The New Console Wow Factor Is Gone

My, how far we've come!

I finally got a Playstation 4 for Christmas and as excited as I was, there was also a pang of disappointment when I booted up the new generation. The wow factor is gone. Although each new generation of video games gets increasingly complex gameplay and detailed graphics, the leaps aren't aren't so big anymore. The devil is in the details, and the details are ever more subtle. It's not immediately obvious as it was in previous generations; my mind is not instantly blown away.

I am old enough to be one of the lucky that have experienced video games from nearly the beginning, starting with the Atari 2600. It didn't matter that characters and objects were amorphous blobs and the games simpler than most board games, because video games were new and novel. It was all about simple fun. Then a certain plumber came along who actually looked like a plumber, could traverse multiple levels that were simultaneously simple and complex, and made me rely on skill instead of buggy luck. Real, bonafide video games were here.

Anybody who doesn't squeal with delight at this picture isn't human.

The wow factor continued with each new generation:

• Sonic knocked my socks off racing through huge distinct worlds at warp speed, as did seeing individual muscles on Street Fighters and Mortal Kombatants. Final Fantasy VI sucked me into my first epic, novelesque, story-based experience.
  
  
  

• Mario fried my brain cells running, jumping, swimming, and flying in 3D for the first time. And then Link one-upped him with the most epic adventure ever. Final Fantasy VII made me drool over photorealistic pre-rendered backgrounds. Metal Gear Solid glued me to my seat, feeling Hollywood and video games had just gotten married. Goldeneye practically ruined friendships. This was the golden age
  of games!

• Chopping off orc heads in both LOTR
  games made me feel like I was in Middle Earth. Shadow of the Colossus seemed impossibly large. I never knew racing could be so fast before F-Zero X, or water so pretty before Wave Race: Blue Storm, or atmosphere so intensely moody before Metroid Prime. GTA III felt like a real world for the first time. "I can screw prostitutes, then kill them and get my money back? The future is now!"

• Actually swinging a remote like a golf club to hit a golf ball was the biggest "why didn't they think of this sooner" ever. GTA IV not only felt like a real city but actually looked real too. Skyrim was so vast it was overwhelmingly stressful. God of War was better animated than some Hollywood movies, and The Last of Us had better storytelling than most. Discussion of whether or not games are art now over.

Such amazing progress I've seen all these years. Every time I got a new console it was a complete and utter delight. But those days are now over. Of course, my Playstation 4 brings me plenty of delight, but the wow factor is gone. I'm so accustomed to gorgeous visuals, deep gameplay, and epic stories; the new generation just seems like one small step rather than a giant leap for nerd-kind. These are all expected now, par for the course.

Pretty, but whatevs.

I still find myself being impressed and excited: the water in Battlefront is quite pretty, the details on everything—especially characters—in Metal Gear Solid V have set a new bar, and being able to create my own Mario levels in Mario Maker is refreshingly delightful. But my mind is no longer blown. I don't know if my head will ever explode again with a new console. I miss that.

Can We Just Go Back to Small Hunter-Gatherer Tribes?

Modern life can be pretty great: binge-watching Netflix until our eyeballs bleed, instantly googling anything, anywhere, anytime on a smartphone, refrigeration to keep our food safe for days/weeks/months, hella fun video games with jaw-dropping graphics, flying halfway across the world in half a day, good deals on bulk alcohol at Costco, air conditioning, Star Wars and LOTR and Harry Potter all exist, ordering almost anything online from Amazon and getting two-day shipping with Prime, and abundant free porn...just to name a few examples.

Despite all this awesomeness, sometimes I wish we could just go back to small tribes of 30ish hunter-gatherers. Sure, life back then was dangerous, harsh, and not all that interesting. Modern conveniences make life a lot easier and super rad. But, at the same time, modern life is a lot harder. Our stress levels are through the roof because we have too much to worry about and make way more decisions in a day than hunter-gatherers (hereafter "HGs") did in an entire year. Most significantly, we now deal with existential issues. What is my purpose in life? What is the meaning of life? Do I matter? 

While we don't know for sure HGs didn't think about this stuff, I'm willing to bet they weren't suffering existential crises. Their concerns were limited to obtaining food, avoiding getting eaten themselves, avoiding getting screwed by mother nature, having sex to make babies, and maintaining safe places to sleep. Eat, sleep, fuck. As a chronically unemployed, lonely single, and in-between-careers with-no clue-what-to-do-with-my-life person of late, that sounds amazingly simple. It sounds pretty damn good to me, in fact. 

Sure, they had a much higher mortality rate, what with all the disease, predators, and uncontrollable natural disasters and change. But, they weren't constantly worried about getting a job or staying employed, the state of the economy, getting stuck in traffic, the other idiot political party winning the election, getting stuck with a bankrupting bill when something unexpectedly breaks down, not having a date for yet another goddamn wedding, not being able to get work done because your computer is being a frozen or buggy dickhole, keeping up with inane style trends, having to get access to HBO again for a new season of "Game of Thrones," choosing the wrong checkout lane at the store, or a billion other things that we stress way too much over, every damn day.

