Shark: Got. Bee: Got. Supergirl: Want

Hey! I did something I said I was going to do! That makes a nice change.

This morning I downloaded and installed DCUO again. The client's a svelte 38GB, positively slimline by today's standards. Still took about an hour. Daybreak doesn't have the pipes, I guess. 

It's always interesting, coming back to an MMORPG you haven't played for a while. Since I have a blog (Oh, you noticed!) I can often check back to see when I last played something. Chances are I blogged about it and those chances are especially high when it's DCUO .

A long time ago, I fell into a pattern with the game. I haven't played it seriously since... well, ever. But not even half-seriously for years. What I have done, fairly consistently, is keep an eye on the freebies Digital Ink hands out, so I can log in when there's a good pet or a base decoration or maybe a cape I want. Then I patch up, log in and grab it.

The thing about that is, there's often a long enough gap between freebies that enough has changed in the meantime to make coming back slightly disorienting. (Disorientating? Never know which of those is right.)

Since I was last there, which was towards the end of August last year according to the record, the whole UI seems to have undergone an overhaul. It looks like a new font to me, a lot thinner and tighter. Some of the menus seem easier to follow. And the conversations with NPCs are now shown in social media style, extremely similarly to how they appear in Bagel in Neverness To Everness. Everyone got to be modern, don't they?

It's an improvement all round, although that's not saying a lot. I love DCUO, even though I only ever futz around there, but boy, is it showing its age. Visually, that is. Especially the faces and the animations. They weren't great fifteen years ago and they have not aged well. And yes, before you ask, for once I have the graphics jacked up about as far as they'll go. 

If you look at my character up there, Nini Mo her name is, (Why, I'll explain in a moment. In a Sidebar. I really like sidebars now. So much better than footnotes. I can do footnotes, you know. It's just way too much trouble and footnotes are intrinsically more disruptive than having the information in the body of the post. I'm not writing a sodding dissertation! Also, I could have put this in a sidebar, now I come to think of it...) you'll see it looks like she's wearing a mask. She is not. That's her face. 

Most characters, player or NPC, look like they're wearing kabuki masks to me. And nothing in anyone's features ever moves, It's like we're all playing china dolls.

Sidebar: Nini Mo, since no-one asked, is named after Flora Fyrdraaca's idol and role model. She's "the Coyote Queen, greatest ranger ever" and Flora thinks she's just a character in a book until they meet. Flora, as all regular readers ought to know, since I must have name-checked her here almost as many times as Lana del Rey, is the titular heroine of the trilogy by the frustratingly inactive Ysabeau S Wilce. Write a book, Ysabeau!

All her old books are either out of print or will be soon, by the way. Prices are rising. If you haven't taken the hint the last ten times I dropped it, now's the time. You can get them on Kindle...

Once I'd sorted myself out and figured out how to use the refreshed controls, I had a chat with Supergirl, who inevitably had a job for me. The DCUO superverse is a weird place like that. You can be the absolute newest hero on the block, barely able to handle a street mugging without referring to the Hero Handbook, and you'll still get a call from some megastar telling you your powers somehow fit the exact requirements needed to face down some intergalactic overlord or other.

In this case it's some arch-villain going by the extremely unimpressive name of Kryb. I assume she's in the comics but I have never heard of her. Then again, I didn't know we had Blue Lanterns and there was one of those standing right next to the Girl of Steel. 

Sidebar: I just checked and there are now eleven colors of Lantern in the DC Universe! Eleven!  Green, Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue , Indigo, Violet, Black, Grey, White and Ultraviolet.

Kryb has been doing unspeakable experiments on children. No details (Or "deets" as Supergirl extremely unconvincingly puts it. Would Kara ever say "deets"? No, she would not.) but I'm betting it involves turning them into some kind of monsters so she can weaponize them. It's almost always that. 

Kryb has the Blue Lantern's niece. (She has a name but I've already forgotten it. The Blue Lantern that is. Not sure about the niece. I mean, I'm sure she has a name, just not that we get to know it yet.) I assume we'd be going after Kryb regardless but the family connection adds a little frisson.

Niece or no niece, (Now there's a game show...) I had absolutely no plans on doing the new chapter but it takes place in a version of Argo City that's somehow on the floor of the ocean and I wanted to see if we had underwater content now. We never had any before. 

