Elite Mindset Development For Competitve Meta Dominance: Premium Nootropic Edition

Competitive games rock, and while I indulge in a fair amount of competitive play I wouldn’t really consider myself truly “competitive” in any of them. Dead average at best. I put the majority of my time into my beautiful, horrible, no-good fighting games - my love for these games is never really going to go away until my wrists collapse completely, and even then I might still try and jam a couple of games of GGXXAC+R, who knows. 

In my recent travels indulging in other competitive games like Yu-Gi-Oh and Warhammer 40k, I’ve been able to sort of broadly spot a trend in how fighting games differ from other scenes. See, fighting games are great because fighting games encourage people to be - hold on, let me take a second to think of an appropriate term here - “losers”. 

Literally: people who lose a lot. 

In a fighting game your new DLC character shouldn’t win. You probably don’t want them to win. Ideally, you should be paying howevermany bucks for a shiny new character with a shiny new costume, and you should be getting beat fifty, sixty times before you slowly become confident that you can plan and play your way out of situations. This is the grasping, tentacle embrace of the loser mindset - playing to learn so that you can play to win when it matters. Not just planning your way out of situations either, I think winning-as-a-goal all the time shuts you out of attempting to do stuff and the satisfaction with making that attempt. Trying something out in a pressured situation becomes another bullet point on a long “ah shit, probably need to practise this a few dozen times” list. 

Broski recently made a video about playing like a lunatic where he offhandedly mentioned a Balrog unplinkable 1f link from jab into Ultra 1 (translation: an intensely difficult and potentially risky maneuver). When you see something like that executed in a game… you gotta try it, right? I heard him talk about it and I wanted to try it. You have to put yourself in the right place mentally to be able to try it in a match, inevitably whiff it, do the little head nod, and then try it again when the opportunity comes up. A well-developed loser mindset (complimentary) lets you play to learn constantly, and if you can enjoy learning then no matter what happens in the game you get to have a bit of fun with it. 

I did a (now-deleted) video a thousand (two or three) years ago where I compared fighting games to learning a musical instrument, where the idea of playing against someone is only true on a surface level because the deeper you go the more it becomes about connection, about improvising together, about one-upping each other with your concept of play to synthesise ideas rather than simply “beating” a person. The more competent you get, the more you drive another to become competent, the more you get driven to not fall behind - situation after situation and cool optimisation after cool optimisation, all contained within this silly box of choices and consequences. THE FIGHTING GAME IS LIKE THE MODERN DAY AGORA, WITH THE PLAYERS AS COMBAT PHILOSOPHERS OF DEBATE AND REASON etc. etc. etc. kill me.

I see you've committed the ultimate logical fallacy of getting grabbed while I have meter.

 

I mentioned this above, but I have been much, much more engaged in the Yu-Gi-Oh card game recently. The experience of being part of a community that requires my physical presence for the game to actually start is a bit of a shift for me, a damp creature more predisposed towards hermitude than any kind of human contact, but the change in pace is refreshing, and the competitive drive that made me fall in love with fighting games has a new home in these far more rules-ambiguous spaces. It’s fun to have to do my research about interactions, to need to explain those interactions so that the game can function with the participation of all players, it’s cool! It is a little interesting how the YGO community demonstrates a significantly different approach to new versions, shifts in the meta, new releases etc. than fighting games. I think the community encourages people to be - and if you’ll give me a second to come up with the correct terminology - I think the best way to describe them is “losers”. 

Live footage of me reluctantly emerging from my apartment. 

There’s no polite way to put this, but I’ll give it a shot: I think that card-game players grossly overestimate their analytical abilities. To believe that your understanding of hypothetical future rules strength is overwhelmingly correct (e.g this deck is clearly the strongest, this is an obvious nerf, this completely kills the deck) is deeply annoying and provides an unhelpful rubric through which to view the game. This confidently stated, absolute understanding of what is good or bad based on a banlist leak or a translated card is often treated as gospel absent from context. More than absent context, it is a viewpoint that encourages the idea amongst mid and lower level players that there is a ‘correct’ way to approach playing the game that beats or invalidates ‘incorrect’ ways, and that if you aren’t right here in the present with the latest release, you are doomed to failure. It goes beyond not wanting to lose, instead discursively treating ‘loss’, or the possibility of future loss, as closer to a fundamental failure rather than a natural state in a game with more than one agent player. This, to me, is a loser mindset because it hamstrings meta exploration (again, particularly at a mid and low level) and provides a tangible, simple answer to the complex, multi-faceted question of ‘why did I lose?’. 

