Looks cool, but will they perform?

It’s been a while since I really wrote anything about anything other than me being depressed, fatherhood, jobs, sports or wrestling, and if there’s ever a topic that gets me all amped up to write, MARTA would definitely be up there.

When I saw this article about how MARTA unveiled new trains, my knee-jerk reaction was to get my clowning shoes on, because just from the text description alone, I figured that there had to be ample opportunities to get back up on the horse and do some clowning.

Honestly though?  After actually taking the time to read the article and see the proposed designs and functionality of the new trains, I don’t really have that much room for clowning.  Although the face of the trains look like a cross between Daft Punk and like a Cerberus shock trooper from Mass Effect, they still look pretty cool, and I think the dynamic light function to indicate the route they’re on is a cool idea.

The interior of the trains have finally come into the modern era, with their being truly connected trains, and no longer there being physical doors leading to exterior access as beggars traversed from car to car.  There is still a lot of room for error when it comes to if people have specific needs for which car they need to get into because of strollers, bikes, or wheelchairs that will have to have some training applied, but at least it’s a start that the cars are actually going to have some variety and not feel like they’re the leftover train cars from the 1980’s DC Metro.

So as ready as I was to get ready to rip this concept apart, I actually don’t have much fuel to burn.  MARTA’s trains have desperately needed updating for nearly two decades, and it appears that it’s finally happening.  Sure, their stations need a lot of attention too, and the general perception of the service and brand seem irreparable, but finally upgrading the trains is a step in the right direction.

However in spite of the upgrades to the hardware, the real question is going to be if MARTA’s actual performance improves, with new trains?  The trains might be shiny and new, but the people running them, and the people riding them, and the stations they’re stopping in and out of aren’t going to be changing that much, and those are the variables that are going to come into play as far as trains remaining on time, hopefully dependable, and not too much the breeding ground for World Star videos.

If so, great.  If not, then still great for the brog, because it’ll be good fodder seeing photos and videos of these brand new fancy trains in the news, where petty crimes, stupidity and some very Atlanta-centric behavior gets the spotlight all the same.

Let’s replace “Krogan” with “Americans”

I don’t really know what spawned the line of thinking, but I recently had a thought in my head about comparing the mythical one-day vaccine to coronavirus to the cure to the Krogan genophage in the Mass Effect series.  Frankly, I don’t know how this post is going to pan out, but I figured I may as well just start writing, and see where it ends up.

For those who don’t know Mass Effect lore, the Krogan are a race of these almost dinosaur-ish, triceratops-ish, reptilian species.  They’re ultra-tough, aggressive, burly and violent, and as the story goes, they reproduced at a speed that gave concern to the galactic alliance, and for lack of a better term, a virus or genetic ailment of some sort, known as the genophage, was unleashed onto the entire race, in order to help suppress their population growth.  Yes, it’s a fucked up concept, but as all stories go, there’s really no bigger villains in the galaxy than man (and their intergalactic allies).

In Mass Effect 3, there’s a mission (Priority: Tuchanka) where the cure for the genophage is developed, and it’s up to you the player to travel to the Krogan planet, to determine the fate of the entire species.  If successful, the cure to the genophage is airborne released into the skies of Tuchanka, where it presumably cures every Krogan who breathes.  Given the way ME3 ends, who’s to say if it actually amounts to anything, but it’s a nice gesture to try and give them some sort of semblance of life back to the Krogan before the Reapers emerged from dark space.

In my perfect world, when the vaccine for coronavirus is developed, it will basically be Priority: Tuchanka, except that it’s more like Priority: America.  Unfortunately, as much as the idea of Commander Shepard going up against, and inevitably killing hundreds of right-wing, over-armed anti-vaxxing Karens and muh-rights Karls is a sadistic fantasy to behold, the mass killing wouldn’t quite go over so well in the real world as it does in a video game.

But the end result where an airborne vaccine is just mass-released into the atmosphere, and takes the choice out of the hands of everyone, seems like a pretty ideal outcome to me.  Granted, given the fact that the world is currently rushing the shit out of this, and who knows if we won’t accidentally sterilize the whole planet in the process, but it’s a risk that many would probably be willing to take in order to get back to some sort of normalcy in the world.

Ironically, the amount of resistance it would take to get a vaccine distributed throughout America much less the rest of the world, would probably be equivalent to the massive resistance we the players get in trying to save the Krogan in a video game.  And unlike in a video game, we can’t just annihilate everyone who is resistant, as gratifying as it might seem.  But the idea of the vaccine simply being dispersed in the atmosphere and taking the choice out of everyone’s hands seems very appealing to me, because it’s not about freedoms, it’s not about rights, it’s entirely about the long-term survival of the human race, and when too many people are being stupid, intelligent ones need to step in and make the smart choices for them.

Well, that didn’t turn out entirely as I had thought it might, but it’s sad/funny that we’re even in a position where the American future can plausibly be potentially compared to the genocidal plot of a video game.

It could only have ended poorly

When I was in the third grade, I used to “read” Choose Your Own Adventure books by deliberately making the worst possible decisions possible in order to get to a The End as fast as I could.  And as soon as I got myself killed, about to be killed, or in a position to eventually die, I declared the book “read” and entered it into my Pizza Hut-sponsored Book-It reading list, where every 4-5 finished books meant a certificate for a free Pizza Hut pan pizza, which meant a perfect excuse for my parents to take me to Pizza Hut, which undoubtedly contributed greatly to my childhood obesity.