And we don't have any now, either. I guess Argo's in a bubble. But then, Argo's always in a bubble . In space, underwater, what's the diff?

Anyway, I got sucked into all of that and ended up spending the morning kicking Kryptonian robot ass, which is less fun than it sounds but still some fun. I was in a group for a while, too, which always seems to happen in DCUO. It's about the last game I play where I get group invites. No-one ever says much and I generally don't know what's going on but it's easier to accept than refuse so I join. 

I don't know how to play my character and Nini Mo's not even level 30 yet, which as I always say is Basic Tutorial Level in the game, so I don't contribute much but no-one ever seems to care. I think it's just one of those "If we're grouped we all share credit" things. The xp certainly flowed. I dinged 29.

People came and went and I died a bunch of times because don't know what I'm doing and eventually I was on my own again. I kept going. Supergirl whistled up Krypto, which led to my character making a sarcastic comment that I found quite amusing. You're bringing your dog in now?

Well, yes, of course she is because the superdog is the superstar these days. Except Krypto in DCUO is Original Krypto, the short-haired kind-of-a-Labrador, not the super-cute tousled terrier from the movies.

Come to that, DCUO Supergirl isn't the one from the movies, either. Or the TV show. Or, as far as I can tell, the comics.

As a DC fan, albeit an out-of-date one, I rarely recognize any of the heroes in DCUO as the same people I know from the comics or the TV and movie spin-offs. They look like them but they don't talk like them. Or act like them. 

Or sound like them, if you have a particular voice actor in mind. All the voice acting in the game is generic and always has been. Competent but unconvincing. Then again, you try being convincing, reading some of that dialog.

So that was all fun but by the time we reached the underboss, Annihilus...  no, wait, not him... Atrocitus, that's it... I'd had enough. I'd have had to stop and relearn my skills for him and I didn't feel like it. Instead, I warped out to my base and started hanging some posters. Base building is the real endgame.

Before all of that, though, I popped into Metropolis to visit the Pride Parade and pick up my free flying shark. They've made an effort for the event as usual. Lots of balloons, flags, music, dancing...

I was curious to see which heroes were staffing the thing this year. Ha! I say "heroes"... Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy were there, of course. And Aqualad. I cannot get used to the American pronunciation of his name, by the way. Him and Aquaman. That long first "a" is just weird. 

Batwoman was there, too. And a few others I've forgotten. I'm guessing all of them have some established gender identity in the comics but I'm out of that loop. When I start my DC Universe Infinite subscription, maybe I'll get caught up.

The shark is as great, as I knew it would be and I also got a bee. Haven't flown that one yet but it looks good in the preview. I'm guessing it's from last year. I must have missed it.

 

That was more than I'd planned on doing so I felt pretty pleased with myself. About the only other thing I might do for this Chapter is try to pick up Supergirl as an Ally. 

To get her for free I'd have to log in just about every day for a a month and actually do something so that's not going to happen but there's a peculiar system in DCUO, where you can chip away at the monthly Chapter rewards by doing a little every day or you can just buy them for Daybreak Cash. The price is on a sliding scale. The Buyout is 4K DBC but one session this morning knocked 200DBC off the total and it only took a few minutes to get the update. 

You can do that once a day while the event runs. After you trigger it each day, it makes no difference how long you keep on doing the content, you won't get any more credit. There's a 24 hour time gate so grinding isn't an option.

I think that's good? Hard to tell. It's a tax on impatience, basically, which I'm fine with. Then again, I would be. I have a lot more DBC than I know what to do with. I might just buy Supergirl's loyalty for cash money.

And that's about all I have to say about it for now. DCUO: it's always there and I always have fun whenever I play. For an hour or two. Then I've had enough for a month. 

Still, I might drop in a few more times before the event comes to an end,. Drive the price down a little but also fly around a little, show off my shark and my bee. 

If you got 'em, flaunt 'em, right?

Krypto? Two Days In A Row?

I'm looking forward to Blaugust beginning on Friday for the simple reason it'll give me something to write about. Let me rephrase that. It'll give me something to write about that someone might want to read. 

