Rambling Thoughts on My 'Balatro' Problem

Balatro is not a game about gambling, despite what the Pan-European Game Information guys might have once claimed. It does start as Poker but quickly evolves into something much more, until its weird mutations have it resemble Poker as closely as Final Fantasy Tactics resembles Chess, insomuch as both take place on grids. Yeah, Balatro is a card game about building hands, but it's also an absurd math problem built around stacking bonuses to numbers beyond human comprehension.

Now, however, as much as Balatro is Not Gambling, it is still a dangerous, terrible addiction. Please check on your loved ones if they start playing Balatro, especially if they have the phone app downloaded. The app is not a casino but works on similar psychological manipulations such as hiding your phone's clock, denying you any sense of time or place, leaving nothing but flashing lights and numbers. Their lives are on a downward spiral and they will need care and support. They might not listen to anything you're saying since odds are they'll be looking down at their phones, playing Balatro. Please give them understanding because they are no longer in control of themselves. Balatro is a disease. Abstain from moral judgments towards the sufferers.

I spent $10 to get Balatro on my phone back in January and that was the entirety of the sum I risked for my entertainment. After all, it is Not Gambling. However, if we consider that at the moment my time is worth something like $30 an hour and that I have spent somewhere in the region of hundreds of hours playing Balatro in the first quarter of 2025, really I'm down thousands of dollars lost from potentially productive time. To complicate this I have definitely played whole games of Balatro while on the clock at a job. (Mr. or Mrs. Eric's Boss, you are not allowed to read this - you may leave the room now.) That time however could have been spent on more production neoliberal activities such as actually gambling on sports or crypto-currencies. Just think of all the economic progress I could be achieving playing real Poker instead of fake electronic nonsense Poker! 

Clearly I am an antisocial terrorist with my deviant behavior of not maximizing my grindset every second of my life. I instead am playing a game with no real point or aim. That I am willfully a wasteful and not maximally productive member of society is not really the problem for me. The problem is that I can't stop. Balatro has devoured my gaming life. I am searching for an escape and cannot find one.

'In the Lost Lands' Somehow Exists and I Appreciate That

In the Lost Lands is probably terrible, probably unworthy of my interest, and yet I am mildly obsessed with this thing. There is a kind of perverse nostalgia compelling me towards it. I saw the trailer for In the Lost Lands and said out loud to nobody "that looks like total shit, I need to see this".

The movie has the over-produced color correction of a 2000s movie, think of Zack Snyder's 300 or Robert Rodriguez's Sin City - plus the overblown lens flair on every lighting source from JJ Abrams' Star Trek. The plot is a generic post-apocalypse western SciFi fantasy... thing which would have sounded very cool back in the 90s if it were an anime OVA, not one of a dozen similar genre mashup ideas. This movie is apparently based on a George RR Martin story, one purchased by the producers back when Game of Thrones was red hot. Instead the idea sat on a development shelf for a near-decade, gathering dust and losing relevancy. If In the Lost Lands were a trailer during a Sony State of Play, it would fit right in next to say, Forspoken. During coming attractions next to proper movies with more than two colors in their pallet like Novocain or Black Bag, In the Lost Lands looks like a bizarre mistake. Maybe somebody had thrown together a fake trailer and AMC Theaters had put it up as a joke.

What In the Lost Lands reminds me of more than anything is bad movie called Priest. Do you remember that? You don't do you? It came out in 2011? Starred Paul Bettany? Was basically lame Judge Dread but with vampires and priests that knew kung-fu but also vaguely a western? In the Lost Lands is that kind of movie. Thing is, Priest made 76 million dollars fifteen years ago. It was based on a Korean comic book that nobody in the West knew about, so had no existing fanbase, yet drew crowds. Priest did not review well, had no fanbase then or now. Paul Bettany would rather you never mention it in presence, I imagine. However, Priest was profitable!

