Philosophy and Faith

The King of an Empty Castle

Sometimes, I enjoy exploring Usenet. What is Usenet, you ask? It’s the precursor to Reddit and Facebook Groups; before all the different discussion forums and other sorts of many-to-many solutions on the internet, Usenet was how people found community online. It is very much a product of its era; the protocol was first implemented in 1981 and it shows. There is no text formatting. There’s no form of ‘liking’ or ‘upvoting’ or ‘thanking’, and there are no emojis. Usenet requires a dedicated program to access, and most of those applications have an appearance and interface that heavily prioritizes function over form.

I still find it interesting though. A few groups still have a handful of active users; unsurprisingly, most of them center around computing and computer programming. Other more general groups have been long abandoned. They are a ghost town, showing discussions from over a decade ago with spam posts being the only content added ever since. Occasionally, a group will contain a post from some unfortunate soul who asked a question years ago, never to see a reply.

Despite the current state of Usenet, starting a new newsgroup remains a laborious process.

I originally started pondering this blog post because I saw that there was no Windows 11 newsgroup. Ironically, the Windows 7 group remains somewhat active. While subreddits get created multiple times per minute (guess there will always be spammers), the arduous process of creating a new newsgroup seems to go to the other extreme. It appears that the last ‘Big 8’ newsgroup whose creation was approved, was added back in 2021. A handful of other proposals for new groups have been made since then, but all of them were denied before even been put up to a vote. The most recent successful proposal was to make someone a moderator of an existing newsgroup. It was the epitome of a hollow victory; the last post in that group was, in fact, the notice that the group had a new moderator. It’s possible that the moderator may be deleting spam as it arrives, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone worth cleaning up for.

This raised another question: Who’s voting on the creation of newsgroups? The answer: three people. Now, I’m not putting any shade toward Jason, Rayner, or Tristan. On the contrary, most of the proposals that have come in have seen participation by at least two of them, so it’s clear they are directly involved, which is good to see.

That being said, it wasn’t long before I started waxing philosophical. I don’t know how many people still actively use Usenet in a given month. Hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands if we stretch it to include Google Groups’ hybrid platform. Usenet has been almost entirely supplanted by Reddit, Twitter, HackerNews and 4Chan. Each of these services has their own advantages and shortcomings, but the real draw are the people. HackerNews has about 3.5 million monthly visitors. 4Chan has about 22 million. Twitter has tens of millions (depending on whose numbers you believe), and Meta’s Threads platform has reportedly seen 100 million sign-ups. Reddit has hundreds of millions. Even Mastodon has managed to keep about a million monthly users on the platform. Again, it’s hard to get numbers on Usenet usage, but I’d bet my money that even Truth Social’s 500,000 monthly user base far outnumbers those of Usenet.

The folks still using Usenet for discussion are, more likely than not, people who have been using it since the dial-up era. I’d be hard pressed to believe that there are even a dozen college seniors in my entire state who have posted on Usenet consistently. There simply aren’t a new group of people seeking to use the system to communicate, especially when far more popular, far more instantaneous platforms exist.

Herein lies my ultimate question: Of what virtue is it to meticulously label a room full of empty filing cabinets, “in case someone uses them one day”? Of what virtue is keeping a lengthy deliberation and voting procedure in place when the user count is so low, a freshly nominated moderator has an entire newsgroup with nothing to moderate? How will keeping a strict adherence to the charters and hierarchies improve the appeal of a system that has 626 total downloads of the most popular software available for ChromeOS?

Again, I applaud the three board members of the Big 8 who seek to hold out until the end. From the outside, though, it almost strikes me as a warning. It’s easy to find one’s self exerting lots of time and energy into some sort of accomplishment whose relevance dwindles with the progress of time, insisting on structure which becomes increasingly quixotic.

 

On the other hand, it seems equally myopic to base the value of one’s work upon the size of its audience. If that were the metric of success most worthy of pursuing, this blog probably wouldn’t exist.

Priceless – A Christian Movie That’s All Heart…And No Head

The cinematography was well done, the dialogue was competently written, the subject matter was timely, the actors had some skill, and the soundtrack was, unsurprisingly, solid.

However, the writer’s room seemed to believe that it was of prime importance that our main protagonist retained the common sense of a raisin. Either that, or nobody on the production staff thought that giving a copy of the script to an intern at a local attorney’s office for review was a worthwhile endeavor. I wanted to like this movie, but it’s tough to cheer for a main character who makes bad choices the whole way through.

If you haven’t seen it already…spoiler warning.

 

Our story starts with a protagonist who’s down on his luck after a messy divorce, and ends up getting paid a lot of money to drive a box truck across the country, no-questions-asked. Now…as far as I’m concerned, that was the first problem: if you’re getting paid a lot of money to not-ask questions, you either commit to not asking questions or you walk away up front. Nobody pays triple market value for a bloke to drive a U-Haul full of sweaters. Assume you’re carrying something illegal, don’t get pulled over, and let it be someone else’s problem. “But doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of the story?” It could…but the other way to do it would have been to have the “what did I do” gnaw at him after he had cash-in-hand and he worked with law enforcement from the ground up. Either way, it’s established early on that our protagonist isn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

Seven minutes in, he finds out he’s a participant in human trafficking (again, he gets no sympathy from me or the title of “unwitting protagonist”…he accepted money and asked no questions). He doesn’t contact law enforcement at that point, when it would have been smart…no, he keeps driving with them, because…he still wants to get paid, I guess…so, he gets to where he’s going and hands them over, clearly not to anybody these young women know. Transaction complete. Congratulations, he’s officially a human trafficker. Our protagonist is actually a human trafficker. We could have had a movie where he went rogue and it was all Liam Neeson from Taken, but no…we had to have a protagonist who is literally a human trafficker.

Cowboy comes in and seems upset about the fact that there’s trafficking going on…mutual distrust is understandable, but….there’s no fish-or-cut-bait situation happening? Cowboy is accusing protagonist of being a human trafficker, but if it’s a one-and-done deal, why take on the guilt now? Oh, he’s got a daughter, and that comes up any time there’s a need for emotional gravity…that’s literally all she’s used for in the whole movie is to be an emotional anchor. We know nothing about her, except that she’s missed by her dad and says cute things on the phone.

Protagonist meets local sheriff, and at this point, protagonist is abundantly aware of what’s going on…now, it was so bleeding obvious from the get-go that the sheriff was in on it. I had no idea how protagonist missed it, or failed to even suspect it…but if protagonist isn’t going to call county police, at least make a statement down at the station. Moreover, protagonist forgot his Miranda Rights. Anything he says can – and will – be used against him in a court of law. He’s guilty of human trafficking and has an envelope full of money and a phone with call logs, and the keys to the truck. He’s guilty and carrying enough evidence for a conviction…and then he flat out confesses his crime. Now, if the sheriff was all-the-way upstanding, he’d probably have rightfully arrested protagonist. Even if the sheriff saw protagonist as an unwitting pawn and let him go free, protagonist still has an envelope full of money that needed to go back to the sellers. If the sheriff considered the money ‘evidence’ (or just good old fashioned civil asset forfeiture), protagonist has nothing to bring back to the seller. He puts his daughter in jeopardy in the most pointless way possible: putting himself in a position to not-have the money.