It's not that I'm short of ideas. More that I'm short of ideas that fit the supposed purpose and function of this blog, which started out as place where I could write brief, pithy opinion pieces about Massively Multiple Online Roleplaying Games and shifted over time to accomodate anything and everything in the broad sphere of popular culture that interested, irked or excited me.

And so it remains. Except, as astute readers may have noticed, it now features mostly posts about things I might watch or play or read or otherwise consume rather than those I actually have consumed.

Which is fine, I guess. As a reading experience I'm not sure there's a huge qualitative difference in a post where I describe some new game I read about and speculate on whether I'd want to play it and one where I recount in needless detail my personal experience with a game I have actually acquired an played, based on little more than the tutorial, which is probably as much as I'm ever going to see of it.

Ditto songs. Back when I came up with the intentionally faux-naif title What I've Been Listening To Lately for my regular music feature, it did at least tend to include some songs I'd been playing in the background while I was writing other posts. Now, it's mostly songs I've heard once and bookmarked, then  listened to once more as I decide what goes into the latest post. 

And does it matter? Probably not. They're songs I liked enough to make a note of and then enough more to keep in on a second listen. I can assure everyone I do still listen to a lot more new or new-to-me songs than ever make it onto the blog, so anything that appears here has at least passed the audition. 

Similarly, I read about and watch trailers for plenty of games I can't even be bothered to bookmark and some of the ones I do save for later get kicked out on review without ever meriting so much as a mention here. Does that make those posts materially inferior to the endless stream of uneccessarily lengthy analyses of every last, tiny development in Guild Wars 2, something that provided the backbone of this blog for the best part of a decade?

Second-to-last GW2 screenshot I ever took. Apparently in October 2023,
which means I must have played more recently than I thought.

 

Posts on TV shows describe a slightly different arc. I very rarely, if ever, write about shows I haven't seen and usually I wait until I've seen the entire run before putting finger to key. Which would be all well and good if I was actually watching any but at the moment I'm not. I literally haven't looked at any of my streaming platforms at all for almost a couple of weeks now. I'm not writing about TV because I'm not watching any.

What I am doing, as I've mentioned far too often, is making music with AI. I do this all the time now. It is close to being the only leisure activity/hobby I have at the moment. It's taken over all the time I used to use both to play games and watch shows and some extra besides. And I have more sense than to post about that more than once in a very long while, much though I'd love to. It'd be the blogging equivalent of cornering someone at a party and reading them your poetry.

With any other spare time I get, I've been scanning, digitizing and editing the novella I mentioned, from which I'm spinning off all these songs. That's taking some time, too. What I'll do with it after that remains to be seen but I won't just be putting it up on this blog or talking about it here other than in this kind of tangential reference. I want to do something a bit more substantive than that although I'm still puzzling over what that might be.

All of the above makes for a somewhat self-indulgent post on the last day of July but a week from now, as we approach Week Two of Blaugust - Introduce Yourself Week - it will suddenly become entirely relevant, appropriate and apposite. Even tomorrow, on Blaugust Day One, it will kind of make sense. 

Maybe don't read it until then? Oh, sorry... too late...

Anyway, in the spirit of writing about things I haven't done, let me say a little about the two new superhero movies that just came out - Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The first thing I wanted to say is that I have considered going to see both of them. And, indeed, am still so considering.

This is a notable event. I believe the last movie I went to see on release at the cinema was Arrival back in 2016. If I've seen anything since, I can't remember it. I'd blame my absence from the cinema on the pandemic but on that evidence I'd dropped off the wagon well before then. 

Post-pandemic I have tried to get my former movie-going partner to come and see a couple of things with me but she's not interested any more, having also had the habit broken by the enforced shut-down. As for going with Mrs Bhagpuss, who's never been a keen cinema-goer but could occasionally be tempted, now we have Beryl, who cannot be left Home Alone (Although she could sit with us as we watched Home Alone, together, at home, I suppose. I've never actually seen Home Alone...) going out together to do anything non-dog-friendly involves such a logistical performance neither of us can be bothered with it.

Which leaves going to the movies on my own, something I used to do not all that infrequently when I was younger. Much younger. 

