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[Days Gone]

Days Gone was - despite its many, many problems - an enjoyable open-world grinder in the end.  Doesn't utilise vehicles very well apart from a couple of driving/jumping puzzles, and the shooting combat is not as good as it could be, but I surprised myself by sticking with it and going platinum.  Nice to get an open world game like this with a finite amount of content and a set end point rather than a seemingly endless circuit of radiant quests - looking at you, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.

Doom annoyed the h*ck out of me, with its tiny, tiny subtitles/tutorials and repetitive gameplay, though to be fair I only got to about level four or so before the constant stop/start arena fights with a gang of the same three or four enemies got really old.  I recall people raving about this at the time but I just don't get the appeal.

[The Sky Is Falling]

The Sky Is Falling and Badge Of Infamy by Lester Del Ray, a writer I have never encountered nor heard of before, somehow.  I didn't really warm to The Sky Is Falling as I tend not to dig isekai* or fantasy in general, but it kept things nice and light and ripped along, and I think I even spotted where the spoof reboot of Dragnet from the 1980s got its one good joke from.  I think if I had any love for the genre I might have got along with it much better, though as it is, it's slight but inoffensive stuff.
Badge Of Infamy is much better, positing a dystopian corporate-owned future before such things were popular in fiction - I got the impression that the "lobbies" were based more on aggressive versions of unions than they were corporate cabals - and the main portion of the book feels like it could easily have been an influence on The Angry Planet strip from Tornado.  Writers typically being addicts, the characters chewing on fags in almost every paragraph didn't really jump out at me as significant but [spoiler]when it became relevant to the plot I actually laughed.[/spoiler]  Not as dated as I expected, and more enjoyable.

* Apart from A Vision Of Escaflowne, which all sci-fi lovers should give a shot whether they like animu or not.

I think this will end up sort of like Fullmetal Alchemist.

The lead English VA is revealed as a nonce IRL and I sell all my merch on Ebay in disgust?

[Captain Marvel]

Captain Marvel - well made, but aggressively banal.  The throwback vibe to 1980s sci-fi adventure movies feels largely accidental, but the cast - aside from the bland lead - do their best with par material.  I found the cat stuff annoying.
Probably the most inconsequential of the Marvel movies so far - which just makes the nerd rage at it all the funnier, tbh.

The Road To El Dorado - also well-made but aggressively banal.  Not quite the disaster I was led to believe, it's still hard to pin down what people were expected to like about it, as the leads aren't terribly engaging, the songs are forgettable, and the story isn't particularly good.  Feels a lot like one of those cheapo cash-ins on Disney animated movies, though I gather this was intentional.
Passes the time, but I wouldn't suggest anyone go out of their way to watch it.

The only failed evacuations Picard does in his advancing years are the ones in his pants when he tries to stand up.

Is he the worst possible choice?  If so, then yes.  If Mogg would be worse - and there's every chance he could be - then Tories might want him for the job, though obviously they'd have to get over their instinctive loathing of Catholics first.

Hat trick - not only are we losing the worst PM in our history, but our last PM was the previous record holder and in all likelihood her replacement will be even worse.  Thank fuck we never elected Ed Milliband, God knows how much worse this would have been without the strong and stabilising influence of the Tories.

I don't like football

Chelsea supporter, eh?

THIS IS MAN GENOCIDE

And Comicsgate.

[SHAZAM!]

SHAZAM! - feels less like a superhero movie and more like one of those YA adaptations of a book series you've never heard of, right up until it turns into a Disney Channel movie.  That sounds like I thought it was mince, but I enjoyed it.  The whole family angle feels cynically constructed (unlike the themes in all the other organic, arthouse superhero movies that get released), but is also something different for superhero movies and DC flicks in particular, which tend to favor snarky jackasses going it alone.  In my heart I sort of know that the execs just banged Superman and Deadpool together and then made everything PG13, but while this lasts it's pretty good fun.

Coincidentally, I'm currently watching Knights of God, and my main takeaway is that the Welsh are a violent and unsentimental people who will do well after society collapses.  Their main source of entertainment will be hunting the English.

Sounds good!  Any post-apocalyptic fiction that doesn't have yet more fucking zombies in it is fine by me.

So instead of going "Hail Hydra" they go "tick tock"?  Genius.

[Threads]

I thought the bit where the bloke just ditched his spouse and drove like the clappers to bang some rando asylum seeker from a foot fetish scene earlier in the episode - because foot fetishism is something we can all relate to - was hilarious, but in retrospect I realise it was meant to be serious.

I found the "transhuman" stuff a bit cringe, creating a connection between body dysphoria and attention seeking that I am sure was not intentional, but it's hinted in the episode that the character also suffers from some sort of depression and/or mental health issues, which is basically Graham Linehan's whole justification for equating trans issues with mental illness.*  There's a strain of online TERF that's dismissive of young trans people and part of their schtick is to dismiss them as angry kids with anime avatars looking for attention, so the whole visual filter thing... I mean, I'm probably just reading too much into it.

Spoiler tags are here for a reason, so consider watching the show before continuing:[spoiler] RTD does Threads, then?  Be interesting to see how WARNING: RTD IN-JOKE INCOMING he imparts important plot points once the phones and tvs stop working, though a world without screens may be asking too much of a BBC audience so I suspect they'll remain a fixture and instead of Threads we'll get that Charlie Brooker sketch about Russell Brand being elected PM, only 6 hours long and without any jokes and yes I realise that's pretty much what watching any Charlie Brooker sketch is like these days.
Also a real danger of it just being a polemic about the working class being thick, but I suppose we'll see.[/spoiler]



* he pretty much posts about the supposed connection 24 hours a day from what I can see, and it just reminds me that until fairly recently it was the consensus of the medical profession - and they backed it up with science - that gay people were mentally ill.