Protagonist then goes to the hotel, and pays $100 for an hour with the girl he dropped off…yes, that’s right, he pays the pimps. And…he takes his hour to let her relax, I guess? It’s really unclear what his plan is at this point, probably because he doesn’t have one and is making it up as he goes. He’s up against an organized set of human traffickers with very little information and no experience, and it shows. Our victim is the only one with a lick of sense; she has no trust in protagonist to hold to his word and sees right through his complete absence of a plan.

Cowboy comes back and shows the slightest level of wisdom, which is great….but in their discussion, it’s revealed that protagonist has managed to grow a conscience in a single afternoon? I didn’t believe it either, but memories-of-daughter come to ensure my concerns are quelled.

Blah blah blah, protagonist and cowboy decide to storm the castle, just the two of them. Now, let’s unpack the list of reasons this was stupid. The first reason, isn’t that the traffickers have guns. Both sides have guns, and cowboy has a cool hat so we can assume he’s better than they are. The real concern isn’t the guns, it’s the hostages. To the traffickers, the girls are replaceable. They can shoot indiscriminately or use the girls as human shields and they aren’t worried about collateral damage. To protagonist and cowboy, however, there’s a problem if anybody dies. Let’s take violence out of it for a bit. Let’s assume a recon visit, no weapons, no damage, no threats…not that protagonist and cowboy can bank on any of that, but let’s try it for a minute…anything they find is inadmissible in court if they’re going to attempt to bring the traffickers up on criminal charges. They’re going to undermine themselves because nobody passed a civics class. 

Skip a bit, and we have ‘the interrogation’…where the trafficker and the cowboy have a rather polite conversation…based entirely on emotion and nothing that adheres to scrutiny. “you took my daughter 10 years ago”, “hate to disappoint, but I was still in high school 10 years ago”, “you’re all the same”…and that’s where cowboy loses me. It’s a personal vendetta, for which cowboy is holding trafficker personally responsible, except that this particular trafficker isn’t responsible for what happened to his daughter AND he admits that his daughter ran away, willingly…stupidly, but willingly. Now, this doesn’t absolve trafficker of his crimes, but it does undo most of the sympathy I have for the cowboy. If he’s not picky about which trafficker he takes down, why does he stay in a town where the law is in on it, and why has he had no success in the past ten years getting other law enforcement involved? He might have the moral high ground and some solid zingers, but at the end of the day, he comes across as being less competent due to his drive being primarily emotion based. It’s great that his feelings compelled him to action, but if we define ‘success’ in this context as ‘efficacy in achieving one’s goals’, trafficker has money, beautiful women, and law enforcement on his payroll. The cowboy has…a mountain of guilt and no success in resolving the trafficking that happens in his town. Absent our protagonist, it’s unclear how the status quo would have changed otherwise. 

Then we rescue victim and the hostage trade that everybody with a brain stem saw coming…props to our victim for staying ten toes to the ground and prioritizing the well being of her sister to the extent she does. The exchange is again, super emotionally charged, and…why didn’t trafficker shoot protagonist the minute he put his gun down? How did actual-law-enforcement show up at this point, but not before? How did the cops obtain a warrant for the other location we see the SWAT team going to, with no evidence? What judge signed off on that warrant? We see protagonist get arrested, but the role of law enforcement adds a metric ton of questions that are all answered in a ‘dip to black’.

We jump to ‘one year later’…what now?! We just handwaved away the attempted murder charges that were likely filed. The police officers were witnesses in that attempted murder. How did he avoid being accused of the death of cowboy? Protagonist could also easily be charged with assault with a deadly weapon, and child endangerment based solely on the testimony of the cops, and there’s still the problem regarding all of the evidence connecting him to the trafficking he was guilty of. How, exactly, did all of that get dropped?

And then, there’s the beautiful, romantic ending…that is all the way messed up as far as I’m concerned. The house he buys is cowboy’s old house, great…how did he get it, exactly? Cowboy met protagonist not three days before he died, there was no way it was left to him in a will. How’d protagonist buy it? With what money? What job did he get that he couldn’t get at the beginning of the movie that allows him to make that kind of money? I count ten people in the closing scene, none of whom are implied to be independently wealthy or have vocations with six figure incomes. The math simply doesn’t work.

Let’s talk about what happens after the arrest. Where did she and her sister go while protagonist was in jail, at least awaiting his arraignment even if we assume everything got acquitted? She’s wearing an engagement ring (again, with what money?), but doesn’t have a wedding band. She and her sister are illegal immigrants with no family in the states…so, we’re left to assume she is living at this house? Living with your fiancée is okay if the house is big enough and sufficiently secluded? Oh, and what’s the story with the sister, who’s still a minor at this point? She has zero agency in this outcome at all; did she ever want to go back with her family and her older sister and soon-to-be-brother-in-law said ‘no’? Did she go to school, and how did she deal with the learning deficiencies she clearly would have at this point?

The relationship itself strikes me as incredibly unhealthy. They went from ‘rescue’ to ‘ring’ in less than a year, their relationship started due to tragedy, its development took place completely off screen, and her family is not mentioned, present, or involved. A 10-12 year age gap isn’t terrible unless one of them is about 19, and there is no way she’s gone through the sort of therapy she needs to get to a healthy state after being trafficked, sexually assaulted, and nearly having her sister killed in front of her…If there was a textbook example of ‘stockholm syndrome’, this seems like it.

…But they look good together and she loves him and the lighting is all super warm and inviting and I’m sure there’s some sort of intended Biblical allegory in there somewhere, so we say “awwwwww”. No. Wrapping that sort of bow on the story undoes everything that came before it. What’s the message here? “As long as you’re rescued from being trafficked, you’ll be fine”? “Hopefully your rescuer is tall, dark, and handsome, so you can marry him”? “Committing crimes to end human trafficking gets you a pass on jail time”? 

 

I skimmed the movie for this review; I might actually-watch it again to add a few more points of contention…but for real, I couldn’t get with this movie because it only works when we limit the story to what’s shown on screen. Anything beyond that and it clearly gets incredibly messy, incredibly quickly.

My laptop must be bored

At the end of August 2021, my OriginPC EON17 laptop “Elsa” gave me one hell of  a scare. For seemingly no reason, the laptop’s fans went into high gear, it beeped several times, and shut down.

I knew the laptop wasn’t in the happiest of states, but with less than a week to go before a wedding I was DJing, I didn’t want to take the chance. I had been debating what to do about a laptop for some time. I’d been buying those Origin laptops at about a 3-year cadence for most of the 2010s, but it was pretty apparent that I’d passed the point in my life where $3,500 for a laptop was a wise investment. A more modest MSI Katana was what I ended up with.

I use it daily, but the most common use case for me is for Remote Desktop. 90% of this laptop’s functionality could be performed on a Raspberry Pi. I have both Serato DJ and Pioneer Rekordbox installed, but I’ve opened them approximately thrice since the laptop was purchased.

