Jexi and the Unbearable Darkness of Being

 Last night I watched Jexi, a movie about a lonely, isolated man Phil who relies too heavily on his phone before he breaks it and his replacement is the sadistic mean girl of AI, Jexi. I immediately love this premise; it would have made a tremendous vehicle for Robin Williams or Jim Carrey if it were currently 1997. It's a magical realist comedy about technology gone awry in an era when people increasingly feel observed, trapped and surrounded by social media.

The movie... drops the ball, significantly. It's got plenty of funny moments, and Adam Devine certainly has the presence to pull off the big moments in the movie, but the film's big moments are really small and far between. So I'm going to say what I would have done differently. For starters, I would have infinite budget, and I would have simply NOT allowed the federal government to shut down, inconveniencing my shoot. If it's not clear from my tone, I'm not a filmmaker, an actor, director, producer, screenwriter, or screenplay editor. I know I don't know what I'm doing, I don't understand the real constraints of the media, this isn't my secret blogger's route to a guaranteed Oscar for best midrange comedy. This is just me reconstructing the movie I wanted to see from the movie that was made. It's how I watch movies. Okay. Here we go.

The movie starts with a montage from Phil's life. His parents give him phones to distract him while they fight, and after three of these the montage changes format to Phil's current life, walking through a San Francisco that's almost completely unobserved as people stare at their phones. Okay, STOP. I need to interject: Jexi, you know you're a movie, right? The preachy tone won't sell to someone who paid to see a silly comedy about a saucy smartphone who says swears. And when your star is Adam Devine, you should definitely avoid preachy: the man has resting Youth Pastor Face. 

Doesn't he look like the studio has guy whose only job is to wrestle away Adam's acoustic guitar?

Phil works in an unsatisfying job writing listicles with Ron Funches and Charlene Yi, but he confesses to them that his real passion, the thing he went to school for, his dream job, is journalism. Probably could have revealed that during those two montages you showed us at the beginning of this movie, Jexi. Say... journalism subplot, in San Francisco? You know what movie just did that really, really well? Venom. Yeah, the reboot of the 90s antihero alien goo comic book that eats human faces has a pretty well-grounded journalism B-story, and if you didn't want to invite comparisons, Jexi, you probably shouldn't have shot in the exact same apartment. See, in Venom, protagonist Eddie Brock has a story he's chasing. Between the bits where's he's growing goo-knives or playing human corpse Jenga, Eddie Brock has observed troubling things and needs to tell the world.  

Meanwhile, in Jexi, Phil has never noticed anything in his life and you start to get the impression that the both Phil and the script don't actually know what a journalist does. Phil gets to become a journalist when someone gets injured, but it's not clear why Phil gets the job, because he's done nothing to earn it and the boss that gives it to him openly hates him. Unsure of what to do now that they've given him his dream, the script has a perfunctory celebration scene that takes place in a supremely generic office.

A few minutes later, Phil and romantic subplot Cate are sneaking into a music venue to see Kid Cudi, and when they're cornered by security, Phil, thinking quickly, says that he's Kid Cudi's accountant. Movie, you just made this guy a journalist. That was literally the previous scene. Just have him claim to be a reporter. Hey, isn't Music Journalist a thing? Aren't there journalists who report on local entertainment? Anyway, in the next scene he's fired from Journalisming. The end!!! I GUESS!

Phil approached journalism like a someone who lied to their guidance counselor in 10th grade, and then just kept sticking with the lie because it was easier than investigating the growing hole at the center of his soul. If you're wondering why I've been pulling on this thread so hard, here's why: investigating his spiritual emptiness should have been the point of this movie.

Early in the film, Phil lies about how satisfying is life is, in that vacuous style that makes social media so emotionally damaging. But his dream is part of that lie. Just like he doesn't actually find living in San Francisco emotionally satisfying, he doesn't want to be a journalist, he just told himself that was part of the life he wanted to make. Similarly, the romantic subplot of the movie involves him "falling in love" with the first girl he sees when he drops his phone. 

I have more to say about this movie, because I haven't even begun talking about the sassy AI. I need to take a break, though, because this essay is longer than the movie.

Mulan (2020)

 I want to complain about Mulan(2020). So, here I go!

This movie was deeply disappointing. I was excited when I heard it was being made--while I was moaning about the movie during our screening my wife kept reminding me how excited I'd been seeing the trailer in the theater.

