Dr Implausible – The Implausi.blog

The WYCU

This has been on my mind for a little bit, ever since last summer when seeing Alien:Romulus in the theatre. Of course, that along with Deadpool and Wolverine led to our exploration of the Nostalgia curve. But following Romulus a discussion with a friend led to the discussion of the shared timelines of the Alien and Predator franchises, and the realization that I haven’t actually seen most of the Predator films, save for the first two, and still hadn’t gotten around to seeing the well-regarded Prey either.

I was due for re-watch, or watch in many cases.

So with learning today about Alien: Earth, a new TV series set in the Alien universe will be coming to streaming in the summer of 2025, I thought it was time to start that re-watch. However, that’s a lot of movies to get through before summer, and we’ve still got Andor season 2 and some other projects going on too.

(Yes, my media consumption occurs at a glacial pace; I get enough free time to get through maybe one or two movies a week.)

But…

What if we watched our way through the WYCU chronologically?

The WYCU is the Weyland-Yutani Cinematic Universe, of course, one of the key pieces of memetic connective tissue between the two (aside from the xenomorph skull inside the predator ship in Predator 2. It’s amazing how much inspiration comes from a little piece of throw-away set dressing.) Weyland Yutani, W-Y for short, is the interstellar megacorp behind much of the machinations of the Alien franchise, and they have their hand in the going on of the Predator-verse as well. Much like CHOAM from the Dune franchise, they’ve spread across the galaxy, and have their fingers (or talons?) in pretty much everything.

I think I’ve we’ve mentioned it in passing when talking about our EvilCorp series, a look at the MegaCorps that permeate the science fiction settings of the future, showing up in everything from present-day cyberpunk settings like Shadowrun to the aforementioned Dune 20000 years in the future.

(If I haven’t mentioned EvilCorp yet, then here’s where we started.)

But we digress: what about the WYCU chronologically? The list has been laid our by others (find a link), so we’re by no means the first, but the nice thing is with Alien: Earth set 2 years before the original 1979 Alien film, it means a chronological re-watch mostly involves the Predator franchise (and about an hour of Prometheus).

Sorry, by chronological I mean by within the continuity, not release order. This, this has some potential. There’s only 9 movies or so to “catch-up” to the continuity before Alien: Earth comes out in “summer 2025”. We can do this.

For fun, and future reference, here’s what the WCYU chronology looks like:

WCYU Chronology

Title	‘Verse	Year	Chrono Order
Prometheus *	A	2012	1
Prey	P	2022	2
Predator	P	1987	3
Predator 2	P	1990	4
Alien v Predator	X	2004	5
Alien v Predator 2: Requiem	X	2007	6
The Predator	P	2018	7
Predators	P	2010	8
Predator: Badlands***	P	2025	9
Prometheus **	A	2012	10
Alien: Covenant	A	2017	11
Alien: Earth	A	2025	12
Alien	A	1979	13
Alien: Romulus	A	2024	14
Aliens	A	1986	15
Alien³	A	1992	16
Alien: Resurrection	A	1997	17

*: the first bit of Prometheus, in the distant past
**: the rest of the movie, as it appears in the main timeline
***: there's also a rumored stealth Predator movie slated for 2025 that may come out before Badlands, but we probably won't see that until it's too late

Dredge (2023)

In a rare turn of events, I recently completed a video game. This happens much less often than one would think (and not counting the recent Half-Life playthroughs I mentioned a little while ago). This is partly due to time, and perhaps partly due to engagement, as the pacing of many games, once the “gameplay loop” is firmly established is some combination of slow, boring, or frustrating.

But there’s something zen-like about a good fishing game. Enter Dredge (2023):

This is a boat-based fishing game with a dark plot, where you start off with a simple boat, not a lot of memories, and a fishing village with more going on behind the scenes. The gameplay is relatively simple: sail boat, spot fish, get fish, sail back, sell fish, try not to lose your mind.

This is the dark twist behind the game: a lot of the fish are Weird, and the locals too, and the various setting elements would seem right at home in an expansion for the Arkham Horror board game. As you continue fishing to fill your hold with the various species for cash money, more and more of them start turning up wrong.

