem with "The Problem with Jon Stewart"

To start, the problem is our expectation. Jon Stewart’s Daily Show changed left leaning consumption of pop news. His writer’s room created a style that has dominated, if the emmy’s are any indication, that has defined a generation of television in the same way that The Simpsons had before them. 


The problem with Jon’s new show is he left behind the format. 


The first episode was unfiltered righteous anger. It wasn’t funny. It had funny moments, but it barely even qualified as a hybrid show, as Jon calls it during a writing room session. I think the show knows it’s finding its legs and that’s why I loved getting to see into the writer’s room. You could tell by the silence of the crowd that everything put in front of them was horrifying and Jon tried to crack a few jokes to bring their participation back in, especially during the group interview. 


Oliver and Stewart will be attacking similar subjects, and the message of their monologues are nearly interchangeable, but John Oliver is a machine gun of fuck you’s and absurdist comedy, Stewart is a rolled-out tube of vitriol with a kiss off fuck you at the end. The kiss-off is the part of the format that stayed true. 


Other factors are at play - COVID and a live audience. Again this changes the way we are used to seeing Jon, hollering over a crowd. No background music during much of the show helps make the information roll out even more somber, something not needed when dealing with the military giving vets cancer. 


I thought it was important. It was important to talk about these things. I didn’t think it was funny, but that’s my problem. We weren’t promised The Daily Show, that show is still on and doing great. I’m reminded of Jon going on Crossfire and being told by Fucker Carlson that he thought he’d be funny, and that wasn’t what Jon had gone there to do.


He’s not here to dance for us but I’m happy to see what he does.


The End of Brooklyn Nine-Nine

After George Floyd died the writers, actors, and producers of the show Brooklyn Nine-Nine had to ask themselves how to write a comedy about police officers after the summer of 2020. We got the answer - focus on the characters, highlight areas of systematic humbuggery such as police unions and the idea of “one of the good ones”. I know a lot of people gave up on the show after last year, it certainly became harder to recommend.


I watched the pilot episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine from Itunes as a special preview promotion they were doing, that is how far back I go with the show. I watched it faithfully in the first four-five seasons, slipped off when the station changed (which was actually because my Hulu subscription ran out), and came back to watch the last season (thanks for the free month of birthday Hulu, oh shirt I forgot to cancel it). To me, the show always had the strength of focusing on its characters, in most ways it approached being a cop with the same childishness that children did - mostly by emphasizing and emulating things seen on tv and movies. 


The show did emphasize the achievement of Captain Holt obtaining his rank, Holt is a gay, black man, but the show uses the achievement so much that it eventually begins to be used as a punchline. When Andy Samberg’s Jake Peralta is in prison we get a minuscule view of some of the injustice in the prison system, but only in the last season does the show set out to say anything.


The season is trying to wrap up everyone’s storylines and do justice to criticisms of police while trying not to show officers hating their job or themselves. For me, a straight white man, Jake is the proxy, but the show doesn’t do a great job of letting anyone else’s problems shine. Captain Holt as a man who has struggled to be a black man and a police officer is mentioned, but only to emphasize the problems that those feelings have created in his marriage. Rosa quits the force in the first episode and gets at least one good episode, though her feelings and reasonings are secondary to their battle with the police union.


The battle with the police union ultimately culminates in Jake making an unlawful arrest and the precinct being sued. Jake admits that he made a mistake and is sorry, words that the police union leader does not allow, leading to a five months suspension, that was in episode 6, he’s suspended for one episode and back in the squad room by the eighth and the loop is never closed, the show deciding to let us spend more time with the characters than worry about the specifics of policing (they are trying to push through a police reform action, but that gets to be a McGuffin not a statement).


Moving to the characters wasn’t a mistake, they are the strength of the show, but by not giving any real consequences to Jake’s action the show ends up mirroring the real-life it was trying to critique.


The Marvelization of Persona

I’ve not had the strength to play P3 in a minute, any version. Feeling the pressure of all the social links I might miss, or how I might screw up a playthrough if I don’t get to the dungeon end by the full moon.


What I have been playing is Persona 1 on Vita and it is very much my speed. The story can branch in different ways, there is much less freedom of choice, but the choices have some weight - deciding who will be the 5th member of your party throughout the game, trying to follow a guide to get esoteric paths to a better ending or the mysterious Snow Queen route.


