24 minute read
JAI OPETAIA
MOTM
BY CORRINE BARRACLOUGH
NOT familiar with his name? You soon will be.
The 26-year-old Samoan Australian professional cruiserweight star has successfully cleared out the local ranks on his way to a 20-0 record with an impressive 16 knockouts.
Now, he’s reaped his reward, earning a mandatory shot at the IBF world title early in 2022. The IBF has mandated that Opetaia will fight cruiserweight champion Mairis Briedis by April 14, 2022, but negotiations are already underway which could see the fight being staged sooner. Many have their fingers firmly crossed on that.
To Aussie boxing fans’ delight, Opetaia has been rising up the ranks, holding the WBA Oceania cruiserweight title since 2019, although he hasn’t fought since October 2020 due to a hand injury.
That damn hand injury has hampered his career for years but now he’s back – and clearly means business.
He’s moved to the Gold Coast and says he’s on a mission to become the fittest he’s ever been; taking his training to a whole new level and pushing his body to its limits.
The fight is on, and the battle now is to bring it to Australia so that when Obetaia steps into the ring, it will be the first major world title fight held in Australia since Jeff Horn defeated Manny Pacquiao. Remember that fight in front of 51,000 fans?
“This is what I’ve been working towards for my whole life, I’m finally going to tick the box,” Opetaia said. “People are excited about getting a world title shot. But I’m going in there to win, not just participate. I’m bringing the belt home. Hopefully that fight can happen in Sydney, with the COVID stuff going on, the closer to home the better.”
His promoter is Dean Lonergan – and if that name sounds familiar it’s because he organised the Horn versus Pacquiao event at Suncorp Stadium in 2017. We all know how that played out, because even those who aren’t sports fans couldn’t escape the mega hype.
“Team Opetaia, myself and Fox Sports all want that fight in Australia as well,” Lonergan said. “We haven’t had a major world title fight in Australia since Jeff Horn versus Manny Pacquiao and then Horn defended his title in Brisbane against Gary Corcoran.”
He adds that his experience with the Pacquiao fight was that it “took months and months to get over the line so it will take patience.”
And so, the hype and anticipation has already begun. You know how it goes…
To arm you with a little bit of background info, Opetaia represented Australia in the 2012 Olympics as a Heavyweight at the age of 16, making him the youngest ever
Australian Olympic boxer. He also represented Australia in the 2014 Commonwealth Games.
And, out of the ring, he’s related to Australian soccer player Tim Cahill and rugby league player Ben Roberts of Parramatta Eels.
He has the fight scheduled. He has the fan club. He has the promoter. Now, he just has to win.
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FILM
ON-SCREEN PSYCHOS
BY PAUL DALGARNO
SMOOTH talking, violent and devoid of humanity: who doesn’t love a psycho? Psychos are good for the chills (Fatal Attraction, if nothing else, put a whole generation off rabbit stew) but they’re also lots of fun to be around.
It’s hard not to enjoy the babyishly brutal Peter III of Russia as played by Nicholas Hoult in the SBS series The Great. (The fact Hoult’s most memorable performance before that involved him singing Killing Me Softly as a kid without friends in 2002’s About A Boy was a clear warning). It’s equally hard not to cheer for the Joker as he repeatedly tries to end boring-as-batshit Batman. Likewise Moriarty (possible psycho) as he torments goodytwo-shoes coke fiend Sherlock Holmes, and Wile E. Coyote (definite psycho) as he tries to flatten Road Runner.
Tim Roth’s character in the new film Sundown was described in The Guardian as a ‘wonderfully relaxed sociopath’, and the movie as the ‘funniest’ and ‘nastiest’ at this year’s Venice Film Festival – a classic blend of right-on and revolting. Villanelle (Jodie Comer) in Killing Eve is a ‘living, breathing, shopping, killing psychopath’ – not to mention babe – whose attractiveness to Eva Polastri (Sandra Oh) is perfectly believable; Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) in Dexter is a square-jawed copcome-psycho who kills for, um, good; Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) in American Psycho makes us laugh while cleaving heads; Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) in Misery is a loveable homebody who hobbles writers with a mallet; and Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho wears his mum’s clothes – lol. The stylised brutality of the screen sociopath is a salve for society’s chafing manacles –unlike us, they’re given free rein to do whatever they want, which usually involves sticking it to the man, literally.
If you’re conflicted about having feels for screen psychos, take heart from the fact that you’re not a psycho. Real psychos lack empathy and wouldn’t feel conflicted (or any other emotion) about cheering for the bad guys in A Clockwork Orange. They probably don’t even Netflix and chill because they reportedly have no creativity or inner life.
Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in Silence of the Lambs, with his love of art and literature, not to mention his appetite – in a good way – for Jodie Foster’s Clarice? Killer, please! A 2014 Belgian study by forensic psychiatrists looked at 126 fictional psychopaths and concluded that Anton Chigurgh of the Cohen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men was the most clinically accurate portrayal. Which is to say: if a dude with a terrifying haircut and airpowered bolt gun asks you for a quick game of heads or tails, keep walking. The same study found that – as in real life – there were far fewer female screen psychos than male. The majority of those that exist – just think Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) in Basic Instinct – tend to be sexy killer nymphs, which again is sadly unrealistic, unless you’re a spider.
I mean, I say ‘sadly’ but I don’t really mean it. What do you think I am – a psycho?
MUSIC
Making A Comeback
BY PAUL DALGARNO
AT 43, Apollo Creed has long since lost his heavyweight title when he climbs into the ring against Ivan Drago in the Rocky film franchise. “It’s too bad we have to get old,” he quips to the Italian Stallion in Rocky III, only to be pummelled to death by the 24-year-old Drago in Rocky IV. We all like to think we have another round in us… but do we?
Four decades stand between ABBA’s last album, The Visitors (1981), and their latest, Voyage (2021). The closest they’ve come to being knocked out in the interim was in the mid-1980s, when they were seen as sparkly has-beens. But they got back up and started meting out a blistering one-two of loveable kitsch (Murial’s Wedding, 1994) and lucrative nostalgia (the Mamma Mia! stage show in 1999 and the blockbuster film versions
in 2008 and 2018). To date they’ve sold 400 million albums and have a collective net worth of US$1.1 billion. In an age of plague and uncertainty, Agneta, Benny, Björn and Anni-Frid are already being hailed as Norse gods returning to bathe the world in harmonising happiness. And yet comebacks are never without risk. Not financially (there’s little risk on that front) but in terms of legacy.
Cue – actually, please don’t – Chinese Democracy (2008) by Guns N’ Roses. To call it the “band’s” first album of originals since Use Your Illusion I and II (1991) feels weird given most members had already quit, leaving only Axl Rose and keyboardist Dizzy Reed. Scheduled for release in 1999, the album was re-recorded from scratch in 2000 and worked on in 15 different studios before appearing nearly a decade later in a blaze of infamy and hype for being the most expensive (US$13 million) rock album ever made. But on the plus side… there was no plus side.
The Stooges were torn a new one for The Weirdness (2007), their first album in 34 years, as summed up best by Zeth Lundy in PopMatters, who wrote that it “complicates the Stooges’ oncetidy history just by existing, and yet it is a very poor record, which complicates things even further”.
Sonic Boom (2009) by Kiss –their first album in 11 years – was released as a CD/DVD package exclusively at Walmart in North America, which hardly screams God of Thunder.
Zeitgeist (2007) by Smashing Pumpkins was dissed by Pitchfork
(and others) as a “calculated move for cash or attention or both”.
The aptly named A Momentary Lapse in Reason (1987) by Pink Floyd… let’s not even go there.
History has warned us time and again to let sleeping gods lie.
But it also suggests that it’s not impossible to silence the doubters after seemingly being out for the count. Just take Prince (Musicology, 2004), Mariah Carey (The Emancipation of Mimi, 2005), Red Hot Chili Peppers (Californication, 1999), or Tina Turner (Private Dancer, 1984).
The heart is often the last to go, as per Creed’s final words: “I want you to promise me you’re not gonna stop this fight, no matter what. No matter what!”
SPORT
Can Football Save The World?
BY ROB PEGLEY
THE world’s biggest sport has a global reach, engagement and depth of passion, that cannot help but provoke change if harnessed properly. So what world problems should soccer work on next?
Well, when Conservative MPs voted against free school meals in the House of Commons last year, a 22-year-old black lad from Wythenshawe in Manchester helped them to change their minds. Within months they did a U-turn and reinstated meals for some 1.7 million kids below the threshold required.
The fact that the lad – Marcus Rashford – played football for Manchester United and England was the biggest factor. Growing up in Wythenshawe, the biggest housing estate in working class Manchester, where gun crime and drugs are common, Rashford had witnessed his single mum struggle to put meals on the table. Marcus has since become a figurehead in the campaign to end child food poverty and he continues to work hard for change.
When Rashford was then a victim of online abuse, the community came out in huge numbers to support him.
