Lucky you! I have some wine.

How far back do we want to go? Let's go back to Origins. No, wait. Let's go back to Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire.

Back in the original XBox days, we had Bioware. They made the *BEST* RPGs. Founded by three guys who dropped out of the medical profession, they said that they wanted to make the games they wanted to play.

Knights of the Old Republic is probably the greatest Star Wars game of all time. You start out as a Force-Sensitive Level 0 schmuck with amnesia and are put on the Hero's Journey to take on The Big Bad. Along the way, you pick up a team of companions, maybe fall in love, learn how to use a lightsaber, choose the light side or the dark side, and clear up all of the questions you have.

I didn't see the twist coming from a mile away... more like from two or three yards away... and so it hit me and the protagonist at the same time and I had to put down the controller and run upstairs and tell Maribou about the game I was playing. "Well!", she said. "I'm glad you're having fun!"

Jade Empire was its own franchise made by the same team. You were a kung fu level 0 schmuck who did *NOT* have amnesia, you were merely the brightest star in the best school of the best kung fu teacher ever and you had to run around and do the hero's journey yourself. Pick the open hand or the closed fist. There was also a twist that I did *NOT* see coming at all. I was left with my jaw on the floor and and sputtering in indignance. It made the fight against the Big Bad that much sweeter.

How I *LOVED* Bioware. They were a day-one purchase. They were *PRE-ORDER* purchases. That's how much I loved them.

Well, for the 360, they were coming out with a brand spankin' new franchise called "Dragon Age". You were in this weird fantasy world and it was brand new. There were humans and elves and dwarves. There were fighters and thieves and mages. Mages tended to go mad and blow up everything so they were kept on a short leash. Dwarves didn't have magic at all.

The game started with one of *SIX*, COUNT-EM, *SIX* potential builds:

Human noble, human mage, elven mage, Dalish Elf, Dwarven noble, Dwarven casteless.

I haven't played the game since Obama's first term but I still have all of those memorized.

Each one of those beginning classes had a unique start in the game and each unique start took about two hours... you'd have your backstory, you'd have a tutorial on how to fight and how to talk and intimidate and charm, and then you'd be inducted into the Grey Wardens and the story proper would start.

Along the way, you'd pick up a team of companions, fall in love, and pick between being a paragon of virtue or an amoral mastermind and fight the big bad and it was *AWESOME*.

And then Bioware was bought by EA and Dragon Age 2 came out and it was... I wouldn't call it a *GOOD* game but it was more a game that I could tell you what it was trying to do. "I could see what it was going for."

Around this time, Mass Effect 3 came out and it had a very controversial ending and Bioware had the choice between listening to the user base and changing the ending *OR* yelling something about artistic vision and shutting down the Bioware forums.

They chose to shut down the forums.

Dragon Age: Inquisition came out and it wasn't *BAD*... it tried to recreate the whole World of Warcraft experience for the single player. A lot of grinding. I didn't finish it. But I see what it was going for.

Anyway, years and years and years passed. Dragon Age: Something Or Other was being worked on, abandoned, revamped, worked on as an iPhone game, abandoned, revamped and, eventually, we got Veilguard.

Veilguard had very, very little overlap with the original Origins game. Instead of having choices that mattered, you had to pick between agreeing because you were nice or agreeing but being really snarky about it.

And, along the way, you picked up companions and some of the companions would explain to you that they were now non-binary.

I am not making this up.

There's also a scene where they explain the best way to deal with misgendering someone.

I am not making this up.

Anyway, Dragon Age: Veilguard sold about 1.5 million units and EA said that their expectations were about 3 million (Dragon Age: Origins has sales of about 3.2 million).

Veilguard is considered a failure when it comes to sales. The studio that created it was shut down and a handful of devs were sent to other in-house studios and the rest were thrown to the winds.

Which brings us to Assassin's Creed.

Assassin's Creed, as a franchise, was *AWESOME*. It was a game the combined sneaking and combat and some light puzzling and a handful of twists and turns and there were two levels to the game... one where you were Desmond, a guy in the current year, and one where you were Altair, an ancestor of Desmond's that you'd visit while in the machine that tapped into your ancestral memories.

And in Assassin's Creed II, you were Ezio Auditore (and there were two sequels to Assassin's Creed II that had you move from angry young man to experienced killer to wise assassin leader).

And in Assassin's Creed III, you came to the new world and played Connor, a half-Native, Half-Brit assassin who was pitted against the Redcoats!

And in Assassin's Creed IV, you played Kenway, a pirate!!!

And then the game got a little bloated. There was stuff in France and Egypt and Victorian England and the Viking Lands and... well, I stopped playing after IV. I got the Victorian England one but didn't get too far into it. I was irritated at all of the monetization stuff they added.

Anyway, they were finally going to come out with an Assassin's Creed game set in Japan! FINALLY!

And the lead character was Yasuke. Yasuke was a historical dude. An African in Japan who was given a sword by his master and occasionally carried his master's weapons and, some historians say, this means that he was a samurai.

So you're playing Yasuke during the something-or-other period and you have to deal with the Big Bad.

People who are not exactly charitable are spinning this as "so you're a black guy running around Japan killing Japanese people? They should have set the game in 2021 in San Francisco!" and stuff that is even worse than that.

It being the current year, the Assassin's Creed: Shadows devs have included an option for Yasuke to have a fling with the enby Ibuki character and that created as much drama as you imagine it did.

Anyway, at this moment in time, Steam numbers have Assassin's Creed: Shadows as having a little over half of the peak numbers of Veilguard's peak numbers.

And Veilguard was considered a disappointment bad enough to shutter the studio.