I did enjoy completing the Mass Effect Legendary Edition on this computer, but video games haven’t been much of a thing for me recently. I played Sol Survivor for an hour last month, and fired up the lootbox-laden Star Trek: Timelines two months before. One of these days I’ll finish my game of Civilization V and see if Catherine the Great can lead Russia to victory. I like the gameplay of Hades, though its “Rogue-lite” genre means that the goal is to beat the entire game without dying. While I appreciate the skill required to achieve this goal, it is infuriating to play the same levels repeatedly, given how little game time I clearly have. A friend tried getting me into Warframe, which lost its allure fairly quickly. I’d spent ten hours with minor variations of  “go to the place and shoot the lads“, ended up with a cargo bay of assorted stuff and still found myself unable to afford a single upgrade of anything. Really, I found myself wanting to better understand why I kept going to places to shoot the lads. This quickly led me to the troubling realization that I was going to the places and shooting the lads because the computer told me to…that nobody was questioning a voice inside my helmet instructing me to kill loads of people with no clear reasoning behind it makes me worried.  An hour or two of Bioshock and Crysis round out my gaming time since September. I’ve had this laptop for nearly a year, and I’ve realized that I’ve spent more time out of state since I’ve purchased this gaming laptop than I’ve spent playing video games on it.

 

When I was young, my father once told me that being an adult is doing the 15 things you have to do, ideally with enough time left to do the 3 things you want to do. I think he’s right, but then I also acknowledge that I’ve watched the entire series of Brooklyn Nine-Nine in the past two months. Is it because video games have lost most of their allure? I mean, that’s probably a part of it – most of the games on the list are older, in no small part because I’m actively seeking to avoid games with lootboxes and microtransactions, which are becoming an endangered species. Maybe it’s a direct aging thing (twitchy fingers don’t twitch as twitchfully at 35 as they did at 15), and maybe it’s an indirect aging thing (work and other things get in the way). Maybe video games were, themselves, just one more thing that was in my life for a season.

Ultimately, if I were to anthropomorphize this laptop, I wonder if it would be bored. 90% of its life spent in a remote desktop makes its specs mostly pointless; I probably will let the laptop start sitting in a bag most of the time once I can get my hands on a Raspberry Pi again, but is it bored, or am I projecting my own boredom onto my gaming laptop and gaming monitor, connected to a gaming keyboard and gaming mouse, only to sit here blogging in Firefox.

Maybe the real answer is that I shouldn’t blog at midnight.

Emoting Over Garbage

A truck full of old computer parts is going to the scrapyard tomorrow morning…and I didn’t quite cry, but I definitely felt sad.

Not over everything, of course. A drawer full of ten-year-old access points most certainly wasn’t worth the space it was taking. An XP-era desktop who already lived a second life as a router had no future as anything but a doorstop. A computer chassis intended for a rack mount would have been great to hold onto if I had a rack to put it in, but it’s just taking up space right now. Over a dozen random routers and switches are finally freeing up their shelves. Defective hard disks, decade-old motherboards, a drawer full of unused power and RCA cables are all headed for the dump, and I couldn’t be happier.

It’s the other things that make me sad. More to the point, it’s what they represent.

I’m 35, and the odds are good that I won’t be celebrating my 37th birthday in this apartment. Over the years, I’ve accumulated projects I’ve never gotten to. There’s a touch screen computer that’s a bit slow for regular use, but would be fantastic for a wall-mounted home automation controller. I got rid of every aftermarket car stereo I’d ever owned. Firewire cables were a staple of my college years, as I captured video from mini-DV camcorders. My last two laptops haven’t had FireWire connectors, and I haven’t shot a video on those camcorders in nearly a decade. My first TV tuner card that invoked years of having a custom-built cable box is no longer usable; it found its way in the pile. The first hard drive I added to an HP tower I got on clearance when I worked at Staples to make my first NAS is in that pile. A DVD player I used to play a DVD at a party I DJ’d many years ago went in the pile, causing me to realize that, in all likelihood, I’ll never play a DVD at an event again. The real difficulty, however, is the realization that I’ve got a number of these scrapyard and garbage runs ahead…and they’re not going to get easier.

I figure that by time I move out, I will have to essentially embrace my inner Thanos – half of everything I own will have to be donated, recycled, given away, or thrown out. I can’t take it with me. I’ll probably have to get rid of my custom-made DJ console that got me through many great years. Can I part with the Adobe Premiere keyboard that hasn’t worked on the last five computers I’ve owned, but I still remember the day my mom and dad bought it for me when I was 17? How about the Stanton CD Player, something else I haven’t DJ’d with in years, but was the only piece of DJ equipment my mother ever purchased for me as a gift? Alternatively, do I keep it forever?

I know this is the beginning of me preparing for the next chapter in my life. I’m not ready for it. I know that this is how life works, and I know that trying to pretend that I can hold on to the best of my teens and twenties by keeping clothes I don’t wear and CDs I don’t use is irrational and illogical. I know it’s all “just stuff”, and that “not getting to do everything I wanted to do by now” is just a fact of life, for everyone, at every stage in life…but maybe that’s really the underlying problem: the fact that the next stage in life is a total unknown.

Every time I think about the next stage in life, it scares me…because I have no idea what it is…like, not even a little bit. After grade school, there was college. After college was ‘getting started in a career’. Now…I kinda don’t know how I feel about any of the ‘usual courses’. I don’t want to climb the corporate ladder at some Fortune 500 company, I don’t want to be a parent, I don’t want to move to a different state or country, and I don’t want to save up for a boat. But I also feel poignantly aware that at some point, life is going to happen to me. I won’t be able to wake up and just worry about the computers I have to fix tomorrow. I’ve been telling myself I’m going to practice DJing more, but that keeps not-happening, and even if I put all my free time into my turntables, it’s not a viable career field for me anymore. Defining myself by my career in general isn’t exactly a winning proposition, either.

Clearing out several hundred pounds of scrap is most definitely a step in the right direction. I know it’s good for me. I just have so much trouble being able to deal with being an adult in this context, and it makes me so incredibly scared to have such a total lack of clarity. Emptying my closets just reinforced that reality to me.

But…maybe there’s hope. I’ve done this before. I know I have. The hard drive I threw out today? Its host computer was thrown out years ago, as was the one after that – my first true NAS. I remember getting rid of the Nissan Xterra I had before my current car, and the Volvo before that. I worried that getting a sedan would make it difficult to transport my DJ gear, and while there were one or two logistical issues, the 160,000 miles I’ve driven in it have saved me so much in gas, the car paid for itself. I said goodbye to some old friends. I said hello to some new ones. I said goodbye to a very good boss. I said hello to another very good boss. Today, I said goodbye to some old computer components, and one day, I’ll be saying goodbye to this apartment.

 

This…this must be how faith is built: having no idea where I will be spending my 37th birthday, or how, or with whom…but believing that I will be in a place I call home, and with people I care about. Because really, when I get down to it, I realize that my mental image of an epic 37th birthday for me doesn’t involve me being surrounded by antiquated hard disks or car stereos. 

Why I don’t like Warframe…and how it parallels a difficulty The Church seems to struggle with

Warframe is a video game. Specifically, it’s a free-to-play looter-shooter.