As the European Championship Final between England and Italy went to penalties, Rashford, along with two other black English players Jordan Sancho and Bukayo Saka missed their kicks to see England lose the final. English players missing crucial penalties in previous tournaments – all of them white, incidentally –had come in for huge abuse afterwards, and so people rightly expected the worst. And it came soon enough, with vitriolic trolling of the players – particularly of Saka, who missed the final penalty – following online. Within a few hours of the final a mural of Rashford in Manchester had been trashed; within a day it had been restored however, and covered in thousands of flowers and notes in a tribute to Rashford.
When Saka returned for his first match with his club Arsenal, it was against their biggest rivals Spurs. People held their breath. The Spurs fans gave him a standing ovation rather than a mouthful. Times are changing.
Onefinalexampleoffootball’s powercameearlierthisyearwhen 12majorEuropeanClubsproposed abreakaway‘SuperLeague’.It wasallaboutmoneyandgreed andTVcoverage,tothedetriment offootball’slevelplayingfield. Aleakeddocumentreferredto domesticfootballfansactually attendinggamesas“legacyfans”. WithstadiumsshutduetoCOVID, thoselegacyfansgotoutoftheir armchairsandtooktothestreets; withindaysthefinancialplanwas inruins– droppedindisgrace.
Because people LOVE football –and they love it on a deeper level than most other sports. They love it on a deeper level than just about anything.
From the streets of Wythenshawe to the beaches of Rio, no sport matters more –especially to working class males. It can make grown men cry. It can move people to get up early, travel vast distances and spend lots of money just to watch it. For many men in particular, it ranks alongside working, the family, sex and having a drink, as the five most basic important things in their life. That level of passion has to increasingly be leveraged for good.
So the question is, from taking a knee – or taking on the media as Raheem Sterling did – in a bid to end racism; or to discussing depression as players are increasingly doing, what is next for football? What world problems can the world game solve?
Sustainability is one thing yet to be touched, however, just this month Spurs are set to play the world’s first net zero carbon football game against rivals Chelsea. Fans will be encouraged to take public transport to the game and eat plant-based foods, while players travel on biofuel coach. There are bigger gestures and changes that can be made in this area, but it’s a start.
Equality is coming thick and fast, with the Women’s Premier League growing and gaining coverage on all of the main channels, and female presenters and pundits now the norm.
Possibly the final frontier is homophobia. While it’s accepted of pop stars or television personalities, it’s still not considerable that a top-level footballer could be gay.
There has never been an openly gay soccer player in the Premier League. Justin Fashanu, football’s first black player to cost one million pounds, came out as gay later in his career, and after hounding by media and public alike, hung himself at the age of 37. Similarly, Germany and Aston Villa player Thomas Hitzelburger came out once he had retired. There are currently over 500 players registered in the Premier League and sheer numbers would suggest that more than one of them is gay. It would be huge if players and fans could be accepting of anyone who came out – and possibly now is the right time.
TECH
Making Virtual Reality Worthwhile
BY IAN MILES CHEONG
FOR all the promises Virtual Reality makes, it has a long way to go before it sees mass adoption, largely thanks to a number of limiting factors serving as hurdles for casual use.
VR has its place in many niches, including first-person shooters, flight and work training simulators, and immersive experiences that can only be conveyed through the medium of three dimensions. One thing all its users have in common is their consumption of pornography, which has become the de facto sales driver. A lack of worthwhile applications and a limited library of games – offering more gimmicks than full-fledged experiences– hampersthemedium.
In contrast to the number of users who use their headsets to play video games on a regular basis, VR porn dwarfs every other use-case by a long mile. And that’s a problem, not because it’s being used for porn – but because it’s not being used for much else. VR is not achieving its full potential, and the market simply isn’t sold on the medium – at least not yet.
Virtual reality is an isolating experience. When you put on a headset it disconnects you from the real world. Maybe that’s a good thing for those who want that experience. But for those who feel discomfort in the disconnection, it’s a chore. When real-life calls, disconnecting from your immersion and reconnecting becomes a wholly unnecessary ritual.
By itself, getting VR to work is a hassle and a half – it doesn’t work out of the box. You have to install drivers, make physical space, and have the necessary hardware to even run the damn thing. It’s an expensive hobby with little payoff.
Worse still, most VR headsets are not even wireless; those that are offer decreased graphical fidelity and are about as immersive as watching James Cameron’s Avatar in 3D. It sucks. The controllers themselves are unintuitive and require you to fumble around to even perform the simplest of tasks in most games, such as Skyrim VR and Doom VFR, where even moving around requires you to teleport from place to place. While it’s nice that some major developers offer VR experiences, these offerings are few and far between – the VR market isn’t big enough for most publishers to even invest in creating standalone VR titles. It’s a poor investment for both publishers and consumers, and that feeds into the circuitous problem of there not being enough users to make the development worthwhile – and not enough games for most users to justify buying a headset.
