Weekend Roundup

I consumed some content. Let's talk about it.

I’ve finished my HARD binge of Starfield.

God, I wish I was capable of moderation.

Since the drop of new content a few weeks ago, I’ve been obsessively playing through Starfield. It’s a wobbly game, but god, do I love it!

This is like my 15th universe since the game came out two years ago. What’m I talking about? When you “finish” this game there’s a multiverse-hopping New Game Plus mechanic that lets you start over, but with all your RPG progress intact (and wish some new “been here, done that” dialogue and quest options).

I finally muscled through the tedium of leveling up relationships with each of the main characters to trigger their special quest lines and boy, was it a pain. I deliberately repeated the main storyline again in this universe—for the last time, I swear it—so that along with the other quests and the new DLC storyline, I’d have enough content to play with all four characters, but it wasn’t enough!

Now, in fairness, I played the new DLC with Andreja even though I’d already completed her quest and romanced her because I wanted to hear all her dialogue with the new stuff first, so I could’ve been faster, but the last character, Sam, was a serious chore. I feel like it took fifty heart-to-heart conversations before he was willing to drag me along with his 12-year old on a dangerous undercover mission. That guy is just the worst!

I’m done with that now that I’ve done it at least once. Next universe, I fess up and tell my friends I’m an interdimensional traveler and I already know everything about them (and have seen half of them naked) and just pair off with Andreja from minute one. Sheesh.

I’m also done with this game for a while. I’m stupid rich (saved five million credits for the new space mansion and then decided I had no use for it and would rather have a tiny house by the beach that cost almost nothing—like a bit of iron and argon for some reason) and there are no storylines to play out.

I guess I could pursue the other remaining goal I’ve had in mind for a long time: surveying every single planet in the game. That’s about 1,400 of them.

Eh, maybe someday. For now, I think I need to avoid games and get my mind back on writing. I’ve completely stalled out on the novel I was working on. Gotta get my head back in the game, but now that I’ve burned out on Starfield, Destiny is deader than a door nail, and Stellaris has updated the game so much that I’d have to go through an extended learning curve, I think there’s no digital distraction tempting me…until that Expanse game comes out next year.

I did manage to finish a book despite the distraction of the video game. Roadside Picnic, the classic Soviet sci-fi novel, popped up in my Libby queue so I went ahead and dove through it.

My only other exposure to Soviet-era sci-fi is Solaris, so I’m kind of inclined to compare the two. They do both deal with utterly inscrutable alien presences. In Solaris, it’s a mind-reading, wish-granting planet. In Roadside Picnic, it’s alien visitors who seemed indifferent to humanity and just stopped by our planet and left a bunch of quasi-mystical detritus in “zones” around the globe.

With Solaris as my starting point, I was surprised at the completely different tone and texture in Roadside Picnic. It’s nowhere near as self-serious. Its social commentary also feels a lot more universal—the system is ever out to get you down—compared to the specific critiques of Soviet scientific bureaucracy that populated the exposition in Solaris.

The voice in Roadside Picnic is also just livelier compared to the ponderous Solaris. Our main character is a Stalker (the name of the late 70’s film adaptation of the book) who sneaks into the zone to pillage alien artifacts for profit instead of letting the government get its hands on them all. There’s a little more cyberpunk to this criminal element than the befuddled scientists of Solaris.

Still Solaris feels like a deeper exploration of big ideas about the nature of consciousness and even about the emotional territory that defines a person’s life and choices and hence just a weightier and more significant novel in general.

(Side note: In a rambling and spoiler-strewn video, I imagined a more compelling structure for Roadside Picnic, if you’re curious.)

My wife and I watched Bugonia now that it’s streaming, having missed it in the theaters prior to the Oscars.

I am not really a fan of Yorgos Lanthimos. There were some things I liked about The Lobster, but overall, I thought the stilted performances he asked of Collin Farrel and John C. Riley was all style over substance—a characterization that I think apt for his oeuvre in general.

But he’s clearly found his muse in Emma Stone as she’s starred in his last five movies. Here she plays a CEO abducted by a conspiracy theorist played by Jesse Plemons who thinks she’s actually part of an alien vanguard here to subdue the planet with biotech. She and Plemons do give great performances, but if the final film is saying anything concrete about the post-fact reality we’ve found ourselves in, then it eluded me.

And, by the way, SPOILERS!!!, I’d kind of guessed early on from the trailer that the film would ultimately land in the wheelhouse of this blog. The trailers (and the majority of the film) play Plemons’s paranoid conspiracy as utter lunacy so starkly that I assumed, knowing Lanthimos, that, in fact, Emma Stone’s character was an alien. If I suspected it before, it was confirmed when upon Googling something about the film to answer a question from my wife while the credits were rolling, I saw headlines describing it as “science fiction.”

This sci-fi twist at the end is so tacked on, though, that it adds no meaning that I can see to the film’s stuttering examination of how mindsets shape reality. If you think this movie has a thesis that isn’t just shallow misanthropy, please let me know.

Finally, I also posted a video wherein I am considering going to the theater to see Project Hail Mary for a third time.

Part of me is afraid to go to the well too often, but not much. I’m quite confident this is going to be one of my comfort movies that I can rewatch endlessly like Aliens, Serenity, Interstellar, or The Expanse (hey, you say, that’s a series, not a movie—yeah, I know, and I can rewatch ALL OF IT forever) so I don’t think that’s a real danger.

What is really giving me pause is this: I’ve got an appointment to take care of in the morning and have called in a sub for the day. But in the afternoon, I was thinking about going to the movie…alone.

I’ve literally never done this. Several years ago, I crossed a threshold and was able to go sit down in a restaurant-type joint alone (when my wife and kids were occupied elsewhere and I needed a bite). I figured it's less wasteful than getting take out and that way I could refill my Dr. Pepper as I go, right?

But movies…I mean, like…whose hand am I going to hold? Seriously can’t even remember the last time I saw a movie in the theater without my wife. It’s kind of an alien idea.

What do you think? Anybody like going to the movies alone?