I previously wrote about my recent vacation in France, and discussed all the places we went and fun things we did. I made a few allusions to parts of the trip that were unpleasant, but I didn't elaborate. I wanted to focus on the enjoyable parts of the trip, and save the unpleasant parts for a follow-up post.

I've previously visited the U.K., Denmark, and Germany, where everyone spoke fluent English, and I never had any problems communicating with anyone. I was a little more worried about the language barrier on this trip, since the French have a bit of a reputation for not liking Americans. I was especially worried about our plans to travel outside of Paris, into more rural parts of the country, where I did not expect English to be as common.

This fear proved almost completely unfounded. Almost everyone in Paris spoke conversational English. In the few instances in which we interacted with non-English-speaking French persons (mostly in the country-side), my partner proved to be surprisingly capable of conversing with them. I had no idea that she spoke French (in addition to Spanish and some Japanese), but apparently, she had been studying French in the months leading up to the trip, and was able to hold conversation well enough.

The only thing worse than an airline seat...

The real misery began before the vacation even properly began, with the trans-Atlantic flight. Airlines seem to be going out of their way to do everything possible to make long flights as miserable as possible. It's like they're all in a race to the bottom. The last few times I flew overseas, it was over British Airlines or Hawaiian Airlines, which were both reasonably comfortable flights. This time, I flew a Delta flight partially operated by Air France, and I've also flown Frontier recently. The 7 1/2 hour flight across the Atlantic to Paris was almost as bad and uncomfortable as a domestic Spirit flight. I had a middle seat, with my knees pressing up against the seat in front of me the whole time, and my elbows scrunched into my sides so as not to be infringing on my neighbors' space.

It's as if plane seats have been scientifically designed to be as uncomfortable as possible for anybody who is of average size or larger.

To make matters worse, as soon as the plane took off from my layover in Detroit, I started developing a migraine. I've suffered from migraines my entire life, and they recently have been getting worse. So I had recently visited a neurologist to talk about my migraines, and he had prescribed me a new migraine medication called Sumatriptan. I had taken the Sumatriptan once prior, and it knocked out the migraine within 30 or 40 minutes, so I was hopeful that it would work again. In fact, I expected that it would work again, and didn't even bother to pack my old go-to medication: Excedrin Migraine.

A small bottle of Excedrin is an essential travel supply.

Well, the Sumatriptan did not work.

The only thing worse than an airline seat, is being stuck in an airline seat with a migraine. I spent the entire 7 1/2 hour flight across the Atlantic crunched in a middle seat, with a migraine, unable to sleep or relax, and unable to read or watch movies. I had even taken my gaming laptop with me, with the expectation of going on a 7-hour Civ bender during the flight. No such luck. I had to just sit there with my eyes closed and my head in my hands, counting down the minutes until the plane landed. Thankfully, once I got out of the airport and metro stations in Paris, and out into fresh air, the migraines started to recede on its own, and I was able to enjoy the rest of the day with just a dull headache.

I've since taken the Sumatriptan again, and it also did not work. So I guess it's back to taking Excedrin Migraine until my doctors can find something else that does work...

In any case, the experience was so miserable that I spent the extra money to choose my own seat for the flight back. I did not want a repeat, especially considering that the flight back was an 11-hour flight that landed in Seattle for a transfer to Vegas. I picked a seat on the aisle in the back row. This would allow me to stretch my feet into the aisle, and being in the back would give me immediate access to the restroom if I needed it (I didn't end up using the restroom during this flight, but you'll understand later in the blog why I wanted this).

I've finally been working at my current job for long enough that I have more than a month of paid time off. This affords me more time to be able to take extended holidays throughout the year without having to worry about saving time for sick days or to take time off around Thanksgiving or Christmas. After a few years of not taking any major vacations (other than short weekend road trips) due to having a baby at home, my partner and I finally decided that the toddler was old enough to be able to stay with his grandparents for more than just a weekend. So we finally treated ourselves (and our daughter) to a real vacation with another trip to Europe.

I spent a week on vacation in France
with my lovely partner and our daughter.

This time, we decided to go to France!

My partner actually spent almost 3 weeks abroad with our daughter. They went to the U.K. as well. I did not go with them to London, since I have already been there multiple times, and I didn't want both of us to be away from the toddler for too long. I decided to stay home while they were in the U.K.. My partner already had the experience of being a single mother and not being able to do things like travel because of having a baby, so I volunteered to stay behind so that she would have the opportunity to do the things that she wanted to do. Instead, I flew out to Paris to meet them during the 2nd week of their trip.

I'm going to write about the plane flight and my feelings about modern air travel in a separate post, since I want to reflect on the pleasant parts of the trip first.

