Movies, Muffins And More

Phew! It's been a busy few days. I'd apologize for there being nothing to see here other than the Advent Calendar posts but honestly, if it wasn't for those, there'd have been nothing at all, so be glad for anything you get, I say.

Not that I'd have had a great deal to talk about if I'd had more time. Gaming of late has been an hour of EverQuest II in the evening and that's it. TV, I'm still working my way through The Good Place. Just a handful of episodes to go there. Something about that soon, probably, but not until I finish it all.

I have a slew of music-related topics bookmarked to cover but I think we may have enough music here already, somehow. Also, there are end-of-year lists to think about. Don't want to compromise those.

I did watch a new movie, which is unusual for me these days. It wasn't new new but it did come out this decade. I might say something about that later.

No, y'know what, let's do it now. Let's make this a Grab-Bag post because that seems to be about all I'm capable of at the moment. Then again, I like writing them and I like reading them when other people do them, so why am I even apologizing?

Flash! Oo-er!

Keen readers may remember I was watching The Flash TV show earlier in the year. I managed three seasons before I decided I really didn't much like any of the characters and took a break. I still haven't picked that one back up but I have now watched the movie of the same name that came out about a year and a half ago.

What I most remember about it from back then is all the fuss and palaver over the antics of the actor in the title role, Ezra Miller. Miller seems to be something of a throwback in cinema terms inasmuch as they don't manage their private life to benefit their professional career. The opposite, if anything. 

They behave more like a movie star from a bygone age, a time when behaving in a disturbingly off-kilter manner off-screen served to make you more in demand rather than less. As the farrago progressed I thought of Richard Harris, Nicolas Cage, Crispin Glover...

Whatever's going on with them, I like Miller in the role a lot more than I liked Grant Gustin in the TV show, even though Gustin is far more like the Barry Allen of the comics. And that, really, is the problem. 

The Flash is dull, isn't he? I own a lot of Flash comics and I always thought he was boring. I mostly bought them either because they were in continuity with other titles I was reading or because they were easy to find for cheap because everyone else thought he was boring, too. 

He was never one of my favorites. Happily married, living in the suburbs, working in a police lab. He made Clark Kent look like a livewire. Barry never seemed to have much of a personality at all, not until his wife got murdered and he went psycho - but even that didn't make him any more interesting.

As for his powers, running fast isn't conducive to either good comics or good cinema. It's basically all motion blurs and speed lines once you get up there. 

Some of his speed gimmicks are more visually arresting but it's notable that both the TV series and the movie go hard on the time-travel schtick to hold the audience's attention. Unfortunately, as well as being impossible to plot coherently, time travel stories have no specific speed-related requirements. 

You can go fast to break the time barrier but you don't need to. Plenty of people do it with devices that don't involve any running at all and frankly all of those look less daft than a guy going flat out on a treadmill while pumping his arms like a six-year old.

The plot is The Flash is pretty much the plot of the first season of the TV show so I'm guessing they're both taken straight from one of the iterations of the comic. It's a dumb plot, wherever it comes from and best ignored. 

The fun is in the set pieces, some of which are very intricately staged and come off quite well, and in  Ezra Miller's performance, which is idiosyncratic, assured and fundamentally weird. The script is about okay, not much more, but the playing carries it.

That's in the first two acts, anyway. In common with quite a few viewers it seems, I thought The Flash was two-thirds of a good movie. Miller playing Barry Allen both as a teenager and a decade or so older is worth the price of admission, which in my case was effectively nothing, since I watched it on Netflix. 

As a comedy, then, it's more than decent. As an action movie, it's not too shabby either. At times it's lively and exciting. There are some exhilarating fights, some even more exhilarating rescues and along the way we get lots of cameos and supporting roles for other DC heroes, which is fan service of the better kind. 

As a long-time DC fan, I felt well-served by it, anyway. Michael Keaton was lots of fun. So was Gal Gadot, for the ten seconds she shows up, and I really enjoyed seeing Sashe Calle as Kara. 

I knew about Supergirl's role from a couple of comics blogs I follow and I was quite pleased with the way she was handled here. Odd to see her not blonde but it's fine. Anyone can change their hair color. I've done it.Looking forward to seeing her in her own movie, now.

The problem, as it usually does with superhero movies, comes in the third act, when all the smaller-scale, emotionally impactful stuff goes straight out the window in favor of huge spectacle and massive explosions. Sometimes they pull it off. This is one of the times they don't..

I've seen the failure of the narrative ascribed to the multiversal elements. They certainly don't help but I feel it's the way they're handled here that's the real problem. No-one should expect the climax to make sense but it's not unreasonable to hope for it at least to look good. It doesn't. It's just messy and chaotic without any sense of visual style.

I don't mind multiverse stories per se, even if they do tend to devalue every significant event that comes before or after, an intrinsic problem with the everywhere all the time at once concept of the universe. But there are narrative ways to get around that. What there's no way to get around is making the whole thing look like it was storyboarded from an idea Nigel Tufnell came up with for a Spinal Tap video while he was high on mushrooms. And even that makes it sound a lot more engaging than it is.

All the same, for all its many flaws and faults, I broadly enjoyed it and it did make me think I ought to watch more movies, so that's good. Haven't actually watched any yet but I have thought about it. So that's progress.

