For the passed week I've been trying to write a piece about the (abysmal) state of the Republican primaries, but I feel like there isn't really anything I can say that isn't being said in the media already. As someone who follows politics, it's sort of refreshing to see that MSNBC actually makes a point I can agree with instead of spouting their usual meaningless "news" or gushing over whichever candidate promises to lower capital gains the most. But it makes writing about it that much harder because it tends to make the forum feel like an echo chamber. So let's talk about video games again!
I decided to see what all the goddamn fuss was about and downloaded a demo of Battlefield 3. I tried it at a friend's house last month but the Electronic Arts hub program (let's admit it - they ripped off of Steam and somehow made it worse) kept crashing every five minutes. Maybe EA should hire less lazy programmers and stop coding everything into web browsers. There was one amusing moment where the game crashed entirely and booted my friend to his desktop, but a large flashing icon read, "You are Playing Battlefield 3!" remained.
It brings to mind a terrifying vision of the future where we all just stare at blinking computer screens that tell us, "You are having fun, human unit 76,332,4-B! Isn't this fun!? Look at all the goddamn fun you're having, human slave, spend money!" And then I remembered that Farmville exists.
Here's why modern army games creep me out, and why the irony surrounding them is both delicious because of their relentless popularity, and terrifying when taken in context.
In any good narrative, particularly one where the hero must face death to complete his quest, the part that makes it good is that moment when we, the audience, think it's all over for them. And then, against all odds, the hero pulls the win out of his ass, trounces the enemy in the most spectacular fashion, and goes home triumphant. The most accessible example of this is, of course, the end of the first Star Wars movie when Darth Vader is about to shoot Luke's ship down. Just as our hero is about to meet his maker, Han Solo rescues him and the entire battle is decided in its final seconds. It's a very basic mechanic of storytelling that builds tension and keeps the audience rooting for the good guy, and if you pay attention, almost everything does it. And why? 'Cause it fucking works.
Modern military games, namely Battlefield 3 and the greater of two evils, Modern Warfare, kind of throw this aside. Or in their terms, shove bits of broken glass in it's mouth and then hit it with a golf club (yes, there is a YouTube link but it's 13 minutes of bullshit and I will spare you - look up at your own risk). My point is that, as the player, you never really feel sorry for the alleged hero, and there is not a sense that his life is in any real danger at any time. I mean, when you put a rag-tag group of guys in robes and tennis shoes against the biggest military in the world, squaring off against dudes with every weapon, ammunition, armor and resource imaginable available at the press of a button, feeling empathy for the latter is a little hard to swallow. With this in mind, the few minutes of the demo I played were just downright boring. I didn't care - there was some time establishing who the narrative wanted me to think the heroes were, and I didn't buy it for a second. This raises two points.
Another reason why having a symptomatic hero resonates so roundly is that it creates a connection between the fictional hero and the real live audience. We want to see someone struggle to overcome a challenge because we struggle to overcome challenges in our lives too. Sure, they aren't as dramatic as blowing up the Death Star, but the point is that it creates empathy and makes us feel that the narrative is speaking to us, on a personal level, even if it's not.
There's no reason to feel any sympathy for the player-controlled avatars of Battlefield, and the only way any kind of emphatic response can be generated is if you, the player, genuinely feel like you'd want to be in a position of that much power. So, instead of going the route that most narratives go, and playing to our sense of compassion, Battlefield kicks compassion in the taco and appeals to our inner mass-murderer.
Now before you say it, I'm going to explain why this is different than Grand Theft Auto.
In GTA, you can win in the game without getting into a single gunfight with the police, and you are generally encouraged to do so. What good is being a master criminal if you're always getting caught and can't walk anywhere without making scene? The things that got all of the attention in the news were almost exclusively the result of the "Hot Coffee" easter egg (where the player simulates having sex with a prostitute - but it was a joke [albeit bad and extremely sexist] added by the developers and not part of the actual game), and players using cheats to get an unlimited supply of tanks to fight the cops. These aren't parts of the core game and in order to play it within context, the player can't use them. If they do, the game stops being a game and becomes a toy - but that is another argument entirely.
Around the height of GTAs popularity, many people in the media were calling it a "murder simulator"; a term which goes back to the days of Doom. It was wrong in both cases and is generally wrong in the case of all video games. If GTA simulates anything, it is a very Goodfellas-inspired, Hollywood-stylized mob life. Whatever your personal objection to the violence (and believe me, I have a big fucking problem with it), it isn't the reason the game exists.