2 Days in Paris

The first part of the trip (for me) was 2 nights in Paris. Overall, Paris reminded me a lot of San Francisco. The nice parts of the city are beautiful and a joy to walk around. The other parts are filthy, and full of homeless people. And these neighborhoods can literally be separated by a single block. It can be emotional whiplash going from the awe-inspiring sights like Notre Dame to the heartbreak of having to walk past block after block of homeless beggars (including children!) -- many of whom have given up on even trying to panhandle for cash.

Since they live in Europe, hopefully they at least still have access to health care. Right? Surely one of the benefits of having socialized healthcare is that people like this can at least have access to physical and mental health care. I hope that is the case. Regardless, there's not much that I can do about it, especially since I don't live in France and cannot vote in their elections. All I can do is vote in American elections, and to advocate for more public policies that promote the humane and dignified treatment of homeless people and those in poverty. Plenty of my tax dollars go towards bombing black and brown people in other countries, much to my disgust and frustration. If I'm going to be paying those taxes, then I'd much rather that they go towards services like shelters, food banks, healthcare, addiction treatment, and job training for the poor and homeless, many of whom are victims of circumstance and exploitation, and do not deserve to be in the situations they are in.

My partner likes medieval tapestries, and the Lady and the Unicorn is one of her favorites.

My partner and daughter did pretty much all of the usual Paris sight-seeing. They visited the Eiffel Tower and Palace of Versailles, which are both things that I would have liked to do, but which were lower on my priority list. Together, we went to the Musée de Cluny to see the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries. This is one of my partner's favorite medieval artworks, and we have a copy of one of the tapestries hanging in our living room. We also spent a full afternoon at the Musée de l'Armée, which is loaded with medieval armor, swords, rifles, canons, uniforms, and weapons from medieval history, all the way through Napoleonic Wars, and both world wars -- not to mention Napoleon's Tomb. They even have Napoleon's horse, stuffed and preserved in a glass box.

I also learned from this museum that, apparently, "gun-swords" were a real thing. You win this round, Final Fantasy VIII...

I wanted to see The Last Duel in theaters. It is a story that my partner was interested to see, and we were making tentative plans to see it. I'm still hesitant to go to a movie theater due to the ongoing COVID pandemic. I actually passed on seeing Spider-Man: No Way Home in the theater because I don't want to sit in such a crowded space with total strangers. I was actually kind of relieved that The Last Duel was bombing in theaters. It would mean that we could go see it in theaters, and I could be comfortable in the knowledge that we should expect to have no problems social distancing in the theater.

But real life happened. We got busy with stuff, and kept putting it off. Then my partner actually caught COVID, so we were self-quarantined for 2 weeks. By the time we would have had an opportunity to go to the theater, I think The Last Duel had already been pulled.

So when we were sitting around in the holiday week between Christmas and New Year, with plenty of free time on our hands, we saw it while scrolling through HBO Max and decided to finally watch it.

The structure of The Last Duel is quite unorthodox for a feature film. It abandons the typical 3-act structure of most mainstream movies in favor of more of kind of a 4-act structure, in which the first 3 acts retell the same events from 3 different characters' perspectives. There isn't technically a 4th act, as the climactic duel is actually part of the 3rd act, but as it's a culmination of all 3 characters' plots, I kind of see it as its own 4th act.

©: Scott Free Productions, 2020.

©: Scott Free Productions, 2020.

©: Scott Free Productions, 2020.

The Last Duel repeats almost the entire story 3 times, once from each characters' perspective.

I'm on the fence about this particular style of story-telling. On the one hand, there's a lot of subtly and nuance that re-frames or re-contextualizes most of the events depicted. We get to see multiple characters' conflicting perspectives of the same events, and how one person can believe himself a hero, while everyone else might see him as a self-righteous dick.

However, I have two significant complaints with the structure of this film, in particular.

The first complaint that I have with The Last Duel is that the desire to re-tell the same events 3 times leaves little time for anything else. We get one scene early in the movie of De Gris and Carrouges fighting together on the battlefield. There's nothing else to help build up and develop the deep friendship and respect that they supposedly have. The audience is constantly being told that they are good friends, but all we ever see is petty bickering between them. We just have to take the characters' word for it that they were ever friends to begin with.

I've had a busy couple of weeks of movies! Three movies in the past two weekends, and planning on seeing Spider-Man: Homecoming in the next couple days. But first, while trying to keep ourselves entertained in Des Moines, my girlfriend and I decided to kill a couple hours at the movies and checked out the newly-released war movie from Christopher Nolan: Dunkirk.

I'll admit that it took me a little while to figure out this movie's chronological structure. Director Christopher Nolan decided to edit the movie into a non-sequential order, in which individual scenes jump back and forth between points in the movie's timeline (sometimes to show the same event again, but this time from a different point of view). There's three main storylines running in parallel: a pair of soldiers trying to catch a boat off the beach, a pair of pilots hunting down German bombers, and a civilian yacht captain setting sail to help rescue the stranded British army. Early in the movie, the scenes with the soldiers take place at night, and the scenes on the planes and in the yacht take place during the day.