I have no existential objections. It's actually a good way to see movies if you want to concentrate on the film rather than have a Shared Social Experience. It's just a bit more effort than I'm quite ready for... although that might be changing.

I want to see Superman enough that I did get as far as looking up the times of showings. I was thinking of going this week but my mother had a health scare and ended up in hospital so a lot of time was spent driving backwards and forwards that could have been spent sitting in a darkened auditorium.

She's back home now, though, and next week is - in theory - clear of obligations (See how long that lasts...) so maybe...

I am and almost always have been a Superman fan, of course, which explains some of the interest. All the same, I haven't felt any burning desire, let alone need, to see a Superman movie since Christopher Reeve first donned the cape in 1978. This movie feels different, though, as evidenced by my previous posts, gosh-wowing over the trailers. 

Superman (And even more so Supergirl.) fans of a certain age have a very particular view of the right way to do The Superman Family. It's been a while since there's been a movie that felt like it might come anywhere close to the mark. This one does and it seems almost rude not to celebrate the occasion by paying to see it.

If Superman has been inadequately served by Hollywood, though, what about The Fantastic Four?  Marvel's First Family, the bedrock on which the entire Marvel Universe was built, have infamously never been given the treatment they deserve by any medium other than the comics themselves. There have been some FF films and they have been bad.

  (The 2015 Version. Apparently the movie is even worse than the trailer. Scary thought.)

By all accounts, the new one isn't. It's good. Maybe very good. That alone makes it worth seeing, if only out of curiosity.

The thing about the Fantastic Four, though, is that they were always more respected than loved, even by Marvel fans. In the 1960s, Superman was old-fashioned in a way that seemed wholly appropriate to the company that published his adventures but the FF always seemed to carry an aura of The Establishment about them that made them something of an odd fit for Marvel's increasingly counter-culture image. 

Let's be honest - Reed and Sue Richards came off like someone's parents. Then Franklin Richards popped out and they really were. What with Johnny Storm seeming to have walked off the set of 77 Sunset Strip and Ben Grimm acting like he had to be in his forties at least, I never really got how the FF were supposed to be part of the same teenage Swinging Sixties set as SpiderMan or the X-Men. It's no wonder their classic run is a whole series of introductions for hipper heroes like the Silver Surfer and Adam Warlock. 

For all that, the team is seminal, with an importance that can't be ignored. Once again, if there's finally a version of the Fantastic Four up on screen that works, I can't but help feel I ought to make some effort to go check it out.

Chances are I won't. I'll likely end up getting both movies on DVD or even watching them on a streaming platform, although that's possibly even less likely to happen than seeing them at the cinema.

I almost said, if you've seen either of them, let me know what you think in the comments, but then I remembered I'm still trying to avoid spoilers so maybe don't do that just yet. Save it for the post when I talk about actually having seen either or both of them.

You might have a while to wait. 

Here, Boy!

It's been a while since I played DCUO. Given that I post about it every time I play, it seems safe to say it was back in January, when I got stuck on Felix Faust at the end of the first chapter of the game's new "narrative-led" approach and never bothered to go back to try and beat him on a second try.

At least I did actually play the game that time. Usually, all I do is log in, claim whatever's on offer, wander around my new Base wishing I hadn't torn down the old one, put up a few posters, sigh at the prospect of redecorating, wish once again I'd stayed where I was, even if the new Base does have a better view, then log out.

Now and again, probably no more than once a year and mostly not even that often, I might go outside for a fly around. Perhaps even do a couple of missions. The days when I tried to keep up with even the most basic solo content at the start of each new Episode are long gone.

DCUO is a game I used to play. Worse, an MMORPG I used to play, making it even harder to return. How many of those are there, now? Literally hundreds, I think. 

It is, at least, one I still very occasionally write about, which puts it ahead of 95% of them, but it's a game I write about less and less. So, why am I writing about it today?

Because there's a freebie I want of course! Just about the only thing guaranteed to get me to patch up and log in to an MMORPG I no longer play is the prospect not just of something for nothing (You get that in virtually all of them every time you log in these days so it's no incentive at all.) but the offer of something I find specifically appealing, coupled with a limited window of opportunity to grab it.