It has a noble intention. It set out to be a Disney Live-Action Remake that wasn't a shot-for-shot remake of the originals (Like Lion King or Beauty and the Beast), and so they made pains to make the movie more culturally accurate to China, to shift the genre from sinified fantasy film into something resembling a proper Wuxia movie. But the movie, for me, still struggles under the yoke that dragged down its Live Action Remake predecessors: a desire to be Very Grown Up but with absolutely no grasp of what that actually means.

Let me air out my grievances first.

1. The movie is not a musical. 

Abandoning musical numbers is one of the ways these movies strive to be Very Grown Up, but I can't imagine someone who liked any of these Disney movies without finding at least one Disney song they enjoyed. Furthermore, the songs in Mulan aren't just good songs, they provide pacing and texture. They're not necessary themselves, but they provide a number of necessary functions that need to be met and planned for.

 The song Girl Worth Fighting For, for example, is a light-hearted number where Mulan's friends bond over women in an effort to keep their spirits up before marching into battle. It provides Ling, Yao, and Chien-Po an opportunity to become fleshed-out characters. It also provides a bridge between the inspirational Make a Man Out of You and moment when the soldiers encounter the devastation of Shan Yu and Shang learns that his father has died. The high of the song's comedy and its dreamy visual elements starkly contrast with that emotional low.

Mulan 2020 replaces this song with a scene of Mulan and her friends eating a meal together and literally speaking the words the words of the song, but rather than contributing to a flow of action (moving from training to combat) or being visually interesting (it's literally just five men in identical outfits speaking the words to the song), or providing any emotional polarity, it just sits there, part of a melange of that scene.

This is especially pronounced with Mulan's departure and the dramatic scene handled by the song Reflection in 1998. The movie feels like its rushing through her departure because the song that handled that exposition got cut, and the movie doesn't bother figuring out another way to build the energy that scene needed. So it doesn't. Mulan 2020 doesn't do away with Reflections (small snatches of the song play throughout the whole film).

2. It's Never Funny

Mushu the Dragon was cut from the 2020 film over concerns of cultural inaccuracy. Which... fine. The only thing more egregious than a talking animal sidekick is a CGI animal sidekick, and I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to put a wise-cracking CGI animal in film without giving James Marsden a role.

However, apparently laughter of any kind is culturally inaccurate, because they kept cutting comic roles until there were none left. Mushu was cut, but also Grandma, Cri-Kee, the dickish bureaucrat Chi Fu, and the ghosts of Mulan's Ancestors.

Now, a film doesn't need a cartoon cricket for comic relief, but I do believe that someone needs to be funny, because watching old Chinese people complain that their daughter is a disappointment isn't quite the carnival of thrills the movie thinks it is. I'm not asking for Krusty the Klown to be doing handstands in every scene, just for someone--anyone--express an emotion other than stoic stoicity.

I think they might not have realized what was happening, though, because supposedly Mulan was supposed to make up for the loss of Mushu by forging a closer bond with her allies: Chien-Po, Ling and Yao. That... that didn't happen. They might have thought that was happening, because Mulan has at least two conversations with men while at camp, and they laugh during it, but honestly those scenes have the same energy as a saloon in a Wuxia movie right before Jet Li alphabetizes everybody's skeletons. There's more esprit de corps in a pair of rotting corpses.

Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh, but I liked the pun.

3. They Broke Chekhov's Gun

In the 1998 film, the Matchmaker song Bring Honor to Us All says that women can bring honor by striking a good match, i.e. match with a good husband. But the film turns that line into an elaborate pun by making both of her victories involve cannons, struck with a good match. It's such a subtle line I didn't notice it until I was researching for this essay, but it's a good object for a problem I had with this film: the elements don't work together.

Take the training montage in Make a Man Out of You. In Mulan 1998, Shang shot an arrow to the top of a pole and challenged his trainees to retrieve it by climbing while carrying two weights. Throughout the song, different characters take a crack at it, inevitably failing as they're dragged down by the heavy weights. In the culminating moments of the song, Mulan binds the two weights together and uses them as a strap to help her climb the pole, succeeding as the sun rises behind her.