The P1 groundwork is so much more closely tied with SMT than with the latter three numbered Persona games. For a start, you’re being invaded by demons and not shadows. The projections and Jungian psychology have not taken root and the game is closer to a monster movie. The characters are still distinct party members and I do wonder what I’m missing by not choosing certain members. 


One of the rumors around the Persona anniversary announcements is a release of the P1 and the P2 duology. I’ve stopped putting stock in any rumors as all things seem as equally possible or impossible.


The interesting and unlikely thing would be a remake of the early games that brought them more in line with the mythology created later on. The connective tissue exists but is often hidden in a throw-away line, or connection. The shadow company from P3 is an off-shoot former partner of the Nanjo group, which was eventually headed by a party member in P1. Can we assume the Nanjo group took ideas from the villain of P1 and continued the experiments that ultimately led to the shadow realm? Very probably. Is it possible these answers are already revealed in some deep tissue dancing game, maybe?


I like to think my desire to see everything connected goes deeper than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For one thing, I was always a comic book fan and blown away when I picked up the original “Secret Wars” as my first trade paperback, it wasn’t just seeing everyone mashed up, it was the idea that the new suit Spider-Man got in the crossover went on to the comic books, which led to Venom. I always favor exploring the links and spinning the yarn out further, sometimes you get the Venom storyline, and sometimes you only get a weird romance between Magneto and Janet Van Dyne.


Watching Jaws in 2021

Jaws is one of those movies that you either saw because it was on tv when you were growing up with someone in your family who wanted you to see it, probably to freak you out, or you saw it later on because you were like, really into film. I saw it a few days before my thirty third year around the sun and I’ve considered myself like, really into film. I’ve not really avoided Jaws; I just assumed I’d watch it in a theatre as part of a classic film series, but who knows when those will happen again at a time I’m comfortable sitting in recycled air.


Family was visiting recently and Jaws was suggested and Jaws was watched. You should know immediately that Jaws holds up. I mean, if we ignore the recursiveness that so much of our public sentiment is informed by the impact of Jaws and not the truth behind sharks (that they aren’t especially dangerous to people). The acting and direction all feel good and, while the shark sure did seem like a rubber monstrosity, I didn’t think it looked especially bad and would have felt better than whatever Jabber Jaws cgi they might try to make work today.


The part I keep thinking about is all those people refusing to shut down their beach despite a public health menace. It is not easy to ask people to hold a gun to the heads of their own business, even while going to the beach served as entry into the shark food lotto. It’s certainly not too fine a parallel. The people were presented with lies about what would help them by the head of the local government and professionals manipulated to give false testimony. 


Well, maybe the parallels are stronger than I thought


Revisiting Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

My stepfather once told me that there was a picture of him hanging up in the Kremlin. He worked military intelligence in Vietnam and trained in Washington D.C. They had pictures of Soviet spies as well, he let me know. On his lunch breaks from spy school he would go to the National Gallery and look at Salvador Dali’s painting of The Last Supper. The print he got decades later when we took a trip to the capital, so that he could visit the Vietnam Memorial is upstairs waiting for the day we live somewhere that I have enough space to put it up.

He told me that there was nobody who wrote about tradecraft like John Le Carre, which is to say that Le Carre depicts the tedium in a way that I can only assume is inherent to a British man of his generation. I watched “Tinker, Tailor” when it came out in 2011 in the local independent theatre and bought it as soon as it became available on DVD. I read the books (and was not anywhere near as obsessed. I thought everything about the movie was perfect, even if I couldn’t follow the full plot.

I blew my movie night capital by suggesting to my partner that we watch it. She’s been watching the Crown so I thought it was a short jump to it. We watched the latest Ted Lasso (The RomCommunism one) and that put her in the Mood to watch “When Harry Met Sally” but she indulged my first instinct. It wasn’t long into “Tinker” when I realized that this movie is the cosmic opposite of “When Harry Met Sally”.

The immediate criticism was one I understood, “Why should I care about all these white dudes"?” and I don’t have an answer. The characters are secondary to the plot. We do get introduced to Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch and Cumberbatch gets the most emotional striking, and best change from the novel, scene in which he breaks up with his boyfriend to preserve his career, knowing that that he’d be expelled from The Circus for being gay.

This was the first time watching the movie where I thought I fully understood how every revelation led into every other, and noticing hints I’d missed in previous viewings. The thing that struck was the cinematography, the movie went out of its way to look like a spy movie from the 70’s and ultimately that’s where one has to meet “Tinker, Tailor” in 2021. It does not deliver an allegory of commentary, it is an adaptation of a by the books spy thriller, and is a by the books spy movie. It isn’t James Bond, and it revels in that.

