Quarantine Control #12: Greek History and Patriot Acts

The COVID-19 strain of the coronavirus is still around and we’re still living in a pandemic, despite the not-insignificant number of people who want to pretend otherwise. The newest rise in cases shows how the United States has largely given up, outside states and cities that were hit hard and flattened the curve thanks to good leadership. There’s a reason why the EU is considering banning travel from America (and Brazil and Russia, countries also hit hard with leaders taking a “let ‘em die” approach), and they likely won’t be the only ones. The safest place is in the home, which is why we still have the opportunity to discuss what we’ve been doing as part of Quarantine Control for the *checks archive* twelfth week. Huh.

 

Geoffrey Barnes

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Format: PlayStation 4
It’s a video game

In last week’s entry, I mentioned that I hadn’t taken any time to watch anything and spent that leisure time playing through Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the most recent installment in one of Ubisoft’s top franchises. This week? No different. This is what happens with extremely long and addictive games, with open worlds that become the main outlet of escape from the consistently-depressing real world (now even outside the pandemic). And I mean “extremely long” here; I’m over 70 hours into this game and I still have plenty of story content to go, not to mention all the side quests remaining. Ridiculous, especially considering that I had the main quest for predecessor Assassin’s Creed Origins done by this point.

But I won’t lie: I’m still enjoying the game. It’s clearly doing something right if I’m still itching the play more after spending so much time with it. The main story, which involves the Eagle Bearer (Alexios or Kassandra — the latter in my case) and their quest to reunite their family in ancient Greece, feels largely tertiary compared to everything else happening in the overall game’s gigantic world. But especially so given what I’ve been doing with my experience in its universe over the course of the last week. I’ve focused on side quests in order to not forget about them while progressing too far through the main campaign. As it turns out, there are a lot of quests.

Calling some of them “side quests” is doing them a disservice. As I mentioned last week: Several fit within the stereotypical side quest mold, and involve fetch quests, taking something from one NPC to another that can’t travel themselves (there is a war between the Spartans and Athenians happening in this game), and killing a person who wronged an ostensibly morally superior NPC. But others tie into the main story, or have deeper stories of their own. These newer Assassin’s Creed games were inspired by The Witcher 3, which also meant taking inspiration from the game’s deeper-than-average side quests. Some reflect that in a positive way.

One quest, for instance, involves helping one of your shipmates to solve the mystery of what happened to his ex-wife. Another involves helping a village full of women arm themselves and fight against an invading army that wants to occupy them, with the invading force fully aware of how the men have gone to fight in the war. (This quest alone makes me believe the claim that Kassandra is the canon protagonist, even though none of the women complement her for being a female fighter.) There’s also another line of quests that involve helping a Spartan-aligned force free themselves from the oppressive rule of a leader on an island.

Several of the side quests are deep enough that I temporarily forgot about what was happening in the main story, but I’m not complaining. It’s good to play a game where the side content doesn’t primarily exist for level grinding purposes. They’re far better in quality than those in Origins.

There’s a good chance the side quests were made at the expense of the story, though it’s unlikely this is the only reason. The AC games are developed by several teams around the world, and it’s tough for all of them to keep track of what each team is doing and what they’re implementing, which also didn’t help. But I’m not going to fully criticize the story until I reach its end, and how I’ll feel based on which among the three endings I get.

As I implied above, it’s going to be a while before I finish Odyssey. I still have around 20 quests to tackle in the main campaign, the longevity of which will vary depending on how important the mission is, and whether I’ll choose to venture through its forts using stealth. There are also several islands that I still haven’t been to. It’s a big game — maybe a little too big. Yet, it speaks to its quality that I still have a desire to get back to it after all this time. I’ll try to actually watch something else for next week’s post, but I refuse to make any promises.

