My son is on winter break from school, but it’s a winter break that doesn’t line up with semester end. He’ll go back after two weeks off and be subjected to final exams over material that has been left to balloon and rot in the artificially humidified winter air.
I suppose it’s the same thing here, with our Gregorian calendar. A year could start at any point, including a solstice, one where each day of the year grows longer than the one before until the reversal, the halfway point again in June. I suppose then I would complain that the year starts in the middle of a month, dictated by the moon. Weeks are purely manmade, the rest we just decide when to measure.
Last night, I introduced the family to the Mummy. You may be acquainted. It’s a certified Good Film, one that holds up as an example of how they “used to make them”. That’s not to say they don’t try to make them that way. As recently as 2019 Universal tried to cash in on twenty years of nostalgia with a reboot that went… well, the thing most people remember about it is that they released a trailer without any sound effects. And not on purpose! It starts out, you think oh, this is pretty chilling, maybe it was an artistic choice. And then the world’s goofiest grunt removes all doubt.
Anyway, the one we have holds up perfectly. I told the family that CGI was so expensive in 1999, it was actually cheaper to higher an actual mummy. That might have been true for the first act, but at the end of the movie there’s a whole cadre of mummies popping out of the wherever. It’s a shame, there aren’t many roles for mummies in Hollywood today.
Speaking of nostalgia, Astrobot has been running roughshod over my household, spraying his feet laser over ev’ry imaginable surface. The controller passes hands like the proverbial hot potato in between frequent recharges. They make the controllers to be cool, with literal bells and whistles when the speaker calls for ‘em. They don’t make them to hold a charge!
I unlocked a sly Cooper costume and asked if my enjoyment was driven more by nostalgia than by competent platforming. But then I got to a level themed around Loco Roco, a franchise I’d never heard of, and the grin never left my face. There’s THAT theory put to bed.