#also the way Meryl says Cash instead of money like

[b0tsbby]

Being a new ass adult of 19 that just started work and adulting and just- and like- I just felt the stress here in my bones a little bit. I just felt the stress here…in my bones a little bit…

[humboldtfog]

Years of depression has prepared me very well for the current state of affairs which is weird but whatever here’s a list of my faves on netflix, if I’m missing something let me know cause now’s the time, right?

I'm kinda embarrassed by how long this list is but also kinda like fuck that, there have been very long periods of time where it was either sit and watch shows all day or lie down and stare at the wall in silence all day so I chose the former and it adds up and there's nothing wrong with that.

Glow (Badass ladies learn to wrestle, great 80s aesthetics and grrrrl power.)

Our Planet (Netflix version of Planet Earth, beautiful, cute, terrifying that we aren’t doing more to save us all.)

Bojack Horseman (Hilarious and “deep” critique of LA and celebrity culture for people who don’t care about LA or celebrity culture. Also very funny visual jokes about how if animals were also kinda humans, and lots of great jokes about cliches and tropes, puns, and weirdly rhyming and alliteration? I don’t know how to explain it just watch it.)

Father Brown (BBC, based on mystery novels about a priest who always meddles in police business and solves murders in his small English countryside town.)

Pose (The Ball scene in NY in the 80s, poc queer and trans writers and actors bringing their people’s stories to life. So much joy, so much beauty, but also NYC in the 80s so you will cry.)

Paris is Burning (Documentary made during the Ball scene Pose is based on.)

Sex Education (Such empowering representations of all walks of gender and sexuality, and actually very educational, like I would straight up show this in schools because everyone would be very entertained and would learn a lot more than they teach in a lot of schools.)

What Happened Miss Simone (Documentary about Nina Simone’s life, music and the activism the establishment/ government worked to suppress and used to blacklist her.)

Night on Earth (Low light camera technology has gotten hella good and they’re starting to learn stuff about animals’ behaviors at night that they’ve never been able to study before.)

Call the Midwife (Follows stories from the midwives that worked in the East End of London after the war, based on memoirs. Interesting look at the kind of life of poverty people led before there were many large hospitals or birth control, right as the British were implementing their universal healthcare program.)

The Great British Baking Show (Everyone’s so nice and everything looks so good!)

Atypical (Dramady about a high schooler with autism and his family, very funny and great representations of autism and how to be a good dude.)

Parks and Recreation (Just very funny and everyone knows it. Amazing ensemble cast, and they still keeps in touch through a group chat awww doesn’t that say something!)

Kim’s Convenience (Canadian comedy about family of first and second gen Korean immigrants that’s just a really solid funny modern day sitcom.)

Queer Eye (I feel like if everyone in this world could get a life makeover from these guys we just wouldn’t be here right now.)

Obvious Child (Jenny Slate accidentally gets pregnant and gets an abortion. It’s funny and it’s realistic, we’re not all Juno.)

Maria Bamford: the Special Special Special (Rad lady comedian not afraid to talk about her mental health and lack thereof and very vocal about the stigma surrounding mental health problems and I very much relate to. My favorite standup probably ever. I could make a list just for standup so message me if you’d like more suggestions.)

Monty Python (Flying Circus, movies, doc, ect. “The Beatles of comedy” is the cliche but it's true.)

Easy (Very unconventional non-narrative structure and editing, following random people in Chicago in a very real life feeling way. Different story each episode, but sometimes characters show up briefly in each other’s lives or return for a second episode.)

Everything Sucks! (High school nerds and lesbians and theater geeks in the 90s! I’m so sad this only got one season I rewatched it recently and it’s just so solid.)

She’s Gotta Have It (Revival of Spike Lee’s first movie, black girl magic, art world, gentrified New York, lots of sex.)

The Office (Classic, holds up very well, totally solid throughout, worth a rewatch. Also if you're a fan Jenna Ficher and Angela Davis are doing a rewatch podcast jsyk.)

Billy on the Street (Mindless game show for laughs, amazing gay comedian runs around New York yelling questions at them. I watch this with my dad and he can’t help but snort even when it’s “inappropriate” or “juvenile” so you know it’s good.)

Good Girls (Some lower middle class family ladies that are all about to be broke decide to rob the grocery store one of them works at, but they accidentally cross a gang that stored their cash there, so they gotta pay it back, and of course can’t help but get deeper and deeper into it. Very suspenseful like your heart rate will go up and stay up. )

Arrested Development (It’s just funny, as you've probably heard, but I'm telling you it just really is.)

The Laundromat (Tells the stories of a few of the people involved in the panama papers in different ways, explains in an entertaining way how money laundering works in a way that made it mostly make sense even to me. The rich get richer, and Meryl Streep is here to tell them to fuck off and pay their taxes.)

Russian Doll (She keeps dying and coming back to the same moment over and over and can’t figure out how to stop the cycle or why so kinda sci fi, very suspenseful, big cliff hanger ending, or rather no ending, and just found out season two filming is delayed because virus which is very annoying!!)

Dear White People (Show picking up where the movie left off, after a frat hosts a black face party and the ivy league college is forced to deal with racism.)

Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings (Stories based on Dolly songs. Very Hallmark channel, you will cry.)

Episodes (Show about two British writers making a version of their BBC show for American tv. Kind of meta, very funny, Matt LaBlanc plays himself and it's great.)

Dumplin’ (Fat girl grows up with a beauty pageant winning mom and enters one herself with the help of her late aunt’s Dolly Parton drag queen friends.)

Lunatics (Chris Lilley is the best character actor ever, all his shows are just him playing different parts and you seriously forget it’s all one actor, even when he’s playing teenage girls.)

Jane the Virgin (Prime time soap opera about a girl who is engaged and waiting until marrige and is accidentally inseminated with the only sperm sample of a man who’s had cancer so decides to keep the baby, very heavy on the soap opera cliches in a meta way but also that’s what it is. So good at first but after the first three or so seasons it gets too much tbh though.)

Zumbo’s Just Desserts (Australian Bake show but with just sweet stuff and pressure to be avant garde.)

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (Jerry Sienfeld goes out with funny people to coffee and lunch in fancy cars and they have funny conversations.)

One Day at a Time (Very very cheesy laugh track sitcom, like the kind of thing my grandma would watch, but it makes me so happy it’s doing a great job eplaining really woke concepts like queer pronouns and ptsd and addiction and white privilege to people like my grandma!)

Orange is the New Black (Good stories about very diverse characters, I’d say by starting it off about a upper middle class white girl it tricks privileged white people into watching and then encountering the more realistic stories of women who go to prison and how the system treats prisoners. Ending of season two is super solid and you can stop it there, season three is a really great critique of the privatization of prisons. I admit it goes on and on to the point that it’s stressful and after watching it spread out over years I can’t remember/ keep up with all the different story lines, though they’re all good stories to tell.)

Space Jam (Just saw while scrolling for more ideas this was added! One of the greatest sports movies of all time obviously.)

Bonus amazon prime shows, I try to avoid Amazon in general but these are just too good if you know a prime member who you can't convince not to give their money to amazon so they might as well give you their login (like yer dad).

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (A 1950s New York upper class Jewish house wife gets dumped and starts doing stand up, so funny, great actors, and they seriously transform NY back into another era.)

Good Omens (Mini series based off Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s satirical novel about the biblical apocalypse, very funny, very smart, very British, does the book pretty solid justice.)

There are other decent things that aren’t included, I’d say these are solid recs for a general list of genres all over the map without letting it get to a ridiculously unhelpful length. I feel like I’d be good at the “if you like this then you’ll also like…” so let me know if some of these are your favorites too and want personal recs for what to watch next based on a brain instead of an algorithm.

If you want to have a remote date and watch things together on video chat or one of those watch party sites or just tell me what to watch next here’s some stuff on my list I’ve been curious about or not sure about or don’t want to watch alone or have been putting off, and now’s the time right?: Strangers Things, I Am Not Okay With This, Black Panther, The Betty White doc, John Mulaney Snack Lunch Bunch, Dead to Me, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, A Wrinkle in Time, The Little Prince, Maniac, Wet Hot American Summer reboots, and a bunch of different standup specials from comedians I like.

[operationrainfall]

I’m gonna start this piece with a fact about myself that only my oldest friends know – I’m a huge fan of weird hybrids. Even as a young lad, I was engrossed with those picture books that let you mix and match body parts to create strange chimeras. So it should be no surprise that I was instantly drawn to the premise of SuperMash. After all, it’s a game all about mixing together different video game genres in surprising ways. So of course I was ecstatic to cover the game. The question is, can SuperMash live up to the ambitious gameplay hook?

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The story starts with a garage sale, the acquisition of a retro game console, and an eviction notice. The main characters are Tomo and Jume, a brother sister duo that happen to run a used game store together. Presented with that eviction notice, they decide to use their newly acquired PlayType console to try and make some money. Their ultimate goal is to use the console’s unique capability to mash together two disparate game genres into a working mini game, package them, and sell them for enough money to find a new place. There’s other side notes, such as Tomo’s estranged relationship with Meryl or a mysterious older gentleman interested in the PlayType, but most of the story is about the siblings finding a way to make things work financially. Though I wasn’t that drawn to the characters themselves, I did appreciate all the nods to game culture and retro collector syndrome.

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For the gameplay itself, you play Tomo as he mashes together specific 6 genres for research purposes. These are the available genres – Action / Adventure, Platformer, Stealth, Shoot ‘Em Up, JRPG and Metrovania. There’s specific tasks you have to accomplish to move the story along, as well as optional side quests that reward you with currency. You use that hard earned cash to buy packs with something called Dev Cards. These are used to manipulate factors in the mini games to your advantage. There’s a variety of them you can adjust – Player, Enemy, Weapon, Level, Glitch and Music. Speaking of Glitches, you can encounter beneficial and harmful ones. Some positives include spawning extra health or randomly killing all foes on screen. Some negatives include the screen titling, being trapped in ice blocks or the dreaded Glitch Ghost haunting me. Though I didn’t use the Dev Dashboard to implement cards that much, it’s nice that there’s something in-game to make things a bit less random. You also acquire more Dev Cards every time you successfully beat a mini game (referred to as a Mash). Besides this, you can also select the length and difficulty of each individual Mash.