That is about 80% of it, I think.

Speaking of which, Assassin's Creed: Shadows released this week and, as of Friday night, has a little under 40k players right now and an all-time peak of 47,616.

By comparison, Veilguard's all-time peak is 89,418. It achieved that on the Sunday after it launched so we can't compare apples to apples quite yet... but it had 77K on the day after it launched.

Good news! Benjamin Netanyahu assures everyone that there will *NOT* be a Civil War.

There will be no civil war! The State of Israel is a state of law and according to the law, the Israeli government decides who will be the head of the Shin Bet. Shabbat Shalom.

(Translation provided by Google.)

Ah, that's something we probably need to kick up to one of the grownups.

I *WANT* guest posts.

Any given post of mine has an author's bio at the bottom but here it is: AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

I was expecting a bunch of bad reviews from chuds who hadn't seen the movie but I expected them to be offset by Team Good people reviewing it as a masterpiece (who also hadn't seen it first).

If the latter don't show up, it might be legitimately bad.

I mean, as a movie. I don't mean morally.

The debate over The Department of Education generally just boils down to the name.

"The Department of Good Things has failed in its mission. We should shutter it."
"What? Don't you support Good Things?"

The widely debunked claim that "every education statistic has gone down since the Department of Education was established!" points to a couple of claims as to why it's not true: High School Graduation Rates and College Degrees.

Both of those have gone up since 1979. Indisputably.

Of course, we've discussed the whole "people graduating without being proficient at reading or math" thing a hundred times and college graduation rates have been discussed a little less (but we've discussed Student Loan Forgiveness a bunch... the consensus does seem to be that the degrees aren't worth what the students paid for them).

And we're back to arguing over whether or not we support the idea of Good Things... therefore we should support The Department of Good Things.

Has anybody seen the new Snow White yet?

How is it?

Well, if you want to pretend that you can't tell, I'll let you continue to do so.

But I imagine that it doesn't feel better when you do that.

See? Isn't that better than "but nobody is arguing for open borders!"?

So at least the police reform/defund the police faction has been told that they are losers.

Was it a mistake to run a candidate in 2024 that argued for defunding the police back in 2020?

Because if we can't get people to say "holy crap, we never should have run Kamala", I'm going to say that you're making stronger statements than those that would more accurately describe the facts on the ground.

We'd probably benefit from definitions here. "They're engaging in commerce!" is one definition of communication/cooperation but it strikes me as trivial.

Like, if we'd not find it particularly notable for "the global left" to do the things we're talking about when we say "communication/cooperation", we may be doing the thing where we're complaining about humans but saying that it's "the global right" doing it.

You know, the way that kids these days conflate "entropy" with "capitalism".

I don't even think that arguing "hey, we need one billion immigrants" is necessarily a *BAD* play. "The Haitians are making Ohio better. Here's the factory owner praising how they're better workers than vintage Americans!"

But this whole thing about how we have a massive influx of immigrants and use new and novel ways to get them into communities who don't get a vote on it and then pretend that nothing happened when there are objections is, seriously, going to turn off more people than a full-throated "READ THE STATUE OF LIBERTY POEM AGAIN!!!"

Yeah, maybe that play will work. "Open borders?" you can ask with wide eyes. "But nobody is even pushing for those!"

The only thing that the global right seems to agree upon is that "Open Borders" is not a good policy.

Yeah, yeah. "Nobody is arguing for open borders!" but remember this article from just last month? In an Age of Right-Wing Populism, Why Are Denmark’s Liberals Winning?

As it turns out, the answer is that Denmark's Liberals are against Open Borders.

The answer just might be "abandon open borders as a policy".

Which, you'd think, would be easy if nobody is arguing for it.

Tull has come out with three albums in the last three years!!!

The Zealot Gene in 2022, RökFlöte in 2023, and Curious Ruminant came out TWO WEEKS AGO.

Huh.

If we could allow for "conspiracy theories" to also cover stuff like "the authorities covering stuff up, obfuscating the truth, and opposing the story of what actually happened coming to light by pushing forward narratives that were not accurate", then we'd find ourselves awash in conspiracies.

Better to narrow it down to the point where it only covers stuff like "covid wasn't a deliberate biological weapon released to harm America, it came from a wet market".

Everybody always thinks that their pet conspiracies are like MKULTRA or Operation Mockingbird but most of them are like the conspiracy theory that says that Covid came from a lab.

Email it to me and I'll submit it under guest posts.

If you don't want to do it that way, email Andrew Donaldson and he'll do it.

One of Leonard Cohen's last poems was titled "What is Coming".

what is coming
ten million people
in the street
cannot stop
what is coming
the American Armed Forces
cannot control
the President
of the United States
and his counselors
cannot conceive
initiate
command
or direct
everything
you do
or refrain from doing
will bring us
to the same place
the place we don't know

your anger against the war
your horror of death
your calm strategies
your bold plans
to rearrange
the middle east
to overthrow the dollar
to establish
the 4th Reich
to live forever
to silence the Jews
to order the cosmos
to tidy up your life
to improve religion
they count for nothing
you have no understanding
of the consequences
of what you do
oh and one more thing
you aren't going to like
what comes after
America

I sent a link to this essay to my EMF. I did not bother sending one to my JMF.

Yeah, my moment for that was "Love Will Tear Us Apart" in the cookie aisle.

"Why are they playing Joy Division?", I asked. Then I got depressed. Then I bought some Fudge Stripes.

Ironically enough, today marks the 54th Anniversary of the release of Aqualung.

March 19th, 1971.

Man, no wonder they wanted to keep this under wraps!