The (Kinda) Monthly TweetBag, Vol. 1, Issue 3
Halloween candy, Dune, and hereditary sports fandom... and more!
So I kinda whiffed on having this TweetBag be a monthly thing, didn’t I? I have an excuse. In August, I lost my job, and my head was swimming. I found a lot of topics at the last minute before writing them, not thinking to pull out this old chestnut. Then in the beginning of October, I found a new job, one that I really like but that requires a different kind of work ethic than what I had before. My mind was in other places. I’ve almost completely abandoned my original writing outlet, not on purpose, just out of a complete lack of time and inspiration. It happens. But I figured, hey, why not pull the ol’ call-and-response out? I could’ve done it last week too, but I just didn’t think of it until it was late Wednesday night and my well was dry. Sorry for that, everyone who was looking for something to read on a Thursday. Anyway, enough explaining. Let’s get to answering some tweets, baby!
Okay, so first off, all six of those candies are heavyweights on flavor. They’d be the SEC West in an on year if I’m going to make a college football comparison. I cannot stress how much this particular variety pack speaks to me. However, you asked for a ranking. I’m giving you a ranking. The tough choices, that’s what I’m paid1 to do.
6. Milk Duds — The concept is sound. It really is. Chocolate covered caramels are an elite combo, not gonna lie. However, Milk Duds caramels are just always as a rule way too hard to chew. If you want to build your jaw muscles, by all means, go ahead. They’re clearly the last here.
5. Heath Bar — Again, it’s not a knock against the concept. Toffee has great flavor, one of the few things the English have given the world culinarily that isn’t an abomination. The problem with Heath Bars isn’t the flavor, but again, like Milk Duds, with the dental ramifications. These bars are the rare thing that take a lot of effort to snap yet get stuck in your teeth like taffy. A pure hassle to eat.
4. Rolo — Fourth in this bag is, to use the college football analogy again, like being a rowdy Arkansas team that is good enough to perhaps win the Big XII or play in the Big 10 Championship game against Ohio State, but was unfortunate enough to play in the same division as Alabama, Texas A&M, and LSU in years where all three were buzzsaws. Rolo is a caramel candy that isn’t a chore to chew, but it’s just in a stacked gauntlet here.
3. Whoppers — This ranking is a true controversial choice, as I’ve seen more than one person compare them to candy corn in derogatory fashion. I like candy corn, but that’s beside the point. Whoppers are an elite chocolate candy because of the malt center. I feel like one of the big downsides of not growing up in leaner times is that people don’t appreciate how texturally pleasing malted balls are. They disintegrate on your tongue like little flavor bombs, and the texture really plays up the sweetness in a unique fashion. I have no qualms putting it the top half here. Go argue a houseplant.
2. Kit Kat — I contemplated putting this at number one, that’s how good it is. You know those wafer cookies? Alone, they can be texturally off-putting - too flimsy and reminiscent of the Eucharist - but if you pack ‘em down tight and blast ‘em with chocolate, it’s a confectionary miracle. Bonus points if you freak out every single one of your friends and loved ones if you take a bite out of the bar whole instead of breakin’ off a piece like normal people do.
1. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups — Please, as if there were any other answer. Peanut butter is already a perfect foodstuff, and Reese’s makes it sweeter while enrobing it in chocolate. There’s a reason why they dominate Halloween (and Easter, and Valentine’s Day). Chocolate and peanut butter are the perfect tag team. They’re Abbott and Costello. The Young Bucks. Farley and Spade. Not much you can do to improve upon it but enjoy it.
Well, like most people who live in giant population centers, my fandom is a product of my proximity. Born and raised in the Philadelphia area, my life of being a fan has been mostly pain punctuated by fleeting moments of sweetness. C’est la vie. Right off the bat, you know that if I’ve been a fan for three decades and counting, lack of success couldn’t push me away. I’m not saying I’m an unquestioning, uncritical fan of these teams as long as I live and breathe though. For example, if the Eagles were to successfully trade for Deshaun Watson, a man who at current time faces 22 credible accusations of either the civil or criminal variety from women who said he abused them, I might have to cool it on rooting for them for awhile, whether it be “until the apparatus that decided it was a good idea to trade for him was gone,” “forever,” or somewhere in between. I can take losing. I can take heartbreak. It’s natural. What I can’t take is reckless disregard for my fellow humans. I’ve already flirted with this sort of thing with the Phillies and their flagrant skirting of vaccine recommendation. I don’t want to root for people who flaunt the fact that they don’t care their industries are filled with scum. Be bad at your job, but don’t be bad to people. That’s fair, right?
Some people say Dave Bautista is so good at acting that you really can’t count him as a pro wrestler anymore, and I swear those people aren’t just a throng of imaginary humans I just made up in my head either. Okay, maybe they are. The point is that once you’re a wrestler, you’re always a wrestler. The easy answer would be to just name wrestlers who are already working in film, but there’s no place for The Rock on Arrakis. NO PLACE AT ALL. John Cena might work as an interesting Feyd-Rautha, but I want spicier. SPICIER.