It's a very weird kind of FOMO. Mostly, fear of missing out is not an emotion I'm personally familiar with. I can let most things slide without being at all bothered. If it's not too much trouble I might extend the very slight effort necessary to pick up something I'm not all that interested in or attend some event that only very mildly intrigues me but if I happen to forget to log in and miss it, I really couldn't care.

There are a small number of games to which I still think, with increasingly slight evidence, I might one day go back and for those I might make a little more effort to acquire something that could be useful, if I did ever return. Things like level boosts or an extra character slot that sometimes attend a promotion, those might be worth not missing out on. 

But these days, even the sort of giveaways that would once have had me looking up my old passwords - mounts or hats for example (I do like a hat, as I believe I have established previously.) - aren't always enough to trigger a response.

So, why am I patching DCUO as I type this? An 8Gb download it is, too. 

I'll give you one word. One name. 

Krypto.

But wait a moment. Don't I already have Superman's dog? Didn't I post about it when I got him and haven't I posted several screenshots since then of my character playing with him in her Base?

Yes, yes and yes.  

But, see, here's the thing... that Krypto can't leave my Base. This Krypto can!

DCUO has a mechanic I've never bothered with. It's called the Ally System and it's relatively recent, dating back only to 2021. When it was announced, I imagined it would be something like the Mercenary systems in the EverQuest games, an NPC you could hire and have fight alongside you as a permanent companion. That would have been great. 

It wan't that. It was more like one of those dumbfire pets EQ mages and necros get, the ones that have fancy names but really just appear, do some burst damage and vanish. They're fancy spells with a visual is all. You'd have, say, Harley Quinn as your ally and when you called her she'd appear out of nowhere, do a big AE, then vanish. 

Big whoop.

Okay, they all also had some secondary and passive effects and there was some upgrade system you could use to enhance them but once I found out you'd barely get to see them before they left, I lost interest. Until now.

What's happening in the current update is a complete overhaul of the system to turn it into something a lot more appealing. Instead of just popping in, doing a special attack and leaving, now your allies will stick around for a while. Still, sadly, not for good like a proper Mercenary but long enough to cycle through their signature attack twice and do some regular fighting alongside you while they wait for it to recharge.

I mean, it's still not great, is it? But it is better. 

The name of the update is Superboy Ally and Ally Update, which doesn't even sound like something thought up by a committee. In a committee at least one person would have vetoed that gibberish. Seriously, who's naming these things now? I'd blame AI but clearly no AI would come up with anything that dull. It takes a human to be that unimaginitive.

Also, as you've probably spotted, it's "Superboy" in the lead, not Krypto. But where the Lad of Steel flies, can the Dog of Steel be far behind?

Well, yes and no. Krypto is part of the package but he's kind of Superboy's Ally, not yours. What happens is, you call on Superboy and Superboy calls on Krypto. 

Okay, technically you do the actual calling, too, in the form of burning a Supply Drop trinket. Nothing's ever simple, is it? 

And what's a Supply Drop trinket, anyway? It's a consumable you can get from a dispenser in your base or from a vendor or in various other ways. Again, I knew they existed but I've never bothered to use one, so I'm not speaking from personal experience.

I guess that's going to change. I'll have to do it at least once, just to see Krypto appear whereupon, I'm assured, he will attack enemies, weaken them with his super-bark and if anyone happens to get knocked down, attempt to revive them. I suppose that means I'll have to do some fighting just to see it happen. 

Also, as I have only just discovered, Krypto has been in the game as an actual Ally in his own right since 2022. So maybe I should just go to Cyborg and buy him. Cut out the middle-dog, so to speak. In fact, seeing he was once given away as a freebie, chances are I already have him and I've just forgotten about it. 

Oh, and Superboy will be there too, of course.

I have only a very vague understanding of who Superboy is in the DC Universe these days. 

I used to know exactly who he was. He was Superman when he was a boy. Just like Superbaby was Superboy when he was a baby. Even a kid could follow the logic.

I have literally hundreds of comic books featuring Superboy's adventures in and around Smallville, growing up on the Kent farm, going to Smallville High, hanging out with his best pal Pete Ross and, of course, courting and being courted by my favorite character in the entire Superman mythos, Lana Lang. 