Battlefield, however, is about as close to the murder simulator as you're going to get. The most disturbing part of the game is a bit where you take the role of a gunner on a support aircraft. A battle rages in the sand of Generic-Muslim-Desert-Country-Stan (cough-Iran-cough) below, and you have to blow up enemy armor before it reaches the scene. At no time are you in any danger, and if the enemy tanks break through your covering fire, the game ends and you have to start over, so there is no dynamic environment - only victory or victory that takes slightly longer. You are so high up the entire battle is fought through a gunner's scope, and as little grey blips scatter from exploding troop carriers, your co-gunner giggles about the ones that are running for their lives, totally at the the mercy of you and an infinite number of machine gun rounds and bombs.
I guess my point is that I don't really understand who this game is for. I see the obvious appeal to 13-year-old boys and Ed Gein, but beyond that, there's no situation there except some kind of power trip with a big splash of ripped-from-the-headlines grit. There's no challenge in it, or context with how it relates to the narrative or anything else - just the simple joy of blowing some motherfuckers to pieces. And unlike Luke blowing up the Death Star, there's no way to even feel like the hero is justified in doing so. What threat do a bunch of dudes in pickups with 30-year-old rifles and limited supplies pose to a fleet of tanks, helicopters, artillery and heavily armored infantry?
I really hate to say this because, because I genuinely feel that gaming is a legitimate form of expression, but those idiots who complained about Doom and GTA have finally been proved a bit right. Which brings me to my last point: where the fuck is all the outrage? Where are the bobble heads and deranged parents going back and forth about how Battlefield and Modern Warfare turned their precious snowflake into a 5th grade Rambo?
Oh right, these games kill brown people in deserts, not zombies or monsters or fictional gangsters.
So we're cool.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Oh no!! The truck have started to move!!
There are only two situations in which I buy a present for myself when I am in absolutely no condition to afford it: Christmas and by birthday, which happen to be only a few weeks apart, so my wallet suffers greatly at my own stupid self-indulgence when I use a pagan holiday and the fact that I'm still alive to lavish myself in gifts.
So for my birthday I picked the Metal Gear HD Collection, and aside from being a sweet deal of three games for just over ten bucks each, they're also three very well done enjoyable ones (helps).
Hideo Kojima must be my nemesis. On the one hand, the aging Japanese game developer is a pompous asshole who hogs the media spotlight, and one of the worst writers in the history of writing. But he does make a damn fun stealth game. The fact is that stealth games, along with old-school point-and-click adventure games, are probably my favorites, which puts me in the extreme minority these days. And at least the Metal Gear series approaches a strong military theme with some thoughtfulness, as opposed to the 'roid-raging boyish bravado of Battlefield or Call of Duty.
Granted those thoughts are almost universally stupid, but the effort is there.
The thing that makes Metal Gear worth it is that the stealth does a number of things right, and follows a strict "do-and-don't" model which makes for a successful stealth game.
1: Constant awareness of visibility
The player in Metal Gear is always aware of how visible he or she is. The crowning game of the MG series (I think), Snake Eater, has a pretty intuitive system of swapping camo uniforms to blend in to surroundings. Granted it gets annoying needing to pause the game every two minutes and get changed because the particular brand of brown wall meshes somewhat better with Chocolate Chip as opposed to Tree Bark, but it's a small price to pay for such a functional system. There are audio cues as well, though it's somewhat unrealistic for trained soldiers to proclaim, "WHO'S THAT!? ... I KNOW I SAW SOMEONE!" every time an errant fern jiggles.
Any game with a stealth element needs to have some way of letting the player know when they're well hidden, exposed, or about to sniffed out.
2: Make stealth a core part of game play, not a "section"
Most shitty games these days try to pull the "something for everyone" maneuver, and include chunks of different game play styles all glued together piecemeal. It's pretty common for most action games to try and break the monotony by including a stealth section, where you need to sneak passed vastly superior foes instead of just shooting them like everything else. It's like the romantic subplot in Transformers: it doesn't make the movie better and more deep and interesting - it just serves to make an already crappy film more schizophrenic and an even bigger piece of shit.
Here's a hint, by the way. If you are developing an action game and life-or-death gunfights get so boring and repetitive you need to spice them up with not gun fighting, you're doing it wrong.