For most of my readership, the second sentence needs a bit more elaboration. A “free-to-play” game is one that isn’t a transactional purchase, but instead costs nothing to play, but has an in-game economy where players can purchase items for actual-dollars as they progress, though an actual financial outlay is not required. Basically every game you’ve ever played on your phone that has had some sort of in-game currency is an example of this model.

A looter-shooter is a game that tends to focus more on a gameplay loop where one, as satirical reviewer Yahtzee Croshaw summarized it, “Go to the place and shoot the lads”. Essentially, one goes to a place, shoots a bunch of lads who apparently deserve to be shot (and who generally also believe that you deserve to be shot), and looks for new weapons and armor and upgrades to those things so that the next time you have to go to a place and shoot lads, you are more effective in doing so. Rinse and repeat for the duration of the game.

My good friend Andrew had recommended I try Warframe. It always bothered me when games have me make a bunch of decisions at the beginning, but I did that thing – I picked my class and my initial powers, and my preferred rifle and sword thing…and I set out to go to a place and shoot some lads.

I’m about 14 hours into the game now. I’ve shot many, many, many lads. Nameless faces, themselves looking to provide me with a complimentary lead transfusion or relieve me of my appendages through a short surgical procedure. I’ve visited a dozen maps and tried multiple mission types…and it has failed to engage me. Fourteen hours in, and I feel like zero progress has been made. I’m some sort of guardian that came back from the dead…I think…but that was addressed in a cutscene early in the game that was incredibly muddy in its exposition. “This was a thriving colony…until the Greneer came” is pretty much all of the backstory I got when I landed on my first planet to shoot lads. Who are the Greneer, why did they come to the colony, who did they subjugate, what have they gained by taking it over? I haven’t met a citizen of that planet so I have no personal investment that I’m aware of; why am I piling up dead Greneer for them? Maybe I’d feel I was on the wrong side of this if I heard what started this conflict, but the gameplay so far doesn’t give me any sense of why I’m justified in emptying ammo clips into fellow soldiers.

So, story isn’t its strong suit…fine. Story isn’t always necessary for a fun video game. I am sure nobody who has ever played Tetris has wondered where these boxes are coming from, why they are falling, or where the boxes go when they disappear. It’s a bit of a juxtaposition to be emptying ammo clips into Greneer without cause and calling it ‘just a gameplay loop like Tetris’, but let’s go down that road for a second…

The game’s loot mechanics have yet to pay off – I’m still using my initial weapon set. I haven’t come across a single weapon or armor pickup. There’s a crafting system, but every single ‘blueprint’ I could use requires resources I haven’t come across yet. I came across my first in-game merchant on my last play-through, but he didn’t have any weapons for sale. The second merchant sold fishing gear. I’ve gotten a few upgrades to my existing weapons, but I still haven’t gotten my first sniper rifle, and short of buying one, I see no way to get one. Fourteen hours in, and I’m sitting on a pile of resources that can’t be used because I don’t have enough other resources to make even low-end equipment. I’m shooting the same lads for the same nonsensical reasons with the same guns and I’m wearing the same armor. The Warframe Wiki has 6,354 articles as of this writing…and I’ve come across reasons for maybe a few dozen. There is indeed an encyclopedia’s worth of terms, but none of them have seemed to have any bearing on my ability to get new gear. This loop is broken.

Now, you might be thinking, “well duh, Joey, the reason for this is that you’ll pony up for the weapons you want! That’s the schtick of free-to-play games, right? Why are you surprised?” I’m surprised because there’s another free-to-play game that got me to compromise my principles and pay for in-game items…and the $100 in total I spent in it is more than I’ve paid for any other video game I’ve ever owned. I was constantly playing that game, to the point where I was rude to a friend and playing it while we were out getting sushi and I had to apologize to him because it was borderline addictive behavior. That game is Star Trek: Timelines.

Timelines is basically a computerized card game; its gameplay loop reminds me a lot of the Star Wars CCG that I played in my adolescence. One acquires different Star Trek characters, then upgrades them by acquiring items, which is done by going on missions. The missions involve picking a group of characters to do different tasks, assigning them to those tasks, a dice roll, and a pass/fail each task. Do a god enough job, you get a bunch of loot at the end, as well as experience points to level up your characters. It’s really easy to pick up and figure out. There are a few different in-game currencies, resource management is inherent throughout the game, and the game kept me coming back – and spending money on four different occasions – because I actually had fun doing it.

The fun I had playing Timelines was rooted in a sense of progress. I got to see characters level up, I got to complete missions with those leveled-up characters I couldn’t complete before. I got plenty of loot. Sometimes it was immediately useful, while other times it was enough to be indirectly useful and I was able to make progress in steps. For about six months I was playing daily; it straddled the line between ‘habit’ and ‘addiction’. It was my cruise to Bermuda in 2019 that broke the habit; with very limited internet I spent ten days not-playing it, which broke all my inertia-based streaks and made it far easier to not-return to it. I still drop in once every few months, play a round, and leave it…but the reality is that in that six month span, I spent money on that far-less-ambitious game.

 

So, what did Timelines do that Warframe doesn’t? Here it is…Timelines made the first hours rewarding. Its gameplay was obvious from the beginning, failing missions didn’t have a price tag, early character leveling was easy, basically every item drop had something useful, I started with a massive amount of the mission currency and early missions used very little of it. There were virtually no barriers to progress. When I failed my first mission, the way to advance my characters enough to solve it was obvious, and allowed me to do so without paying money. As I continued playing, I started wanting characters I didn’t have, sometimes for stats I needed to complete missions, and sometimes it was based on liking a particular character…and the store made sure I knew how to get them. The game has ways I can play with friends, or with strangers I meet in-game, but I can play all by myself if I want and never interact with another player.

Every single one of these attributes contrast with Warframe’s design for newcomers. I can’t build, the earned currency is useless, I can’t try different weapons, it seems to try and press me to play co-op missions and then simultaneously make me feel more ‘alone’ in-game when I do so. I might be more engaged with Warframe if I better understood the story, but I don’t. I might be more engaged with Warframe if I felt like the actions I took and the choices I made in the game impacted the game world, but they don’t. I might get some amount of enjoyment out of it if I was allowed to try any of the weapons beyond what I started with, but I’m not. There’s nothing for me there. I uninstalled it.

Here is where I finally compare it to faith: it is incredibly easy – and common – to have faith feel like Warframe if you’re new to considering eternity. This is doubly true if one has had a bad experience with faith in the past, or if one presently has a particular faith and is considering a different one. Christianity has a whole culture surrounding it, and it’s very, very easy for newcomers to be confused regarding what is directly Biblical and what is merely cultural. It’s easy, as seasoned Christians, to forget what it’s like to be in the “early levels”.

Even as Christians, it’s common to struggle with matters of the faith, the state of earth, and the omnipotence of God. It’s super common for me to look at a situation and be like, “uhm…God could totally solve this in, like, 20 minutes, and even that’s 19 minutes more than He would probably need, and it really wouldn’t be that much of an inconvenience for Him…yet this problem still exists, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. One of the things that’s been a bumpy part of my faith is trusting that God is addressing the matter in some way or another, and that my perspective is limited and also is nowhere near understanding the nature of God’s ultimate desires and intents. It’s taken as long as it has to get here because it’s easy to use “He works in mysterious ways” as a hand-wave dismissal of the matter at hand, rather than see such situations as the sort of thing that requires a level of faith far higher than I presently have and trust in His perspective and goodness. If I, someone who has been a Christian for over 15 years (or 30, depending on how you count) can still have difficulties with the fundamentals, then it would be a pretty terrible thing for me to expect that from someone who is new to the faith, or who doesn’t ascribe to the faith at all.