The reduction in bulk and wireless freedom are a given. Miniaturisation and wirelessness will come with the march of progress, but there are a number of things VR manufacturers can do to make their products worthwhile.
VR’s problems need to be addressed at the roots. Its greatest strength: isolation, is also its greatest weakness. Coupled with the disorientation you experience when you come back to reality, there’s simply no easy way to “tab out”. The VR industry could learn a thing or two from Apple: add a transparency mode.
You shouldn’t need to take off your headset to see and hear the world around you or respond to your email. It has to be convenient to be attractive to the wider market. After all, noise-isolating headphones wouldn’t be quite as convenient if you had to take them off to talk to someone. And being able to see your surroundings would eliminate the hassle of removing and putting back on your headset, completely killing the immersion. Having cameras and microphones mounted on the headset is an easy fix – to say nothing of how bulky these things are at the moment.
The elephant in the room is the fact that there’s no standard for VR headsets. While some applications work on multiple devices, most simply do not. You’re either getting an Oculus, an HTC Vive, or a Samsung. You might go for a Valve Index if you’re feeling extravagant. Platform exclusivity is a factor that limits what you can experience with your investment.
Unlike TVs and monitors, the experience is less than uniform, for both developers and users alike –and given that the whole point of
VR is to be immersive, anything less than a solid experience is not only immersion-breaking, it’s headache-inducing. It doesn’t help that VR headsets have intense hardware requirements – the cost of VR doesn’t end with the headset alone.
The good news is that the industry understands these problems and is actively working to solve them. It only remains to be seen if the consumer market will have the patience to tolerate VR as a work-in-progress before it finally reaches maturity.
GAMING
TACTIAL ROLE PLAYING IS BACK
BY IAN MILES CHEONG
WHAT’S old is new again. The tactical role-playing games many of us grew up with in the late 90s and the early 2000s will always have a special place in our hearts – be it Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, or Final Fantasy Tactics.
For a while, it seemed video games had moved on from the genre and onto greener pastures. As visuals became more advanced and gameplay more frenetic, there seemed to be no place for slow-paced, story-driven experiences. Outside a handful of select releases by Obsidian Entertainment and Larian Studios, most companies invested in role-playing as a whole preferred to adopt the ‘bigger equals better’ approach of open-world RPGs like Skyrim and Cyberpunk 2077 – titles that blur the line between action game and RPG.
It’s hard to tell a story where your choices matter when your only options are to pull the trigger to swing a sword. Telling a story, or at least one that’s reactive to your actions, requires context and character motivation – elements that only an ample amount of dialogue options can offer.
Enter the tactical RPG: a genre that rewards patience and calls on players to invest time in creating and subsequently role-playing a character, and doesn’t require much (if anything) in the way of reflexes. It’s no secret that as gamers are aging, so too are their tastes – and there’s few things more accommodating to older gamers who want to sit back and think about their actions than an RPG that doesn’t penalise its players for not being good with a gamepad.
There’s nothing new about tactical RPGs – and it’s partly what draws so many gamers to them. Millennials who grew up on the turnbased and “real time with pause” RPGs of Y2K will feel at home with the new generation of titles led by the likes of Wasteland 3, Pathfinder: Path of the Righteous, and Pillars of Eternity 2. Baldur’s Gate 3, made by long-time RPG producer Larian Studios, is also playable and slated for a full release in 2022.
Despite the fact that many millennials – at least those who didn’t lose themselves in Counter-Strike – grew up on tactical RPGs says nothing of the fact that the genre has always catered to a more mature crowd. It’s as if these gamers, now of age, are finally old enough to truly appreciate what the genre has to offer.
The resurgence of the tactical RPG is largely owed to the fact it can now be experienced by an audience that’s looking for more than the cheap thrill of landing the top spot in an Apex Legends leaderboard – a feat that requires quick reflexes and mastery of the first-person shooter. If you’ve played one tactical RPG, you already have the means to play them all. There’s no learning curve, unless you’re playing one for the first time ever.
There’s only one real way to play a shooter: you point and click. That’s it. In a tactical RPG, not only are there different difficulty options, there’s the option to play the game as one of a myriad different classes – spellcaster, a charming bard, a swordslinger, or stealthy rogue – and every combination in-between. In a well-made RPG, your experience is geared towards your personal preference.
One unique feature offered by every tactical RPG is that each playthrough can be tailored to the player’s liking. Prefer to breeze through the combat? Just play on story mode or disable perma-death. Prefer a tactical experience? You can do that, too.