It's a great moment; a metaphor for how Mulan's unique perspective inspires her to turn obstacles into assets. The technique is even reused during the climax, with Mulan and her buddies (I really need a collective name for those Ling, Chien-Po and Yao... suggest one in the comments?) scaling the columns in the palace to ambush the evil Shan Yu. Showing a character learning something, and then using it later in the film is a really easy way to create a cool moment in a film. It creates the same tingle as a reference, but doesn't require your audience to be depressed millenials chasing a nostalgia buzz.

This scene is replaced with a water bucket carrying challenge. Which is not a problem unto itself--many a family member and college acquaintance rolled their eyes with my protracted complaints about Disney Remakes being shot-for-shot recitations of their 90s forebears. 

But Mulan doesn't beat the water bucket challenge with wit. She doesn't come up with a clever twist on the challenge's rules which allow her to succeed where everybody else failed. Instead, she's given permission to "unleash her chi," at which point she... just carries the water up the hill. She does precisely what was asked of her. She doesn't, say, carry everybody's water. And later in the movie, of course there's no reference to her carrying water.

The movie is just a string of things happening.

4. Cowards! You're all damn cowards!

I forgot how much Mulan talks in the original movie. According to this article, Why Mulan Needs Mushu, Mulan is the chattiest Disney princess. She's embarrassed and vulnerable, she makes mistakes and gets confused. She's not a super powered super lady with a ton of midichlorians. She's a person in challenging circumstances who rises to meet them. She depends on the people around her, and they like and respect her, and everybody shows that. With emotions. The cartoon character is more human than the real life character. 

Addit with Screwdle: Breath of the Wild

I recently beat Breath of the Wild, the 2017 entry into the Legend of Zelda series. This game is really fun and expansive, and I enjoyed it a lot. I completely respect the journey that a game like Breath of the Wild must undergo to become a video game, especially one so expansive as this. But... My habit when playing any game, is to expand it in my mind. After all, my imagination isn't limited by crunch deadlines, or budgets, or the technical limitations of the game.

So, here's Addit with Screwdle. Stuff I think should be added not because it completes an incomplete game, improves it, or because anybody messed up, but because I like it and it makes me happy. Think of this as mechanical fanfiction. Fanfiction about gameplay, rather than plot.

Equipment

I had a lot of opinions about the weapon system in BOTW right away. I think everybody did. I feel like the Obstacle / Tool / Obstacle path that has traditionally been used to gate off parts of LoZ games is the soul of the franchise, the thing that makes Zelda games so fun to explore. Half the fun, after all, is remembering that you passed a rock that can only be lifted with the Power Bracelet and going back to see what was there. Plus, I love magical artifacts. I liked looking at pictures of the Power Bracelet, or teleporting to the Dark World with a magic mirror. I've always been an archivey nerd, and I love the completionist feeling of watching pedestals in your inventory window fill up as you complete every dungeon and sidequest to get every item. Breath of the Wild doesn't give you that feeling.

Tattoos

The most obvious potential "artifacts" are the runes. Presumably they were subsumed into the Shiekah Tablet to distinguish them from the breakable weapons links encounters, but it's still disappointing. But I started thinking. If we're not going to make these items, and Link's bare body is right there for us to see... what if the Runes and the Spirit powers were tattoos? Your magic powers are represented on your Magic Phone, sure, but they're also tattoos. Maybe Link has the Magnesis rune on his forearm. The Cryonis rune on his left shoulder. Maybe he has the symbol for Vah Medoh and thus Revali's Gale across his back and Vah Ruta over his heart. When a rune or spirit power is ready to use, they glow under Link's armor.

Lasso

A rope-based melee weapon. Tapping the attack key would cause Link to whip with the lasso. Using the “melee throw” function would cause Link to try and lasso a target. If he connects, he plants his feet and begins using stamina to pull the target. Lassoed enemies get tangled and vulnerable. Horse-riding enemies are unseated. Ridable enemies are temporarily easier to ride. Think about how much fun it would be to lasso a Lynel!

Rope Arrows

Okay, the lasso was just an extension of this idea I like a bit more. Rope Arrows would allow you to fire a rope at distant targets. The rope would be climbable, and able to be staked down to serve as a tightrope. Walking on a tightrope and pressing X while a bow is equipped would cause link to drop down and zipline. Enemies like Lynels and Hinox, when charging through a tightened rope, could trip and fall. In some ways, it might resemble the Grappling Hook from Phantom Hourglass.