Anyway, Metal Gear lets the sneaking take the foreground makes it relate to everything in game play. Stealth, disguise, or just shooting the place up are always options to deal with situations and the player is never locked in to just following the game's lead from point A to point B. Another game with a good stealth element is Fallout, which is not a stealth game, but always makes sneaking an option as opposed to combat, and has no mandatory stealth levels.
3: Don't punish the player (too much) for mistakes
Most games with stealth levels will fail the player for being seen, and chances are that if your game has a mandatory stealth level, the stealth doesn't function so well and players are going to get seen a lot. Metal Gear does have an optional mode to end the game in defeat if the player is seen (paradoxically called "European Hard" on the menu, which makes my juvenile brain think British porn [this doesn't reflect well on me as a person, does it? {anyway}]) but it's not mandatory. The worst you'll face in Metal Gear is running away from some heavily armored chaps until you find a house to crawl under and wait until they lose interest, also proving that the Soviet Union collapsed due to the Russian military not being able to pay attention to something for more than five minutes. The player can stay and fight if he or she wants but there isn't much of a point and it mostly ends as a big waste of ammo.
4: Complete missions without killing anyone
The point of stealth is not to be seen, correct? So in theory, the best stealth operative would be able to complete the mission and leave the opponents unaware that anything has even happened. The absolute best example of this is an old game from the late 90s called Thief, and the title pretty much sums up the entire game. The player can sneak into and out of a rich douchebag's mansion, bag all the swag, explore the entire place and leave without a single conflict, and the game actively encourages this. Metal Gear provides the player with a silent dart gun that can stun enemies as opposed to killing them. In Snake Eater, there is a wonderfully done and very Heart of Darkness-esque boss battle where the hero must face off against the ghosts of everyone he has killed during the mission. The solution? Don't kill anyone.
Games with designated sneak levels usually just have the player kill enemies in a different way than normal, and never address the fact that the trail of dead bodies might raise some serious questions about beefing up security. Games like Thief and Snake Eater actively discourage the player from fighting or hurting anyone (beyond a dart in the neck).
Of course the real failing of Metal Gear games, that keeps them tumbling down the jagged peaks of perfection time and time again, is the writing. I am currently working through Peace Walker, where the player assumes the role of an ex-CIA agent turned rogue Colombian insurgent. The heroism is layered so thick on this dude that it is difficult to keep in mind that, in the larger narrative, you are actually playing the bad guy. It could be that the writing is so intricate and that it uses point of view so effectively that it masks any sense of wrongdoing and creates true empathy for the character. Or it could be that it's yet another of Hideo Kojima's over-written bowls of rat pee and is so much of a literary eyesore that the player simply has no idea what the fuck is going on.
I'm gonna go with door number two.
So for my birthday I picked the Metal Gear HD Collection, and aside from being a sweet deal of three games for just over ten bucks each, they're also three very well done enjoyable ones (helps).
Hideo Kojima must be my nemesis. On the one hand, the aging Japanese game developer is a pompous asshole who hogs the media spotlight, and one of the worst writers in the history of writing. But he does make a damn fun stealth game. The fact is that stealth games, along with old-school point-and-click adventure games, are probably my favorites, which puts me in the extreme minority these days. And at least the Metal Gear series approaches a strong military theme with some thoughtfulness, as opposed to the 'roid-raging boyish bravado of Battlefield or Call of Duty.
Granted those thoughts are almost universally stupid, but the effort is there.
The thing that makes Metal Gear worth it is that the stealth does a number of things right, and follows a strict "do-and-don't" model which makes for a successful stealth game.
1: Constant awareness of visibility
The player in Metal Gear is always aware of how visible he or she is. The crowning game of the MG series (I think), Snake Eater, has a pretty intuitive system of swapping camo uniforms to blend in to surroundings. Granted it gets annoying needing to pause the game every two minutes and get changed because the particular brand of brown wall meshes somewhat better with Chocolate Chip as opposed to Tree Bark, but it's a small price to pay for such a functional system. There are audio cues as well, though it's somewhat unrealistic for trained soldiers to proclaim, "WHO'S THAT!? ... I KNOW I SAW SOMEONE!" every time an errant fern jiggles.
Any game with a stealth element needs to have some way of letting the player know when they're well hidden, exposed, or about to sniffed out.