While a round of Apex Legends or Call of Duty can give you a quick fix – provided you play well, of course – games like Pathfinder offer a more fulfilling, substantial experience that lingers long after you’ve finished your first playthrough. These storydriven, tactically-minded games require you to invest in your character and the choices you make, which impact the world and the characters around you.
The realms in which the stories take place offer a respite from the monotony and grind of the real world, away from cancel culture, crime, and the grind of daily life. It’s easy to get lost in the fantasy worlds of Faerun, Rivellon, or Golarion, settings replete with their own culture and political machinations – all of which you have an active hand in shaping. Here, your choices matter.
With the COVID-19 pandemic locking much of the world indoors, there are few better places to explore than the worlds behind the looking glass – and they’re adventures you can experience at the beat of your own drum.
WASTELAND 3
POLITICS
Pushing Positive Discrimination
BY ALEXANDRA MARSHALL
IHAVE long been a critic of the Doomsday Clock. For the uninitiated, the Doomsday Clock is the product of paranoid hysteric convinced that civilisation exists on the knife-edge of disaster. In a few seconds, these lazy decades of indulgence will strike ‘midnight’ and instead of drinking and fireworks, humanity is supposed to collapse in on itself.
The apocalyptic timepiece began its life at seven minutes to midnight in 1947 with a group of geniuses who survived two world wars and then decided ‘oh now the world is ending’.
In reality, humans are pretty good at coasting through natural disasters. If anything is going to ‘get us’, it’ll be a self-inflicted wound. Biology made us exceptional survivors, but our social structures have warranty issues. Leave humanity sitting around without an existential crisis for too long and we’ll create a disaster to break up the boredom of safety.
As a species, we crave the drama of calamity. Our literature is an endless worship of heroes and their eternal war against evil.
The Wuhan sniffle has given a directionless generation the power to be heroes without leaving the comfort of their bedroom. All that’s required is a quick stab in the arm and suddenly their lacklustre existence is elevated to an act of stunning bravery. Triple masked with a fresh set of needles in their online bio, these kids enter the fight against wicked freedom-loving ‘fascists’.
Listening to the woke promote discrimination and segregation has to be peak irony for this era in human history. The pointy tip of hypocrisy hides dangerous slopes full of ice and treacherous falls on all sides. Australia arrived at this summit after a long ascent into madness.
Marxism is a piece of ideological malware accidentally downloaded over a century ago. Since then it has mutated inside our civilisation, spreading through skim soy lattes and indecipherable social science courses attended by youths wearing dozens of tiny badges protesting consumerism. It is the catalyst most likely to set that midnight bell ringing.
Affirmative action. Positive discrimination. Quota systems.
Call them whatever you like, at their core they are a vengeful act of discrimination dressed up as virtue. The idea is to stop treating people as individuals based on merit and instead rank them via a system of ‘protected characteristics’.
This translates to an employer hiring a less qualified person because they share a skin pigmentation with a previously persecuted group. Mandatory diversity is not based on logic. People of European descent have been conquered, killed, displaced, erased, culturally abused, enslaved, starved and persecuted. Now, they are being punished for surviving.
Social systems evolve over time. Female equality was a positive step. They won the argument and, for a second or two, women entered the workforce under the power of personal merit.
Equality of choice does not mean equality of outcome. When women failed to choose ‘the right professions’ activist movements decided to cry ‘sexism!’ instead of filling out job application forms. These political movements weaponised race, gender, and
sexual orientation for the purpose of election.
“Are you a woman who failed at STEM in university? You must be a victim of the patriarchy. Vote for us and we’ll give you a job, no matter how shit you are.”
Infantilising women disgusted those who earned their position.
Positive discrimination was adopted by Liberal and Labor, padding their factional games with quotas. Not satisfied with destroying the presumption of merit within their candidates, they mandated discrimination in the Australian workforce by placing pressure on companies to ‘equalise’ their gender and race statistics.
Forget hiring people who suit the job, you’ve got to hire people that ‘look right’ in a painfully shallow reflection of everything that’s gone wrong with society.
Once discrimination is accepted as a positive activity,’ it is easy to extend. Barely an eyelash was batted when state premiers came out and declared that segregation of the unvaccinated would become mandatory. They encouraged medical discrimination for the common good and criminalised diversity.
Australians have been taught
to view themselves as a range of identities. Protecting the status of the collective at the expense of the individual is exactly how we ended up with witch burning, genocide, and apartheid.
History is very clear on one thing: discrimination is never virtuous.
Those who engage in it are remembered as the villains, not the heroes of the human story. Remember that the next time you watch someone turned away from a shop or dragged off by police because they didn’t have their papers in order.