In the Lost Lands is a disaster that has made none of its budget back. It is too small a movie to even get clowned on by industry types who love to laugh when say, Mickey17 is not a hit. There's something to note here: a D+ genre movie fifteen years ago could make money. Whereas these days, oh no. If you have 55 million dollars, you would save more of it by setting it on fire than doing this: flying Dave Bautista and Milla Jovovich out to Poland to pose dramatically in front of green screens with guns and sickle knives.

This massive flop will probably be the final nail in coffin for the long decline of the career of Paul W.S. Anderson, who not coincidentally is married to Milla Jovovich. In the Lost Lands could very well be the last time either name gets inside a cineplex. Anderson and Jovovich have been a great power couple in the realm of mediocre genre flicks, having piloted the original Resident Evil film series through six or seven installments (neither you or I care to actually count). Their last production together was a 2020 adaptation of the game series Monster Hunter - and we share the same stunned reaction of "wait a second, there was a Monster Hunter movie?!" And yeah, that happened, it existed. Anderson has never been a great director, but who can deny the appeal of things like Event Horizon or Mortal Kombat or even Resident Evil 1? Alien vs Predator sucks but he understood the pop-corn-ball assignment in a way. He's never made a truly great movie, and has made many movies few will remember (Pompeii, The Three Musketeers, In the Lost Lands). As hacky and frankly, unambitious as Anderson is, I cannot find the rhythm to dance at his grave. 

I feels the environment is not going in a healthy direction if we cannot have a space for garbage like In the Lost Lands and garbagemen like Paul W.S. Anderson. If they are extinct, the entire food chain is in trouble.

Top 15 Movies of 2024: Honorable Mentions and Other Stuff

Wildly late as usual on my plans. This post concludes the Top Movies of 2024 series. 

I'm still considering exactly what I'll do for a Top 10 List of Video Games in 2024, whether or not even such a list even makes sense anymore. I'll have something out eventually on that front, I hope. Still gotta finish Metaphor ReFantazio and that game is loooong.

But for now, let's talk about all the Good Movies of 2024 That Didn't Make the List - there's a lot. Also a Bad Movie. And a few movies in between.

And yes, I am requesting that you watch every single one of these movies (except the last one). If you start now you can probably be done by about oh... Sunday. I'll talk to your boss for you, they'll understand. This list is in no particular order, by the way.

Hundreds of Beavers, dir. Mike Cheslik

One of the few movies whose title could easily be its own porn parody. Hundreds of Beavers was really close to making the Top 15, until I ultimately decided I did not have much to say about it that was not just 'describing the object'. It's a really cool movie to describe, sure, however, my opinion does not bring much to this movie. I like this exists, I cannot I learned much about life or myself watching it - besides learning that I really need that hat.  

Hundreds of Beavers is a live-action cartoon comedy. The entire thing operates on a mixture of Looney Tunes physics and video game economics. Our trapper hero (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) completes several "runs" to collect loot and objects across an old-timey theme park vision of 17th century fur trading in the Great Lakes region. And maybe he'll win the heart of a local cute Furrier girl (Olivia Graves). This movie is all black and white, with almost no spoken dialog. And everybody is wearing big goofy mascot costumes. It is a little over-long. Personally, I'd have cut down the first act by a lot, but Hundreds of Beavers has a vast wealth of jokes, and lots of visual gags. It is maybe the most creative movie of 2024. Everything you can imagine, and several things you could never imagine, happens in this grand battle between fluffy animals and our goofy bearded protagonist.

Be a Hater in These Super Bowl Times

 

I hate this fucking Super Bowl.

Now: am I really angry about football? Maybe not. Maybe this is all about the personal life stuff I've gone through these past two months, where I've watched most of the NFL playoffs in various hospital rooms. (I'm fine, by the way, I'm always a visitor in these rooms, not a patient.) The reason is I feel just a crushing overwhelming feeling of hopelessness lately, that we passed the point that anything can be done to stop this unending era of horror and depravity. That the authorities that should have stopped this have all been bought, the champions we should have had were insufficient and came up weak, that the media can only given token complaints, that many in the punditry class actually are all too happy to prove how smart they are and be contrarians about this. "No, it isn't that bad, relax, in fact, what you think is bad is good, because I see the nuisance of this situation, because I'm that much more wise and brilliant", says the opinion editors.

