The Friday High Five

The sweet taste of victory, unusual job descriptions, and empty promises

Warner Bros.

Every Friday I share 5 things I enjoyed this week. Also, high fives are inherently cool, and I think we can all agree Friday is the bestest day. Hence the Friday High Five. 🙏🏻

My Favorite Thing This Week Was…

My Detroit Lions Winning a Playoff Game

In this space last week, I talked about how my favorite thing of the week initially was the University of Michigan winning the National Championship, but I demoted it because I felt rather empty about the whole thing. And then I swapped it for a video of two Hobbits playing Baldur’s Gate 3.

This week also includes a Michigan-based football team winning a big game and Baldur’s Gate 3, but they have swapped spots. What’s the difference? Why did the Lions victory bring me such joy when Michigan’s did not?

I honestly don’t know. That’s the problem with feelings—sometimes they’re just there but you don’t have a clue why, or where they came from. I suppose that’s why they’re called feelings and not thoughts.

My best guess is I’m used to Michigan winning, or at least being winning-adjacent. Fun fact: Michigan has won more college football games than any other school.

Meanwhile, the Detroit Lions are historically bad. Not too long ago, the team went 0-16. They were the first team in the modern era to lose all of their games. Fans started wearing paper bags on their heads. (Why did they still go? What else is there to do in Michigan when it gets cold?)

So I’ve become accustomed to the Lions traditions. Yet hope endured. And this season, finally, things are going right for us.

The last time the Lions won a playoff game was in 1991. I remember that game. Barry Sanders was in his third season. We throttled the Cowboys and then lost in the NFC Championship. The future was bright, but we never again enjoyed such success.

Yes, winning a single playoff game counted as a successful season.

Ticket prices for this weekend’s game against Tampa Bay set an NFL record. I think the only people surprised by this are the ones not from around here. Sometimes sports is a fun diversion, and sometimes it becomes something more. People are crying about the win, which they had no hand in and get nothing out of. Does it make sense? No. Do I feel it too? Hell yes.

Other Things I Enjoyed This Week

Baldur’s Gate 3

I finally broke down and bought the game my friends have been talking about. Even my son had it before me, and told me about the experience, which is a weird bit of role reversal. Usually the recommendations flow from me to him, as nature intended. But this is yet another signal that our relationship has entered a new era.

The game is everything it’s been advertised as. And it’s totally in my wheelhouse. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the closest approximation to the experience playing Dungeons & Dragons. It’s not the same, but it’s damn close. It’s really been scratching the D&D itch lately.

One thing I did not expect to see—penis physics. It only came up during character creation, when I could assign a gender and even choose the … erm … equipment. At one point while appraising possible hairstyles, I spun my guy around to look at the side. And his man-bits flopped with surprising realism.

I giggled, naturally.

Here’s what I keep thinking about: Can you imagine the developer who had to code that into the game? Who spent weeks staring at CGI dongs, making minor adjustments to account for gravity and heft, until they got the flop just right?

What do you even put on your resume after something like that?

Jan 2023 - July 2023: Larian Studios. Animator, focused on the character’s mid-section. Worked on tubular physics.

Chuck Klosterman IV

I’ve talked about Klosterman numerous times in this space. He’s a brilliant thinker who happens to write about music (mostly) but also movies and culture in general. And sometimes headier topics. Klosterman is the sort of writer you enjoy reading but silently despair the entire time because they are clearly way smarter than you are, and there is no way you can possibly make up that kind of ground.

Right now I’m reading a compilation of his essays from the early 2000s in the book Chuck Klosterman IV, which seems like a very Led Zeppelin-esque sort of name. I’m halfway through and it’s been a lot of musician profiles so far—Britney Spears, Bono, Robert Plant—which is always fascinating in a voyeuristic sort of way. I also just appreciate how Klosterman writes. He does a great job of setting the stage with active description, and begins many of the pieces in medias res.

I’m still thunderstruck by this almost throwaway line in a piece about Radiohead, which speaks directly to something I mentioned struggling with recently:

Fool Me Once

Netflix

We’re only 2 or 3 episodes into this Netflix show, so it’s too early to proclaim victory. The problem with mysteries and thrillers is often times the big reveal is a big disappointment. It’s the Lost corollary: The more a story courts intrigue as an end unto itself, the higher the probability it’ll suck.

But so far, Fool Me Once has been worth our time. There are enough feints and misdirections to keep us guessing, but not so many that we tire of the sport. Most importantly, it seems to be going somewhere.

Someone on the Internet compared Fool Me Once to The Night Agent. I wouldn’t go that far. The Night Agent seized me by the throat and wouldn’t let go until we finished season one, which we did in about a week. Fool Me Once doesn’t demand I watch the next episode right now. At least not yet.

Terminator Salvation

I don’t exactly love Terminator Salvation. It’s not a good movie, even by the standards of the franchise. I haven’t seen it in years but I think Terminator 3 is probably a better movie.

However, I don’t own Terminator 3. I own Terminator Salvation.

It’s a fascinating movie. Salvation is the only Terminator film set entirely in the future. In every other film—I believe; I’ve never seen Dark Fate because I heard it sucked—Judgement Day hangs over the story like the proverbial boot waiting to drop. Salvation takes place in the impression left after Skynet stomps humanity. It’s something Terminator fans longed for since the brief glimpse during the opening scene of T2. Alas, the future is mostly a bunch of filthy humans who more or less operate in the open, and not the grim, chrome-and-laser annihilation we were promised.

There’s something to be said about a story completely unconstrained by everything that came before, one that isn't overly concerned with the now-cliched high wire act of preserving the future by sending killers to the past. Salvation has some of that energy because it’s part of the franchise’s core DNA, but in this case, it’s John Connor trying to save Kyle Reese so that Reese can go back in time and become John’s father, and therefore save John and also the entire human race, or so we’re told.

This is the problem with time travel stories. At their core, they’re pretty idiotic.¹

The Terminator franchise has become one in which every successive film since the first is a sequel, when logically, they should be prequels. Skynet failed to kill Sarah Connor because Linda Hamilton is one bad mofo, so why don’t they go back and kill her mom? Or her grandmother? Go all the way back to the Mayflower if you have to. Try to tell me you wouldn’t watch a Terminator movie set during the Revolutionary War.

Despite all the logical inconsistencies, there is something at the heart of Salvation. I’m still trying to put my finger on exactly what that is. You glimpse it at points in the narrative, but then lose it as the story turns in frankly dumb directions.

Adding to the intrigue: Christian Bale stars as a grizzled John Connor—Bale does a lot of yelling because that’s how you know shit has really hit the fan—and does the role justice, especially given the mostly-lame script. Salvation came out the year after The Dark Knight. Said another way: At the height of his stardom and box office power, Bale played a character whose driving concern is sending some dude back to the 1980s to shag his mom.

1. The first Back to the Future being an obvious exception. I also love About Time.