I’m not saying that Star Trek: Timelines’ Skinner Box mechanics are the sorts of systems The Church should seek to implement. I’m also not saying that the primary reason anyone comes to Christ (or attends a particular church) is purely a function of the people, ignoring the role of God in both The Church and the life of the non-believer or new believer. What I am saying is that as long term Christians represent – or misrepresent – Christ in how we interact with those who don’t share our beliefs and/or our knowledge of what the Bible says. It is very easy for our representation of the Gospel to alter its perception, not because the Gospel has changed, but because we misrepresent it. 

If we’re going be an encouragement to those around us to pick up their cross and follow Christ, we need to make sure that we aren’t treating them in a way that makes them feel like the way I did playing Warframe: lost, confused, alone, overwhelmed, powerless, and primarily concerned with parting me from my money. The Gospel is none of those things, but if we’re representing it as such with our lifestyles and our interactions, it will be of little wonder why we contribute to new believers deciding they are better off uninstalling.

Am I insulating myself?

I continue to use my phone without Google services, and I like it. I finally feel free. But now I’ve started to wonder.

I remember watching “The Matrix” for the first time back when I was 15 or so…and I remember thinking about the nature of what motivated the characters and why. “Freedom” is a word that gets thrown around alot, but there is a part of me that, even back then, seemed to resonate with Cypher, the one who negotiated with Agent Smith to get plugged back into The Matrix in exchange for giving up Morpheus. Now sure, the betrayal part wasn’t cool, but wanting to get plugged back into The Matrix? That made a whole lot of sense to me.

Cypher was having a steak dinner. Not really, but it was real to him. What was everyone else having? One nutritional supplement. That’s it. For the rest of your life. Neo found love in Trinity, but Morpheus never did. If Cypher was looking for female companionship, there were no options on the ship after Switch died. They spent their days constantly on the run from the Sentinels, they never saw daylight, there was nothing they got to truly own…the list of drawbacks continues, while the list of advantages of not-being in The Matrix doesn’t. We root for Morpheus and Neo and Trinity because they’re fighting the good fight…but in practice, was Cypher really so off base for wanting to live out his life back in The Matrix? I don’t think so.

It’s been about a month since I’ve been using this phone completely Google-free. I can take pictures, but not nearly as good as the photos I can get using the Camera app from OnePlus. SwiftKey is still inferior to Swype. Visual Voicemail barely works. Frost, my Facebook replacement, acts strange and has trouble loading pictures sometimes. I can’t be sure that it’s truly software related, but my 5G performance is generally worse than LTE…and that’s just the things I know.

I don’t use TikTok.
I don’t use Craigslist.
I don’t use Snapchat.
I don’t use  Youtube (except in a browser).
I don’t use SoundCloud.
I don’t use Twitch.
I don’t use Office.
I don’t use a Fitbit or other fitness band.
I don’t use Teams or Slack or Monday.
I don’t use CashApp or Zelle…though I do use Venmo and it works.
I dont use Discord.
I dont use Spotify.
I don’t use Pinterest.
I don’t use Walmart or Target or pretty much any shopping apps.
I don’t use Google Docs or do much in the way of document editing on my phone, unless you count this blog.
I don’t use Uber Eats or Doordash or pretty much any food ordering app.
I don’t use Alexa or Google Assistant or Siri.
I don’t use Ring or a security DVR.
I don’t use Neighborhood or Next door or Everyblock.


The list goes on and on…and I’m starting to wonder if the experiences I eschew to spend my days on a command line on my desktop are worth it. People are finding things they like, buying and selling things amongst local people, ordering new foods, chatting with the people it’s been a social taboo to meet, and I’m sure there are hundreds of other things that mobile apps are doing, but I’m not.


There is most definitely a part of me that feels a bit like Ariel… Wanting to be where the people are and finding myself  wondering if my aversion to echo chambers and endless online accounts means that I have simply made an echo chamber of my own. I sit, wondering whether the nuance of the liberty I feel is a technicality in that I spent a massive amount of time and effort to simply custom build my own prison.

Google collects a metric truckton of data from everyone, and yet, the world turns. Nobody else gets concerned if Google has all their contacts; nobody in my contacts list isn’t in someone else’s phone that is uploaded. My texts are synced on someone else’s phone, and even if my location is only partially traceable based on the amount of disabling I have implemented, my work phone remains on my person with far fewer limitations.

Why am I fighting this battle? What am I fighting for? “because I can”? Because I’m somehow sticking it to “Big Tech”? Because I’m worried about my data being accumulated and monetized while also using Facebook and doing nearly all my shopping with a credit card?

Maybe all of this effort is just me spiting myself. If Google turns on the billion people that already have Android phones and somewhat-consensually sync all their data, then I’m very unlikely to be “spared” from whatever happens. I’ve got friends who expressly opt into giving Google data in pretty much every possible way… And they seem happy.

Betrayal aside, maybe Cypher was right: the steak he ate wasn’t real, but the experience of eating it was, and it was an experience he could have inside The Matrix that he would never experience as long as he was “free”. Maybe my quest for a Google-free phone is little more than a quixotic waste of time, and I’d achieve greater happiness by going back to the phone’s original software from the manufacturer, leaving my phone modding days in the golden age of the HTC HD2 or Galaxy S3.

Or maybe, freedom is ownership…and even if “freedom” boils down to constructing my own prison, at least it’s mine.

Surviving Covid…and Defining Fear

I got Covid. And I no longer have it.

 

I was very fortunate. Aside from the first day or two after the onset of symptoms, I’ve worked through worse colds. My sense of smell is taking its time to return, a lingering side effect which seems to be commonplace. My case was very, very mild. Like I said, I was fortunate – it was so similar to a regular cold that I almost didn’t get tested.

A coworker spent time in the hospital as a result of Covid not too long ago. There’s no clear reason why I didn’t have a similar experience. Whether or not the science eventually sheds light on the common thread regarding the severity of symptoms, I can only attribute my experience to God’s protection, and yes, I will give Him credit for that.

 

I have one friend who has virtually no concern about getting Covid at all. To be clear, it’s not that she believes Covid isn’t real, it’s an ambivalence toward getting Covid. Her concern is far more focused around government overreach and societal norms being shifted, and to that end, I don’t think she’s completely wrong.

 

In contrast, I was speaking to a friend today with whom a catch-up dinner keeps getting postponed. Despite implicit availability, he is hosting a small number of family members; his household has committed to a  voluntary lockdown until they leave out of concern of catching Covid. Despite the unlikelihood of getting Covid from me, the concern is so great that his family is eschewing the outside world until his family heads home. The desire to avoid being the cause of a family member getting sick is understandable; I don’t think he’s wrong, either.

