Reviewing games in 2019 is impossible. You’re shooting at a moving target: every game in 2019 is a weird quasi-finished v0.5 Pre-Release Early Access Beta, requiring a 24/7 internet connection so it can stream five gigabytes of updated content each day.

Once, a game was a $60 box with a CD in it. It was finished. It did not change. But now, a game is a spewing open sewer on your hard drive, fountaining out a never-ending deluge of shit: new characters, new mechanics, new loot boxes, new collectible cards, and new internet memes.

The ever-changing nature of modern games makes them difficult to talk about. It’s like reading a book with George RR Martin yanking pages out and gluing new ones in, or watching a movie while Peter Jackson is still directing it.

Apex Legends is the new contender for the battle royale throne. It features the genre’s standard game mode (a huge number of players, vying for dominance on a map that shrinks in size), merged with the team-based heroism of Blizzard’s Overwatch. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds asked “where will you go?” Apex Legends asks “where will you go, and with whom?”

The game leaves an indelible visual impression. Every battle royale game has a launch sequence, but this is the most visually stunning one yet, with the screen wracked by bloom and lens effects and your characters quipping as they skydive. I enjoyed the way everyone leaves coloured trails of smoke (so you can guide your team away from groups of players…or towards them, if you like living dangerously).

When you land, you loot. Your first port of call should be a gun (or two guns): the characters are absolute bullet sponges, and it’s frustrating to empty a full magazine into someone’s chest and have them continue charging at you.

It also takes time to learn the idiosyncrasies of each weapons – for example, the Peacemaker shotgun has such a tight spread that it can be almost used like a rifle, and the Mozambique is laughably underpowered, to the point where it’s better to use your melee attack. The Devotion energy rifle has a “spin-up” (the longer you fire it, the more damage it inflicts), which in practice means the enemy takes a weak shot or two, runs away, and the powerful end of the burst splatters uselessly against a wall. The gunplay as a whole, feels slightly underdeveloped.

So, too does the much-hyped character-based element.

Before each game, you choose your “legend”, each of whom has different tactical abilities. Unlike Overwatch, these are fairly subtle and seldom game-changing. Bangalore can throw smoke. Pathfinder can set up a zipline.

The number one reason to choose one legend over another is their hitbox size – Wraith is the current favorite among the Twitch elite, because her tiny size makes her difficult to hit. You will have a miserable time playing as Gibraltar and Caustic: their massive hitboxes attract every bullet on the server, or so it seems.

So there are balance issues between weapons, and balance issues between legends. I’m sure these will be rectified – hence why reviewing games is pointless. Anything I can criticize might be completely different tomorrow.

One thing that deserves unreserved praise is the pinging system. In other games, communication with your allies is difficult: you either have to type a message, or get on voicechat and entrust your teamplay to pubescent voices and $5.00 microphones. Not anymore. Apex Legends allows you to rapidly ping locations on the map, indicate supplies for your team, flare enemies, and even cancel the last message you sent in the case of a false alarm. They really did think of everything, and a good team can execute complex strategies based on two seconds of pinging.

I also must praise something that isn’t in the game – there are no emotes for dabbing, or floss dancing, or any of that shit. Good.

But overall, the game needs more content. There’s still only one map, and eight legends, two of which must be unlocked (didn’t Overwatch launch with 21?). There’s a lavish assortment of paid skins – the game is free, and this is how they plan on making money – and it’s clear that a lot of effort that could have made Apex Legends a stronger game instead went into creating fluorescent blue Mirage vests and sparkly glitter covers for guns.

On balance, I had a good time with Apex Legends. I hope it gets better, but what they gave us isn’t bad. The battle royale genre is now out of its formative stage, and into its development stage. Genres are being mixed up and recombined, in the hopes of scoring the next crossover hit. I have no idea whether Apex Legends will still be the state of the art in six months, but it’s clearly the state of the art right now.

In my review of Rock & Rule, I stated that it’s an adult film with no adult content.

This is not true; I saw an edited cut. According to the Rock & Rule wiki (??!), a version exists featuring brief nudity from Debbie Harry’s character, Angel. (Described below by an anonymous superfan, who gets way too into it. The Zapruder film wasn’t this obsessively analyzed.)

For most of the film, Angel wears a conservative but stylish red blazer over a black top with matching black pants, boots and a gold belt. After Mok enslaves and drugs her, she is forced to wear a very skimpy outfit for her involuntary performance at his concert. The outfit is a dress with a bare back and a front narrow enough to expose the sides of her bare breasts. The lower half of the dress is two fabric panels in the front and the back divided by slits up to her pelvis on either side, exposing her legs to the top of her hips. Also, Angel is not only going in her bare feet, she also isn’t wearing anything underneath her dress. We can see she’s bare underneath when the breeze periodically causes the fabric panels to lift, exposing her bare tush and the creases of her pelvis. This especially happens when she is singing to the demon and the back panel of her dress flips up, revealing her bare bum.

Can the coast guard mount a rescue mission for this man’s keyboard? It’s clearly drowning in its operator’s drool. Additional credits to society chime in the comments.

Based on her haircut, general appearance, it looks like they actually modeled her at least somewhat on Debbie Harry, who provided her singing voice.

Nothing gets past Sherlock here.

Angel’s brown” fur is actually her skin. After all, “fur is skin” exists according to TV Tropes & Idioms. So her sexy, thick, buxom, toned body is exposed.

A compelling argument, backed by citation. Can I suggest a career as a lawyer? You’ll be spending a lot of time in courtrooms either way.

Yeah, I think she and would get along well to being friends and having fun as girls. Her natural personality reminds me of a lot of the I usually hang out with. You rule Angel girl!!!! <3 :)

You shouldn’t think that, because Angel’s not your friend, or even a real person. She’s a cartoon mouse. Parasocial fixations on fictional characters are unhealthy, and you should make some real friends.

