The Rise of the Super Villain

“The forces of darkness are many and weak, while the forces of good are few, but strong.”

-Spoony, on the subject of Anti-Paladins

It’s arguable that this is true not only in Dungeons and Dragons, but also in reality, or at least it was until recently. In the past, a plot or scheme, if it was to be pulled off on any real scale, took the coordination of many individuals, large underground networks, such as various mafias, or gangs. Even criminal conspiracies in the business world usually require the coordination of at least a handful of people to do things like manipulate stock prices, or perform insider trading.

The weakness of these conspiracies was the weaknesses of the individuals within them, which could then be used by law enforcement to break up these groups. It wasn’t as though a single person could pull off large scale events by themselves, not without the resources provided by a group, time, money, ideas, expertise. Today though, there could be hundreds of people, working individually, lone wolves more dangerous than what we’ve ever faced before.

We know that an individual can do a lot of damage with the right gun, venue, and enough ammunition, see the Vegas shooting, with over 50 deaths and over 200 injuries, but that’s small potatoes compared to what he could have done with our existing technology.

But how much damage? A world ending amount. We have already reached a point where all the tools are in place for a slightly more sophisticated bad actor to bring them together to perform acts that in comics, only superheroes could stop.

So how much would it cost? It really depends on the methodology. Writing an AI to perform a single simple destructive task, all that requires is a decent computer and the know-how.

On the physical side, there’s gene editing, which, some might say is prohibitively expensive, but getting a large CRSPR CAS-9 gene editing kit can be purchased for a reasonable price, on Amazon no less, for just a couple hundred dollars, an amount that could be scraped together by even a frugal and determined fast food worker.

These threats are coming, and we won’t have a superhero to save us. I honestly think that the better option is just to make life better for the lower class, to reduce that kind of resentment, before some rando on 4chan decides to genetically engineer super measles and to dump it into our water supply, or some hacker makes an AI that starts a nuclear war.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters totally Jumps the Megalodon (Some Spoilers)

It has been a while since I’ve done a movie review, but it has been a while since I’ve been able to make it out to see a movie. I let my roommate pick, and her immediate pick was Godzilla: King of the Monsters. To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised, as I thought she was going to drag the two of us to see the wholly-unnecessary live-action remake of the Disney classic Aladdin. I was first surprised by the number of people who were in the theater, a fairly late-evening showing on a Tuesday night, in fact the theater was nearly sold out, with only two left after we purchased ours, in the front row. I won’t complain about the movie-going experience too much, though being stuck in the front corner of the theater with a seat that wouldn’t recline did cause me to become a bit contorted by the end of the over two-hour run-time.

How you make a giant monster film that is supposed to be about giant monsters boring? By giving people the wrong elements. There are so many people that we just don’t care about in this movie. There’s the woman from The Conjuring movies teaming up with Tywin Lannister to unleash titanic monsters from across the planet, and yet I don’t care about any of the people. They are flat, with twist reveals that feel convenient, if not outright stupid or unmotivated. There is a young girl who can apparently run from a fallout shelter outside Boston to Fenway park in just a short time, on foot, sneak into it while it’s being used as an evacuation point, and then later makes it on foot from Fenway Park to her home in the suburbs, on foot through an irradiated hellscape in 6 minutes, which is super believable. I wouldn’t care so much if they didn’t make such a big deal about the time limits in place in the movie itself.

I wanted to know more about the monsters, who are the stars of the movie, but we learned so little, and the little that we did learn was blown up so they could hand-wave away any explanations. I mean, they find out the earth is hollow, then a couple minutes later find the lost city of Atlantis within this deep-earth tunnel, and then THOSE MADMEN, THEY BLEW IT UP. WITH A NUKE. Now it was to charge up Godzilla to fight a big monster, but just, no one even acknowledged the significance of what they did, no objections, and oh yeah, a guy blew himself up, but we don’t really care about that.

THEY KILL MOTHRA. JUST AFTER THE GIANT MAJESTIC BABY MOTH IS BORN THOSE MONSTERS (the screenwriters here) MURDERED THAT BEAUTIFUL CREATURE, WHO LITERALLY DID NOTHING WRONG TO DESERVE IT.

They tell us nothing in the movie about the monsters except there’s a bunch, and that they’ve been around a long time, and Godzilla is a good guy I guess, sometimes? I wanted to know how they knew this, but I guess they do. GIVE ME MONSTER LORE YOU BASTARDS!

This movie is generally inoffensive if you don’t think about it, but it’s not really funny, the lines that got laughs out of the audience were:

“I record everything.”

“I think she said gonorrhea.”

And there was one more, but I don’t even remember what it was, though none got a laugh out of me. I give this movie a bleh/10 (roughly a 4-5).

Oh yeah, there’s credits stuff where they tease Godzilla versus King Kong, and Mothra laid an egg with Godzilla, but whatever.