 

Personally, I always took the stance of “if I get the ‘Rona, I get the ‘Rona”, wore my mask, and left it at that. I made it eight months, but I did, in fact, get the ‘Rona. I’m very much aware that such a stance is far easier to have in retrospect when my experience with being sick didn’t involve a ventilator.

 

As I bring faith back into the picture here, there is yet another line whose limits are worth exploring. Both individuals I’ve referenced above share my adherence to Christianity. They would both likely agree on the validity of 1 Timothy 1:7 – “For God has not given us a spirit of fearfulness, but one of power, love, and sound judgment.” (HCSB). They would also both likely agree on the validity of Proverbs 20:15 – “A fool’s way is right in his own eyes, but whoever listens to counsel is wise.” (HCSB).

 

When it comes to Covid, I feel like it’s so unclear: Somewhere, a line is crossed between “listening to counsel” and “having a spirit of fear”. Inversely yet synonymously, that same line could be drawn between “following one’s foolish way” and “having a spirit of power, love, and sound judgment”. Both sides would argue that what they are doing would fall under ‘wisdom’ rather than ‘spirit of fear’, and yet their approaches are mostly opposite each other.

 

Christianity is no stranger to people achieving virtually-opposite conclusions. I’m certain you can come up with your own example. In the case of Covid, however, I’m not talking about government policies or something that ends up being fodder for a future statistics class. I’m talking about the tightrope walk between “trusting in God” and “being cautious”. I’m reminded of this scene from Austin Powers. It’s amusing to find a biblical parallel at a Blackjack table, but ignoring the fact that the antagonist was cheating in the clip, they both said they wanted to “live dangerously”, but only one of them did so.

 

Christianity isn’t safe, and wasn’t meant to be. No matter where you look in the Bible, someone had a rough time advancing the cause of Christ. Someone did something unsafe for the advancement of the Gospel; virtually every apostle died in connection with their spreading of the Good News. At the same time, the difference between spreading the Gospel and spreading Covid is undoubtedly self-evident: one saves, the other, well, doesn’t.

Both of the people in my examples would agree that only one of those two things is worth dying for, but I think they’d also agree that it’s possible to die of Covid without dying for Covid. What one calls “living life without fear”, the other would call “living life without prudence”. What one calls “esteeming others above one’s self”, the other would call “living in fear”. What I called “leaving it in God’s hands”, others would call “unnecessary risk”.

 

I really don’t have a conclusion I’ve drawn, or some spiritual or practical insight I can express. It feels like we’re all right, and all wrong at the same time. This is the precipice of moral relativism – a bottomless well to which the Gospel gives no credence or merit. In terms of the practical, I don’t think that any of these approaches should be made illegal, or that they’re inherently immoral. I do think, however, that there must be a way that God is most glorified, and that all three of us seek to pursue that method, while finding ourselves on divergent paths as a result.

 

I hope that the correct path becomes more apparent as time progresses. Until then, I wish you all good health, and a good holiday season.

It’s Hard To Let Go: The Ultimate Mass Effect Fantasy Element Is The ‘Load’ Button

I just finished Mass Effect 2 again. The suicide mission is always unnerving because it reflects reality: it’s possible to do everything right and still lose.

This time, I lost Mordin and Tali. This is especially hard, since both of them have core plot points in the third game. Mordin will never gain pennance and cure the genophage. Someone else will do that…but someone else might get it wrong. Tali’s death ensures that there will not be peace between the Geth and the Quarians – without her, the choice is ‘which race will die‘.

But I don’t have to do that. I can reload my game save and make some changes to who I assign. And if I get it wrong, I can do it again. And again. Until everyone lives.

Beyond the mass relays, quantum entanglement based communications, and all of the other nearly-impossible parts of the game’s story, that ability is the ultimate fantasy: being able to undo your previous choices and avoid having to live with the consequences.

Let’s go save Mordin and Tali.

An Answer To The Question Every Teenager Eventually Asks

This week, a brilliant, well-meaning person in my Facebook feed was discussing the idea of an iPhone app which would highlight viruses (the ‘flu’ or ‘corona’ kind, not the computer kind) if present on a surface. My ‘this is a load of bovine excrement’ alarm went off pretty quickly, so I responded by trying to appeal to the fact that electron microscopes cost as much as an entry-level BMW, weigh hundreds of pounds, and the batteries to power them would weigh thousands, all of that ignoring the incredible amount of computing power required to identify and highlight viruses on a screen in real-time. Naturally, the answer received in response was something to the effect of “well, technology keeps getting better and smaller!”, which is only partially true – the power adapter for my laptop weighs four pounds because there comes a point at which ‘physics’ starts knocking at the door.

The person private-messaged me and attempted to be a bit more convincing. I ended up deciding to do the math. Now, I might not have gotten it correct because ‘powers-of-ten’ has always managed to have me off by a very-important digit or two, but the math I came up with basically said that my 4×2 folding table could fit nearly 8 billion flu viruses on its surface without stacking. The reality I was trying to point out is that everything we touch is covered in microscopic bugs in one form or another, so making an app that would point them out individually would be pointless, because even after bleach or Lysol (but hopefully not both), surfaces would still be too heavily covered for such an app to be useful.

I wasn’t the best math student, and I never, ever enjoyed it. Once I get past, maybe 9th grade math, my understanding asymptotically plummets (though admittedly, I happen to remember what an asymptote is), and if I were to dust off my high school and/or college transcripts, they’d show someone who wasn’t exactly a star pupil of the discipline. Though writing this blog entry makes me want to try taking a 9th or 10th grade final exam found somewhere on the internet just to see how much I actually remember, the high level concepts of algebra, logic, and statistics have served well as building blocks for a bulls**t detector.

When economists seem to project year-over-year growth forever, the math says that there will be a saturation point at which a company will be unable to expand further. This is how we explain why video game maker Bethesda thought selling a $100/year in-game premium subscription to a game that cost $60 off the shelf was a good idea. When politicians talk about massive spending bills, the sticker shock of ‘billions of dollars’ is commonly a scare tactic – those numbers are commonly tied to a multi-year timespan and a population of hundreds of millions of people. I’m certainly not advocating for infinite spending, but I am saying that math helps us turn that “$500 billion” number into “about $156, per person, per year”, which is about the cost of a large coffee at 7-11 twice a week. When friends try to pitch me on the latest multi-level marketing trend, they always tell me about the fantastic opportunities at the top of the mountain. I always ask three questions: What’s the median individual revenue, what’s the average of the first standard deviation, and what’s the percentage of people who make it to this top tier? …I’ve yet to get an answer, but I promise you it’s the fastest way to making sure you don’t get asked about the next one. ” The ‘if-then’ statements used to demonstrate logic proofs help teach inference and deductive reasoning, allowing broader pictures of human behavior to be ascertained with incomplete information. A good number of statements from an untruthful person paired with logic proofs like the fun Latin-derived ‘modus tollens‘ can help catch a liar in his or her tracks. A simple stand I recently made from plywood required a ruler and some trigonometry so I knew how to cut the legs out of a single piece of wood and ensure they were even. Simple multiplication was drilled into me in third grade, and being able to halve and double very quickly is incredibly useful when I’m DJing and have to get my phrases right so I don’t end up with weird segues that are too short or too long.