 

Joseph Daniels

With the end of Mobius Final Fantasy in less than a week, I’m wanting to spend as much time as possible playing the game.  Obviously, now is a very good time to catch up with some video essays on YouTube.  Essayists like Lindsay Ellis and Lily Orchard are among my favourites, and I also listen to the Jimquisition and Bob Chipman’s The Big Picture on a weekly basis.  Unfortunately, YouTube’s current ad placement policy makes it incredibly difficult to want to experience YouTube lately.  “So just turn ad block on.”  Except that I’ve got YouTube open on my PlayStation 4 because my laptop is occupied playing Mobius, and I’m pretty sure you can’t use an adblocker on a video game console.  I swear, during an interview segment on one of the shows I like on YouTube, and without any natural breaks, it went to commercial at least three times.  The show actually has natural breaks, but only one time have I ever seen a commercial on YouTube placed during one of those natural breaks.  Instead, commercials will often interrupt what someone’s saying, and it’s annoying and it sucks.

This makes it incredibly hard for me to want to recommend anything on YouTube any more.  This would’ve been a perfect time to watch more Netflix, but… Mobius.  And most of what I want to watch on Netflix are things I want to experience visually, not just audibly.

Hasan Minhaj to the rescue.

Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj (2018)
Source: Netflix
Episodes: Ongoing (currently 39)

Okay, okay, I know this show is available on YouTube as well, but I refuse to refer anyone to YouTube for the next little while.  So as far as I’m willing to tell you, Patriot Act is EXCLUSIVE TO Netflix.

If you’ve seen Last Week Tonight, then you’ve seen Patriot Act.  Where Patriot Act improves upon the formula is that Hasan doesn’t pause every so often to berate some fictional person in accounting or a bird after his Tostitos or any of a number of other short skits peppered into John Oliver’s video essay style reports.  Not a single word is wasted with Hasan.

To be fair, these skits have actually been dropped by Last Week Tonight at roughly the same time that they had to change to a temporary, minimalist set due to the current Covid-19 crisis, and this has increased my enjoyment of the show quite a bit.  This is probably the only way in which Covid-19 has made improvements to our society.

Owing to its status as a Netflix show, and thus it can operate on a production schedule a bit different from network television, the series can be made in small batches every couple months, with each volume or “cycle” as Hasan calls then, containing six to seven weekly episodes.  Some of the topics explored within the series are also covered by other shows like Last Week Tonight, but focus on different aspects than John Oliver’s show.  Whereas John Oliver focused on the NRA’s activities in the United States, Hasan shone a light on their activities spreading pro-gun propaganda to the rest of the world.  Hasan also did a takedown of cruise ships that Adam Conover would be proud of.  There’s also an episode exploring the various ways in which workers in the video game industry are abused and forced to work periods of crunch, which you’ve likely heard before if you’ve watched the Jimquisition for any period of time, for this is one of Jim Sterling’s pet issues.

Probably one of the most important episodes due to recent events in the United States is the episode that closed out the fourth cycle, “The Broken Policing System.”  In this episode, Hasan examines how the police are trained as well as how the police are routinely able to get away with murder.  If you watch just one episode, watch this one.  I’m sure the Koch brothers would love you for it since then you wouldn’t watch the episode that was uploaded three weeks prior where their own efforts to undermine public transit are exposed.

The next important episode to look at is one that was uploaded just half a year ago, “Why Billionaires Won’t Save Us.”  This episode became even more relevant during the current epidemic, where the rich actually somehow got richer despite the economy being mostly closed.  And from the current cycle, the episodes to look at first are “What Happens If You Can’t Pay Rent?” as well as “How Coronavirus Broke America” and especially “We Cannot Stay Silent About George Floyd.”  The best thing about Patriot Act is that, unlike Last Week Tonight, I don’t have to wait an indeterminate amount of time before the upload becomes available in my country.  Patriot Act is available right away, and it’s the entire episode, not just the main segment.

At just 23-25 minutes per episode, Patriot Act is very bingeable, one cycle barely lasts three hours and covers six to seven different topics.  There’s even an episode about Canada.  If I haven’t yet enticed you to watch, hopefully that’ll do the trick.

To show how dark of a road the United States is going down, we have somehow turned the mere act of wearing masks into a political issue. There sure are a lot of faux tough guys who think masks are for pussies, alongside the people caught up in conspiracy theories about masks being the devil’s tools or something. Stay in the house as much as you can, but you should absolutely wear a mask whenever you go out, even if you live in an area that hasn’t been hit hard or where the virus has subsided. And for Christ’s sake, do NOT believe everything you read on Facebook. It’s very possible this will get even worse before it gets better, especially in countries with inept-at-best leadership.