FPMC: Fall Passive Media Consumption

Well, before Demonspawn Ajit Pai, Comcast and the FCC totally ruin the internet as we know it, I might as well continue to reflect on some entertainment with no major spoilers.

You can pretend like you don't hear the title music playing...

I blew through Stranger Things 2, and was glad to see every character have something to do; instead of the 4 boys working on one thing together, the teens their thing, and the adults on another, they were divided and mixed and the parallel storytelling was awesomely done.

I saw a chart earlier in the year that explained how sophisticated television is now compared to what our grandparents grew up with. My only gripe with shows/movies with multi-layered storytelling is when the smart-ass creators also try to time warp. Cloud Atlas, anyone? Not everyone can direct a Memento, and when the visual communication gets lost, so do the poor suckers that have to watch it. This makes me think of my first gripe with Justice League 2017.

Who turned out the lights on all of these movies?

The first hour or so of Justice League is like reading the first paragraph of 5 different essays with no transitions. That would result in a B- in English 090. You still pass, but that paper ain't being put up on the fridge. It's hard to have 5 different characters intersect, but that movie cost $300m. Perhaps having a director could have helped. Anyway, an hour in, the movie gets to the good stuff, and has its funny moments, a few awesome brawls, and was more enjoyable than I'd imagined. I wished the score was better and the heroes didn't dumbly let the bad guy steal a really important weapon, but I thought it was cool.

Next up: Disney/Pixar's Coco, the movie set in Mexico during the Day of the Dead festival. Disney's stepped up its culture game fo sho. Moana had Polynesian voice actors and was based on Pacific Island mythology and Coco's main VA cast had Jon Ratzenberger, a Pixar staple, as the only non-Hispanic. The movie was gorgeous as expected, and I hadn't seen any previews to tell me what to expect. The only gripe was the neglectful parents nearby who let their kids wander the dark theater while they were on their phones, as well as the too-long-for-a-short-film Winter Special about Olaff from Frozen trying to find a new "chra-dish-shin" (tradition) for that time of the year. The last Pixar short I saw was the Hawaiian Islands lava video before Inside Out that had my eyes...err, sweating.

no te metas con la abuela!

Most importantly, I got to see the culture's views on the afterlife as opposed to sometimes gruesome, immediate and sad elements of death I'm used to seeing. Dia de Los Muertos has a lot in common with Japan's Obon and Korea's Chuseok, visiting family graves, making shrines and offering food to the dead. In the US, we have Memorial Day, which I've never seen more than a visit to a deceased serviceman's grave, some flowers and kind words. It's easy to feel like there's no culture in the US when our sparse holidays are more about the general concept of family togetherness than anything purposeful. By contrast, every Korean and Japanese person I've ever met could describe their family's rituals in great detail, adding where their family differs from the cultural norm. Ahh well, I still enjoy the togetherness.

'Ey, man.

I also saw Thor 3, which was delightfully weird and funny. The planet most of the movie took place on was eclectic, somewhere between The Fifth Element and Tron. The movie's director and voice actor for Korg (the blue rock dude), is none other than Taika Waititi, who makes really funny movies like The Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which I also watched recently.

UPDATE: How could I forget the most off the chain show of them all. I am 100000% a Trekkie after re-watching The Next Generation earlier this year. Now I understand a bit of the sting of watching the occasionally corny, clever insight into humanity and philosophy the show would drop on you went to the flashy sci-fi action flicks that JJ Abrams brought us. Take this aesthetic (the show looks absolutely gorgeous), add back the humanity with some witty quips and smart shit and you get my new favorite thing in the universe: Star Trek: Discovery.

She's thinking of some clever shit.

This show is badass. Michael Burnam...half a season hasn't explained her name yet...is passionate to her own demise, and puts a lot of people in their places. I love watching Sonequa Martin-Green perform. I am upset to read that she is already married. She's gorgeous, but this is a case where I admire both the actor and the character. The captain she serves ends up sending your mind thinking the worst only to have something else happen. Get caught up, y'all. There are 11 episodes right now, as it's on its mid-season break til January.

Grey Friday: Know your brands

Dudes. Chicks. Calm that consumer rush. This is a hard one, cause I try harder than the average Joe to be frugal and not financially wasteful, but I do get an extra blood rush during November's consumer push. It's no secret that Black Friday deals are businesses' chance to get rid of old inventory. While that's no problem in itself (that's a good frugal direction to be headed,) be careful of overloading on junk.

My best advice for thriving frugality is to know your good third party brands. Spend a few minutes on Amazon or CNET to learn some known flaws with big brands or product lines. For example, none of the LG tvs I've seen are not very good at handling black levels...shadows, facial hair and the letterbox lines all look "neon black," instead of having varying levels of depth. Samsung has a track record of terrible customer service. Stores used to use different types of cables to sell different tiers. HDMI (the current standard) for Samsung and Sony, and component cables (extremely limited in color depth and resolution) for Vizio and Spectre. I haven't seen this practice for at least 5 years, though. The stores may have realized that some people don't have the $200 extra to get the name brand; or maybe they realized it was a shitty underhanded practice. Ultimately, custom settings can make your cheapie TV look much better.

And please, please adjust your picture settings...a 2nd-tier TV is very capable of looking like the picture on the left.