The fact is, math is frequently distilled down into drills and repetition, sterile in its presentation in some cases, and comically absurd in others. To be fair, the fact that I learned asymptotes in high school but checkbook balancing in college as a byproduct of an accounting class isn’t a testament to properly prioritized curricula. It’s not like there has been a massive push to implement things like tangential learning into math class. This leaves us to be exposed to math for its own sake, and the fact of the matter is that most middle school and high school students (or college students or adults, really) will respond well to that sort of execution. I really can’t fault most students, former or current, for pushing back against learning something with such an unforgiving right-or-wrong grading system at the same time that “getting a good grade” is the only objective ever presented for doing so.

So, when will you use math, you ask? “When you need to figure out if someone is trying to sell you on a load of bulls**t.” THAT is how that question needs to start being answered.

Play the Flute – a Christian film that didn’t learn from Fireproof

A friend of mine invited me to a screening of Play the Flute. I was a bit surprised in that, for some reason, I thought I was going to see Unplanned, so I’m certain that my confusion in that the main characters and plot points of that movie weren’t present, which meant that I kept waiting for that part of the movie to start, which obviously didn’t happen. I think that movie could have solved that problem with a title card at the beginning, which it did not have.

So, spoilers ahead. Also, go ahead and read my Fireproof review if you haven’t already. Also, I’m really annoyed because I had plenty of this written out, and then the WordPress app on my phone decided to have a fit and not actually save what I’d written.

I’ll start by giving credit where it’s due – the tech people involved in producing this film were on point. Camera angles were fantastic, lighting was on point, hair and makeup were done well, sound mixing was flawless, and location shoots were done with consistency and efficacy. The actors and actresses shouldn’t hold their breath for an Oscar, but while the script they had to deal with had massive issues, the cast was pretty well chosen and effective in their delivery. Props to all the people who put in so much hard work into this film.

The movie opens with Matthew 11:16-17, in the King James version of the Bible. That set the tone for a few themes, just none of the ones it was going for. I’m hoping you can agree with me that the language used in the King James version of the Bible isn’t exactly what I’d call ‘readily accessible’ to a modern viewer. I’m not trying to start a “which-version-is-best” debate, but the language used simply isn’t the sort of vernacular which is self-evident to a contemporary audience. The King James version of the Bible is used in exclusivity throughout the movie. I don’t intrinsically mind that, but in doing so, the audience for the film is likely to be an audience of Christians, primarily. Even that, I don’t have a problem with, except that they do the whole direct gospel message in the film, which assumes an unsaved audience. Targeting to a demographic is one thing, but these two things together seem to show a conflict of intent…one which was likely lost on the writers.

80% of Play the Flute takes place in a church setting. A new(ish) pastor comes in to be a youth director at an existing church with an existing youth group, and is shocked – SHOCKED – that a group of 14-18-year-olds aren’t inherently, independently motivated to read the Bible and live their lives according to the principles of the Word of God. He’s shocked – SHOCKED – that those individuals are more concerned with social acceptance and sports, making it difficult for me to believe that he’s ever met an adolescent in a church setting. Now, I’m not an unforgiving person so I do understand that the kids are direct and open about it for the sake of storytelling, but if they were going for realism those kids would have been able to tell the story of Joseph basically-verbatim, and would have been able to give a moving testimony about how much they love God while still ‘doing the bad things’ the other six days of the week. Oh, also, at no point in this movie are any of the kids romantically attracted to anyone else? None of those entanglements are involved? The story would have been much better with one of those, and I’ll get to that in a bit, but the fact that the whole movies goes by with a group of hormonal teenagers never once expressing a desire to even ask another one out on a date is patently unrealistic. While I’m at it, husband-and-wife duo don’t even kiss each other hello or goodbye, let alone express any sexual desire for each other. They are married, movie! If you’re going to take screen time to warn against sex outside of marriage, at least imply there’s sex in marriage!

The youth pastor, along with his senior pastor, throws shade at the churches that talk about numbers and events and programs. I agree with the fact that a church that uses fun events as a replacement to Bible study has issues, for the very reasons they specify. However, that’s like saying that since knives can be used to harm that they shouldn’t be used at all, and the movie itself contradicts this. The youth group goes on their one-day retreat (an event), they have fun, and that event creates an opportunity for the pastor and his wife to impart Godly wisdom into the students with whom they are entrusted. Our protagonist pastor has less success building relationships with the young people and imparting Godly principles to them in a classroom setting than he has at an event or program? I’m shocked – SHOCKED! That’s just not how effective youth ministry works. Yes, a classroom setting is common and it absolutely has its place, but as a rule relationships in youth ministry simply aren’t built that way.

One other thing they did was to go to a cemetery, and the pastor talks about how life is short and fleeting, and gives the whole “where will you be for eternity” thing…y’know, because the perfect way to encourage kids who don’t meaningfully know God to follow Him is to say that the options are to spend eternity with Him…or not. This is a theological rabbit hole of its own, but I’ll say this: the behavioral shifts in the characters are a result of that relationship developing in the natural. How does that work? The pitch is basically a “fire insurance Christianity” sort of thing, but the results are temporal in nature? One of the kids call him out on it, and I was thinking to myself, “that kid would be excellent at CinemaSins”. Even if I didn’t go down that theological rabbit hole, what was his plan? Drive for 20 minutes each way with all the kids in the van, during the day (so, Sunday?) to spend five minutes in a cemetery hearing a story about a turbulent flight and then turn around and go home? That’s a poorly planned Sunday School field trip.

Not a single character has a home life that’s at all expounded upon; every parent seems to just assume the church will handle the spiritual upbringing of their children. We either don’t see parents, or we see very one-note parents who make me wonder about the back stories we spend so much time not-seeing. Natalie’s aunt has four scenes – twice where she laments her getting made fun of (but never encourages her to go to another youth group?), once where she gives the “Moses had a stutter too” speech, and once where she’s around for the apology. Shannon’s mom lets her run the show and the absentee dad is also only discussed in throwaway dialog; basically she’s there to show Shannon’s wealthy background. Marcie’s mom is there thrice – once to say she’s not a fan of Shannon (never explaining why or trying to encourage her daughter to be discerning, just ‘because I said so’), once to exposit the flag metaphor (and assume her daughter was going to make that sort of a choice because her mom guilted her into doing it), and once to show that she’s happy with Marcie’s change. I’m not saying this movie needed more runtime, but I am saying that there’s plenty of lost opportunity here and it’s in conflict with the pastor’s taking responsibility for the choices the students make.