Sadly, Superboy hasn't been young Clark Kent for a long time. I know Jon Kent had the name for a while but who's using it now I'd have look up. Hang on... let me do that... okay... that's a new one on me. 

So, in answer to my google query "Who is Superboy in 2025?", Gemini's summary reads

"In 2025, Superboy is primarily known as Kon-El, also known as Conner Kent. He is a genetic clone of Superman and Lex Luthor. Conner Kent is a prominent member of the Superman family and is known for his involvement with the Teen Titans and Young Justice. In the Young Justice animated series, he is a founding leader alongside Aqualad, Kid Flash, and Robin, and his relationship with Miss Martian is a significant part of his character. "

I'm not vouching for all the ancillary detail there but after cross-referencing the substantive point then, yes, it does seem that the Superboy we'll be allying with is going to be Conner, who I do actually remember from when I watched Titans. I seem to recall he was a colossal ass then but that was Titans. Everyone was. 

Anyway, I don't care about Conner. Or any of the Superboys, unless its the Silver Age Superboy I grew up with. I'd take him as an ally although it goes without saying I'd rather have Supergirl. Any of the Supergirl variants, really. And believe me, there are plenty of those.

Would I rather have Supergirl's pet Streaky the Super-Cat as an additional Ally instead of Krypto, though? Hmm. Not so sure about that. Streaky was always kinda sneaky. He had a great line in that side-eye cats like to give you. Also he was not exactly what you'd call reliable.

Moot point. No-one's offering me Streaky. Or Supergirl. I'll just have to settle for the boy and his dog. 

And after all that, the game has patched up and I can log in. I believe there's a bit of work to do before I can take possession of the pair ("Complete Patrol 3 in Campaign 2025", whatever that entails...) so I'd better get on with it.

I'll report back when I'm done. With pictures to prove it. 

You'll Believe A Dog Can... Run Really Fast?

It's going to be kind of a Grab Bag of TV and Movies today, I think. Hard to be sure. I'm making this up as I go along. Then again, what else do I ever do?

First up, Ted Danson's new Netflix hit show

A Man On The Inside

I straight up would never even have looked at this if it hadn't been for The Good Place. I'd always thought of Danson - assuming I ever thought about him at all, something I certainly wasn't in the habit of doing - largely as an amiable buffoon, someone who got lucky in the 'eighties and was coasting on that luck ever since. This, clearly, is complete nonsense.

Following his excellent comic turn in the afterlife sitcom, Ted appears here in another show from approximately the same team and turns in a subtle, nuanced and very moving performance, playing a recently-retired, recently-widowed professor, now so adrift from any kind of meaningful life he's been reduced to cutting out endless "interesting" articles from newspapers to send to his only daughter, a busy mother of three teenage boys, who has neither the time nor the inclination to read them.

That's how we see him as the series opens, anyway. From there, the extremely unlikely plot has him taking a job with a private detective agency to act as the titular man on the inside. The inside of a retirement home. 

Here's the thing about the plot: it's ludicrous but it's one hundred per cent internally consistent, which means it works. More impressive yet, even though I finished watching the show more than a week ago, I could very easily rehash the entire storyline here and now without having to look anything up. I can even remember the names of most of the characters. Given my memory these days, that's one heck of an endorsement.

The plot isn't the main reason to watch the show, of course. It's more of a sitcom than a mystery. Do we have a portmanteau name for those yet? We should. There are enough of them. Mystcom, maybe? Sittery? Someone workshop that for me...

The show has been very well received by both viewers and critics. About the only bad thing anyone seems to be able to find to say about it is that it may be very heartwarming but it's not that funny. I read a few comments like that before I watched the show for myself so it may be that I'd had my expectations lowered but it made me laugh. Quite a few times. 

As for the heartwarming part, it manages to walk that difficult line between sentimentality and genuine emotion with great facility. Danson himself is just about as good as you could imagine anyone being in the part, which isn't an easy one to play. It requires him to be sympathetic but also slightly annoying, amusing but also kind of sad. He also has to come across as basically competent while also being goofy and out of his depth.