And as they get weirder and weirder, and you progress through more of the zones of the game, the story builds up as well. I really liked the different places to fish, the relative ease of following along the main storyline, and how I was able to complete the main arc of the story at about the same time as I had gotten (most) of the unlocks. It never felt too grindy, and if there was a grind, well, I was just doing some more fishing.

I guess the lesson here might be that it’s not a grind if it’s a grind that you like.

Anyhoo, the game never outstayed it’s welcome, and progress was enough to make me feel like I was moving forward, even when I was a little bit stuck. I finished it, and went back for the alternate endings, and enjoyed how they got to the finish. Bravo!

Recommended to check out if you see it on a sale. I got it off Epic, and enjoyed it a lot.

Where have the mixtapes gone?

“How did we find new music back in the day?” This question was making the rounds on one of the social media sites the other day, and it got me thinking. Partly because of my own return to purchasing music directly over the past year, and partly due to our ongoing engagement with nostalgia culture (which we talked about at length last summer – see the Nostalgia Curve series).

And of course, as with all things millenial and younger on social media, “back in the day” is some combination of “before the internet” and “last century”.

Rude!

The answer is a little simpler though: papers and zines, word of mouth, and mixtapes. The print media still exists, even if it’s not nearly as influential or dominant as it was in the past (and we can get into a bit of the history of the local magazines like Vox or Brave Words and Bloody Knuckles, and how they were foundational for the various scenes in the 1990s), but the mix-tape seems to have fallen largely by the wayside.

Punk-O-Rama III (1998, Epitaph records) – Back cover and tracklist

Of course “mixtape” is a term that encapsulates the platonic ideal of what was shared. A lot of mixtapes were compilation CDs (above) and LPs (below) too. Often this was arranged by the label, to feature singles of as much of their talent as possible*, as with the Epitaph “Punk-O-Rama” series, with Volume III shown above. But pre-internet (or at least, before music on the internet became widely accessible, and 1998’s Punk-O-Rama III was right on the cusp of that), it was one of the reliable ways for a young lad to check out a lot of bands, or even just get a single you were looking for. Distribution wasn’t great “back in the day” either, and a lot of times you were stuck with that you could get your hands on.

Rock Sizzlers (1984, Polystar) – Back cover and tracklist

And what you could get your hands on was wildly erratic. Witness 1984’s Rock Sizzlers, from Polystar above. A mix of top 40 hits, movie soundtrack singles (Flashdance apparently being popular back then. You can tell by the inclusion of – you guessed it – Frank Stallone), some rock singles, and some pure pop. Modern English, Kiss, Soft Cell, Agnetha Faltskog, and more). That is as eclectic a mix as has every been dreamed up by the writers for a SCTV spoof sketch. Often the mixtapes would be more on theme:

Nutty Numbers (1978, Ktel) – BC and tracklist

…such as 1978’s Nutty Numbers, by Ktel, a collection of comedy and novelty songs with a cute cartoon cover. (I may have overplayed this one more than is healthy for a young developing mind. However, I’m sure modern parents that are all too far aware of Bluey can understand.)…

Canadian Mint (1974, Ktel) – BC and tracklist

… or 1974’s Canadian Mint, also from Ktel, a collection of early seventies singles from what I imagine are Canadian artists. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure, as while I recognize BTO and Chilliwack and The Stampeders from the mandatory replays on Canadian Classic Rock Radio, many of the rest I’ve never heard of at all.

Regardless of the source, the Ktel records shown here shown at least the hints of a theme, of a selection criteria at work, and so are examples of what I like to call “commodified curation“. (We will be talking more about that in a month or so, so right now that’s a bit of a placeholder). This curatorial aspect is key, “back in the day” as it is now. One of the things lamented and lost in this era of algorithmic delivery of content tuned to your interests and needs is that “human touch”. And though this may occasionally allow for moments of serendipity and discovery, more often than not it feeds us more of the same, “variations on a theme”.

