At Least We're Not Detroit

This video and its sequel are actually kind of selling me on Cleveland. I won't lie, they had me at "buy a house for the price of a VCR."

Watch on YouTube

Someone made a similar video about Annandale, one of the DC suburbs in Virginia. It's a bit mean-spirited, but I don't think it's a misrepresentation. I'm interested in what caused Annandale to become like this when the rest of the NOVA (northern Virginia) area is doing so well. I also wonder if there are more videos like this out there, like, is "hastily made 'tourism video' of my economically depressed hometown" an established YouTube genre?

VOTE BARRET WALLACE 2020

20 Years Later, the Hardest Losses in 'Final Fantasy VII' Have Changed
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3kgv5/20-years-later-the-hardest-losses-in-final-fantasy-vii-have-changed

This is a game that is fundamentally about economic and environmental justice.

The world of Final Fantasy VII is entirely dominated by corporations who have polluted the world to such an extent that humanity has become cloistered in corporate-controlled nightmare cities where they're bottled up to rot in slums beneath metal plates. Their entertainment is provided by a mega corporation that runs a theme park that contains all of the hopes, dreams, and physical activities denied the average person. The world is dying, and it is the fault of those in power.

Chrono Cross, environmentalism, and a world without humanity
https://medium.com/@NEwertKrocker/chrono-cross-environmentalism-and-a-world-without-humanity-c2ed048b812f

There is definitely a sense in the final battles of Chrono Cross that yes, these avatars of sea and earth and sky have a point. As Serge and his companions, you’ve witnessed first-hand that the humans of the world have put their own interests above that of the planet — sometimes violently. When the great Dragon God — the planet’s ultimate weapon against its violent oppressors — asks you “Must one kill other living things in order to survive? Must one destroy another world in order to allow one’s own world to continue?”, it’s easy to read it as the typical pseudo-philosophical posturing of a villain before the final battle commences. But as forests continue to be clear-cut, the ocean becomes increasingly acidic, and dry lands become deserts, these questions start to sound less philosophical and more practical. If we destroy another world, can our own world continue?

I have to admit that I was never able to get more than a few hours into Chrono Cross - it's one of the PS1/PS2 crossover era RPGs in which each random battle takes at least five minutes - but I'm always intrigued when gameplay reinforces a game's central premise, especially when that premise is "maybe we should spend more time thinking about what it means to save the world."

I'm looking forward to the PS4 release of Final Fantasy VII, and my one hope and dream for whatever new culture springs up surrounding the game is that people start taking Barret seriously.

Algorithmic Time

The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katherinemiller/the-2010s-have-broken-our-sense-of-time

How did everything get so jumbled? Stories about our phones, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest often concern Nazis, grifters, scammers, plagiarists, the aesthetes who reject that online life, the famous, the infamous, people who are making a buck, and anyone else who pushes the logic and limits already in place. But what about the rest of us?

The 2000s were a bad decade, full of terrorism, financial ruin, and war. The 2010s were different, somehow more disorienting, full of molten anxiety, racism, and moral horror shows. Maybe this is a reason for the disorientation: Life had run on a certain rhythm of time and logic, and then at a hundred different entry points, that rhythm and that logic shifted a little, sped up, slowed down, or disappeared, until you could barely remember what time it was.

The writer isn't wrong, but holy hell do all of the flashing GIF images make this article difficult to read. I understand that this is (probably?) the result of an intentional artistic decision to create a format that mimics the experience of having your attention constantly divided between multiple competing demands online, but it works a little too well. The essay is about how having our lives mediated through social media disrupts our memory; and, lo and behold, I can barely remember what I read.

All that being said, I'm planning to cut and paste the text into a document to study later, as what the author is describing mirrors my experience of the past four years almost perfectly.