Content Being Devoured

Watching - Ted Lasso (Excellent)

Reading -Our Kind of Traitor (did not like as much, not going to keep with it)

Persona 3's: P2

PVP3s


An argument as old as FeMC, is it better to take Persona 3 on the go or to go in front of the tv? 


Our score so far 


P3 FES 1

P3P 0


For this play session, we unlocked our persona and explored the first floor of Tartarus, then one of the games glitched and erased playtime, so this was a forced stop point.


P3P

Big fan of playing on portable. That will always be a factor.

 The game moves smoothly and feels like it is skipping over a lot of tedium.


In addition to the female Main Character, the other gigantic change for P3P is that you can take complete control of your party members during battle, this is the most comfortable mode for me.


The game force quit coming from sleep mode because of some … extra software I had downloaded to my Vita. Forced error, but I’m still holding it against the experience. Also, I’ve removed the software and tested in lower-stakes games and haven’t experienced the same plot.




P3 FES 

May it was just because I came to FES second, but it felt like it took ages to cover the same amount of plot ground.


One player’s “Tedium” is another’s “World Building”, getting to see the polygons move through the mall or school courtyard lets you see interesting things the developers plugged in. Such as early sights of characters like Akihiko getting swooned over by girls in the school entrance and a kid in the mall that looked like Ken (before either join your party). There’s also an old monk smoking a cigar on a bench that I very much hope becomes important later.


As noted above, in P3 and P3 FES you don’t have direct control over your party members and this has led to me trying to monopolize control as the main character and trying to take many turns as possible. I’ve played enough Persona to know this will not be a tenable strategy after this tutorial stage.


The chair you set on to hear exposition looks like Orpheus’ lyre, which was neat.


Both

The underlying mystery seems neat. Orpheus transforming into a demon monster at first meeting was cool.


Verdicts



Even if the smoking monk never becomes important, that image will stick with me more than anything from P3P’s session so far.

 

The consensus online is that P3P has a better story, which probably will center around the editing. I wonder how much of this feeling is because I started the session in P3P, and so FES felt even longer because I saw everything again.


My feelings on party control make me feel like I’m self-diagnosing my issues with control. Still, aside from issues to talk about in therapy, the idea that I can lose a battle for issues beyond my control goes into my feeling of not getting into Persona games because of how little they respect my time. At least this setup lends logical sense to the idea that when your MC wipes, you get a game over. Logic does not equate to enjoyment.


I’m going with FES this time out. There wasn’t enough friction yet with combat to make me want to bounce off, and I’m enjoying the extra visuals.


Mass Effect Trilogy and the PS3 Store

Mass Effect Trilogy on PS3


It felt like seeing a Swatch advertised in the margins of Facebook; the Mass Effect Trilogy was the most popular game on the Playstation Store, but it wasn’t the remastered edition. It was the original trilogy.


Also, I got a PS3, rotten with money, see a bullet point in a previous article.


As someone who missed all of Mass Effect and didn’t have any way to catch back up until very recently, I was amazed. Honestly, I was amazed by the whole store. I didn’t start trusting the shift to digital games until very recently, inspired mainly by the Switch. The only digital game I’d bought on my PS3 was Dragonball Z Battle of Z, which was a better game than a naming convention. Looking back on my PS3 history had a lot of DLC and a handful of PS+ games. I left a lot of money on the table with PS+ and I’m retroactively kicking myself.


I have to wonder what the alternate version of myself would have been like. If he’d have discovered the wealth of PS1 and PS2 options. I’ve got Persona 3 FES and Digital Devil Survivor Pt 1 queued up as things I missed out on. I’ve got Dynasty Tactics 2 downloaded because I love a nostalgia game that can be an endless time sink.


I can’t decide if I want to play P3:FES now or wait until I’ve played the PSP version. The Persona community widely debates and desires a definitive edition. In five years once I’ve managed to finish two run-throughs (they are very long games) perhaps I’ll have an answer.


Also, I bought a Vita too. Very bad with money. I was surprised to see one in stock at the used game store and I pounced, now I have all the Persona games. Whoops.


Swabbing the Steam Deck

Valve announced their handheld, the Steamdeck, on 7/15, and I traded in my Playstation 4 a few days later. Now I’m partway to being able to afford a Steamdeck and maybe after requests of gift cards for major birthdays and holidays between now and sometime in mid-late 2022 when my order is actually available I will be able to justify this extravagant purchase by saying that I didn’t spend any of my own money on it.