Sometimes, foreign brands are as cheap as third party, but have amazingly high standards. For headphones, Beats are overpriced and bass-heavy, and you're better off getting the German-engineered Sennheisers and spending the extra cash on something else. Logitech, Swiss, makes great, affordable products that last forever. In the realms of computers, Acer and Asus, Taiwanese, sells laptops with better hardware than HPs that cost almost half as much.

I won't weigh in on fashion-related Black Friday sales because part of my frugality means I'm crisp, but not current *brushes off shoulder.* I also won't say what stores to avoid, though 'doorbuster' sales make me imagine the worst, and I'd personally just order online at my own pace. Our favorite retailers are doing sales all month long, so there's no need to skip out on your loved ones Thursday night after the Martinelli's is still washing down the third piece of pie you crammed down. We aren't drinking and driving, after all.

If you're only looking for a few things, the amount you save in not paying tax on Newegg.com, or the free shipping from many sellers might cancel out the lower-priced local deal if you factor in your personal time, gas, and hospital bills associated with stick fighting over the last SNES classic at store price. (Damnit, Nintendo, just make more; it's not that hard of a concept.) Year-round, consider DealNews, TechBargains and woot for daily deals; there's no reason to pay big box retailers' rent, line Shell Oil's pockets with money, and miss out on your cousins' cracked-voice rendition of Poker Face when you can have stuff sent to you.

Muh-muh-muh-mahhh

Last warning, stores will probably try and getcha with one of their store credit cards that gives you 5% cash back or 10% off every purchase. Often, you can find a better deal on the items themselves online with a little bit of searching, and just not spend the 5 or 10% in the first place. That means you're not paying interest on it, or forced to spend said rebate at that very same store! Besides, I have a hard time cancelling unused, unneeded lines of credit, and that doesn't help anyone! As always, keep your spend demons in check, and think about that debt you have to pay back at the end of the month for that chocolate robot frog that was 30% off. Have a good Black Friday, but more importantly, a great Thanksgiving.

Another Fall Gaming Spree

a little subtle South Park reference action

I'm on fire! Over the last month, I've taken a chunk out of backlog indie arcade games, including my 2017 To Play list. The biggest barrier to getting the Platinum on SteamWorld: Heist involved collecting hats that appear randomly. This meant grinding easy kills with overpowered characters for a handful of hours before realizing that the $5 DLC significantly decreased the grind. Since I liked the base game anyway, I was happy to part with the funds and finally finished up both the base platinum and the DLC trophies in a quick 5 hours.

Ride the jetstream

Next up was Abzu, a beautiful undersea exploration game very similar to Journey. In terms of difficulty, it was very chillax, and the road to completion is 5-6 hours. The game is gorgeous, and really atmospheric, so play it in the dark with your sedative of choice! This game was free for PS+ members in May this year, so hopefully you already have it.

The graphics are as great as they need to be

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture was superbly mundane. Recently, I'd seen Transformers: The Last Knight, which is a dumb story about how the Knights of the Round Table are connected with the Transformers, the robot aliens from some other planet. Rapture is a stark contrast to this. You're in a super ordinary but abandoned town, and you collect memories that clue you in as to what happened to everybody. There's not much of a twist, as you learn pretty quickly that some strange light-cum-virus took whisked people off to a strange dimension that you don't really get to explore. The voice acting is compelling, the very average town is graphically crisp, clean and realistic. It's a slow-moving game, but the path to platinum can be completed over a weekend. This was another free PS+ title in the last year or so, and I recommend it if you're tired of getting your ass kicked at games!

*Ahem* Coarse language *straightens necktie*

Basic AI, basic towers, pretty simple

Continuing my theme of relaxing, low-difficulty, cheap-or-free trophy hunting, Royal Defense was a $2 impulse purchase for me. It's a very forgiving tower defense game, and can be completed in a weekend as well. The game crashed twice, one time actually erasing my saved progress. Luckily it was an hour or so of progress, and I memorized the tower placement, catching up pretty quickly. My advice for this is that every 10 levels (there are 60), you might pop out to the XMB and upload saved data to the cloud, and continue playing. It's a bit below average for its genre, but $2 for a weekend and some trophies worked for me.

Hue is a bit of a creeper sometimes

Next up, Hue, a free PS+ title this month. Hue is a puzzle game with a handful of headscratchers out of 60 or so tasks, meaning it's not very difficult at all. You start out in a black and white world and slowly discover colors, while learning about a person who periodically leaves notes for you. The main mechanic is turning the background a certain color, which vanishes blocks, lasers and platforms as well. Fuchsia boulder tumbling furiously at you? Quick, change the color and it disappears past you! Looking for a door? Maybe the orange background is the same color, so you have to shift. That's what Hue is all about. I did everything in about 10 hours, as there is backtracking that makes you re-solve a bunch of the puzzles.

Yep...

Last but not least is Oceanhorn, one of my most looked-forward-to indie titles all year, though it was released in 2014. The game idea was sold to me as a Zelda clone. Sold! The only complaint so far is the direction isn't very straightforward, so I spend a lot of time revisiting the wrong places, trying to find new access points with my new items. Ahh well, besides looking and playing like a Zelda game, there is also an exp-based leveling system, so that's neat. I've barely put 3 hours into the game, so will be working on that in November.

This list of games did great damage to my backlog, though only 2 of them were free, so I lose some frugal points there. I hope to gain those back, as one of my best friends just loaned me The Witcher, Final Fantasy XV, and its DLC.

Game on, people!