By the way, reading the heart ASCII <3 requires that you tilt your head to the right, and the smiley emoticon :) requires a tilt in the opposite direction. When the two appear back to back, you’d technically have to whiplash your head 180 degrees to read the text. Pretty painful, and if you did it fast enough, it might even prove fatal.

This could be used as an assassination method. Copy and paste “<3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :)” into an email, send it to your enemy, and see if they snap their spine. Or maybe that’s not how it works, maybe you’re supposed to imagine that the smiley is tilting its head. Can smileys be killed this way? Let’s try. :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :(. There. I just rocked and rolled it to death.

You’ve heard about this, or will: James Gunn was dismissed from the production of Guardians of the Galaxy 3.

First, condolences. I don’t often talk about this, but I was fired from a multi-million dollar movie production too. To get technical, I was “fired” in the sense of never being hired for one, but still, the wound is fresh.

What led to his firing? Some tweets, years old. Some are innocent, their context snipped away by sélecteur Mike Cernovich (a far right figure who apparently wanted Gunn fired). A couple were clearly jokes.

This scandal has provoked opinions, most of them bad. So far, nearly everything I’ve read about the firing of James Gunn is united in missing the mark.

“Why joke about that sort of stuff?” Why not joke about it? People joke about all manner of things. “It’s offensive!” Thank you, @JudenGrinderPepe1488, for being the voice of moral guidance we sorely need. “It trivializes pedophilia!” No, it doesn’t, dumbshit. It’s transgressive humor, which means it relies on shock and outrage. If pedophilia is trivial, the joke does not work.

I realise that many people don’t find Gunn’s humor funny, and don’t comprehend how anyone could. Let me attempt an explanation: when you joke about pedophilia, the goal is not to get a laugh but to provoke a shocked “ew!” response in your audience, which is isomorphic to humor in the minds of some people. In the same way, people eat chili peppers, not because capsaicinoids taste great, but because the burning sensation on your tongue is pleasurable. Maybe you don’t find it funny. This is because you’re trying to read a language without the necessary vocabulary. I think jazz is unlistenable, but this isn’t jazz’s fault: I’ve been trained to process music in certain ways that, unfortunately, have welded my brain shut to Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. Your sense of humor was shaped by things, too, and when you judge something as unfunny, it judges you back.

You should still understand that firing people for jokes is wrong. After all, someday a person with power won’t understand one of your jokes.

But there’s an even more annoying sentiment being expressed, mostly from the political left. They are attempting to finesse some sort of culture war story where where unprincipled right wing conservatives are getting leftists fired in bad faith, something that would never happen in reverese because only the left has standards and decency and honor and (heavy breathing commences).

This narrative collapses under five minutes of investigation, but that isn’t the point. Cernovich did not fire Gunn. He does not own Disney, is not on their board of directors, and has no power over them whatsoever.

Disney fired Gunn.

Twitter’s remedy is “don’t pay attention to trolls like Cernovich”, which isn’t a solution at all. Bad faith actors are everywhere, and someone else will pull the same stunt tomorrow. Playing whack a mole with individuals is a waste of time in an ecosystem this vast: and Gunn-esque firings will continue to happen until we think systemically.

This requires a sidetrack into another topic: computer viruses.

In my lifetime, I have seen an interesting shift in who we blame for viruses on the internet.

In the 90s, we blamed the creator of the virus. When your computer got infected, you felt personally slighted, as if hax0rkid69 did the equivalent of leaving a bag of flaming shit on your front porch.

In the 00s, a shift happened, and we blamed the user. It was grandma’s fault for not recognizing that the .jpg had a hidden .exe at the end of it. Partly it was the fact that the era of personal “you got pwned by hax0rkid69!” attacks were over. Viruses relatively bland and anonymous, as if they’d achieved sentience and were programming themselves, and most had goals of marketing or theft rather than blind destruction. Mostly, it was learned helplessness. There were so many that trying to drop the hammer on individual virus creators was futile. The only way to stop them was for grandma to learn how to use her damned computer.

But in the 2010s, another shift happened. Nobody blames virus creators, or grandma. Just as we accept that viruses exist and will never go away, we also accept that incompetent users exist and will never go away. If your defense model relies on everyone exhibiting pluperfect competence, you have failed as a security engineer.

Now, we blame the system.

Scott Alexander recently commented that Apple’s MacOS contains an autocorrect that works on medical terms (such as changing “duloxetine” to “fluoxetine”). Apple fans arrived to point out that this can be very easily switched off…and the backlash was amazing, and inspiring. It’s not the responsibility of several million end users to navigate around Apple’s potentially life-threatening incompetence. The responsibility rests with the creators of the system. What makes more sense, solving a problem in O(n) or O(1) time?

This is an evolution of thought that should be applied to bad-faith actors getting their political opponents fired. Blaming Cernovich is bass-ackwards – the equivalent of getting mad at a script kiddie who infected your computer. Blaming Gunn is equally counterproductive. He would still have his job if he hadn’t sent those tweets, but he couldn’t have known those tweets would cost him his job when he sent them, just as grandma can’t reasonably be expected to check her emails for .exe attachments. Additionally, “those tweets were unacceptable but James Gunn deserves a second chance!” is a subcategory of “blaming Gunn”.

The only people handling this correctly are the ones blaming the big mouse.

Gunn had the misfortune to work in a system that is both increasingly risk averse and sensitive to PR scandals. This isn’t unreasonable: PR scandals are one of the few things a big corporation cannot control. Fortunately, there’s a ready solution: make it so that firing people for Twitter jokes leads to an even bigger PR scandal. That’s a risk companies need to be even more averse to.