Wind Rune

This would functionally replace the Korok Leaf and produce a gentle current of wind, allowing you to navigate on rafts more consistently. As it stands, I almost never used rafts because giving up a melee slot for a Korok Leaf felt like a huge waste. I’m sure we could have included some puzzles that required the Wind Rune, as well. We can visit that in a minute.

No-Slip Set Bonus

The Climbing Gear, once fully upgraded, should have prevented slipping while climbing in rainy places. Very basic, very simple. I can’t think of a place where rainslickness serves as a story-critical bounding obstacle. Maybe the Thundra Plateau? I'm just... look, I'm the Hero that Seals the Darkness. I defeated an ancient manifestation of hatred. I can change clothes while hang-gliding. You're telling me that I slip on rainy surfaces while wearing No-Slip Gloves? Oy oy oy.

Snowquill Headpiece

... is the smallest hat in the game. Smaller even than earrings. And it confers cold resistance? Okay. I laughed at the joke. We all laughed! It was funny. But that laugh is over, and I wanna see Link in glare-resistant snow glasses and a parka hoodie. I'd wear that all the time!

Boomerangs

It bothered me a tiny bit that the most common type of boomerangs you encounter for most of the game, and indeed the strongest sort of boomerang you find, are three-pronged Lizalfo boomerangs which don't look like boomerangs hardly at all. Also, I almost never broke a boomerang--generally I missed catching them and then they'd glitch through some geometry and that was that. Give me a few more regular boomerangs, please.

Enemies

So, I would have liked to see a greater variety of enemies in such a large game. It would be easy to just list off my favorite enemies and insist they need to be in the game, but that’s not quite the point. So instead I'm looking for enemies that either help make the different regions feel different, enemies that suit BOTW mechanically, or enemies that help emphasis a mechanic I wanted to see more often. This game had fewer enemy varieties than Link's Awakening, for pete's sake, and nearly all of Link's most quintessential enemies are gone. Where are all the giant bugs? Dungeon weirdos?

Like-Likes

Shield Eater

These shield-eating jellies were the first and most obvious enemy that was missing from BOTW. In most LoZ games, losing your shield feels weird because it's the only item you can lose, but in a game where nearly your entire inventory is completely replaceable, Like-Likes would be a reasonable monster to have lurking in certain areas, gobbling up rusty shields or your third Bokoblin Arm.

Leevers

Desert Menace

One of the most classic Zelda enemies, these bloodthirsty cactus could diversify this game's monstrous ecology by replacing Octorocks or Chuchus in the Gerudo's desert.

Kargaroc

Feathery Foe

The road to Zora’s Domain was the first time I truly encountered Lizalfos (although I know now they can be seen sooner, swimming in the Squabble River). This lead me to believe that the semiaquatic Lizalfos were the special foe of the Zora people, and that the Gorons, Gerudo and Rito would have their own rivals.

I was disappointed to learn that wasn't the case, but liked the idea that each race might have a nemesis monster race. I ALSO felt that BOTW, with its unequaled vertical spaces, was the perfect place for more flying enemies. Thus, kargarocs seemed like natural enemies to include in the game. Living primarily in the Tabantha region (or serving highly specialized roles elsewhere), Kargarocks would swoop down to unseat Link when he's riding and attempt to carry him back to their nests. It might be funny if they harassed any mounted characters (like Bokoblins or Hylian riders).

Maraudo Riders

Mounted Pests

One of the most deadly enemies I faced in BOTW were the Maraudo Wolves, partially because I tended to underestimate them but also because their circle-pounce-feint strategy is a lot smarter than most enemies' "blunder into range and punch until Link is standing in a cloud of smoke and teeth" strategy. This felt wrong. Replacing Maraudo Wolves with Maraudo Wolves ridden by Bokoblin riders would be a much more reasonable threat, and frankly I think bokoblins should MAYBE be able to ride anything ridable.

Gleeok

Two-headed bridge guardian

When I was crossing the bridge in Lake Hylia, I thought I saw a massive fish swimming in the lake. I was wrong, of course, it’s an island, but that idea stuck with me. When I found Gleeok Bridge later, it made sense that the two-headed serpent might rise out of the water around the bridge to fight Link.