Of course when it comes to mixtapes, the actual mixtapes represented one of earlier forms of social media – shared and spreadable between friends, or traded via PO boxes and mail envelopes through addresses listed in the back of the aforementioned zines. Or perhaps the mixtapes are simply the last of the analog social media, along with the other tape traders – both VHS and Beta – of Wrestling and Anime and other more salacious content:

Regardless, the mixtape era represent something lost, something concrete and knowable, a discrete snapshot of a time, place, theme, or choice, plucked out of the endless river of our culture, and fixed in time, as opposed to the eternal now of the digital streams.

There are signs this is changing however. We’ll follow up on this soon.

*: Which makes me think of record labels in terms of wrestling promotions, and hmm, I’m sent. I’m not going to let this analogy die. I need to dig into this one further.

Flow (2024)

Mentioned as an aside in an earlier post on The Lost Tower, Flow (2024, d. Gints Zilbalodis) is a delightful little film made entirely in Blender by a small team of creators from Latvia.

I caught it at our local theatre on the Sunday night of the Oscar’s, jumping at the opportunity to see something new rather than the endless parade of speeches, gowns, and jokes, all of which would be diced up into content sized chunks in the coming days. And it was the right call.

Flow is truly a delight.

It is a narrative entirely without (human) dialogue, though one that is not without communicative action (and I think this needs to be stressed and has mostly flown under the radar in online analysis), and it is thrilling and engrossing throughout it’s runtime, even when the focus is on naps in the sunshine. (Or perhaps especially when the focus is there).

So it’s through this lens that I want to take a deeper look.

Communicative action is a very human-focused view of communication developed by Jurgen Habermas (who we’ve talked about before at length in our podcast episode on the Public Sphere), where the ‘argument” (discussion) is how rational actors deliberate on what actions to take.

And when we start talking about “rationality” our anthropic bias makes us hesitant to see this in animals at all.

But as the ethologists would argue, this isn’t the case: the animals exist in their own lifeworld, and are making rational decisions based on the events and environment around them.

(And before we go too far off on a tangent, yes, that mention of lifeworld, in the Husserlian, phenomenological sense of the world was intentional).

This world, filled with life, reacting to the events around them, filled with inter- and intra-species communication, conveyed without any dialogue, solely through camera angle, sounds samples, and stunning visuals, provides a stunning panorama on which the story can be followed even by our own pets viewing the movie on a TV screen.

It’s a marvelous work.

And the vibe is good too. If you get a chance, check it out in the theatre, where the experience of total cinema can engulf you in the world. But if it’s not playing near you, check it out on whatever streaming service offers it.

And make sure your pets can join you in watching it too.

Highly recommended.

Lady Gaga, “Mayhem” (2025)

Thought I’d branch out, try something completely different, and the new Lady Gaga album was a chance to broaden my horizons a bit. having already started to hear Abracadabra non-stop since its release the night of the 2025 Grammy Awards, I was a little curious what the full album would be like. Turns out, not too shabby indeed.

I haven’t picked up a dance-pop album since Dua Lipa’s “Future Nostalgia” (2020) was on repeat play on the gym’s stereo system, and while decent, I don’t think Mayhem quite hits the heights of that album, though they share some similarities. I quite like the first three tracks (“Disease”, “Abracadabra”, and “Garden of Eden”) and the latter’s callbacks to Lady Gaga’s own “Bad Romance” provides a nice link to her earlier work. Checking the archive, this is the first Lady Gaga album I’ve owned, though obviously her music has been ubiquitous in the 21st century.

The album unfortunately falls off a bit after that. there’s still some decent tunes: “”Killah” sounds funky enough to appear on a Prince album and “Zombieboy” is topical enough to show up on some geek-related soundtrack at some point in time. The remainder of the album blurs together a bit, unfortunately, at least to my untrained ear. What could have been an all-time classic 8-song album, or a good 10-song one feels bloated with the 14 tracks on it. A tighter track selection would’ve served this album well. Still decent enough dance pop, happy enough to see it come up in the shuffle. 8/10

*: I realize I didn’t mention the Bruno Mars duet “Die With A Smile” from 2024 as this has been played tons, but I appreciate the inclusion of the single here, rather than being off on its lonesome in the ether.

**: Choosing to show the CD rather than the case, and it looks like there was a bit of a missed opportunity there to go full “death metal spiderwebs” with the logo, which would have been a nice way to push those boundaries just a bit further. C’est la vie.