I understand that at a high level an accurate and fast assessment of deck strength in a game that gets monthly releases is a necessity if you want to make it to the big leagues and win a Nintendo Switch or an Air Fryer, but I think having the content-creator-powered insight into these assessment processes acts as a bit of a glue trap for a lot of players, and I think that the conversation both online and offline leans overwhelmingly towards this. 

Like… if you are an active YGO player, I want you to take a genuine look at yourself and honestly ask “am I high level?”. 

“Am I a high level player?”. 

If not then maybe you are being stopped from reaching a higher level of play not because you don’t have a max rarity Vanquish Soul core, but because you’ve stopped thinking about how to problem solve within the absurdly wide and endlessly novel confines of the game. I’m not naive enough to say that you can go out and win with your sick favourite monster utilising the heart of the cards to own your opponent, anime style, but I can definitely tell you that I consistently learn a lot more about how the game works by losing for 10+ games in-person than I do from booting up Master Duel and winning a bunch. I don’t think people need to go play games with set goals like “I’m gonna win EVO” or “I’m gonna win a YCS”, but I do think games like YGO would benefit from communities that publicly and visibly encourage more incremental and abstract progress. Without building a strong base that understands the subtleties and intricacies of the game and revels in it, I think the idea of competitive YGO is doomed to continue a cycle of “new thing objectively good” without the kind of intense meta development that revealed Vergil as an insanely highest-tier, nonsense character in UMVC3, or uh… Chun Li as an insanely highest-tier, nonsense character in UMVC3. 

I genuinely believe this tournament made me a lifelong fan of a game I don't even enjoy playing. Also I might be wrong here but I'm 90% sure Yipes talked about how busted he thought Vergil was on a Team Spooky stream like... week 1 of the game coming out. Absurdly ahead of the curve.

 

This is already slightly too long. Go forth and lose, losers. You don’t need to be the most winning to contribute, you just need to enjoy it enough to start being creative about what you are trying to do and mindful about what it means for you to engage in an activity where you should lose a lot. Playing a game against others, trying to win, losing, and being able to develop alongside them is an intensely valuable experience for me, and I think in games like Yu-Gi-Oh (although I should mention this game is in NO WAY unique here, I just care about it) the cadence of conversation around 'losing' and 'loss' can cheapen a huge, beautiful part of playing and hamper the development of opinions about playing. 

YOUR MOVE dun dun dun dundun, dun dun dun dundundundun IT'S TIME TO D-D-D-D-D-D stop reading it's over the blog is over. 

 

Bonus! This is my favourite monster card in the entire game, and an actual, no-shit, random game-winning draw. I'd love to see an expanded Lava Golem archetype, I think it's just such an odd and interesting monster.

 

You Won't Believe What Happened: Thoughts About Telling Stories On the Tabletop

Imaginative games and social games without a moderating narrative force (like a DM, for example) are super interesting to me, because your story is constantly coming into direct conflict with another, equally important story happening on the other side of the table. This isn’t exclusive to war games like 40k or AoS, but I think they provide the loosest example where the divide between the narrative world and the tabletop world is the largest - which I fully understand is a huge statement, but bear with me, because I think they help illustrate how rich story worlds can become through play.  

I’m going to put a glossary to explain what some key asterisked things are, but if you see any proper noun just imagine a little plastic soldier of some shape or colour. Truly I was not bothered building in explanations mid-paragraph, but I will put some jargon-decoding stuff at the bottom. You’ve been warned, abandon all hope, all ye who etc etc etc. 

 

I think there’s a fascinating “zoom-in” that creates a canon that happens mid-game, and doesn’t really have to reflect anything other than what is being experienced presently on the table. Say, for example, you are playing the Dark Angels*, you take the Lion*, Azreal*, a dozen inner-circle companions*, and a block of nigh-unkillable deathwing* knights. Your (probably rather beautiful and cultured) opponent takes the Genestealer Cults* and you lose. You don’t just lose; you get completely trounced. 

40k and Street Fighter 4 actually take place in the same universe. 

On the table the Lion killed nothing, Azreal died to a landmine, a single group of four roided up Aberrants* successfully killed a Land Raider* and ten Terminators* with only a single model dying, the Inner-circle companions all fell to a group of seven malnourished children and their equally malnourished genestealer puppy. The absolute best and brightest of one of the most storied and respected chapters in the entire known universe of Warhammer 40k got trounced by a bunch of miners and some dirtbike teens. 