NPCs

One of the things I felt was particularly weak about BOTW was its NPC characters. Upon reflection there are more, in greater variety than I realized, but then I compare them to older Zelda games and still feel like something's missing. Link to the Past had the Exiled Thief, for example. A neat guy--he helps you pick a lock. Link's Awakening has an old woman whose pet dogs are chain chomps! Rescuing Bow Wow is a major story point!

Sword Master

The special vagaries of BOTW's combat is visited briefly in one of the most important shrines in the game (the one overlooking Kakariko Village and the first Great Fairy shrine you're likely to encounter). However, I missed having a sword-master tutorial. Give me a couple sword schools that focus on getting sneakstrikes, Flurry attacks, and parrying. Give me some more guided interactions with the combat system, because I especially felt like sneakstrikes were beyond me.

Witch

Syrup the Witch produced potions in Link to the Past and the Oracle series, and her granddaughter Maple flew around the world, periodically bumping into Link in order to give him items. The Gerudo witches Koume and Kotake appeared in OoTs and MM to sell potions. There's a witch family in Link Between Worlds.

I would like to see a witch brewing elixirs in her special witch hut in some of the more forgotten backwater forests of BOTW. Perhaps she’s stirring a pot similar to Sayge’s dying apparatus. On a bookshelf in her house there’s a book of recipes that contains the recipe for the best version of every elixir you’ve brewed. Put her in the Minshi Wood, since that forest is pretty empty.

Witch’s Apprentice

One of the things that inspired me to write this was the vision of a witch flying over Hyrule Field. She could run a shop of rare or difficult-to-craft elixirs and you’d have to lure her to the ground with octoballoons carrying potion ingredients, maybe? Occasionally she'd follow you while you're riding on horseback, racing you. But in that playful, companionable way.

Kapoera Gabora

Link’s owl guide from Link’s Awakening and Ocarina of Time doesn’t necessarily need to make a reappearance, but the vastness of the game often made it lonely, and it doesn’t help that major expositions are caused by flashbacks Zelda helpfully stored in her phone for you. I like the idea of Kapoera Gabora showing up in the ruins of different towns to explain the cause of their abandonment and give us a view of the world outside Zelda's phone. A calamity happened! Help us understand it.

Give me Closure for the people I save

One of the cool things about BOTW is that you get a glimpse of how the monsters threaten the people of this world. It’s not the first time that it’s happened in a Zelda game but it happens more often now. The problem is that these people will express gratitude... then nothing happens. They just wait for the monsters to respawn on a blood moon. On one occasion, I saved a woman, then road down the road at breakneck pace... to save her two more times, each time with no acknowledgement of the previous times.

Give me closure on these! Let these people build a homestead or something after I kill the bokoblin that's bothering them. Give them a trading quest.

Give the New Champions more to do

Since the game went to the trouble of introducing relatives of the Four Champions who help you gain access to the Divine Beasts, it would make sense to incorporate them into the larger story. Having them interact with the ghosts of their ancestors might make them a touch more memorable.

Korok Dialog

The third or fourth time I found a Korok, I realized that these guys have maybe two lines of dialog total. Their cookiecutter “you found me” dialog means they have only slightly more personality than a korok-shaped treasure chest. I mean, I came to the Hyrule Castle, a monster-haunted castle permanently cloaked in a shroud of red fog, the ground literally oozing liquid evil, and then I climbed to the very tippy-top, and your line is "You found me!" Which, by the way, is the exact same thing a Korok said to me when I found one hiding under a rock outside a comfy tavern.

How about having these guys acknowledge the world in any way? Write a stock line for each related to where they were hiding, and then for the ones that are hiding in particularly interesting points, give them something to say when you talk to them.

Like for a geolithic pattern: “Thanks for helping me finish that pattern!”
Hiding under leaves: “I love jumping in leaf piles!”
Circle-of-rocks in the river challenge: “It sure was wet down there!”

And then, like “Wow, from the top of Hyrule Castle you can see pretty much the whole world!
“Wow, from Zelda’s turret you can totally see Crenel Hill!”

“Great job finding me in the dark! There’s another one nearby!”

“The Lynel over there was singing showtunes when he thinks nobody’s listening.”

Zelda

Something I thought early in my BOTW playthrough: that Zelda was trapped in Hyrule Castle with Ganon, hemming him inside a bubble generated by her piece of the Triforce. Occasionally Ganon would muster his strength to create a streaking phantom monster, which she would shoot with her Light Bow, keeping the beast trapped inside the castle walls for the most part. But then, occasionally, she'd slip, or miss, and some Malice would escape into the world.

