A few weeks ago, we laid out the timeline for the Weyland-Yutani Cinematic Universe, the WYCU, and in the footnotes we mentioned the rumours of an unnamed Predator project due to come out in 2025.
And this week, that rumour was confirmed:
We have Season 4 of Deadliest Warrior coming out on June 6th. Predator:KoK is set up as an anthology movie, with three arcs, following Vikings, Samurai, and WWII US fighter pilots (in what looks to be the Pacific theatre). Interesting alternatives, and I’m really excited to see how they come to the screen.
This should land somewhere in the middle of our WYCU rewatch, so we’ll likely step back for a special episode to cover it during the middle of our chronology.
Join us online as we shout “Who… Is… Deadliest?” at the screen and online.
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.
Sometime algorithmic feeds can allow for joyous moments of serendipity, when stuff outside your sphere breaks through those digital walls. Case in point:
This cute little digital short showed up on the feed. And rather than let it flow away into the ephemera of the river, I thought I’d capture it here.
Why did it show up? No idea. Perhaps it’s because other Blender-animated shorts, like the Oscar-nominated Flow (2024) are attracting attention (of which more on later), but regardless, happy to have it show up.
One of the challenges of drifting away from the academic institutions is the reduced access to academic work. This has impacted the material I’m able to draw on for research and reporting. So when a good open access database is available, such as the one provided by UC Santa Barbara, it’s nice to keep track of it, and in this case, share.
We’ll squirrel this away under the Research page for now, and add more updates to that as we go.
Was struggling a bit with the creativity over the holidays, which spilled over into the new year and the seemingly unending flood of bad news. As you can tell by the existence of this post, I’ve managed to get things moving a bit. The first step was turning off the firehose, and you can follow that link to read about some constructive actions to take towards your media health.
The second step is to keep creating. I mentioned my struggle in passing and was pointed toward this interview with Heather Cox Richardson via The National Press Club. The relevant bit is at the 57-minute mark (spoilers) which this clip below should link directly to:
The gist of her advice is to “behave with joy”, as a means of resistance against an authoritarian government. “Do the things that matter to you, and that you can bring to the people around you.” “We can meet the moment, and as scholars, be honest”, and that by doing the best (scholarly) work we can, we contribute back to humanity.
Which seems like a lot to ask from a blog and media channels that mostly focus on the intersection of sci-fi and technology, but it’s what we’re doing. Maybe our project is a little bit wider in scope than we initially thought.
But the big takeaway, at least for me, is that moment of reflection that I like what we’re doing here, and I enjoy doing the podcast, the blog, the newsletter, the videos (about which I hope to show you more soon!) and the various other bits we have going on here.
So, after a brief period of stasis, we’ll get back to the things that bring us joy, and find the joy in sharing them with you as well. See ya soon!