As the pastor continues trying to use Bible-as-a-textbook methods to reach the kids (all of whom have perfect weekly attendance?), eventually, each of them have a shift in their heart to stop doing the bad thing they did before, and apologize for it. Now, to be fair, I do at least give credit to the fact that these changes are primarily done at an individual basis and are the result of an overarching shift for the duration of the movie, and it’s not necessarily any of them reciting a particular prayer publicly, so I was at least pleasantly surprised about that (though the white flag thing was a bit heavy handed). Even so, the “Play the Flute” title refers back to the verse in Matthew, which essentially stated that “you’re either playing the flute, or the flute is playing for you”. The variant I grew up with was, “you’re either a missionary or a mission field”. That’s fine, but it still leaves a whole lot of questions as to why the kids had their change of heart. The verse, restructured for the context of the movie, amounts to guilting the kids into doing the right thing. One by one, each of them stops doing a thing, and we the audience are supposed to be proud of them. I mean, to take that to its logical conclusion, do we then look at the external actions and say “the end justifies the means”? Yes, film limits the ability to show a change of heart rather than a change of action, but literally no adult has a one-on-one conversation with any kid about where their heart really is, leaving plenty of room for the ending to be a group of moral atheists. Really, each of the characters were problematic in one way or another.

Natalie’s parents died tragically…but it’s addressed one time a throwaway line of dialog. Talk about a missed opportunity – how is that not the perfect setup for a crisis of faith? Let Natalie scream at the pastor, “G-gg-God couldn’t ss-sss-stop my parents from-mm-m dying, He could at l-ll-llleast get rid of this s-ss-stupid ss-ssTUTTER!!”. She would be someone who was doing all the things she was supposed to be doing, but when it really came down to it, she would have had a real internal struggle that would have been incredibly to see unfold. But no, she just has to be the one-note, perfect church girl from start to finish with no growth or development. Her moment of bravery isn’t a matter of bravery at all; telling Marcie what she thought didn’t cost her anything, or have the threat of doing so.
Squirrel admits his fraudulent timeclock punching, but coerces his coworker friend into doing the same. This is another missed opportunity. Let Squirrel do it alone and get fired, while his friend keeps his job. Let his friend ask why he admitted it and took the heat. The ensuing discussion could involve Squirrel saying he did the right thing even though it cost something, and that he was trusting in God to provide for him. The friend could see this, and then go to the boss and admit he was doing it as well, and go to bat to get Squirrel rehired. This would show how Squirrel’s influenced caused his friend to make his own choice, and even allow an opportunity for Squirrel to share the Lord…but instead the scene uses force and Squirrel gives an ultimatum to someone who doesn’t share his commitment, and we’re okay with that? 
Teddy…stops making fun of Natalie. Great, but he’s gotten less positive reinforcement from everyone over time so it wasn’t much of a sacrifice. It didn’t take much for Natalie to end up being more receptive to Teddy at the same time Shannon pushed him away, so Teddy just switched allies. What would have been far better would have been for Teddy to have had a crush on Shannon and having started the movie with Teddy doing Shannon’s bidding to try and win her affection, with Teddy’s big moment being him telling Shannon off, realizing he had no shot with her as a result, and then having to reconcile with a Natalie who is still incredibly guarded and ends the movie willing to be civil with him at best.
Marcie is Shannon’s patsy, but for no defined reason. Throughout the movie there is no indication that Shannon has any leverage on Marcie, they don’t really seem to do anything fun together, and Marcie seems to lack any other friends while also shown as being able to just start being friends with Teddy and Squirrel on the spot. Marcie’s shift away from Shannon was supposed to be her big deal, but Shannon’s popularity was waning and she already had new friends as a result, so it wasn’t a sacrifice by the time Marcie decided to take her stand. 
Then there’s Shannon, the movie’s attempt to have a Regina George character, except she lacked her nuanced moments, charisma, sex appeal, or social authority. A clawless cat if there ever was one. What did she spend her massive allowance on? We never see. Why did Marcie have loyalty to her, but nobody else does? We aren’t told. Why do her parents tolerate her disrespect but also incentivize her going to church? It’s unclear. Shannon put Vaseline on a chair. Regina called the parents of her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend’s parents and pretended to be Planned Parenthood, breaking up their relationship and making the girl a social pariah. Shannon is what happens when writers of Christian movies try to involve conflict while also trying to avoid showing a sinful thing in a movie – we end up with a character whose salt has lost its saltiness.

Let’s discuss Shannon’s false accusation. We, the audience, know nothing happened…but nobody else does. The #metoo and #believeher movements have their problems on both sides, but on what basis does the whole youth group take the pastor’s side? We the audience know nothing happened, but they don’t. Are they defending him simply because “he would never do such a thing?” That’s the root of the issue at hand, but how come literally nobody even attempts to consider if Shannon was right? They went after Shannon for information but nobody tried to put the pastor through the ringer? When they tricked Shannon into confessing, how come none of them used their smartphones to get an audio or video recording of her saying it so they could prove it to the people in charge? Why not have a text message exchange so they could use screenshots as evidence of the lie to show to the senior pastor and Shannon’s mom? Also, the church across town was perfectly fine having him despite knowing the circumstances and controversy around his departure? 
It would have been far more interesting if they showed Shannon walking out the door behind everyone else, then walking back in the room and having the screen fade to black with the audience never seeing what exactly happened. If I wanted to double down, it would have been particularly interesting to do a sort of flashback scene regarding both accounts of the story, one from the pastor where the apology happens, and another from Shannon’s point of view where she successfully seduces him, leaving the reader to figure to spend a little time debating who to believe…but of course, it would have been much more controversial, and if there’s one thing this movie can’t handle, it’s giving the audience something to think about….and also, it wouldn’t have driven the plot because then there would be a genuine cause for a schism.

I’ll close by talking about the actual dialog itself. The script had so many smaller issues with how the characters talked to each other. People walk into the room to have a discussion, they begin with some thoroughly mundane thing that nobody cares about, and then they change topics to the real thing worth discussing. Does Marcie’s mother always announce when she’s got laundry for her? Did the script really need three lines of dialog between the pastor and his wife about the logistics of returning the shirt? Did Squirrel and his coworker always have to reiterate the plan in an expository manner immediately before they carried it out? So much cringey dialog was present throughout the movie. Virtually every character did it…except, ironically, the one with the stutter. The Moses parallel was obvious it was coming the moment the stutter was introduced, the Joseph foreshadowing was heavy handed, and the theme verse only meaningfully made sense at the end which made it clear they were chosen for plot purposes. I almost have an objection to the Bible being used purely to add literary conventions to such a poorly written script. It was obvious the car wash at the end was coming the moment there was a discussion about the bet being one-sided. Beth trying to get the girls to interact more nicely together “because she said so” demonstrated how out of touch the writers were with how kids actually interact. Even as adults, did nobody think about how they would feel if someone was suddenly nice to them because an authority figure coerced them? There were just so many examples of poorly constructed dialog and annoyingly worded exposition that it made me wish they just started quoting the King James Bible again.

 

In conclusion, I simply couldn’t conjure up any grace for this movie. If it was 1999, maybe…but for all its other flaws, 1999’s Left Behind Movie benefited from Jerry B. Jenkins’ excellent source material, making it a layup to have a script written without cringe-inducing dialog. I had issues with God’s Not Dead, but even those script writers seemed to have been involved in a conversation at some point. Play the Flute was about an oblivious pastor, a paint-by-numbers youth group that failed miserably at character development, and a goal that only makes sense to a church audience while also being called an “evangelical tool” by a group of people who had no concept of how people interact in real life.

Sorry, 3/10 would not recommend to anyone…and those three points all go to the production crew.

 

Edits 4/17/2019 – some rewording for readability and clarity.

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