But no. It turns out she's just chilling in a polyp in the castle, until you save her. 

Places

Monstrous Cookpot

We find a ton of monster camps that feature their cooking. Cooking fish, roasting giant slabs of meat... but it would be pretty neat to see at least one with a person-sized cookpot. Sneakstrike the chef to get a rare elixir! Here's a typical Moblin fort, but the platform wraps around a cookpot over a roaring flame.

Flood Zone

In Link to the Past, you have to drain a reservoir in order to find a piece of heart. Even in BOTW, there are challenges in Vah Rutala and some of the Shrines that require water depth manipulation challenges, and it would be cool to explore some more of those in the overworld.

Gameplay

Caravan Mission

I can already hear people getting anxious about the escort mission, but hear me out: rather than pass/fail, you're awarded a rupee total based on the success of your defense.

Point to Point Racer

The world of BOTW is huge, and it would be fun to have a unique, maybe over-designed NPC who challenges you to races all over the world. There is a jogger who challenges you to a race, Similar to Fletus from Brutal Legend. You come up to a Hylian at a campfire while riding your horse, and she's like "Hey! That's a fine horse you've got there! I'd love to race you from here to Fort Hateno!" And then you have to chase her on horseback, or just try to navigate a path there. And she gets mad at you if you cheat by teleporting. Th

Stable Raids

The people in BOTW seem pretty comfortable in their post-apocalypse. Occasionally a person will fight a bokoblin on a bridge but nobody seems to be in particularly serious danger. Their cities and even their outposts seem comfortable and safe. I wanted to ruin the sense of safety these people have. Sometimes, when Link is near a stable, Zelda would miss a shot back at Hyrule Castle, letting a piece of Ganon escape to spawn monsters that then attack the stable. Intercede at your own peril but also recognize the stable might close while the beasts take over the stable, sleeping in the beds, chasing livestock and fighting. This would be a rarish event, something that happens under supremely scripted situations and separated by dozens of hours of gameplay.

Conclusion

BOTW is a great game, and I had a lot of fun dreaming of this stuff while I was playing it. Have your own ideas? Wanna complain that mine violate the spirit of the game? Great! Share them with me!

Bogleech Pokemon: Samstink and Fouliath

Samstink
The Dogbreath Pokemon
Fighting/Poison
Samstink have breath so disgusting it takes on a physical shape. Samstink's breath-arms dissipate in rain.

 Ability: Poison Touch
Physical attacks have a small chance to poison
Ability: Stink Breath

Fouliath
The Strongman Pokemon
Fighting/Poison
Fouliath has breath so powerful it can knock down an entire building. Fouliath are obsessed with building the strength of their terrible breath, and can be seen eating anything that smells terrible.

Ability: Poison Touch
This is the same as the last one.

Stop Motion Lego App

Lego has a stop motion app, and the last time I used it, it was very average. Minimal features for a stop-motion app. Onion skinning, variable framerates, and I think that was it. Then I had an idea: LEGO heads printed with multiple faces, for the sake of animation! Turns out they already do that. Wait, a better idea! Several LEGO heads, printed with several phonemes so you can make your brickfilms look like they're talking! That... seems like something only a hardcore brickfilmer would bother buying.

And then I got Snapchat, and I had a bunch of ideas all at once. See, Snapchat has something called Lenses. Basically, the app detects your face and then does something weird to it; one Lens will detect the "eye" area and then redraw the face so your eyes appear huge. Another app can swap your face for a face from a photo in your inventory, even going so far as to animate the mouth moving.

So, what if we applied this kind of technology to LEGO? First, you produce a quality stop-motion application. Forward and backwards adjustable onion skinning, variable framerate...

Then you introduce the Snapchat technology. You print a LEGO head with some detectable characteristic. Probably an array of simple machine-readable green-screen dots, which can be easily filled in while maintaining the light/shadow balance of your original film. Whatever it ends up being, we'll call it the d-face, for "detectable face". While you're filming, the app gives you that little square to let you know it's tracking the d-face. Then, once you've completed an animation with the d-face detection on, you can go into the FACE ANIMATION menu.

