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That’s pretty much what I expected, sadly
Re: deus ex prescience the intro definitely hits different in 2020
a billionaire corporate asshole who basically owns the world’s governments callously saying “let the plague kill all the poors”? how barbaric, what a wild conspiracy, something like that could never happen
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some combination of Deus Ex and the HAARP facility shit from X-Men Legends blackpilled me as a child and I ironically listened to the Alex Jones Show for like 5 years in middle/high school but I turned out okay when I realized most of that stuff is just a coverup for the real coverups so thanks JC Denton, you never led me astray
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It unfortunately creeps ever southward. It’s only a matter of time until Logan Square merges with “Wicker Park” and becomes a horrible voltron that stretches through everything north of Grand Ave. Can’t wait till we get “Feels Good, Bar” on the corner of like Kedzie and Augusta.
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it hits me the other way, Deus Ex is specifically drawn from the right-wing militant conspiracies that were kind of fun in the '90s when they were on the wrong side of the end of history but it’s not so much fun to joke about any more. The Eidos Montreal series picks up with an Alex Jones-alike on the radio and it’s something that would have worked in the original but it’s immune to parody or fun speculation now.
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deus ex even kind of gets at “conspiracy theories covering up the actual conspiracy” with the sleazy tabloid reporter who writes wild-eyed conspiratorial articles, who turns out to be an inside agent working to discredit anti-unatco sympathizers
and then aliens being the least relevant part of area 51 lol
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i really want to stream myself playing Deus Ex while listening to Kid A at the same time for maximum millennial 20th anniversary angst lol
edit: might as well throw The Moon and Antarctica in there too lol
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I think about how absolutely fuckin gnarly this Yoshi’s Island 2 commercial was.
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Funny that Deus Ex, which I considered just a big fun sf conspiracy X-Files mashup back in the day, has achieved Robocop levels of incisive satirical pre-history, while Control, a very slick modern product also about conspiracy, is basically a goofy 60s throwback with very little resonance to reality
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I felt Control definitely hit close to home with my experience of horrendously devolved bureaucracy and managerial incompetence. Definitely not as increasingly prescient as Deus Ex though.
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I don’t think Deus Ex, which asks for direct player involvement in story choices, is playing in the indulgence/satire mode of Judge Dredd. I think it’s sanding off as many of the racist edges as it can.
And its core fantasy, that hyper-competent transnational elites are engaged in 4D chess against each other while One Man on the inside strives to reveal the truth, backed by the only true patriotic militia seeking to restore the President’s power, is even more ludicrous and explicitly anti-semitic in its current, salient incarnation. In the late 90s there existed some narrative of competence and consolidation that could undergird it; in a time of rising authoritarianism seeking common purchase against transnational systems and epochal self-dealing incompetence, it’s more unmoored than ever but holds increasing cultural power among an increasingly reactionary public.
Control is clearly truer but less important right now; the fantasy that bad and weird stuff happens and it’s kept under locks by people who can’t even gain the agency to independently think about the moral dimensions of their actions or gain any perspective on what they’re doing, living entirely inside this all-encompassing crushing world.
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The merged world in ffv.
Exdeath is my favorite final boss character from the final fantasy series, but this could be because it was the one I first played.
Also, the skull eater
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and a boring ripoff/homage of mr creosote 
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Hey I like Monty Python as much as anyone but that sketch always leaves me wanting more:
- Wet sloppy smacking/slurping noises
- Slimy spaghetti exploding out of a person
- “Huge Yoshi Tricks”
Also it’s not like I could get Mr. Creosote during a commercial break during X-Men the animated series!!!
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Se7en Director’s Cut
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Not on purpose, but lo, the prophecy has been fulfilled. There really is a global pandemic whose potential cure has been squirreled away to the rich; there really isn’t any more public interest in UFOs and aliens and all that stuff is considered blase next to the actual pressing problems of people constantly preventably dying; there really is daily violence fomented between federal “police” and a loosely aggregated leftist militia; and all of it is being delivered by mealy-mouthed muppets whose barely human mode of communication makes everything they say memeworthy and fit for chopped 'n screwed videos. They accidentally told the future
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I think it falls apart when you look closer. The NSF is clearly based on right-militias (hi to the Michigan militia I grew up near) whose modern-equivalents are III%-ers and the Bundys and the boogaloos; the plague cures everyone’s waiting for are all vaccines and even in the US there’s still elite consensus that it needs to be distributed to everyone to be effective and there’s consensus behind a need for free testing if not the managerial capacity or care to do it properly (I don’t think there’s a modern analogue to the Ambrosia story; in this case Human Revolution’s ‘tech implants as a precursor to mind control’ is more salient). Steve Bannon wishes he was Bob Page but like all our nationalist goons he’s transparently a grifter before an ideologue; the post-JFK mythos of shadowy competent government officials has been conclusively shattered in our media- and image-driven world.
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Sure there is, now, when it doesn’t exist. When it becomes an actual thing someone can own then the “we’d like to, but that’s not realistic” talk will spin up.
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I’m extremely pessimistic about structural issues in the US federal government but I don’t think this is where it breaks down. The spring stimulus threw a ton of money to funding testing programs and therapeutic research and the House/Senate/WH talks broke down over Republican demands to provide no more state funding and guarantee near-blanket business liability protection.
I do think the health care rollout will be deeply compromised despite nominally-paid-for vaccines, because the crunch on state budgets, without federal backstops will have started to bite into regional health systems. They’ll have damaged the capacity to provide the care they already committed to delivering.
In other words, the same patchy conglomeration of incompetence and rot that’s damaged the nominally-free testing program that remains in place.
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