The first thing I should’ve checked- will I be able to buy it through my Steam Wallet? That’s where the reservation money came from, other hardware is available to purchase through Steam directly. All signs point to probably. Still, probably a good thing to have learned for sure before converting years of PlayStation gaming into an exclusive currency. 


The context of this announcement was my favorite thing. The morning of 7/15 Nintendo announced that the Switch PrOLED models were going on sale that afternoon. Just before those sales went live, Valve stole the news cycle by announcing their new handheld and that presales would go live the next day. If you were on Giant Bomb Premium, you got to see Jeff Grubb make the real time decision that he didn’t need to get a Switch OLED as he went over the news (Grubb Snax episode 3, ten minutes later he decided to get one which I also identify with). I was never going to get the Switch OLED as most of my Switch gaming is done docked, and I don’t appreciate fine things enough to care for a better screen when undocked.


I opted to go for the Steamdeck for a few reasons:

I’m bad with money

I’m bad for FOMO

I appreciated that it seemed easy to get a reservation.


I’ll only elaborate on the last option here and reserve the first two for a professional. 


I was in the PS5 hunt when it started. I managed to get one and spent the whole time, up to the moment it shipped, if my order was going to get canceleled. To try and circumvent that, Valve just offered up a reservation system through their website, focused on giving those who had a proven Steam history the ability to get their reservation in first. You put down a $5 reservation, and then you are notified about when you’ll be able to order down the line on a first come, first served basis. I like that, I mean, the servers still buckled and the estimated shipping time of the Steam Decks all slipped from December 2021 to Q2 2022 by the time I officially put my order down (and the most expensive model was expected in Q3 the last time I checked) but that’s done. I don’t have to think about it anymore. If I decide not to get it, then I don’t have to. I’ll have more money than I’ve spent on Steam altogether in my wallet, but I won’t have to get it.


I will get it because I am foolish and loading up my steam wallet, but I have time (and privilege) to decide. After spending so much time frantically trying to make sure I can get a Playstation 5 and seeing friends still not get one, I am glad to have my spot in line and get notified when the stock fills up.



Backlog Mission Statement

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There is too much to play, and the new stuff is often expensive. More so when one is saving up for a wedding. To try and hold myself accountable, to try to make writing a regular practice, and in trying to work through the infinite backlog - I wanted to write about my experiences. Some of the games are very old, some are newer. This is meant to be a fun, positive experience, so adhering to the strict rules won't be that important. Games should be fun. Writing should be fun.

Wrestling by Yourself

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Some people don’t feel like you should drink alone. I think you should never watch pro wrestling alone. During the pandemic one of the few social occasion was having a friend over to watch WWE Network, or do a screen share with a group. From social experience I then went down a rabbit hole of podcasts and a fascination with the history of the sport. This enthusiasm is colored with an understanding that very little has aged well and nearly every show has something that should make the modern viewer cringe. This is part of why I like sharing the experience of watching a wrestling event; it is a litmus test to see their tolerance for cringe. When you watch wrestling alone you are more likely to wonder what choices in life brought you to this moment. 


This past Independence Day I saw a recommendation on my Youtube page for Total Nonstop Action Wrestling’s (TNA, and yes, they pun on the name a lot) first pay-per-view. For those unfamiliar, a wrestling pay-per-view acts as a culmination event for recent storylines that have been running on the weekly shows. It’s like if your favorite show had to have a sweeps week event every month. Jumping into a random PPV that isn’t one of the big tentpoles - a Royal Rumble, Survivor Series or Wrestlemania - can leave the viewer lost in plot lines. The first PPV, that promised a fresh start.


TNA was a low-budget phoenix rising from the ashes of WCW. The wrestlers showing up were some stars of the old company, who hadn’t moved on to WWE, and those from WWE who had been let go or left; this formula held for most of the promotion. Rick Flair notoriously appeared on TNA television a few months after having a legendary retirement match at Wrestlemania.  It was the home of Sting through the 00’s and the promotion that gave AJ Styles his first notable television exposure in the States. Wrestling is best when it has strong promotions competing, but TNA wasn’t that.


(Copyright - Impact Wrestling Pictured - acceptable television in 2002 and even the co announcer thinks the cowboy gimmick should’ve been led out to pasture)


In the beginning, TNA was partnered with the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), a move that was meant to instantly raise the pedigree of the thing on our screens. The NWA’s history is more significant than I’ll go into as this piece is already full of an alphabet soup of acronyms, but the short story is that the NWA was an old and powerful coalition of regional wrestling promotions that feel out of importance and regard as WWE and WCW came into prominence. 