Hunt and gather, eat, have sex, chat, take care of and entertain each other, sleep. Repeat. Damn that sounds nice. I know it's crazy, but sometimes I wish we could abandon all our modern trappings and go back to such simplicity. Yeah, I really need a job and a girlfriend...

WTF Is This - Kevin Tries FCP X

Although I decided to quit editing—and post production altogether—almost a year ago, I'm still perfectly capable of riding that bike. I agreed to help a good friend put together her acting reel, but I didn't have my old Avid 6.5 or FCP 7 installed on my new, shiny, kickass MacbookPro. And, I didn't want to install them. They're both archaic, not designed for the modern OS, and seem like a waste on a new machine. So, I thought, rather than shell out $20 for Premiere for one month, I'll just take Apple up on that 30 day free trial of FCP X. Why not?

I really did try to approach this with an open mind. After all, I'm not a pro anymore. What do I care? My emotional investment is gone. And it can't really be that bad, can it? Surely it won't be too hard to figure out. It's still Final Cut...right?

Stage 1 - What Am I Looking At?

Okay, booted up the program. Surely, it'll create a new untitled project and then I'll choose what to save it as and where...Libraries? WTF is a Library? I'm not here for books; I'm here to edit. What do you mean I can't save my project? You just automatically save everything. Well, okay, I guess that's nice. Wait...you want to put all my media in the user Movies folder in some special Library container? And all the project information there too? WTF is wrong with you, Apple? Oh, I can specify where to put media, and I can choose to have media stay right where it is when I import it, instead of it copying to the Library or transcoding. Phew!

So I need to create a new Event? What in the Sam Hill is that? Oh, it's a project. Okay, "iPhoto", whatever you say. You've created an event based on today's date? No thanks, I'll make my own. I'm perfectly capable of coming up with my own events; just ask all my friends who've attended my super rad parties! Now, I've got a new Event and my clips imported. Wait, stop sorting based on content creation date and let me sort however I want, you bastards. Are there not folders or bins? What is up with these long-ass film strips for every media clip. Is this iMovie? What's going on????

Stage 2 - I Don't Even Know How To Edit

Alright, switched over to listed text instead of pictures and film strips. Time to create a sequence and start throwing in all these clips. Oh, there's a new project button. But I though the project was the Event? I'm so confused. WAIT. The Project is the sequence? JESUS CHRIST, APPLE. Are you trying to give professional editors hernias? 

There's only one viewer window...it's going to show me whatever is relevant to what I'm looking at or working on...okay, I guess that's...interesting. We'll see how it goes. Clip loaded up. How the fuck do I navigate? I don't see any scrubbing tools. Okay, the old navigation keyboard strokes work but damn't, I need to go far into this clip. How do I scrub in the viewer? OMG, you want me to scrub on the fucking film strip in the bin? Are you kidding me? Why can't you just put a god damn scrubbing tool in the viewer? For fuck's sake, it's taken me like ten minutes just to be able to set in and out points on my first clip!

Okay, calm down, Kevin. Now you know. Just cut it into the timeline and surely you'll be able to cut this in no time. "F10" Overwrite...nothing. Oh sweet baby Jesus, I don't even know how to cut in a clip anymore. Oh, so it's "D" or mouse drag. Fine. Whatever. As long as it works. 

Stage 3 - Why Won't You Just Do What I Say?

So when I just want to change the order of clips with transitions, you're going to randomly fuck up the lengths? Great. Very thoughtful of you.

Why are you sliding the transition's postion between clips when I just want to trim its duration? Did I fucking stutter?

Stop automatically adding transitions intended for the video track to the audio. If I want an audio cross dissolve, I'll tell you. Oh, you want me to "expand the audio" from the video. I'll expand my dick up your ass.

Stage 4 - Oh, That's Cool.

Hey, these audio fade sliders are pretty neat. Just slide 'em easily with the mouse, plus they go way beyond the boundary of framerate to fine-tune practically down to the millisecond. I could get used to this. Way to go, Apple!

Stage 5 - Despair. Utter Dispair.

Apple, I'm begging you, just let me do what I want to do. I just want to trim off a few frames of this clip, but just because it has a transition effect, you're making it really fucking hard to do that. Where do I put the mouse to signal that? Why don't you just have a trim mode?

Sometimes, you let me put a fade at the start of a clip, and sometimes you insist on putting it in the middle between the clip and the darkness of nothing. And I can't figure out why. Why are you so fickle? You've regressed from a grown-ass adult to a teenager!

Choosing to center-align text vertically doesn't actually center-align vertically? What the hell is wrong with you? I have to eyeball this shit?

