EPISODE 706: TWO JUMPS TO NEPTUNE
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
I had a really weird thing happen this week, a thing that might only make sense to Gen Xers. I was on my way home on Saturday night and walked by a place called “Barcade.” It’s a bar filled with old timey console video games. Like, for real old time: they had Frogger. They had Donkey Kong. The price was 25 cents a game, and the joysticks often would stick in just the same way as way back when.
So I got a beer and some tokens and wandered over to BurgerTime, where a guy in his 20s or 30s was playing while his girlfriend watched. He was doing okay. The console version of the game is actually pretty hard; the eggs and hotdogs that are you chasing Ghosts-in-Pac-Man style have set patterns that you can play on, but they really hustle. And when you kill them they come back pretty quickly.
He’s on the second board, which is a tough one. The bottom and the right side are filled with platforms and ladders. Very easy to get trapped. And he’s about halfway through when he dies. It’s his final player. Game over. Womp womp.
I’m standing right there the whole time. He and his girlfriend both look at me at various moments. And after they finish the game he takes out another token and plays again.
Now, if you are an Xer reading this, I know what you’re thinking: Did you put a token on the console to indicate you had next game?
I did not—and here’s why: I don’t know that they would have understand what that meant. And more than that, I don’t know if those rules still apply.
I mean, OF COURSE they apply, right? We’re in an arcade. This is how that society works. But then again, this guy, when he finished, asked me, “Have you ever played this game before?” (Cut to: Me sitting with my friends in The Quad, their four-person dorm room at West Hall, as we played BurgerTime for hours on their TV.)
“Uh, yeah.”
“This is my first time,” he replies. “It’s pretty fun.”
If the man has never played BurgerTime, is there any doubt he doesn’t know that you don’t get to play again once you lose if there’s someone waiting to play? I think not.
The same thing happened when I went to play Frogger. This 20something woman was absolutely loving it, in a very OMG THE PAST WAS SO CRAZY U GUYS way. She was doing well, too. She could get the frog to the top left corner opening like nobody’s business.
But then when she finally lost, she looked at her boyfriend and then took not one BUT TWO tokens out so that now the two of them could play it. Which was NOT COOL.
It’s Lent, Lauren. C’mon now.
As I walked home, I wondered—was it my responsibility in that situation to teach them how this works? Or if this bar is filled with 20somethings and probably owned by someone not much older, is that even how it works in the first place?
Getting old is weird…
Also weird: BurgerTime. So here’s the premise of that game—you are a tiny chef trying to make burgers. And the way you do that is by running over each of the layers—buns, burger, cheese, tomato, lettuce—which hang on scaffolding, waiting to be dropped to the plates below.
So first of all—who came up with the idea of making the burger layers massive and the chef so tiny? Because that is not at all an obvious choice.
Second—while you’re trying to put the burgers together, you’re being chased by hot dogs, pickles and fried eggs. Hot dogs, I can understand. They are to burgers as real dogs are to cats. But pickles are an ally of the burger; they often find a home on burgers. So what exactly happened with these pickles? Why are they so angry at the chef?
Also, what the hell is fried egg doing here? I realize today sometimes you’ll see fried egg on a burger. But that was NOT a thing when BurgerTime was invented. So how is it a part of this story? What could possibly be its beef? (#sorrynotsorry) Having fried egg chase the chef is like having him being hounded by a jar of peanut butter or an apple. It doesn’t make any sense.
It is a pretty good game though.
Yes, Frogger doesn’t make any sense either…
The other thing I learned returning to one of my childhood pastimes at age 52: One of the most dangerous moments in Frogger is when you’ve just succeeded in getting a frog into one of the top slots. If you keep your hand on the joystick as you do that you will very likely leap your next frog into traffic.
I actually played one other game that I didn’t know, but it’s sort of like Galaga meets Tempest—you spin around a top layer while sets of alien ships show up, attack you and then descend into a deeper layer from which they shoot at you and fly at you. A special three part alien shows up and if you kill it you get double shots. It’s fun.
At the very beginning, as soon as you hit start, the screen goes black and these words appear:
“Two Jumps to Neptune.”
Tell me that is not a great opening line. Like, why am I headed to Neptune? And where am I coming from—I’m guessing Pluto, because when you make it Neptune you then start jumping to Uranus. It seems like the goal must be Earth? Or the sun?
When you’re telling a story there’s this principle that you want to enter a scene—and the script itself—as late as possible. You want to enter in the middle of the action, with lots of questions hanging for the audience.
Two Jumps to Neptune is a perfect example of that.
So the world is a mess. The last thing anyone in the world needs is a war—ever, but also in a pandemic, which while it may be ebbing here is not exactly over.
In the church we had the I/we thing a couple weeks ago, where thousands of baptisms of a guy who had been a priest working in the U.S. for 18 years were invalidated (and lots of other sacraments too), because he had been saying “We baptize you in the name of the Father, etc.” rather than “I”.
A couple of you wrote me about this, saying it was crazy. And I agree, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Here’s the tl;dr: When a priest does a sacrament, he’s understood to be doing it in the place of Jesus. It’s Jesus who welcomes people into the Church. Given that, the priest should be saying I, not we.
Fine, right? But then in 2020 the Church said if you use we instead of I, you actually didn’t do a baptism. Which yeah, is ridiculous. A person can believe that they are standing in the place of Jesus and still say “we.” First person plural does not somehow erase first person singular. Also, you can just plain think you’re doing things the right way, and that should be enough. Otherwise sacraments are magic spells. And in that case, I’ve got a couple Expelliarmuses I would like to use right about now.
So yeah, basically the Catholic Church did a factory recall on this guy’s baptisms. And no doubt other people are going to dig up many more cases of the same thing now, so we can all look forward to that. It’s happened already: when the CDF first announced this I/we decision in 2020, a guy who had been ordained a priest a few years earlier discovered this had been done to him as a baby (burn your When Johnny Got Baptized videos now) and suddenly his ordination was invalid – he was never baptized, therefore he could not have ever been made a priest (yes, this is how crazy this gets), and therefore everyone he had married or baptized was not in fact married or baptized and his confessions were no more legit than if three kids in a trenchcoat and clerics sat in the confessional and talked in a deep voice. Oh and none of the Masses he had celebrated had actually produced Eucharist either.
So so dumb.
Also dumb: a bill saying kids and staff can’t mention anything to do with homosexuality in schools throughout the state of Florida.
For more on this, Kate McKinnon:
THE BATMAN came out last week. I have not seen it yet. I am told it is awesome.
Meanwhile I finally finished the final season of POSE. If you never watched this show, man do I recommend it. It’s a tale of transgender people in New York in the 1980s and 90s, and it’s just filled with great stories and characters. Recommend it so much.
THREE TWEETS
Seems fair.
And this week in you have to click the tweet to see how amazing this is…
Have a great week, everyone. See you in seven!
As a Protestant, the I/we thing was pretty surprising and alarming, although I agree the form the sacraments take matters. Maybe this is off base given the context (I am not a priest) but sometimes we all have to act in the place of Christ and do what Jesus would have done. In these times I know I'll always be doing that imperfectly, and I just hope that by his grace, God will still use that effort to build the Kingdom