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The timing of Toho’s first new feature following シン (and their monsters-only shorts), the Apple series and another Legendary sequel next April would’ve spoiled 8-year-old me who’d go on to starve between Star Wars installments.

Scuttlebutt is that Apple TV+’s “Monsterverse” series is being filmed in their new Vision Pro-compatible format, which got me imagining, aside from the possibilities like experiencing scale within the peripheral, about how they might (not) expand the franchise with characters other than the two main attractions from their last outing. Why not a more humanoid giant, maybe with a different origin since we’ve already dispensed with Mechagodzilla, even an extraterrestrial one like the 特撮 heroes they were originally trying to emulate?

Reason I dug Jet Jaguar as a kid was that grin of his resembled the one on Marvel’s short-lived Scarecrow in another artifact from my past, who would leap out of existence and bother impressionable minds without today’s resources.

Update: Fuck, this is a rehash of a 20-year-old entry (plus more future-proof links). AI writing assistants can’t come soon enough, and not the striking kind.

The product announced today has me tempted to capture one of my 全力坂 runs before it’s too late, even if it may already be, ironically, for my own vision.

Update: I don’t think it’s particularly creepy or Black Mirror-dystopian to record with one of these on, any more so than using a giant phone or iPad camera, but I did wake up screaming at a swarm of bugs hovering above us last night, only to realize that it just might have been the kind of nightmare AR will make possible.

Spate of new-ish programming lately that’s kept me powering through the interminably repetitive weeks: From is back and as abstruse as ever; Matt U. assured me there’s a supernatural component to Yellowjackets, so I gave in to see what all the hoopla is about; Mrs. Davis, Damon Lindelof’s latest romp, about an omnipresent AI that is actually hardly around; Rabbit Hole, which really should’ve gone where its title suggests but instead seems like a worse version of Mrs. Davis; and the superior spy show with the MI5 rejects in “Slough House.” Gary Oldham’s Jackson Lamb is the freshest character I’ve seen in some time.

Apple’s been picking some winners lately, so I gave Silo a shot, and the scene with Rebecca Ferguson climbing toward answers at the end of the second episode must’ve led me to a dead end in a neighborhood completely sealed off by connected buildings, some businesses like a coin laundry, most of the others residential. The cul-de-sac didn’t appear to have any exit than the way I came, until I spotted what looked like one on the third floor up a mesh ladder, followed by the traditional kind from the second level. Surprisingly no fear of heights. An Indian woman called for her boys Xavier and Shervin, neither of which I recognized as Hindi names. A prominent radio antennae stood on the roof.

I suppose it’s never too late to be taken by surprise. And honestly, even if I had known about the Atari Falcon at the turn of the millennium, I doubt it’d have broken my resolve outside CompUSA, nor lessened my subsequent experiences in Liberty and Vice Cities, among the many places that glorious black monolith took me. This chance historical revelation does, in fact, reinforce my long-held belief that their next iteration nose-dived and explains my disenchantment with console gaming, maybe a loss of faith in the Sony of old. (I say that as if I’m an Apple convert, but the PS3 still sits connected to the even older XBR LCD, which I refuse to update with dominant 재벌 brands and if we ever make it back to Japan, I’m definitely buying one of these.) You’re my only hope to feel again, GTA6!

I looked through the doorway and saw a young person’s bare arm suspended unnaturally high above the room, undulating slightly and the fingers wiggling to show that someone unseen was behind it. Suddenly I was attacked by a dozen gray fists, but I fought them back, defiant and insistent that they weren’t getting to me, even as the image of my aggressor in the back changed shape and color.

In quite the change of setting to an anime convention, my friend and I (I think it was Frank Hsu, because he was tall, thin and decked out in motorcycling leathers) were admiring the life-sized mechs on display, and when we learned we could actually climb inside one for photos, queued up thinking that we were first in line. Turned out it already stretched around the display and the others were full-on cosplaying as sentai pilots, so the Shoei or Arai helmet and riding gear looked philistine in comparison. Nearing the end of our wait, a woman with a baby approached and we let her cut ahead of us, but she then tried chaining in a fat relative who waddled up and we objected vehemently. I don’t remember taking any pictures because the very next thing, my buddy looked more like that fucker Steve Bannon and was thanking me; such an abrupt edit in my timeline frightened me that Alzheimer’s had struck and this was how my perception would continue, jumping from one moment to another, unaware of what happened between them.

It’s how I reconcile Severance and Navillera. (Although the former will probably be revealed to be mad science like Dr. Brain, the Trojan Horse implant that has to be “macrodata’d” to override memory or willpower conflicts.) Bread-winning aside, what good are we to our loved ones if we don’t know who they are anymore? What good are we to ourselves?

It was the second season of a Squid Game/Severance love child and I was one of the employee/contestants, waiting in a spacious modern lobby with all the others for our first assignment. There was an announcement and a rush of people to the elevators, who then returned with forms they were furiously completing, filling in shapes with their №2 pencils, presumably as part of the next series of tasks. What I immediately noticed, however, was that all of them were women and the four or five of us fellas still lounging on the couches didn’t seem too interested in participating. Instead, we went downstairs to a seat-less auditorium where in place of a stage was a towering window covered by a flexible lattice. I joined one of my colleagues trying to climb it to freedom, but a tsunami raged outside with such force that we were swung off by the rising water.
I actually enjoyed the series last month, despite my niggling issue with co-opted business terminology; wouldn’t “balancing” (as in work-life) have conveyed a more favorable impression of the fanciful procedure? But who am I to know the discarded ideas and ultimate plans of successful people. While the premise shouldn’t be too far beyond my experience to have come up with, maybe I’ve been preoccupied with mitigating the frustration of corporate bureaucracy and organizational dysfunction on a short-sighted personal level, after hours or no, rather than exploring how it might be done away with once and for all.

One of my favorite Korean words, with the more nuanced “what the fuck” meaning than is often translated. It’s what I look for, at least when really warranted in the dialogue, from creators whose ideas may not come from the same old places (like the Doom Patrol going outside the box instead of relying on Morrison—whose own early influence I miss), and for most K-content nowadays that’s the webtoon. Not that 지리산 was ever going to be Twin Peaks, and while Hellbound and Dr. Brain aren’t high art, either, they’ve got Netflix and Apple money to go crazy with. One of them just might veer off into The Wailing.

Meanwhile the WTF that Kara Wai‘s family went through in Tracey does seem to have had some effect, or I’m grasping for the kind of correlation that’ll lead me to nightcapping with hardcore gay porn, spurring a dream I was taking a sex ed class led by an Emma Stone-looking goddess who put me on the spot by getting in my face, revealing a bikini under her regalia and asking where I’d make my mounting deposit. Her left eye opened beyond its lid as if to invite the option. Below, I still told her. Fellow student Charlie Hunnam from Queer as Folk passed by afterward, removed his shirt and revealed that his went into a condom, tactic of choice by strip club goers of old. I wondered if our instructor had office hours.

Surely the inspiration for my pre-AR AR-idea, though every once in a great while I’m blessed by a real-life reminder, like the other evening when after hundreds of 全力坂 runs the Universe manages a confluence of upper-echelon specimen from the local demographic and timing along that stretch of Clydepark where my last sighting of one in cut-offs and cowboy boots I’ve come to dismiss as a mirage.