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If you have the impression there’s a lot of player control, you might be in for a surprise. See, every time you either manually or randomly roll the dice to create a Mash from two genres, there’s one thing you have zero control over – the objective. There’s a decent range, from killing a group of foes to only killing a specific one, collecting a set amount of currency, finding and selling weapons, rescuing lost characters and a whole bunch more besides. At first I really liked the sheer amount of variety. Early on, you only have to fulfill basic requirements to progress. But once you start investigating the mysterious journal that came with the PlayType console, things get a bit trickier.

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Every time you have to fill out a journal page, Tomo is supposed to suss out and complete specific objectives. The problem is these objectives aren’t really clear. For example, to fill out the Action / Adventure journal page, you are supposed to find 4 gem-like objects. But the names of these objects aren’t specified. So I thought for sure I had already found the Fire Wordstone, and kept avoiding Mashes that listed finding that as a goal. Problem was, I actually had a different Wordstone, so I was accidentally wasting time. Or take the Metrovania journal page. Instead of objects, it displays what appear to be specific stages, but with no clear names. As a result, I have literally been trying to fill out the Metrovania page for more than an hour, with no success. An additional irritant is that sometimes SuperMash didn’t tell me when I had unlocked a journal page objective. And keep in mind you don’t get to set the objectives, so you could be playing for a while before you are able to progress. Thankfully, once you do fill out a journal page, you get to experience a cool boss challenge based around that genre. These range from fighting a giant airship to defeating a fantasy monster to infiltrating a base.

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While I was frustrated by the journal roadblocks, I don’t want to give the impression that playing through SuperMash was a constant slog. If anything, it was a mixed experience, with some good and some bad. Let’s start with what I enjoyed. I loved all the nods to the game industry in SuperMash. For example, there’s a cat girl wearing bandages named Sheila, a pixelated swordsman named Tye and a man armed with a gun and cardboard box named Mercenary Mongoose. Likewise, the visual styles of the genres are reminiscent of consoles from many generations, from NES to Game Boy to SNES to Sega Genesis. I also adore the silly Mash titles the game generates. Many are totally ridiculous, while some almost look as though they could have been real games. SuperMash takes a Mad Libs approach to composing all the Mashes, often with hilarious results.

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When it comes to how the actual genres are mixed together, that’s pretty crazy unpredictable. Some of the genres work surprisingly well together, and others are a mess. Say you’re playing a Stealth Mash as a Platformer character. This means you’ll be able to jump on top of enemy heads as well as shoot them with silencers. Or you’re playing a JRPG with Shoot ‘Em Up. You’ll encounter aerial raids, and get interrupted by random encounters, complete with ATB systems. But then you’ll get nightmare combinations like Action / Platformer and Stealth. I’d say for every fun Mash, I had a handful of bad ones, and a lot was dependent on the RNG. I got less and less worried about quitting a Mash quickly if it had many rough Glitches or absurd requirements.

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Now let’s talk bad. It should be noted that right before you boot up SuperMash, you get a disclaimer about how the system can produce strange results. I’ve encountered lots of unintentional bugs, such as being unable to leave a challenge room, or being literally blown into stage geometry, unable to escape. It’s also a pain when you’re doing well in a Mash and the PlayType console has a hiccup, forcing you to quit. I get that Digital Continue was going for an authentic tribute to old school consoles, but that’s a little much. I also encountered some really wonky physics, such as being unable to navigate through a door. There’s even times when the path forward in a Mash is less than clear. I should point out the item you need will likely be in that Mash, but you’ll have to figure out what it is. An example is a noxious gas cloud. You could get past it with a gas mask, or with an invulnerability bubble. You just have to figure it out on the fly.

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Also, though I feel most of the genres are done justice, there’s a couple that fell a bit flat – JRPG and Metrovania. I’d say both are the most complex genres on tap, and it’s hard to distill their essence into a 5-10 minute mini game. Frankly the JRPG games reminded me of Koei Tecmo mobile RPG adventures. Sadly that’s not a compliment. Often I would pray my randomly generated party had enough mana to cast spells and not get steamrolled by basic foes. Lastly, I have two complaints about time. It takes upward of 20 seconds to load each Mash, assuming it doesn’t crash midway. Finally, I’m not a fan of how many Mashes have strictly enforced time limits. I hate being rushed, though I admit some of the Mashes without a time limit took way too long.

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In a weird way, I feel like SuperMash is the bastard child of Retro Game Challenge. Both have an admirable focus on retro with amazing creativity on display. I just feel the execution here was a bit rough at times. Also, I would have died to see some more genres represented, such as Beat ‘Em Up, Racing or even Rhythm. But if you enjoy crazy games that indulge in their passion for video game nostalgia, it’s hard to go wrong for only $19.99. Just be ready to navigate some choppy waters.

IMPRESSIONS: SuperMash I'm gonna start this piece with a fact about myself that only my oldest friends know - I'm a huge fan of weird hybrids.