And yeah, maybe that is all a metaphor for something. I can't really say for sure. Nor will I be particular vague about it, what am I, Jonathan Swift? All I do know is that there is no part of me that wants to watch this unfold. I have no doubt about the outcome. Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs will three-peat, and it will be miserable.

Here's what I don't want to hear: "relax, be positive, enjoy yourself." Instead, let's appreciate the power of Hating. I am full of Hate. This is a full-on, big league, major levels of Hate now in 2025. I think this is healthy, to really really deeply despise something. The power of positive thinking only gets you so far. No, you need to recognize when you're fucking pissed and you need to relish that emotion. Really stew in the broiling hatred. Braise yourself in your contempt. Be really fucking mad and don't give yourself a reason. Do you need a reason to enjoy something? No. The power of sports is to create completely arbitrary emotions. It is emotional gambling, and also real gambling, parasitic to a reckless degree. What happens with a random ball bouncing two thousand miles away means nothing to me. It has as much affect on my life as the shape stars million and billions of miles apart appear to have if viewed from Earth's arbitrary position in the universe. If the Broncos shocking us all and winning ten games in a season can bring me joy, than the Chiefs being this damn unending of a nuisance should also bring me to a rolling boil.

I have motto these days: A.B.H.

A. - Always

B. - Be

H. - Hatin' 

Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 1 - I Saw the TV Glow

1. I Saw the TV Glow, dir. Jane Schoenbrun

There is a particular reaction I get from certain movies. David Lynch has pulled this off a few times. I could not keep a conversation with a friend just minutes after I finished Lost Highway. Inland Empire left me disturbed and half-zombied, unable to really function. These movies make me feel stoned, and I'm not somebody who much likes getting high. The basic movements of conducting life are suddenly are made utterly bizarre. I left the AMC theater after I Saw the TV Glow, walked over to a yogurt shop, and found completing the transaction with the guy behind the counter difficult. My brain was just in a fog of feeling and over-stimulation. I had completely disassociated from my body and my mind. I was not fully there, I was instead off writing a narration about what I was doing. Eric Fuchs ate his snack, feeling dizzy, while I wondered if I Saw the TV Glow was going to be the best movie of 2024.

Also, they had Spice Melange flavor yogurt in honor of Dune 2. Turns out it tastes like coconut lemon saffron. It did not open my brain any further to the greater magic of the cosmos, unfortunately. If there was transcendence to be found it was in the movie, not in the Spice.

I Saw the TV Glow is about a queer identity, it is about a very 90s-kid nostalgia for Teen Nick meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it is about losing your sense of reality when fandom is your only identity. But whether you have any personal experience with trans awakening or Are You Afraid of the Dark?, this movie has a universal message of terror. This creeping question of whether you have lived any life worth living at all. Whether the self you've created is utterly insufficient. That you denied yourself the opportunity to evolve, to become, to love and be loved. You locked yourself into an ideology or a lifestyle that is a false narrative, and are stuck like this. To use Duke Leto's phrasing, "the sleeper did not awaken". The Matrix was similarly powerful in its ability to create a techno-gnosticism - which also was at its core a trans metaphor. But you did not need to be trans to feel its energy. If anything The Matrix is over-universal considering its application in the worst kinds of people's worldviews, see that whole Red Pill fucking nightmare. That story is about escaping false realities to be a truer, romantic, perfected self.  

I Saw the TV Glow asks "what happens when you take the other pill?" When you strand yourself, maybe forever, in a false, insufficient life. It is the kind of thing I get to worry about now. I'm thirty-four, I work a service job that is not a career, writing has never paid a single bill, and these are all my own failings. Mortality has been on my mind a lot lately as my family members get older, frailer, and they might pass away before I feel like I've ever achieved anything. My anxiety about getting old has been creeping through this Top 15 with such things as Look Back and The Substance, these fantasies about restarting your life, maybe to do it all again, maybe to do it right this time. You never need to get old, it's never too late. I Saw the TV Glow is that full brutality of "you fucked it up". But even in this grim reality, like I said two weeks ago: reality is insufficient. There is still hope.