TNA attempted to get to an honorable start by showcasing previous NWA champions. For someone interested in wrestling history, this was a who’s-who showcase that capped off with Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, one of the best wrestlers of the eighties, who looked like he could still go in the ring if he needed to, but the history lovefest was capped off with a Jeff Jarrett appearance. 


(Copyright - Impact Wrestling - UFC Hall of Famer, and facial hair choice maker, Ken Shamrock)


Jeff was a main event competitor when WCW went under. He’s a veteran and generational star. I hated him, not in a love-to-hate way, just that I found him absolutely uninteresting to watch. Watching now, I can see he was doing some good things. His family had also started TNA, which I knew going into this viewing, which meant that I assumed he would walk out the champion of the evening. Scott Hall and Ken Shamrock make appearances to interrupt each other on the mic and build hype for a battle royal for the inaugural NWA-TNA champion. It’s all fine. Jeff gets told off by a wrestler who is one of the first to do the strut that Jeff and Ric Flair are famous for; credit is a murky business in professional wrestling.


The first match features some X. Division stars who everyone else would think of as Cruiserweight division competitors. These include AJ Styles, it’s a a competitive, exciting bout with a gimmick tag team called “The Flying Elvises.” Maybe there is a business or storytelling reason that came later for why the ragtag team had to lose against the Elvis team. I didn’t hate the Elvis team as much as I thought I would, which is a testament to their athleticism and charisma, but the hindsight of an AJ Styles tag team losing to Elvis impersonators is a rough one.


Things are downhill from there.


Another gimmick match with guys in bodysuits winning over a team that looks like they’d otherwise get a credible push. There was a random attractive woman at ringside. I could not figure out why, but after the match, she walked away, and I noticed a future HR issue at ringside.

(Copyright, Impact Wrestling)


Inexplicable booking, over-the-top talent, and exploitation of women is as consistent in pro-wrestling as spandex. Where TNA’s pay-per-view truly stood out was for its unprofessional camera work and sound mixing. During a preview for a future lingerie battle royal, which is I recognize where I should have stopped watching, the announcer and camera crew were consistently out of sync. Live television is hard, and this was the team’s first. Thankfully, I wasn’t too invested in the future of the lingerie battle royal (Taylor Vaughn won).




Then we get to a special appearance by Toby Keith singing “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.” Now the show goes from being a snapshot of 2nd tier pro wrestling to being of a time and place in American pop culture. Pro-Wrestling has never been shy about pandering to American patriotism, and Keith, and his song had famously won the culture war against the Dixie Chicks. Wrestling promoters and politicians both know that if the substance of your presentation is not exciting then patriotism is a good substitute to get people hyped up. Keith was at the height of his stardom, my mom had his CD. All you had to do to sell merchandise was slap an American flag on it. I didn’t like the song then and I find it revolting now.


It is then with no lack of schadenfreude that I reveled in the poor mixing job that production gave Keith. The solo acoustic performance being drowned out by the audience. The most inspired scripted event was Jeff Jarrett interrupting the song’s end and nearly getting into a tussle with Toby Keith cementing Jeff as the company-wide heel. I liked this, especially as it led to Keith getting involved later in the battle royale and throwing Jarrett out. The whole event was fine. We gott treated to some WCW stars (and Lash Larue) coming out to perform their moves, then get thrown out by Jeff, but bless Norman Smiley and “The Wiggle” for getting the best pop of the night. The match ended with Shamrock one-on-one with someone I’ve never heard of, which is again, fine. It seems like they wanted the guy’s stable of heels to be a big deal and it was a bolder move than throwing Shamrock and Hall or Jarrett as the final bout. Shamrock won, which allowed TNA to trade in on the same street credit that the WWE before them had felt when bringing Ken in, that he was a legitimate tough guy.


Starting a thing is hard. I already hate and second guess so many things about this post and website. TNA would go on to become Impact Wrestling, and I lose the thread, but it is still around, Ken Shamrock returned and joined their hall of fame. In the aughts, it was the best alternative to WWE that we had. Eventually, it was where Sting landed, which immediately gave it credibility. It had a weird ring for a while, and that was very cool. As is often the case with any pilot episode, things got better, but I didn’t go along for that ride, and in reviewing some of the stuff for this piece I’m not sure I’ll get on the ride again for a while.