I abused the hell out of this system, until my teacher caught onto my little system, and eventually prohibited me from reading anymore Choose Your Own Adventure books, at least as far as the Book-It program was concerned.  I eventually began reading them more thoroughly, and enjoyed a vast number of them throughout their publication, but the point is, the whole thing started with me reading like six pages of the book in total, and deliberately making all the worst choices, in order to get to an ending, regardless of if it were good or bad.

So that being said, Game of Thrones.  The series is now, officially over.  For better or worse, considering the putrid manner in which the series ended.  I’m still mentally deliberating on where GoT’s ending falls in comparison to other shitty endings out there, and I think I’m a place where it’s somewhere in between Mass Effect 3, and the series finale to Dexter.  Needless to say, that puts in pretty rarified air of being especially terrible, and a lot of it probably has to do with the fact that all aforementioned series’ churned along swimmingly at various points and collected large numbers of dedicated fans, sucking up emotions and commitment and dedication for several years, before taking all their hopes and dreams for a good ending, stabbing them in the heart, boating them into a hurricane and synthesizing them with machines.

I mean, I can’t say for a second that I didn’t see this coming.  Endings are the hardest thing in the world for any story, and the list of popular, epic and legendary stories that have shitty endings is longer than the equator.  Plus, the dumpster fire that episodes 4 and 5 steered the story going into the finale all but sealed the series’ fate as just another story with a shitty ending incoming, because they simply went past the point of no return in episode 5.  The question really was, how shitty the finale was going to be, because at this point, the vast majority of people I knew who watched the show had all resigned themselves to the obvious notion that it was going to suck.

And boy, did it ever suck.  I found myself predicting just about everything that occurred in the episode like 10 seconds before it happened, like particular characters saying certain things, doing certain actions, or predicting very obvious outcomes.  Getting back to the point of talking about Choose Your Own Adventure books, it legitimately felt like the entire season 8 was one live-action Choose Your Own Adventure story, where there was one linear plot that consumes the majority of the season, but when it comes time to start winding down, there was literally nothing but a whole bunch of shitty and rushed endings, where not a single one of them is capable of making the viewer not seem I’m not mad, just disappointed.

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League of Payforachievements

Since not all of my six readers are League of Legends players, much less gamers at all, I’ll try to kind of start with an analogy that those who have gamed at all within the better part of the last decade might understand.

Achievements, have become a pretty normal thing in today’s gaming landscape, with players getting little pop-up notifications in-game from their systems themselves, when they accomplish particular tasks in the games they are playing.  Ultimately, they’re utterly useless in the grand spectrum of most games, but their existence has created somewhat of a collecting hobby for those who game.

Some achievements are justly achieved by accomplishing monumental feats, like beating Mass Effect 2 on the hardest difficulty without dying once.  Others are as systematically simple as proceeding through the story, and getting an achievement for each notable storyline break point.  There are achievements of insanity, such as completing an entire Left 4 Dead 2 campaign only using a melee weapon.   There are achievements of futility, such as deliberately getting every single question wrong in a round of 1 vs. 100, and then there are achievements of everyone gets a trophy, such as simply starting a game.

The point is, achievements have become somewhat of a point of bragging among gamers, and one of the greatest accomplishments is getting a 100% of achievements earned in games, because usually every game has a good variety of achievements from layups to Hail Marys.  As in the case of XBOX Live, players’ stats have a running tally of how many games they get 100% success rate on, and for players like me, it’s something to be prideful of, to be able to prove just how little of a life I can sometimes have, when I obsess over trying to Boomer Bile over all four survivors in one hurl.

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Race to Geth ER

Legion is hurt.  Which ship gets Legion to Geth ER the fastest?  The Normandy, a Turian envoy or a Quarian vessel?

Seriously though, as a self-proclaimed typography snob, I simply cannot condone this message by Starbucks, regardless of how much of a slave I am to their product in general.

I get that creating racial awareness is something that perhaps the world as a whole might benefit from, in spite of how futile I may personally think it is, but I simply loathe when any word has to be broken up in an advertisement, much less twice.

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Quarians and Geth in the workplace

More recently, I made an analogy about workplace dynamics in regards to someone else’s workplace, but then came to realize that such an analogy could apply to most every workplace to some capacity, naturally of course, referring to my own as well.

But basically, in the workplace, there are workers that are Quarians, and then there are workers that are Geth.

Quarians are workers who are basically trying to survive.  Quarians have habits and tendencies that may seem dated and obsolete, but hey, they’ve worked at keeping us alive for X amount of time, there’s little reason to deviate from them, regardless of the fact that if superior, more efficient ways exist.  It’s like the Quarians in the Mass Effect storyline, they’re so caught up in general survival, that they’re never really able to put up an earnest fight against the Geth that have taken over their home world.

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Dragon-Con stories: The Divas of Shit Mountain

I like to think of myself as a pretty easy going kind of person.  I may complain and voice my disdain at Dragon-Con from time to time, but I’m well aware of the fact that a lot of things are out of my control; I just instinctively bitch sometimes.  Like big-ass crowds, common people smelling all rank and BO-ey, the football bros that come and troll the place; all that shit is completely uncontrollable, and there’s nothing that can be done about it.  I accept that.

But if there’s one thing that agitates the shit out of me, are diva costumers.

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