The color pallet of I Saw the TV Glow has a heavy use of blues and neon pinks. "Bisexual lighting" was a meme back in 2018, and here we have it again. Even a shared memory of many 90s Kids: the big gym parachute, is blue, pink, and purple. There are more "naturalistic" scenes with reds and greens. The starker the color correction gets, the closer we are to the surreal and fantastic. Our main characters watch their favorite TV show, The Pink Opaque, this young adult horror-themed program, and are awash in an impossible pink light. This is our lead, Owen (Justice Smith)'s first friendship with the older Maddy (Jack Haven, congrats on the new name, btw). It also becomes Owen's brush with sexuality, first moment to dare be independent from his parents, and we experience most of this through the hazy warped fog that is long-distant memory and nostalgia. Owen and Maddy stare into the TV and are transfixed by the glow, seeing something that might be meaningful only to themselves. It is liberation a half hour at a time, between commercial breaks.

Creepypasta as an art movement seems to have largely died down, but I Saw the TV Glow shows it at least lives in inspiration. Schoenbrun's first movie, We're All Going to the World's Fair, was about an online community playing a shared horror fiction game. The Pink Opaque is based a lot on the short story, Candle Cove, where a forum reminisces about a short-lived program that seems to be too horrifying and strange to have ever existed. What our leads see on the television has the structure of a YA program, two girls with magic powers battling suburban monsters. But the effects are terrifying, more extreme than a broadcast program should have been. The show ends with both of its leads captured by a nightmare Moon Monster, with perhaps Owen and Maddy as their reborn selves, prisons bodies with assigned genders at birth. Or maybe it was all just a TV show. The point is that Shoenbrun takes a concept that was designed to be fearful and disturbing, and instead conjures it as a vessel to something greater, a different plane of existence. That Pink Glow is memorizing because of its fear. Maybe we enjoy fear because there's something in horror that we admire, that we yearn for in ways we cannot express openly.

I Saw the TV Glow is a horror movie full of jump scares and great gore gags. There is a decent spooky part in that Ice Cream Monster though. More terrifying might be Owen's father (played by Fred fucking Durst!), this stern faceless creature of masculinity, who can devastate a scene with a single line: "isn't that a show for girls?"

Really I Saw the TV Glow works as a masterful work of vibes and discomfort. Owen is so awkward and so out of place in the world, or any world. The vague haze of the past actually feels more "real" than the future we are shown. Things get much more disturbing in I Saw the TV Glow's final act, when Owen begins telling us a narrative that is certainly not true. We see a new version of The Pink Opaque that is painfully aged and cheesy and whose plot is missing the two main characters. An older Owen announces to us that he has a family now, "I love them more than anything", said in a flatter tone than Justice Smith usually gives. This family is never seen. Owen either is making them up, or this character's life is so artificial and so going-through-the-motions of heteronormativity that in truth, they might as well not exist. Owen feels no love for them, no connection to this life they were "supposed" to have. We see Owen working a miserable job at a children's birthday arcade, another 90s-kid memory of places like Chuck E. Cheese or Discovery Zone. This is a menial task that would never allow them to provide for a family anyway. Owen is briefly so overwhelmed by anxiety they have a panic attack that glitches the entire reality of what we're seeing. The whole world pauses while Owen struggles to breath.

There is still a final surreal image of hope. That even at this late state, even in terrible old-age make-up, Owen can still be, whatever Owen was supposed to be. We see them tear open their flesh, revealing a very yonic slit in their chest, within which is the glow of a television set. It is in these moments, in secret, that Owen can still live a life of fantasy and possibility. Where the crushing boot of authority and complacency and naked hatred towards whole swaths of the country can be silenced and ignored. This is Videodrome, again rebuilt to not be body horror, but whatever that term I could not come up with in my Queer review was, a Body Romance, a Body Comedy? I Saw the TV Glow says 'Long Live the New Flesh' with pride and defiance.