At first, I thought maybe this was some kind of time zone difference. Like maybe the scenes on the boat were taking place sufficiently east that the sun had already set; whereas, the planes were flying far enough west that the sun hadn't set yet. This wasn't the case. The movie was, in fact, shifting between an aerial pursuit taking place during one afternoon and the boat escapes that happened the night before (or several nights before). Maybe I missed something at the beginning of the movie that made this all more clear?

I didn't have any trouble following along with the non-linear, compressed time in Inception, but this movie threw me off a tiny bit simply because I wasn't expecting it. Once I realized how the movie actually worked, it was easy to follow along with each of the individual threads, and to start to see where and how they intersected. Not a deal-breaker in any way. By the end, everything comes together quite nicely.

The early movie cycles between the day of the evacuation and conflict from the night before.

Much like War for the Planet of the Apes (which is quite good), Dunkirk is a surprisingly slow and quiet movie...

Nobody can make a game about World War I. Trench warfare is too boring. Nothing really happens. There isn't a strong, identifiable villain or good versus evil struggle.

Those are among the many excuses that people made for why all the video games are about World War II, and never about World War I. And then the gaming public and journalists got a glimpse of this:

That teaser trailer was damn good. People were excited. I haven't played a first-person shooter since Call of Duty: World at War, I generally hate online shooters, but even I was excited to try out this game! And other people were hyped about it too.

Now, I never really bought into the idea that World War I was "not video game material". I've long advocated for games to look at all periods of history for inspiration, and World War I is a monumental moment in world history that certainly deserves to be examined by games. The indie market certainly realized this, with games like Valiant Hearts and Verdun. But the big publishers have completely shied away from "The War to End All Wars".

This is a shame. The rapid technological advancements and radically new military tactics that evolved leading up to (and during) the war could be great material to examine in the form of a game. The widescale industrialization of warfare, the complicated politics, and the general fuzziness of the morality of the war are also ripe source material for dramatic storytelling. So it's about time to see this war thrust into the mass market spotlight.

I'd prefer to have seen a strategy game along the lines of Total War; but whatever, I'll give DICE and Battlefield 1 a chance.

UPDATE: 12 MARCH 2018, Better than I gave it credit for:
After having played Activision's Call of Duty: WWII and (especially) EA's Star Wars: Battlefront II, and having talked about it with friends, I have gained a bit of respect for the successes that Battlefield 1 has been able to accomplish. I've started to like it more in retrospect. Not enough to go back and re-play it or try out any of the expansions (yet), but I do feel that I may have been a bit too harsh on the game in retrospect, especially with regard to its campaign vignettes.

I'm not going to change my original review score, but compared to CoD:WWII and Battlefront II, this game probably deserves a slightly higher grade. So keep that in mind as you read the following review. Of all the big-budget first person shooters that I've played in the past couple years, Battlefield 1 is probably the one that I most enjoyed, and it's the one that I would recommend.

The futile indifference of war

First impressions were actually pretty damned good. I was actually really impressed with Battlefield 1's campaign tutorial. It's basically a guided tour of the game's various core mechanics: shooting at enemy soldiers, capturing victory points, piloting vehicles, and so forth. It does a good job of introducing each of these mechanics and systems by jumping the player around between multiple characters in a large-scale battle.

But what really stuck out to me was how the tutorial transitioned between these different set pieces, and how it handled player death. This tutorial is actually surprisingly merciless and difficult. As you complete one set piece, the game gradually (and subtly) increases the threat until it becomes overwhelming and your character dies (or they just kill you after a timer expires), which allows the game to teleport you to the point of view of another character for the next set piece. The dying character's name and birth / death years are shown on screen during the transition, granting that character with a certain degree of humanization.

The excellent tutorial emphasizes the indifference and futility of "The War to End All Wars".

Depending on how good you are at the game, you'll go through between half a dozen to a dozen different characters, each with a name and an age. And they all die. The tutorial makes this war look brutal and futile. It even has an almost Dark Souls-like indifference to the player character, killing you without a second thought and forcing you to respawn as another poor, dumb bastard who's about to die for his country, rather than restarting you at a checkpoint until you get it right.

I even wish DICE had gone a bit further by also displaying the character's birth place and maybe even a snippet or two of other biographical trivia. Maybe listing some hobbies, or saying that he was on his high school's varsity football team, or some other little detail like that. DICE settled for just the name and birth / death year, but it's still effective and establishes a very strong running theme throughout the tutorial. The point is a bit undercut by the rapid pacing and by how conventional the actual running and shooting feels. But I still walked out of this tutorial excited by what the rest of the campaign had to offer.