So, what happened? 

Well if we keep thinking inside of a game that has maths, strategy, and tactics, then we can say that maybe you failed to walk towards any single objective, and maybe your models were too recently painted to attract any kind of dice luck. Maybe you failed to use your stratagems effectively and put too much focus on killing things and too little focus on the threats around you and the abilities of your opponent. True and real, but a bit boring, isn’t it? 

So, what actually happened? 

Well, glad you asked, the Genestealer Cults ambushed a group of Space Marines* somewhere, and in the darkest caves of a sad, sad mining world, the great demagogues of the four-armed emperor are spinning a tale. Our loyal comrades took to the field against the hated enemy and his strongest warriors, and while the losses were heavy we beat the forces of the oppressor back and liberated a swathe of the world. The weapons of the overseers broke and shattered in the face of our devotion, and our justice was strong enough to pierce tank armour. But let me tell you about his false warriors - one stood most terribly above his brethren, a fierce warrior of suffocating presence carrying a malign energy, his entire focus the immiseration, the de-enlightenment, the re-enslavement of free spirits and blessed bodies! His name? Well they will never say it, but it was none but the Lion of the Dark Angels himself!

It’s so much fun to play with the idea of narrative through play, and it allows for silly, lore-congruent, and asynchronous storytelling. You don’t need to be playing the Dark Angels to field The Lion on the tabletop, you just to have a hero who showed up on the day and fought with fury and leadership so stunning that a significantly less worldly footsoldier might report over the comm-link the only thing that makes sense to them: “They’ve got an unstoppable Marine, this must be a Primarch*!”

The table narrative, the narrative of recalling what happened how it happened, can always be completely 'true' if the right (or wrong, or most misinformed, or most terrified) perspective is employed.

OUR brave beautiful bug people, THEIR fanatical fascist foot-soldiers.

In a wargame where there is no specific “player” side, I think it is an interesting constraint to think of your army (and your actual army list!) as your army as-understood-by the enemy. We can sort of enter the circle of play already, using the literal function of an army list while understanding that we can move far enough away from the table to treat the events as canon but the ‘facts’ as representative rather than literal. This allows us to take one step further back from the present, table narrative, to zoom-out slightly. If we’re keeping the idea of the (handsome, perfect) Cults led by Some Guys vs the (secretive, perfidious) Dark Angels led by Lion El’Jonson and Azreal and whatnot, then the Cults may be working from simply incorrect information rather than embellished information, because why, exactly, would they know what the Deathwing are? 

So, what happened? 

Well the Genestealer Cults were just mistaken. They may tell great tales of this event, but from the start (and the awful stats displayed at the end back this up) any respected historian would tell you that this must have been the unfortunate massacre of a regiment of slightly taller regular soldiers: a tiny, unremarkable event in the context of a planet-wide uprising. Plus why the fuck would the head of a legion be on the planet Mine-o-Tronius XII in the galactic back end of nowhere? Think about it.   

There were once the tools to pull together a cohesive on-table story that makes sense in-universe, now there kind of isn’t. That’s the short version of this issue, designed to make me sound less old. Named characters, special characters with real lore significance are great, and GW has made these models truly spectacular to the point where you should absolutely not deny yourself the usage of them. This doesn’t mean the storytelling is gone, but it does mean that you should encourage the people around you to get a little more creative with their stories they tell both before and after the battle. 

Keeping a canon isn’t everything either, I think it is funny to make excuses as to why something was or wasn’t what it seemed - they didn’t check the expiry date of the plasma, that’s why they didn’t do any damage. Lion was ill that day, had to get his distant cousin Housecat El’Jonson in. But these are all stories, jokes are stories, they can build worlds with others in weird ways that just aren’t as readily available inside games with stricter boundaries.  

Average lore-accurate Space Marine pictured here on his daily commute.

I’ve always loved the idea of the canon Space Marine vs. the tabletop Space Marine as a concept because it fundamentally changes the shape of the story and warps your battlefields to the purely metaphorical through the power of Main Character Madness. Sure, hypothetically, a squad of five marines could get torn apart by twenty hormagaunts* on the charge, but doesn’t the story make more sense when we embellish the action and interpret it through an SM-friendly lens? 

So…. what happened? 