2: Make stealth a core part of game play, not a "section"
Most shitty games these days try to pull the "something for everyone" maneuver, and include chunks of different game play styles all glued together piecemeal. It's pretty common for most action games to try and break the monotony by including a stealth section, where you need to sneak passed vastly superior foes instead of just shooting them like everything else. It's like the romantic subplot in Transformers: it doesn't make the movie better and more deep and interesting - it just serves to make an already crappy film more schizophrenic and an even bigger piece of shit.
Here's a hint, by the way. If you are developing an action game and life-or-death gunfights get so boring and repetitive you need to spice them up with not gun fighting, you're doing it wrong.
Anyway, Metal Gear lets the sneaking take the foreground makes it relate to everything in game play. Stealth, disguise, or just shooting the place up are always options to deal with situations and the player is never locked in to just following the game's lead from point A to point B. Another game with a good stealth element is Fallout, which is not a stealth game, but always makes sneaking an option as opposed to combat, and has no mandatory stealth levels.
3: Don't punish the player (too much) for mistakes
Most games with stealth levels will fail the player for being seen, and chances are that if your game has a mandatory stealth level, the stealth doesn't function so well and players are going to get seen a lot. Metal Gear does have an optional mode to end the game in defeat if the player is seen (paradoxically called "European Hard" on the menu, which makes my juvenile brain think British porn [this doesn't reflect well on me as a person, does it? {anyway}]) but it's not mandatory. The worst you'll face in Metal Gear is running away from some heavily armored chaps until you find a house to crawl under and wait until they lose interest, also proving that the Soviet Union collapsed due to the Russian military not being able to pay attention to something for more than five minutes. The player can stay and fight if he or she wants but there isn't much of a point and it mostly ends as a big waste of ammo.
4: Complete missions without killing anyone
The point of stealth is not to be seen, correct? So in theory, the best stealth operative would be able to complete the mission and leave the opponents unaware that anything has even happened. The absolute best example of this is an old game from the late 90s called Thief, and the title pretty much sums up the entire game. The player can sneak into and out of a rich douchebag's mansion, bag all the swag, explore the entire place and leave without a single conflict, and the game actively encourages this. Metal Gear provides the player with a silent dart gun that can stun enemies as opposed to killing them. In Snake Eater, there is a wonderfully done and very Heart of Darkness-esque boss battle where the hero must face off against the ghosts of everyone he has killed during the mission. The solution? Don't kill anyone.
Games with designated sneak levels usually just have the player kill enemies in a different way than normal, and never address the fact that the trail of dead bodies might raise some serious questions about beefing up security. Games like Thief and Snake Eater actively discourage the player from fighting or hurting anyone (beyond a dart in the neck).
Of course the real failing of Metal Gear games, that keeps them tumbling down the jagged peaks of perfection time and time again, is the writing. I am currently working through Peace Walker, where the player assumes the role of an ex-CIA agent turned rogue Colombian insurgent. The heroism is layered so thick on this dude that it is difficult to keep in mind that, in the larger narrative, you are actually playing the bad guy. It could be that the writing is so intricate and that it uses point of view so effectively that it masks any sense of wrongdoing and creates true empathy for the character. Or it could be that it's yet another of Hideo Kojima's over-written bowls of rat pee and is so much of a literary eyesore that the player simply has no idea what the fuck is going on.
I'm gonna go with door number two.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Church and Poop
Ho boy, gotten behind on the bloggings. But before we get into my fun ass day, let's play a round of the hit new game show Well That's Presumptive of You, Starbucks!
For Christmas, X got me a Starbucks sampler thing with a couple coffees and teas and a package of hot chocolate mix. When I took the hot chocolate mix out, the box had this to tell me:
How the hell do you know what I loved as a child? Like most kids in the 80s, I drank Ovaltine. And I didn't have the inclination to pour salt in it because that sounds disgusting. A typical holiday drink at Starbucks already has more calories than a fucking Big Mac, and apparently they don't skimp on the salt content either. And just so readers are aware, the taste is something I'd imagine you could recreate by melting a gourmet sea salt chocolate bar in a crock pot and thinning with two cups camel ball sack sweat. Point is, Starbucks, don't assume to know what I like or assume that any normal healthy human being mixes salt into their sweet drinks. Well that's presumptive of you, Starbucks!