The characters left to be cast are the aforementioned Feyd-Rautha Rabban, brother to Bautista’s Glossu “The Beast” Rabban, Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, and his daughter Princess Irulan. There’s also Paul Atreides’ little sister, Alia, whose circumstances I won’t spoil here, but no matter how she is introduced, I’m not sure I can have a wrestler play her. So, the remaining cast of Dune, Pt. 2, if I were going solely wrestlers:
Feyd-Rautha: Randy Orton — This role was played by Sting2 in the original. I’m not entirely sure what Orton’s acting chops are. You couldn’t pay me to watch the WWE Films features they cast him in, but given that Glossu and Feyd-Rautha are brothers, I’m going with a guy who was like a brother to Bautista in the Evolution stable. Of course, it would play a lot better if Paul “Triple H” Levesque or Ric Flair were Vladimir Harkonnen, but fuck both of them, and Stellan Skarsgård is perfect as the Baron. Anyway, Orton already looks like he could be a Harkonnen, and as long as he does good knife fighting with Timothee Chalamet in the final scene of the movie, he won’t be a total failure.
Irulan: Jade Cargill — Virginia Madsen played the character in the original movie. I only saw bits and pieces of the original movie, so I’m not familiar with this character or her father. I know less about her than Shaddam because they at least talk about him in Pt. 1. Cargill is my choice, mainly because she’s a cosplay queen and can serve lewks. Can she act? I don’t know, but I mean, sometimes, having the look is all you need.
Shaddam IV: Roman Reigns — A power-mad asshole doing everything he could to keep a stranglehold on what he has, so much so that he’d ally with the dirt worst people in the universe to do so? Yeah, that’s Reigns to a tee. He has experience in movies, and I bet Denis Villeneuve could get more out of him than WWE’s producers and Vince McMahon already are.
It’s hard to give a straight answer because the recent adaptation is only half-a-story. Especially since Villeneuve’s version is my first exposure to it. My first urge is to go with a Zelda-style adventure game, but Paul’s swatches of action in this first movie really don’t lend themselves to a full slate of action, at least until the third act after he escapes from the Harkonnens and wanders the desert with his mother. The next idea would be to go with a jRPG, but again, most of the characters in this first movie don’t, well, survive. Judging only on the first half, the best option most probably a strategy game, a puzzle solving game with limited action. The best analogue is probably the Mission: Impossible game for the N64. On the surface, it probably seemed like it was riding on Goldeneye 007’s coattails, but it wasn’t just an action-heavy FPS. Stealth and non-violent puzzle solving were both huge elements.
A long time ago, my mom used to go all out dressing us up for Halloween. One year, she saved big appliance boxes, painted it silver, gave us tinfoil hats, and had us trick-or-treat as robots. It was cumbersome, sure, but it was a creative costume. Halloween rules when you have parents who want to indulge you. Today, the creativity can still be there with the Etsy generation. The fact that my mom was able to be creative without a repository for inspiration or easy, prefab costume kits makes the memories all the more special.
Grass/Fire/Water is a naturally occurring cycle where one direction is super-effective offensively and the other is strong defensively. Without thinking about it too much, there’s another obvious naturally occurring cycle in the Psychic/Dark/Fighting triad. The main difference is that Psychic attacks cause zero damage to Dark-types instead of just half-damage. That might throw the cycle off-balance. Still, even with that major discrepancy, I would still go with that trio. You can always give the Psychic-type starter a secondary-typing that might make it a little less overmatched.
I don’t think you’re ever going to see a mainline Pokémon game with existing creatures as starters, as a note. You’ll see it with sideshow games like with Legends: Arceus. However, the scuttlebutt is that the final forms of Rowlet, Cyndaquil, and Oshawott are going to be regional variants. I am interested to see if that rumor is true. If it is, then it will turn the whole series upside down. Regional variants are not new, but having starters get that treatment feels like a big deal, an even bigger deal than when they introduced regional variants of the original Trio Birds from Red/Blue/Yellow in the Sword/Shield DLC. I’m excited!
You’re really going to make me a guy defending racism and a guy doing PR for a team that covered up rape? The truth is, all the bad public relations in the world won’t mean a thing as long as they each have the richest people in their sports to cover for them. I’d say Manfred is having the worse week because more people still watch baseball than hockey, and Bettman’s survived a shitload of scandals. But don’t fool yourself; both of these assholes sleep well at night.
The thing that bugs me the most about NFTs is that most of them are so amateurish. You see all those fuckin’ apes that people are making their avatars? Like, they’re well-drawn, but they’re not artistic at all. They look like boardwalk caricatures, only somehow worse. The best thing is simply right-clicking on one and saving it and making someone who paid five figures for it so. goddamn. mad. Still, nerds getting mad isn’t worth the planet roasting, but I mean, who knows anymore. No one who can do anything cares. What a world.
I have never been paid to write this, I cannot stress this enough.
Again, Gordon Sumner, not Steve Borden, and Steve Borden is probably too old to be Feyd-Rautha now anyway or else I’d have picked him.