Was it really twenty ‘gaunts, or was that just a number to reflect the nearly endless swarm of hundreds that overwhelmed them? Did you ‘lose’ five marines from the battlefield because they were killed by twenty hormagaunts or did they assess an unwinnable situation and beat an effective retreat, their ceramite armour and centuries of experience allowing them to drag wounded comrades out of the line of fire, away from the eyes and scent-things of cunning predators and away from the action? If this was literal, if they did die, then why - how long has this strike force been fighting for to be worn down to this point? What heroic deeds did this squad achieve in the twenty uninterrupted days of fighting before their weapons and armour finally gave out? 

I love this kind of narrative, I love how it can build out of nothing and create something collaborative with the person across the table as you build a universe together through choices and dumb luck. 

Every type of social gaming, every kind of play that involves engaging in an imaginative world is enriched by storytelling. There is, I think, a distinctly delightful and youthful (or even youth-regaining) feeling in teasing stories out of your games, and sharing them with others to build a collaborative, creative canon around your play - and also in hearing about the shared canon that others have created amongst themselves. Not every game requires a storytelling, or even role-playing, element, not at all, but I think that every game you play with someone else deserves the opportunity to flourish in an imaginative ground that you and the other players till together, to bloom into connections based on opening the door to transform your play into a whole creative world. 

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh THE END. WHOOPS. GOT A BIT WEIRD THERE, FORGIVE ME.

*I don't know how to add footnotes in Blogger, so here's the glossary. We're doing this in the same font size as the main body!

The Dark Angels: The Dark Angels are the first of the Space Marine legions, they are adorned in a beautiful dark green and have a winged sword as their symbol.

The Lion: Lion El'Jonson is the Primarch of the Dark Angels, which is a fancy term for their leader and genetic sire. Thought dead, he's back for some reason that I haven't read about and he's capable of tonnes of murder.

Azreal: Azreal, the Chapter Master of the Dark Angels. A mighty and storied warrior in his own right, Azreal has been playing second fiddle to the Lion since the Lion returned from his trip to god knows where.

Inner-Circle Companions: New Dark Angels elites who carry big swords and wear cool cloaks.

The Deathwing: The name for the first company of the Dark Angels, the elite veterans of the chapter. The Deathwing wear large terminator armour, and are adorned in a bone white instead of the traditional dark green. Fun fact - the Deathwing originally changed their armour colour to honour a battle some of them fought against the genestealer menace, fun coincidence that didn't cross my mind while writing this. Also this straight up might not be canon anymore lmao.

The Genestealer Cults: Workers and miners in one of the many awful cities or planets of the imperium, corrupted body and soul by an alien menace. Dressed in their work gear and armed with mining lasers and/or whatever they can find lying around, the faction represents a world mid-uprising as they try and retake it and prepare it for the coming of the true, four-armed emperor (a large amount of bugs who will devour the planet). Phenomally cool, 10/10.

Genestealer Cult Aberrants: Large guys who are now more alien bug than human. They swing big ol hammers at stuff.

Land Raider: Just a biiiiiiig tank.

Space Marines: I should've probably started here! The Space Marines are the huge super soldiers of the 40k universe, perfect in nearly every way and capable of all sorts of dumb shit like spitting acid and gaining the memories of their foes by eating them? Weird!

Hormagaunts: Tyranids (space bugs) who leap at things and attack 'em with claws. If you've played the hit game Space Marine 2, you'll have killed thousands of the fuckers.

Ex-Streamly Loud And Incredibly Shit: Ranking Our Wonderful And Cool Streaming Services :^)

 

I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore. 

I’m tired of my streaming platforms being bad so I’ve decided to pit them against each other in a winner-takes-all, streaming tierlist battle royale. The participants have been picked based on two categories: do I have access to them, and have I ever used them, and they will all be evaluated fairly and objectively on their various merits by a panel of unbiased judges (me, changing costumes a lot and doing accents). Once the services have been graded, we’ll slap them into a tierlist at the bottom of the article so that their shame will be immortalised forevermore, or, at least, until they make screenshotting the main page a copyright-claimable offense. 