On to my day. Today I went to church. That doesn't sound so weird, so let me elaborate. Today I want to MEGACHURCH. There is a local mega-church that my friend D told be about - the kind that sends out amusing broadcasts containing some incredibly sexist rhetoric. Here's an example:
"Men are beer mugs, and women are wine flutes. It's a man's job to teach a woman to love her weakness, so she doesn't become a firefighter, because a woman can't rescue people from burning buildings."
Don't know what kind of chicks these people hang around, but some of my female friends could rescue Andre the fucking giant from a school of starvation-crazed hammerhead sharks. But that's besides the point. We didn't the good stuff today - the nutbag preacher didn't do the sermon. Instead we got this twenty-something black kid, and I only say black because I mean black in the way that Halle Berry is black, as in dark-skinned-but-not-African-looking-because-those-folks-scare-off-Whitey.
The "sermon," if you could call it that, started with the church band playing some Christian rock with the lyrics projected onto matching screens in a cheap purple-backed Power Point macro (no photos, sorry. Use your goddamn imagination). The entire hall was more like a community college theater than a church, and the facade of the building looked like a downtown Washington DC mattress outlet store. The only thing identifying the church as a church was a business style overhang with some hipster scribble of a Jesus fish that looked like someone's two-year old nephew got ahold of some markers and the owner just said, "Meh."
Anyway the band played some songs, then the young preacher got up and started preaching. I'd quote from the sermon but there really isn't any point - it was a wonderful display of perfectly circular logic. The point was essentially that, God doesn't care about your good works, only that you accept Jesus as your savior and get your sins forgiven at regular intervals. I felt kind of insulted with this little bastard in his Imma-Hit-The-Clubs outfit telling me not to aspire to everything because I'm shit, you're shit, he's shit and we're all just shit. There was some anti-science logic in there but it was so safe and under the guise of faithfulness that it didn't really turn into comedic gold (saying that we don't need to move passed the cross as opposed to launching into totally batshit loco theories about how evolution is wrong). The only time it got juicy is when this kid talked about how he traveled to the Middle East and totally told some Jews and some Muslims that he was like, better than them, which as D explained, is kind of the church's shtick. Overall it was pretty interesting seeing a bunch of forty and fifty year olds raise their hands in praise while they're getting yelled at by the most passive-aggressive community college sophomore in known universe.
Part of what freaks me out so much is the insistence that Jesus or God or whatever is talking to you and speaking to you through signs. Here's an example: I spent the last week vomiting my major organs out thanks to a nasty stomach virus. Interesting thing about my stomach virus diet of Gatoraid, rice, and Pepto Bismol is that it is not conducive to taking dumps, so after the virus I was a bit backed up. Today that ended, coincidentally, after going to the church sermon. Had I been a real believer, I'd think that basking in the greasy cornrows of the preacher man healed by bowels. But when you think about it for two seconds, it probably had more to do with the fact that afterward, I ate pancakes, Taylor ham and three fucking cups of coffee.
The religious mindset would dictate that Jesus felt sorry for my neglected anus and put the poor guy back to work, and even though to most religious people that probably sounds insane, that is the fundamentalist belief. That you take no credit for anything and that the mythic daddy in the sky does it all for you. No risk. No responsibility. No consequence.
Mega-churches scare me, as they should anyone, as should fundamentalism in any sense scare anyone. But when churches arrange gigs like this with unenthusiastic life music and debate team dropout inspirational speakers blaring hipster slang at a bunch of fucking soccer parents, you can't but giggle (I almost lost it during a song where the bridge had a vocal "oh-oh" and the projector kept showing the lyrics, "oh-oh"). It reminds me of North Korea. There is no way one can deny the kind of horror and human misery that exists in that nation, nor the fact that their militaristic presence in that part of the world destabilizes the entire Eastern sea board.
But when they make it a state sponsored truism that the new dear leader learned to drive at 75 miles per hour down winding mountain roads with perfect accuracy at age eight, they are So. Fucking. Funny.
For Christmas, X got me a Starbucks sampler thing with a couple coffees and teas and a package of hot chocolate mix. When I took the hot chocolate mix out, the box had this to tell me:
"Salted Caramel: The drink you loved as a child - now all grown up."
