Do you remember this thing? If you happened to have been around in the 1980s, you might have seen this game. It was called Simon. It was a memory game. It flashed one of four light-up colored buttons in a particular order, and it made all kinds of noise. The point of the game was to push the buttons in the order that they lit up, repeating the pattern. Kind of like the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Anyway, I have never had one. For some reason, it seemed out of reach to me. It's weird because I always think of myself as having been deprived of toys, but that's just not true. There were times when my family didn't have a lot, but we always had stuff in varying degrees of plentifulness. We just didn't have a Simon. So, you know, deprived.
I suspect strongly that our lack of a Simon game was due in part to a lack of interest in listening to a Simon game for hours on their part. I have no evidence to support this belief, but I suspect it anyway.
What we did have, though, which I think is better, was a board game called Stop Thief. It was a traditional board game, except that it came with an electronic device that looked remarkably like what phones would look like ten or so years later. It was pretty cool.
A few years ago, my mom sent me a copy of it, and that made me smile. I love having things like that. Weird reminders and treasures from my history.
Now, my mom and I are very similar in that we put a lot of stock in the way that the things we've owned are a part of our history, and therefore are priceless. Because, really, how else can you keep your memories if you throw away the artifacts of your own history? We both have tendencies towards building museums of our own lives. I'd call it hoarding, and it most probably is that too, but I don't think of it that way. I think owning this Stop Thief game, which I likely will never actually play, is very much like having a piece in a museum dedicated to my memory.
The shitty thing is that I can pretty much guess that no one else will see it that way when I die, and some poor soul has to deal with the colossal amount of bullshit I've collected over the last 47 years. I'm guessing they're not going to be very impressed with it at all.
My mom's house burned down in the Caldor fire a few years ago, and she lost most of her stuff. It was a traumatic and extremely painful experience. Watching mom lose all her worldly possessions made me rethink just how valuable those memories are. Because while that was a traumatic and still very painful experience for my mom and my whole family really, she got through it. And there are benefits to purging stuff. I do it now, every couple of years, and I just did it before the move. I also put most of that stuff in storage, which was a huge step. It's not setting it all on fire, because I know where it is and I go get it if I need to, but it is a very vulnerable feeling to not have my stuff.
It's getting easier, though. I'm starting to think about things I've been carrying around for my whole life, and how maybe I don't actually need to keep carrying them from place to place. Maybe I can let some of that stuff go.
I'm gonna keep the Stop Thief game though, because it's cool.
Black Phone 2
So I was just okay on the first Black Phone. I didn't hate it, and I didn't particularly love it. I remember the short story well enough, and I thought the first movie did a decent job of telling that story.
Black Phone 2 decided to do something very different, which was a good thing. While technically, it's a continuation of the first story, it's a very different kind of horror movie. While the first Black Phone was more disturbing and frankly kind of upsetting, this is much more of an '80s teen movie. It wears its influences on its sleeve, perhaps maybe too much. I enjoyed the parallels to A Nightmare on Elm Street, but there were a few points where I wished I were actually watching an Elm Street movie instead.
There's a pretty sick Pink Floyd moment, which Scott Derrickson seems to like to utilize, and I appreciate that.
Now, here's the problem. There are some really weak moments in this one. I'm going to try and talk about my gripes without spoiling anything.
Okay, so in a movie like this, where there's a supernatural element at play, there are always rules about what's happening. What can happen and what can't, and what the parameters are. Sometimes the main characters figure these rules out (like, for instance, in A Nightmare on Elm Street) and then use those rules against the antagonist of the story to ultimately win and survive.
Now, in Black Phone 2, the characters seem to figure these rules out pretty quickly with very little information, and that bothered me. Stephen King does that a lot. Giving characters a lot of certainty about things that have absolutely no precedent in the real world. When you're dealing with supernatural entities, I need at least a little skepticism. It's easier with kids, because kids have the wonder of imagination or something, but really, even then, I need to feel like they went the appropriate steps to arrive at the place where they can understand the rules.
I'm not saying that's the wrong way to tell a story, because lots of stories do that, but in this case, I never felt like the rest of the movie was good enough to hold that weaker part up.
Also, there's a thing at the end that was super cheesy and was a completely wasted opportunity to do something scary.
So while this movie didn't totally work for me, I respect that they took some big swings on a sequel, and I still think Ethan Hawke is a great slasher villain.
Also, I'm glad they brought Jeremy Davies back, even though he was one of the things that made me uncomfortable in the first one. He's good at that.
Ya know, after thinking about it for a bit, I think this would be a really great entry-level horror movie for kids who are looking for a little more than Goosebumps but aren't quite ready for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I'll give it another half a star for that. 3.5 stars!
Peacemaker: Season One
After some prodding from friends and a mild interest in keeping up with what's going on in the DCU now that the Superman movie came and went, I broke down and watched Peacemaker.
I tried it once, when it first came out, and it wasn't my thing. I watched two episodes before I moved on. While I thought Suicide Squad (for clarity, the James Gunn one) was okay, Peacemaker wasn't my favorite part of it. It felt very edgelordy and had that in-your-face humor that isn't something I'm typically into.
So I ignored the show for the last couple of years or whatever. Eventually though, I was convinced to give it another shot and I'm glad I did.
While it is still that edgelord humor, it's also a pretty interesting study of a complicated and hard-to-love character. The further evolution of the character has been fascinating because I really didn't like him. I found Peacemaker abrasive and frankly kind of gross, which was by design, I imagine. I didn't expect to see the show explore the consequences and causes of those qualities.
Seeing how he's wrestling with his own villainous tendencies is something I think a lot of people can relate to. Reconciling what you've done versus the better person you're trying to be, and how people see you. It's all rich subject matter to sift through, and this show does it impressively well.
It's also quite funny, and it's really difficult to watch John Cena and not smile. The charisma and general goodness of the actual guy shine through in a way that I'm not sure anyone else could have played this character and pulled it off.
I'm about halfway through season 2, and I'm enjoying it so far. Especially the addition of Tim Meadows, who makes anything he's in better.
I'm still poking away at the keyboard trying to write, but it's been a slow couple of weeks in that department. I did, however, play around with a book cover idea in Canva for an upcoming novel that I haven't started or even figured out what it's about yet.
BIG into putting the cart in front of the horse. That's how I do.
Obviously, that tagline is just for my own amusement and won't actually be what the book is, but it will probably be an influence.
Alright, I'm done! BYYE!!!