This is all tee-hee fun and games, what a goofy time, a tierlist - what a novel idea! But I have to be completely real with you for a second at the start here: these websites almost universally degrade the art they host, and their short-sighted business model is going to keep on bearing rotten fruit until they collapse and when they do they will take everything with them into the fire. Streaming platforms will kill the things you love just to show they have the right to do so, and they would rather no-one see something than someone else make any money or gain any type of capital whatsoever from it. These services need to be treated with extreme scepticism at the absolute best, the anti-art carrion scramble for films and shows has lowered the bar of acceptability, usability, and trust so far that they should be made to crawl through the acres of dvd graveyards before they are even allowed to beg to be given the chance to apologise (and also they should consider lowering prices somewhat). ANYWAY.

Prime Video 

All the joy of paying for a streaming service with half the benefits.

Easy D-tier, because we simply do not want to go lower than that. Prime Video feels like it was modeled on a scam website: you chase your media of choice by stumbling around fifteen different useless tabs that all attempt to upsell you shoddy cable plans. Video streaming but with a realtor’s aesthetic. 

What’s worse than the upselling is how dehumanising the whole thing feels, how genuinely degrading the experience is, like… “Thanks for your monthly tithe, you get nothing at all in return”. The entire thing is pretty close to unnavigable, it is, at absolute best, a placeholder that has stayed around for too long.
At worst, someone at Amazon is genuinely happy with how it works, how it looks and what it does. Terrifying. On top of that, while it performs the same core function as other streaming services in farming user information, it doesn’t even bother to maintain any kind of facade of improving the user experience, and will never act on any data gathered to recommend to you anything that could possibly reflect your established viewing habits. I can say with confidence that I have never been recommended a film or show by Prime that made any kind of sense to me - could my history potentially point me towards being interested in the Prime-exclusive Panty & Stocking 2? No, apparently I only want to watch Supercop International: The Makening or some equally anonymous film starring Frank Grillo doing his best alongside an endlessly rotating cast of borderline unwatchable actors. Terrible platform!

Further minus points because of your dogshit AI thumbnails and the constant feeling like every time I open the website I’m getting A/B tested to death, get a fucking life Prime Video god damn. 

Shudder

Goddamn what an all-timer front page. Took this screenshot today - two originals, Harmony Korine's Trash Humper, the mother fucking PUPPET MASTER series? Goodnight Mommy getting a spot on the big screen and an anthology film at the end there with the ABCs? Crazy stuff. 

 

You don’t have to give it to streaming platforms, but in this case I gotta hold up Shudder as a near-perfect example of what a streaming platform should be. Is it a bit janky? Yes. Does it have the exact same problems with slightly wonky dumb streaming service UI stuff? Yeah, sure. Does it work normally, for a super reasonable price? Absolutely. 

Shudder deserves recognition because it has a goal, it has a theme, it has things that it is clearly passionate about, and things that it wants to actually show you. When was the last time, do you think, that Disney + featured an interesting or confronting older film on the front page? Has it ever? 

Will it ever put something like Hundreds of Beavers on its front page, or relentlessly push Mad God? Will you ever see a splash screen encouraging you to try Audition, or one highlighting the recent acquisition of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, or the absurdly famous Silent Night Deadly Night 2? 

Shudder is a platform that is dedicated to a small but vitally important part of film culture and history, and it will share with you the fruit of its curation efforts with all sorts of pizzaz and panache and p...enthusiasm. It also has original films, new releases from both through acquiring new movies to distribute and in funding and cultivating a homemade library of post-streaming-era low-budget horror. For how comparatively cheap it is (in NZ dollar prices at least) Shudder is maybe the only one of these cursed websites I will go to regularly just to have a browse, because it's the only one interested in highlighting new additions without too obviously pushing you to go see whatever new Shudder thing is out. 

It's important to highlight this here (otherwise I'll just repeat myself a bunch), but a huge problem with how streaming websites operates currently is how callously they treat media that isn't Prime-branded, or Netflix-branded, or Disney-branded. How nakedly ugly it is to be able to painlessly access every minute variation of Star Wars while being locked out of decent subtitling or forced into completely fucked versions of other films. Shudder stands shockingly alone in its appreciation and promotion of other films, and I think it presents an opportunity to peep through the cosmic keyhole into another universe where this is the standard across all platforms. It should be the standard, Shudder should be a niche little oddity where you go to see Hellraiser 3 but it isn't - it is exceptional in its field and that's a little fucking sad, no?

Curation lends meaning to a library, and the gulf between a curated selection and an uncurated selection is extremely noticeable once you go out of your way to experience both. It’s like the difference between walking through a gallery and walking through a warehouse that just happens to have some pictures in it. A-tier, easy. 