How the hell do you know what I loved as a child? Like most kids in the 80s, I drank Ovaltine. And I didn't have the inclination to pour salt in it because that sounds disgusting. A typical holiday drink at Starbucks already has more calories than a fucking Big Mac, and apparently they don't skimp on the salt content either. And just so readers are aware, the taste is something I'd imagine you could recreate by melting a gourmet sea salt chocolate bar in a crock pot and thinning with two cups camel ball sack sweat. Point is, Starbucks, don't assume to know what I like or assume that any normal healthy human being mixes salt into their sweet drinks. Well that's presumptive of you, Starbucks!
On to my day. Today I went to church. That doesn't sound so weird, so let me elaborate. Today I want to MEGACHURCH. There is a local mega-church that my friend D told be about - the kind that sends out amusing broadcasts containing some incredibly sexist rhetoric. Here's an example:
"Men are beer mugs, and women are wine flutes. It's a man's job to teach a woman to love her weakness, so she doesn't become a firefighter, because a woman can't rescue people from burning buildings."
Don't know what kind of chicks these people hang around, but some of my female friends could rescue Andre the fucking giant from a school of starvation-crazed hammerhead sharks. But that's besides the point. We didn't the good stuff today - the nutbag preacher didn't do the sermon. Instead we got this twenty-something black kid, and I only say black because I mean black in the way that Halle Berry is black, as in dark-skinned-but-not-African-looking-because-those-folks-scare-off-Whitey.
The "sermon," if you could call it that, started with the church band playing some Christian rock with the lyrics projected onto matching screens in a cheap purple-backed Power Point macro (no photos, sorry. Use your goddamn imagination). The entire hall was more like a community college theater than a church, and the facade of the building looked like a downtown Washington DC mattress outlet store. The only thing identifying the church as a church was a business style overhang with some hipster scribble of a Jesus fish that looked like someone's two-year old nephew got ahold of some markers and the owner just said, "Meh."
Anyway the band played some songs, then the young preacher got up and started preaching. I'd quote from the sermon but there really isn't any point - it was a wonderful display of perfectly circular logic. The point was essentially that, God doesn't care about your good works, only that you accept Jesus as your savior and get your sins forgiven at regular intervals. I felt kind of insulted with this little bastard in his Imma-Hit-The-Clubs outfit telling me not to aspire to everything because I'm shit, you're shit, he's shit and we're all just shit. There was some anti-science logic in there but it was so safe and under the guise of faithfulness that it didn't really turn into comedic gold (saying that we don't need to move passed the cross as opposed to launching into totally batshit loco theories about how evolution is wrong). The only time it got juicy is when this kid talked about how he traveled to the Middle East and totally told some Jews and some Muslims that he was like, better than them, which as D explained, is kind of the church's shtick. Overall it was pretty interesting seeing a bunch of forty and fifty year olds raise their hands in praise while they're getting yelled at by the most passive-aggressive community college sophomore in known universe.
Part of what freaks me out so much is the insistence that Jesus or God or whatever is talking to you and speaking to you through signs. Here's an example: I spent the last week vomiting my major organs out thanks to a nasty stomach virus. Interesting thing about my stomach virus diet of Gatoraid, rice, and Pepto Bismol is that it is not conducive to taking dumps, so after the virus I was a bit backed up. Today that ended, coincidentally, after going to the church sermon. Had I been a real believer, I'd think that basking in the greasy cornrows of the preacher man healed by bowels. But when you think about it for two seconds, it probably had more to do with the fact that afterward, I ate pancakes, Taylor ham and three fucking cups of coffee.
The religious mindset would dictate that Jesus felt sorry for my neglected anus and put the poor guy back to work, and even though to most religious people that probably sounds insane, that is the fundamentalist belief. That you take no credit for anything and that the mythic daddy in the sky does it all for you. No risk. No responsibility. No consequence.
Mega-churches scare me, as they should anyone, as should fundamentalism in any sense scare anyone. But when churches arrange gigs like this with unenthusiastic life music and debate team dropout inspirational speakers blaring hipster slang at a bunch of fucking soccer parents, you can't but giggle (I almost lost it during a song where the bridge had a vocal "oh-oh" and the projector kept showing the lyrics, "oh-oh"). It reminds me of North Korea. There is no way one can deny the kind of horror and human misery that exists in that nation, nor the fact that their militaristic presence in that part of the world destabilizes the entire Eastern sea board.
But when they make it a state sponsored truism that the new dear leader learned to drive at 75 miles per hour down winding mountain roads with perfect accuracy at age eight, they are So. Fucking. Funny.
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