There would be a couple faces in this app. Basic simple face, face with painted red lips, cocky smirking face, skull face, etcetera. Each face has a gamut of emotions. In a launch, you'd probably want four emotions: happy, sad, angry, surprised. There are ways to automate transitioning between emotions, or even between faces. These faces would get overlaid on the d-face, snapping to them and rotating in space, much like some of the more complicated Lenses do in snapchat.

"But... couldn't that be accomplished with two heads printed with each face? Brickfilms are already natively inflexible, so the audience will grant the animator a bit of leeway with facial expressions. Why would I want this?"

Good question, surprisingly astute imaginary reader. Now, using that earlier Snapchat tech, while you're creating a face, you could record dialog with the front-facing camera active. Snapchat can detect a fair bit of mouth movement, which they would then translate into phonemic animations on your character, creating a smoother, more accurate speaking animation.

Final idea, pretty crazy town: wave-marking. In iMovie, you can pull the audio out of a video clip, which gives you the wave form for the audio. We'd use the same technology to give you a visual "mark" to deliver your animation to. Notate your audio so you can use a set number of frames to get to a particular sound. Helpful for animating to music!

Pokemon Go! Changes, From One Nerd to Another

Pokemon Go is an incredibly successful game. It's wildly successful and people who experience joy tell me it's a lot of fun. I... don't like it. That's just me! I don't think it's not fun, it just doesn't appeal to me. It feels too much like Ingress with Pokemon stickers on there. I know how video games work, now, and changes are definitely on the way, but while they're coming out, let me talk about the changes I would make to this game.

1) Rebranding Pokemon Candy
This game's economy is... messed up.  Unlike a traditional RPG, where Pokemon are leveled up through devotion and training, Pokemon are evolved and powered up through the use of two in-game resources: "stardust" and "candy". Candy is specific to a family of Pokemon--Pidgey candy can only be used on Pidgey, Pidgeotto and Pidgeot. This means that common Pokemon are easier to level than their rarer counterparts.

I don't like the  candy system because of that economy, and because the idea of Pokemon inexplicably carrying candy--smooth, striped spheres--bothers me. Berries make more sense within the Pokemon canon, since Pokemon are well-known to carry berries. It would also make slightly more economic sense to align these evolution-promoting berries to egg groups, which would make it easier for players to promote preferred Pokemon rather than common ones.

Stardust should also be changed. Stardust is better than other freemium resources (gems, coins, stars), but it still feels painfully generic, like it was thought up by a Mattel exec in 1986 to explain why the Carebears should be shipped with five ounces of glitter. There's gotta be a more interesting thing to use. Vitamins? Minerals? PROTEIN? Buff berries? Ooz grabblers? Weave mubblers?


2) Changing Up the Look
First of all, the aesthetics. Pokemon Go is basically Google Maps, but with a generic anime protagonist where the little blue guy normally is. If you pan around the map, you'll see hovering pins in the distance. Some of these pins end in little diamond shapes, others look like little hovering platforms with Pokemon on them. They don't look... they don't look great. I suggested using Pokemon gyms.

Okay, these little rectangular gyms from the Gen1 that this game pays tribute to are not particularly iconic. Later generations used more distinct architecture that might be more iconic, but one software developer pointed out that gyms might be too large to overlay easily onto the screen. Well, let's go with something smaller. The familiar statues from Gyms.

3) Changing Pokestops
Pokestops gotta change, too. I was thinking it'd be cool to replace the little pins with trainers. They give you a little rejoinder about themselves pulled from a list (I like shorts! They're comfy and cool!"), give you your item, and if you tap on them, it does what the Pokestop does and spins around to reveal the real world location. You don't control them.

Or, as an alternative, each Pokestop is a Pokemon obstacle. STRENGTH boulder, WHIRLPOOL whirlpool, CUT tree. You get your normal haul of items visiting the Pokestop, but you have a Pokemon that can use a particular move? SURF, and you get a bonus item. CUT, bonus item.

4) After you catch a new Pokemon, it shows you the Pokedex entry right away. I mean, you might start skipping over it eventually, but that just seems basic.

5) Pokemon Snap

Dude, you don't have combat, you have an AR camera. Gimme some Pokeball film and let me catch the Pokemon that way. Hit the film at the right time and KA-SNAP, you caught yourself a Pokemon. It fits the Pokemon Go mechanic more readily. This one is actually a pretty cool idea. Because I'm so handsome and smart.

Seriously, though, wouldn't this make more sense?