Neon 

 

Tragic. Maybe even criminal, I don't know, I've heard rumours.

This is a bit of an odd one because for the most part I like Neon. I like the layout, I like the recommended, upcoming, and currently airing page, and I like the little icons they have for different users. The little bonus plans are a bit weird, but not super obtrusive, and the TV app sucks, but overall it’s pretty good. Neon’s most significant victory is that its presentation feels like a premium product where you can go watch prestige shows (or Adventure Time). It genuinely feels good to indulge in a legacy-brand streaming service, where you have unlimited access to a super specific series of libraries - the issues it has are mostly generic, the same kind of porcine laziness as the rest of the high-cost platforms, but there is a certain something about how Neon carries itself. Maybe it's the slightly more sober palate, maybe it's the good promotion of locally made stuff, I don't know exactly what appeals to me here but it works.

For non-OCE readers, Neon is HBO Max plus some other bullshit bundled together by Sky, so we’re blessedly free from the branding nightmare and the name-associated decisions that are tanking the service in the US. We do, unfortunately, still feel the effects of HBO/Discovery’s awful practises, as does everyone! It is difficult to have enthusiasm for a platform that is explicitly anti-film, anti-television, anti-art more generally - it's just a hard thing to know, and like most things that are hard to know, it's also nearly impossible to un-know. 

What's gonna get canned next, I wonder, as I queue up another episode of The Righteous Gemstones. What's gonna disappear and never come back. What kind of twisted economics are going to take place next week, and what piece of art will it stain forever. Fun thoughts, only on Neon! 

Also what the fuck do you mean ‘no Deadwood’? It’s literally your show, so where is it? What’s the point in having a branded distribution platform for your heavily protected brand if you’re not going to use it to distribute the things you made? Is there another, cooler HBO out there contesting the fucking rights?? Are we in the middle of a Deadwood land grab, is this the wild west for Deadwood specifically and am I allowed to stake a claim???

B… minus.

 

Disney + 

I'm assuming that the title means the zombies are for the dawn of the vampires. 

 

The young and popular prince of streaming platforms operating in the service of the old, decrepit and deeply evil king. Ah, sorry - the old, decrepit, deeply evil, and popular king.

I’m conflicted about Disney + for a couple of reasons: on the one hand maintaining a subscription here is feeding a large (!!) amount of money to a megacompany that will continue to be one of the most vile on the planet, but on the other hand it does have Andor. It also has super dope guilty pleasure shows Justified (lots of Timothy Olyphant cowboy stuff here, guy knows how to rock the hat, what can I say) and the X-files, so on balance who can really say if it’s good to feed money to the saccharine terror machine. 

D+ (not the grade yet, sorry if that scared you) is, like Neon, undeniably the real deal when it comes to looking and feeling like a premium service, but it is super uneven with regards to its treatment of different properties. I like that it curates Disney/Marvel/Star Wars media into fun little packages, I love that it wants to show you behind-the-scenes featurettes from major headliners. I do wish it had anywhere near that respect for literally anything else. 

You’ve got Aliens, but you’re telling me that you couldn’t find any extras to upload? In the nearly 40 years since release, you just couldn’t find a single piece of additional content to add colour to the film or to further feed the interest of an audience looking for more?

Wow Frog, what a hater, why don’t you have this energy for the other platforms you just don’t like Disney - this is true! I am a hater! I don’t like Disney! But I don’t think my standards are that high here: if you are the unlimited money company with the awfully expensive service, then, in my humble opinion, more should be expected from you. 

D+ (still not the grade, I'm so sorry I promise this is the last time) is very obviously angling to be Television 2, and in being the front-runner for this attitudinal shift from website-style thinking to TV-style thinking we're able to see a lot of Disney+ elements being adopted by Netflix et al. With the recent change to make ESPN available on the platform the future as spearheaded by D+ is also looking pretty clear - we're going to get the usual inter-platform jostling for position in an attempt to make it seem like there's competition in the market; major sporting events are split cleanly between Netflix, Disney, and Prime; this is likely followed by a weird period of quiet legislative pressure, and then this is in turn followed by mass sports betting app integration. You're gonna be able to tie your betting app to your TV app, so you can watch the Red Sox continue their dastardly winning streak and get an on-screen pop-up to tell you your bet progress on an NBA game, or on a Netflix UFC event, or on a Prime cricket match, or even a Prime/Twitch integrated esports event! 

Wow - I can't wait! I'm thinking Positive Thoughts!!