Can you just stop reinventing the entire functionality of editing? I don't know how to do anything anymore!

Damn't, I can't stop pressing "Command+S" to save, even though it does nothing anymore. AAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHH!

Stage 6 - Somehow Got It Done

It's all there. Somehow, I really don't know, it's all there. The clips are trimmed how I wanted, audio faded precisely, text over picture with their own transitions, and I even managed to cut in some photos and crop them and everything. I still don't know exactly how I was able to trim clips after they already had transitions on them. I swear I did it like two or three different ways, but hell if I remember how. I'm afraid to touch anything now, cause god knows if I'll be able to put it back if I fuck it up. But it's all there. 

Stage 7 - Export Eyeroll

All I have to do now is export a nice little H.264 ".mov" so my friend can watch it and either sign off or give me notes. Let's see here...there's no straight up Export option. Oh god, the Share thing, like in Quicktime X. Oh, good laaaaawd. 

Okay, fine, let's get this over with. New preset for Export File. Yup, H.264. Now let's customize these settings...really? What format the audio is in and what to do when the Share is done...that's it? You're just gonna decide for me? Jesus tap-dancing Christ. I'm not an amateur idiot, Apple! I appreciate you lending a hand to the noobs, but why can't you just give me some mother fucking options here? Do I really have to just export a ProRes Master and convert in another program, or pay for the new Compressor? Uggggggggh.

Fuck it, let's see what you do with this H.264 Share. Wow, that export was lighting fast. How can I trust an H.264 export that fast? Surely, it must have screwed up. No, looks good. How the hell did it do that? There's gotta be a catch, right? Whatever. It's done. Time to peace out of this bitch.

LA Galaxy Must Ditch Herbalife As Sponsor

I love my LA Galaxy, and because I love them, I say that they must ditch Herbalife Nutrition as their sponsor. It's long past time. Hell, it never should have happened in the first place. Herbalife is a pyramid scheme, plain and simple. That is completely unacceptable.

Of course, Herbalife has taken great pains over the years to assert their legality as "multi-level marketing" and defend themselves from accusations of being a dirty pyramid scheme. God knows how much money they've spent on lawyers all these years. But, it doesn't matter what they say. Their business structure is this: distributors must buy a bunch of product from Herbalife and sell the product themselves. If they recruit new members, they get a cut of their sales and the sales of members they too recruit, and so on. That is a pyramid scheme. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. You don't even have to take my word for it. Some quick googling will find you plenty of reputable sources exposing Herbalife for what they are. To get you started, here are pieces by The New York Times, The Atlantic, and CNN.

They only continue to legally exist because the government has had its head up its ass since 1979 when they relaxed the rules defining pyramid schemes. Just because the government isn't doing its job, does not make Herbalife acceptable or justified. Wall Street screwed over our entire country and got away with it, but we all agree they're a bag of dicks and should have been punished. Herbalife is no different. Fortunately, right now the Federal Trade Commission is investigating them, so there is still hope the government will do the right thing. 

Regardless of whatever feces Herbalife spews out of its public relations mouth, the fact is Herbalife profits by deceiving the gullible poor, promising them amazing profits they most likely will never earn. Hardly any of their members make a profit sizeable enough to justify the time and effort invested, much less a livable wage. They lose half their members every year, but replace them with new unsuspecting victims. They use cheap labor to reap in profits with zero risk because the labor bears the entire financial burden. If their product was truly viable, they would sell it in stores and/or online like a normal corporation. When it comes down to it, they are bad news bears.

So why does this matter for the LA Galaxy? Herbalife Nutrition is plastered across their jerseys, throughout StubHub Center, merchandise, and media. You can't read "Galaxy" on the jersey from far away, only "Herbalife Nutrition." They are not only deeply associated with the Galaxy, they front and center. 

Actually, association is too light to accurately describe their relationship; it's a partnership. A continued partnership means that the Galaxy support Herbalife's business model and practices. The Galaxy might as well hold a press conference to declare that they're okay with taking advantage of poor people in the interest of corporate greed. If that's what Herbalife stands for, then that's what the LA Galaxy stand for when Herbalife is branded all over the Galaxy. 

If you asked anyone from the Galaxy if they're okay with that, they would say, "Absolutely not!" The LA Galaxy are a classy organization. They were the first American sports club to embrace and proudly field an openly gay male athlete, they constantly give back through their charitable foundation, and their employees all conduct themselves in a dignified and respectable manner. To be partnered and associated with such trash as Herbalife is just not them. And it's not right. 

Sports clubs are more than just entertainment organizations. Players, coaches, and staff are role models: for kids most especially, but also for adults who look to them for inspiration. Sports clubs play a vital role in shaping the moral fabric of our society. They must hold themselves to high standards, and we must hold them to that that too. The LA Galaxy usually do, but not when it comes to their sponsor. We can not let this slide. Herbalife Nutrition must go, and that's all there is to it.