#7 - The lies we tell

We all tell them, don’t we? Hopefully, like me, they are more the innocent kind, the type that give ourselves permission to indulge in things that aren’t bettering our lives or simply to make other people’s lives more tolerable. I’m not one to go around telling people you enjoy eating baby’s rusks or doing hurricanranas off the top rope, but I might massage the edges of truths now and again to keep my world in order.

“Not a problem,” I say with a nod as I practically push myself into a hedge to let a four-person-wide family walk past me on their way to school as I make my way home from the same drop off. I resent it. I’m allowed to take up space, but I’m seemingly one of the few people left alive who understands walking in single file. Christ, this is starting to sound like a Daily Mail op-ed about the state of parenting today. Trust me, it’s not going there.

This week I convinced myself that watching borderline drivel on Netflix and Disney + had value, that it’s only possible to truly appreciate what’s good if you are aware of the bad. Also, given I’m now writing about it, doing so had value to my work too. A lie of sorts, but one I’ve repackaged as a necessary evil.

I read on Jank.cool this morning an article on if games can be so bad they are good. Annoyingly this is what today’s newsletter was going to be focused on, looking at how I feel films and some TV shows can very much achieve this, but games not so much. Brendan’s article is far more interesting than my take would have been (not a lie?), but I’ll share with you the film and show I watched that I think represent this perfectly.

Netflix’s sharks in a hurricane movie, Thrash, is pure trash, to Jaws what Queen of the Damned is to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s the kind of film that you watch and wonder how it ever made it beyond an idea scribbled on the back of a napkin - and it would have left ample room on even the smallest. Not content with one disaster (a hurricane that the people in this film give no respect whatsoever, including one woman who is heavily pregnant), it throws hungry sharks into the mix. Top marks for piling on the stresses, I guess.

The main characters all survive, and I think it says a lot that I hoped their happy moment basking in the glow of their own survival would be cruelly interrupted by one final attack. It didn’t come, although a suggestion of another mega storm hitting did open the door to a dumb sequel - maybe some doctors could perform open-heart surgery on the back of a whale or something next time, to up the ante from giving birth during a town-decimating double catastrophe.

Next up, The Beauty. FX’s show about the desire to be beautiful, which is half The Substance and half X-Files, is schlocky trash of the highest order. People explode, almost everyone is awful, sense is discarded in favour of desires, and episodes flash past your eyes like a maglev bullet train. I honestly had to check I hadn’t fallen asleep during one of the early episodes, its content thinner than a pensioner’s skin.

I must watch more to build my cultural awareness and enhance my abilities as a critic, I tell myself, at the same time puzzled as to why a show that revels in gore and sex blurs out female nipples. A whole load of lies that I don’t have time to unpack lead us there.

Terrible show, terrible film, and yet… I watched both, and was happy to do so. Am I really lying to myself to justify spending my time on such frivolities or did I genuinely enjoy them? I can’t remember ever asking myself that question after playing what I’d consider a bad video game.

Back in the real world, my daughter turned five this week. Kids take everything quite literally, so to her being a big girl (or bigger girl) isn’t so much about the number but her actual height. The logical conclusion to this line of thinking is that she would grow overnight as she turned five, and she’s been excited about this for weeks. So when she burst into our bedroom at 6am on her birthday…

“Wow, hold on… have you… are you… taller? Did you grow that much overnight?”

She’s my big little girl and I’d tell all the little lies in the world to make her happy. Thankfully she’s young enough to fall for my terrible acting! Or maybe she’s taking part in a mutual lie that benefits both of us. I mean, what age do most kids learn the truth about Father Christmas, only to go along with the charade as it’s all part of the fun?

Quick shout-out to my friend, Jim, who I’ve guilted into reading this each week before it goes out to the masses. He’s promised me he won’t ever mince his words, and won’t lie about it to spare my feelings… hold up! My wife, however, I can trust to tell it to me straight. I’ve made it my mid-life goal to convince her that I am actually a funny man. She’ll tell me if I’m not. And does, often.

Note: Apologies to my sibling, 18 years my junior, who I convinced at age four that horses were just large dogs. They are not.

I think there’s a point at which beliefs can be construed as lies, and there’s no company embodying this more right now than Xbox. The gaming division of Microsoft has been operating with such a sense of delusion that you have to wonder just what has been going on at the top. Lies? Maybe. Incompetence? Possible. This week’s Xbox Game Pass price reduction, which goes hand in hand with Call of Duty no longer being included on Day One, smacks of the kind of corporate forecasting/lies that inevitably reveals itself to be hokum.

Still, something getting cheaper is good in my eyes.

This newsletter isn’t entirely about shoehorning video game news onto the end of whatever topic takes my fancy (I have other interests too). I’ll have a think about some other bits and pieces and round them up in the quick reviews below. I’m a critic, too, you see.

Things I can review:

• Helium balloons (gift shops): I walked into town this week on a mission to buy one large, rose gold No. 5 helium balloon for my daughter’s birthday. The purchase was easy, the journey home was not. Despite the weather tricking me into thinking it was already summer (a season I hate, for the record), this day happened to be blowy. The route home also took me past a particularly dirty Wetherspoons. “Happy birthday, mate,” shouted one patron who had clearly not been drinking only the coffee in his hand that morning, as I hugged the balloon like a grizzly bear might caress a butterfly. “Yeah, thanks,” I replied with a fake smile and a sense of dread for what my life would become if this balloon didn’t make it home safely. One close shave with a bus later I was home. Happy child, happy life. 5 high-pitched helium happy birthdays out of 5 hungover revelers.
• Mushrooms (shops): On top of my attempt to walk more, I’m trying to eat better. But I’m pretty terrible at that, so I’ve resorted to keeping things simple, one meal being fried mushrooms on toast. I love mushrooms, but sadly my family hates them, my son almost gagging at the smell as I cook the third different meal of the evening to suit everyone’s needs. He’s not of the age where he’ll sugarcoat anything with a little lie, and it does take the edge off my enjoyment, for sure. 4 garlic button mushrooms out of 5 shiitakes.
• Spurs (Premier League, for now): 2-1 up against Brighton, a move out of the bottom three on the horizon, and a glimmer of optimism in the air. All gone in the 95th minute, my fists clenched, a quiet, heavy, and exasperated “fuck sake” escaping from my mouth as Brighton drew level, the family reunion finale of Tangled playing in the background much to the joy of the rest of my family. Someone tell me why I can’t give up football, please. 11 underachievers out of hundreds of hours of misery.