Are You Ever Going To Get Started?

On the Scars of Destruction expansion for EQII, that is. And no, thanks for asking, but it seems I am not. Not for a while, anyway.

The expansion has been out for over two weeks and so far all I've seen is the staging post in the starting zone. I wrote a couple of posts about all the things I needed to do to get ready for some actual adventuring. I had to hit the level cap of 130 with the character I planned to take through the storyline, so he could wear the free upgrade gear and get the quests, but once that was out of the way I was ready to get started.

Or so I thought. Then I made the mistake of doing some comparisons between the maximally upgraded Ancient combat arts I was using, most of which were from two spell tiers ago, and the Expert versions from the current tier. To my surprise, it seemed the CAs and spells I could craft for myself would be upgrades, so I thought, before I got stuck into the new content, I'd just get my Alchemist out to do some quick crafting...

Yeah. Nothing's ever that simple. First, there was the minor issue of the rares he'd need. It takes two rares per combine at these levels and I only had a handful of the right ones. Making Expert versions of all the Berserker's CAs would require well over a hundred rares. They're not impossibly expensive on the broker but they are just shy of two million platinum each so I'd bankrupt myself before I'd even made even the really key ones.

That can be fixed relatively quickly by selling some of my vast supplies of Collectables. I just put the few I happened to be carrying around in my bags up for sale a few days ago and I've already made over 30 million plat. No, the real roadblock turned out to be something I'd completely forgotten.

In recent expansions the Advanced recipe books for the Expert spells and CAs have to be obtained through Research. This used to be very easy because "Research" meant a collective effort from the whole server. There were a few NPCs who wanted stuff made and after enough people had made it for them, they were ready to sell their recipe books to anyone. You had to do some of their quests to get faction or special currency but it didn't take long.

Now, you don't technically have to do any quests or make anything for the NPCs. They'll sell you their books as soon as you have the correct crafting level, which my relevant crafters all do. They don't actually have the books in stock any more though. They have to research them for you. And that takes ten days. Per book. And there are three books.

Basically, from the moment you decide you want these books, it's going to be a month before you get them all. Obviously, I should have done this during the year the Ballads of Zimara expansion was current content but I didn't, so I'm doing it now.

I ought to have it all done by Christmas because there is a way to halve that thirty day waiting period. You do daily quests for a little golem in Aether Wroughtlands. They're exactly like the quests the old researchers used to give out, just annoyingly placed in a different zone from the researchers themselves. If you do the golem's dailies, one of the rewards you get is a page you can read that knocks a day off the research timer. Do them every day and you can get your research done in half the time.

My current EQII session consists of getting those dailies with my Sage and my Alchemist then knocking the quests out as quickly as possible before swapping to my Berserker to go mining for whatever time I have left, in the hope of digging up some of the hundreds of rares I'd need if I'm ever going to upgrade everything for everyone.

It's pointless in a way because my Berserker seems perfectly capable of doing the entry-level content in the new expansion just as he is. But it's also really relaxing and ideal for the hour or two that's all I seem to be able to find for gaming most days right now. 

It does mean I probably won't see much of Scars of Destruction until the New Year, but that's fine. I'm in no hurry. As must be obvious.

Muffin, Miffin, What's The Diffrin?

I saw this on MassivelyOP the other day and because I have no sense of perspective when it comes to how many free MMORPGs I can feasibly play, I became momentarily excited by the prospect of a new one. This time it's a cosy fantasy MMO for mobile, developed by the people who made Torchlight Infinite (Which I have not played.) and published by NetEase.

It looked like it might be amusing so I went to give it a go. The website has download options for Android and iOS as you'd expect but it also has a button to download the game for Windows. On closer inspection, that turns out to be by way of a NetEase proprietary emulator called MuMu.

I already have two mobile emulators installed on my PC - BlueStacks and Nox, both of which I've written about before. Neither of them is perfect so I was willing to try a third. 

I got as far as downloading it and starting the install process before I thought I ought to do some basic research as to the safety of the thing. It seems it probably is the best emulator currently available and also that it's every bit as safe as you'd expect, by which I mean not very safe at all.

I might still have carried on - I mean, as one redditor put it, everything steals your data. At this point, who even cares? What put me off in the end was the way whoever copy-edited the "Muffin's Story" page on the website couldn't even get the title character's name right. Is it Muffin or Miffin? (It's Muffin, blast you!)

I'll probably come back to this one at some point. It looks mildly interesting. Maybe I'll just see if it runs on one of the emulators I already have installed. If those are stealing my data it's a bit late to worry about it now.

Humpty-Dumpty Syndrome

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

"Intentional Fallacy: term used in 20th-century literary criticism to describe the problem inherent in trying to judge a work of art by assuming the intent or purpose of the artist who created it." - Definition as per Britannica

"I wrote the lyrics and ought to know what the lyrics I wrote is really about" - Victor Willis, lyricist and singer, The Village People.

I recommend reading Mr. Willis's lengthy explanation of why Y.M.C.A. is not, has never been and never will be a "gay anthem" in full. You can find it here on Stereogum. As one of the comments puts it "this is one of the funniest things i've read in a while, but if i was in a different mood it might have made me quite irritated and frustrated".

End With A Song

I think it's time for everyone to just...

Chill Out - Witch Post