High Five Wednesday 3/25/20 (Patreon)

Hey hey hey,

I hope things are staying stable for you right now, if you ever need assistance or someone to talk with we are here to help anyway we can. I haven’t left the house in a few days, the only time I have left is to help with Food Not Bombs. They’ve been redistributing a lot of food during the crisis.

We are doing the basement show tonight and recording some more bonus video material. We got plans to stream with the hosts of Means Morning News and District Sentinel Radio this week to talk about the PRMC hearings of the 1980’s. We are also working on a Doors stream with Liz and Brace from TrueAnon. Follow us on Twitch, Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter to get notified when we go live. I am trying to watch some more movies while holed up so I jumped on IG live yesterday to find some new favs. What are your favorite pandemic themed movies of the moment? 

• Lego Legacy Heroes Unboxed - Playing a Free-To-Play Pay-To-Win mobile game is usually a sign of severe mental duress. Waiting around every 4 - 8 hours for resources or goodie bags to generate is not a rewarding experience for very long. Well now I have time and I can bust open goodie bags at 5am if I want to.
  
  This game is actually pretty enjoyable, it’s basically the old Final Fantasy ATB style battles over and over again. No dungeon crawling here, you watch animations and then fight, it’s mostly just grinding away to get to the next level so you can beat the next campaign, challenge, or mission. There aren’t any skill trees or in-depth fine-tuning of the character's abilities but you can collect pieces for large lego sets that give you bonuses like pirate ships and castles, you can acquire pieces to build new figures, and also find items to upgrade your characters.
  
  Honestly, the biggest draw to it all is the mash-up of astronauts, ninjas, knights, zombies, cactus women, hikers, etc being really fun. All the animation and attacks are lego-ized which gives it an appealing look. A necromancer can crash a wave of tiny bricks on top of a businessman and smash him into pieces. I haven’t spent any money on it yet which means some stuff is unbeatable without more goodies, which is good because it gets me to stop playing. 

• Streetbees - I’m not sure how legit this one is but I believe I found it early enough that you can get something out of it. They do “conversational” market research stuff, and right now plant based milk, grooming supplies, and outdoor activities are the info they are collecting. You get paid $1 - $2.50 to fill out a 5-10 minute questionnaire and take a picture. So far I’ve earned a few bucks just reporting every instance that I have plant based milk. You get a $1 every time you drink the milk and $2.50 every time you buy it. It’s called “conversational” because it’s more like facebook messenger than a multiple choice test. You will go back and forth with the AI to report your current experience, and it doesn’t require a lot of writing.
  
  Use my referral code 6145H5X

• Quaranzine -  Stephen (@clownhound), our zine maker, put together this free edition of the zine to look through while you’re on quarantine. Tag us with your mad libs. 

• 12 Monkeys - I never watched this because the cover looks like an action movie flop. I always thought his was going to be a budget Se7en or something. I am so glad I was wrong, and I got very excited once I saw Terry Gilliam was the director.
  
  Immediately I loved Twelve monkeys because it has cumbersome and wonky technology that’s similar to my favorite Gilliam movie, Brazil. The image of the future world in this is incredibly fun even though it lacks the slickness of The Matrix or other CGI driven sci-fi experiences. It looks gritty and it feels efficient, which adds a lot to the experience.
  
  The premise of this film is that a virus wiped out 5 billion people, and the remaining folks in the future send prisoners back in time to stop the culprit. James Cole (Willis) is in charge of investigating the year 1996 to find out how exactly the virus got released, with hopes of getting a pardon. He also ended up in 1920 and 1990. He even witnessed the showdown at the end of the movie as a child (they show this at the beginning). Through his travels he ends up in a psych ward and meets psychiatrist Dr. Kathryn Railly who is eventually convinced that this mofo is traveling through fuckin time. Brad Pitt is excellent as Jeffrey Goines, the son of famous virologist who test on animals. Jeffrey is also the leader of an ALF like radical animal rights group and and prolific conspiracy theorist that can spin webs of paranoia on the fly but can’t quite keep it together. He’s radical for incoherent reasons and ready to break the law. 

The whole thing is paced incredibly well and the time traveling is very pragmatic like the rest of the movie. It’s a great little package that has a succinct premise and excellent twists that make it akin to an amazing Twilight Zone episode.

• Megadeth - Tornado Of Souls - I listen to this song every day when I wake up. Rust In Peace is a brilliant album and the beginning of guitarist Marty Friedman’s run with the band. Megadeth never gave up on thrash and they have the biggest archive of phenomenal albums that there is. Pick anything from 90 - 99 and you’ll hurt your neck from headbanging. 

If you like what you read here and you haven’t seen all of my High Five posts they can be found here.

Peace,

Brett