Oh, I Love A Failed Parade

Also, MAGA parody hats are always embarrassing, regardless of your political stance.

Hello, everyone! Happy Tuesday! Three weekly posts in a row! We’re doing it! We’re lifting this bus! Come on, everybody! Help me lift this bus! Everybody! Come on! To the bus! Come over here to me and this bus! Help me lift it! Just a little! No, don’t just stare! Help me! Okay, I’ll lift it on my own! Oh God! Oh God, it hurts!

The Worst Birthday Parade Anyone’s Ever Had

Look, I know that being happy that a bad person feels bad doesn’t make things better for everybody. Schadenfreude doesn’t reunite families, end cruel violence, or put food in the mouths of kids. But, shit, at least it feels good! It feels good to know that the dude embarrassed himself with a crappy parade on a day that was both too rainy to be nice and not rainy enough for them to save face by canceling it. It’s good seeing his miserable face looking bored as hell during an event he’s spent years pitching and re-pitching like a vacation that nobody else in the family wants. His birthday parade sucked. It was poorly attended. Nobody was that impressed because nobody really saw the point of it and even fewer people bought that it was actually meant to celebrate the military. And, hilariously, it had an announcer talking about crypto sponsors like it was a halftime free throw contest at a basketball game. It was the fascist equivalent of the little seahorse in Little Mermaid announcing “his royal highness, King Triton.”

I really don’t want to ever have to write the phrase “we’re living in a rough time” again, but it certainly feels like universal wins are in short supply right now. There are assholes everywhere making everything either a total victory (rare) or a complete failure (common). Depending on where you are on the center-left political spectrum, you’re either being told by someone abrasively that protesting immigration is a political loser or being told aggressively that protesting at all is pointless. A

bsorbing the news feels like taking a shower in acid rain that’s eating away at both your skin and your ability to feel your skin peel back. So, I don’t know, maybe it’s good that we can laugh at some powerful assholes who had a bad day. It might not take them out of power, but it’s worth remembering they aren’t fortresses who are beyond the reach of petty human emotion. They are just greedy little assholes who are out to serve their own vile pleasures. Making them feel bad is part of the work.

No Matter Where You Stand On The Political Spectrum, MAGA Parody Hats Are Super Embarrassing

I know some of you aren’t video game people, so here’s what you need to know: There’s a video game called Splitgate 2. All you need to know about it is that it’s a pretty good free shooter that was rebooted after a relatively flat launch. However, the man who runs the company is the son of one of the people behind TurboTax and Quicken, so you know he definitely earned his way to the top. Anyway, during a promotional event, he wore a MAGA parody hat to make first person shooters great again. It turns out people didn’t like it, which first made him say how not sorry he was and then, after that didn’t work, how very, very sorry he was.

The other thing you need to know is that, hat alone, it probably would’ve just been weird. Instead he spent a good chunk of his presentation talking about how mad he was at other companies that make games. Disliking your competitors isn’t really new, but it was like they fucked his wife or something? He complained about how uncreative and uninteresting other shooters are, and then announced a battle royale mode. Which, again, if you don’t like video games, is sort of like saying you’re tired of television shows being stale repeats of one another and then announcing your big new drama, “Law & Fire: Hospital Unit.”

It’s just… You know what I love most about being into video games? Just how normal nobody is ever capable of being! It’s just the best. I’m glad that one of the industries I’ve hitched my wagon to is packed with weird rich dudes who are filled with misdirected rage. It would be wonderful if there were one video game event in which every executive acted within an approximation of normality. Just one event! Just one little event where they don’t talk like a RoboCop business executive or complain about the biggest problems with the industry while representing all of them at once.

What’s probably the biggest bummer for fans is that Splitgate 2 isn’t even a bad game! It’s not my cup of tea, but of the cups of tea that aren’t for me, it ain’t a bad one. It’s like celebrating the completion of a marathon by shooting your foot off.

Anyway, if you are into this type of thing, I might have written a column making fun of the whole situation.

Recommendations

Just finished The Warren by Brian Evenson, one of my favorite horror authors. Or, really, just authors period. It’s a short book, which is always a great way to start any recommendation. Nobody is expecting you to read eight books of a saga here. Even calling it a novella might be a bit of a stretch. Really, this is a short story that dreamed of being a big boy and closed his eyes real tight and almost - just almost! - made it.

So how is it? Great! It’s Brian Evenson! He’s the type of horror I love most: Sad and lost and lonely, baby! I would call myself a pretty big horror fan, but I tend to shy away from a lot of the more torture-forward horror. Pain is shocking and uncomfortable to me, but there’s something more interesting about the idea of not even knowing where you are, who you are, or even what you are. Especially if onto those questions is added, “and what the fuck am I supposed to do now?”

That’s, to make this a Reading Rainbow review, basically what The Warren is about. Someone called “X” - which is actually explained well and not just a hokey sci-fi first draft name - is trying to figure out if he’s the last human being alive. He only has a degrading computer and some even less stable clues left by the people before him. This itself is complicated by the fact that he does find another person in hibernation but that person both doesn’t want to be found and disagrees on whether they’re even the same species. Questions are raised and not answered.

Even writing this much is spoiling too much and, again, the book is so very short that I feel like me going paragraphs deep in it is actually doing it an injustice. And, hey, I will recommend Brian Evenson to anyone at any time.

A shorter recommendation: Fast Fusion for the Switch 2. At $15, it’s one of the cheaper launch games. It’s also not just a port of another game like Cyberpunk 2077. It’s one of the few brand new games for the Switch 2, and it looks incredible. You like F-Zero? You’ll like this. You don’t like F-Zero? Hard to say if you’ll like this! But if you’ve got a Switch 2 and you’ve been looking for something that isn’t either $80 or a game you’ve played before on a PC, Fast Fusion.

Upcoming Events

Have you bought my book yet? If not, which version of emotional manipulation would get you over the finish line? Threats? You better fucking get it! Emotional blackmail? I always support the thing you do, but you can’t support me? Pathetic pleading? Please! Please love me! Whatever you need to convince you, I’m willing to do that. The publisher says we’re doing well, but I don’t feel like I’m doing well, and I probably won’t feel that way until everyone says they love me and I believe it!

That said, if you did like the book, I’ll be doing a memoir authors panel next week on June 25th in Bryant Park in New York City. This is my first memoir and, depending on how quickly death embraces me like a lost loved one, possibly my last! So if you want to hear about how I put all the words in the order I chose, come on out! Also, the other two people on the panel are pretty great and will likely have legit advice.

There still looks like one more thing for next week that could be pretty cool, but I’m still nervous about it. This sounds like a lie, I know. It’s really more me being excited but incredibly cautious after a lifetime of self-jinxing.

That’s It!

Thanks as always. What are you folks up to? Any good recommendations? Please give me something. Something to hold onto.