 

Anyway you get a B… barely. Same problems: where’s the extras, what’s the point in your library of older films, and why is your shit the only streaming platform that consistently desynchs audio and video, please cost less etc. etc. etc.  

 

Netflix 

It's kinda sad how all these websites look exactly the fucking same lmao

Ah Netflix, I return to your endlessly disappointing lukewarm embrace.

There’s not a lot of novelty to squeeze out of this so I’m just going fast forward to the good parts, but if you’re picking up on a somewhat negative vibe outside of the Shudder containment zone then prepared to be surprised! Surprised by how un-surprising my opinion is about a company that has recently partnered with the odious CTE merchants at the UFC and WWE! 

Pointless library, awful communication, disorganised, often just straight bad versions of good movies, general weirdness - it’s all happening here on Netflix, the everything app. Same poor user experience, same seemingly endemic problems, but with the added bonus of the worst subtitling to ever grace online video streaming. 

Netflix is also littered with anemic Netflix Original movies and series, the new and trending splash screens acting like the gibbets that hung outside towns and cities as a warning - don’t bring or make anything good, lest this be your fate. It’s depressing. The Netflix Original was the difference maker in the battle between television and streaming, this tantalising dream that an online service can deliver the same (or better!) than a traditional distribution structure with traditional guardrails, audiences, and advertising. We’re exciting, we’re new, we’re not going to make you wait weeks for a whole show! We’re online, we’re relying on communities, our word of mouth is to do with quality rather than simply having a captive audience at 6pm! All these promises, now just echoes and bones in the desert. 

Also a fair amount of Frank Grillo here too - nothing against him, cash those cheques dude. He’s such a genuinely watchable actor as well, a lot of real old-fashioned charisma - for Netflix subscribers I’d check out Cop Shop to see what I mean. 

One big point in the favour of the big N - the recommendations are pretty congruent, and will often appear under the category “because you watched x”. Glad to see at least one site is using my data to pretend to improve my experience! 

 

Crunchyroll

Words? On a streaming website?? Well I never, what ever will they think of next.

Crunchyroll has a huge advantage over the major players because Crunchyroll is still fundamentally stuck with the visual attitude of a website that people are supposed to use instead of a glorified storefront. We’ve got readable information here, and a scrollable page that actually ends instead of endlessly refreshing with new products. Big mistake, pal - better fix that immediately.

You can navigate it, you can see gross comments from 2014, you can read articles, you can even buy merch, but it’s all focused around a single thing: anime. 

One single thing made up of lots and lots of smaller things called 'genres'. 

Crunchyroll has a shocking amount of tools and options that remind me of different, better times where consumption and building communities were tied together as part of discrete pockets of fan culture. It’s neat, and if you can stomach seeing some criminally bad isekai garbage on the front page there’s still a lot of room to find some incredible shows. That's the end of the assessment and a new, great tagline - Crunchyroll: It's Alright!

There is also something really, really interesting about Crunchyroll that is maybe... less alright. 

See, Crunchyroll is maybe the number one example of a streaming service you can see tumbling down the cliff in real time from multiple angles, Hot Rod-style. You can feel it when you go into Prime Video and are asked to activate a Crunchyroll extension, which is a separate payment from Crunchyroll and (in OCE) doesn’t communicate at all with Crunchyroll itself. You can sense it when you can’t quite remember if they did anything to advertise Mob Psycho 100 season 3, and then find articles about them union busting and paying extremely poorly. You can smell it with every new fuck-up, with every small reminder that this website used to honestly be a bit better four or five years ago, with every added inconvenience, every additional step users need to take, every jitter, every pause. 

It might sound like I’m positively salivating at the thought of Crunchyroll getting worse; I’m not. It’ll morph into a sub-par streaming service shorn of any prior internet identity and fansub history, and it’ll then get folded into a larger platform - that’s just what’s happening, and it is getting worse as progress continues. We just get to witness each slow, seemingly inevitable step as it happens. 

C tier, would be higher but you can’t possibly behave like you’ve been behaving and expect any better C-dog.

 

What are we doing here? What sort of bad, rancid vibes are we putting out into the world by continuing to humour platforms that show such raw contempt for both the users and the art? Shudder probably has problems that I'm glossing over, but at least it wants me to give Puppet Master a go, and I can't remotely say the same for any of the others. 

Puppet Master? Weird that comes up so many times, probably should go check out this other thing I wrote about puppets.