Perhaps the toughest sell of all is his ability to get along with, well, everyone. You have to believe that both old and young people would find his character almost immediately appealing; that they'd want to spend time with him, listen to him, tell him stuff they might not tell anyone else. As an actor he's playing to the audience on the other side of the screen but his character is also playing to an audience on the inside, some of whom have no idea he's acting, some who suspect it and some who know. It requires a complex set of skills and Ted has them all.

Danson is the center and the star but as usual these days there's a whole ensemble of supporting roles, all of which are played well, some very well indeed. I particularly liked the three non-pensionable-age women who orbit around Ted in the roles of his actual daughter (Sometimes pretending to be his niece.) his employer (Sometimes pretending to be his daughter.)and the owner of the residential center where he pretends to have settled, who has the good fortune never to have to pretend to be anything other than the caring, empathic, over-worked professional she is.

It's an unusual show, especially for a hit, in that a lot of the roles are given to actors in their sixties, seventies and eighties. As someone in his mid-sixties, I imagine I'm supposed to find that an added attraction but actually I just found it a bit weird. I'm not entirely convinced old people in general like to watch other old people being old. I know I don't. They all do it very well, though.

The end of the final episode absolutely screams "Give us a a second season!" and I imagine there will be one, given the show's positive reception. One more will probably fly but it's very hard to see how the premise could be parlayed into a long-running series. I mean, just how many cases could there be that need a guy in his seventies, willing to act as a P.I.'s inside man to solve crimes? As many as make Netflix money, I guess.

I'd happily watch another eight episodes, anyway.

The Sticky

For reasons I already forget, I'm back watching Amazon Prime Video again after a months-long lay-off. It's good to leave the streaming services to lie fallow for a while. When you come back you find all kinds of new things have cropped up.

As soon as I came back I found this one being pushed at me in that unsubtle way Prime has, shoving its latest offerings to the front of the queue like a proud stage parent. I glance at the shills and mostly ignore them but this one caught my eye because of the peculiar title. The Sticky? Who the hell calls a show that?

The title, it transpires, refers to maple syrup. It's an odd name for a very odd show. It's a comedy crime romp (Cromedy? No, don't start that again.) inspired by an actual theft known as The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist.  The makers of the show are very concerned you know it's Not The True Story. Every episode starts with a disclaimer to that effect.

I'm not sure what they're worried about. Having watched all six episodes I feel safe in saying no-one could possibly mistake anything that happens here for reality. It's a black farce from start to finish. 

Every character, pretty much without exception, is a type and the playing, by and large, is directly to that type. Occasional hints of backstory or personality peep through the facade but mostly everyone sticks firmly to their assigned role, occasionally hamming it up like it's panto season.

That makes it sound shallower than it is. I thought it was pretty good fun all round even if it didn't have a lot of depth. 

I had been hoping it would be a Canadian version of the excellent Australian show Deadloch  and of all the shows I've seen, that is the one it most reminds me of, although it's nowhere near as funny or as dark. Still, the similarities are hard to miss. 

There's the abrasive, big city detective, sent to a small town to sort out a murder for a start. The extremely brief, barely acknowledged, sexual frisson between the incomer and the local cop even seemed as if it could be an intentional parody of the same relationship in Deadloch. Then there's the small-time power-broker, top of the local dung-heap, pushing their influence too far and getting their come-uppance. Plus there's swearing and casual violence and some solid one-liners but every show has those.

Mostly, though, The Sticky feels too odd to be derivitive, what with minor-key elements like one character being in a coma for the entire series and one of the supposedly most sympathetic characters running a mink farm. 

Peak weirdness arrives with the appearance of Jamie Lee Curtis's character, Bo Shea, a hit-person with a limp and a cane, who manages to be both terrifying and hilarious all at the same time. Her bravura turn in Episode 5 does a lot more than just steal the scene. It makes the show.

Curtis also co-produces, along with Jason Blum of Blumhouse and indeed the whole thing has the feel of a personal project, something someone with the power to make it happen thought would be fun to do. I imagine they were right. Jamie Lee certainly looks like she's having one hell of a good time as Bo. Luckily, it was fun to watch, too. I enjoyed it. I even laughed out loud a few times. 

Like A Man On The Inside, The Sticky ends with the clearest possible lead-in to a second series. I hope it gets one.

My Old Ass

From TV to movies. I've watched more movies this year than... well, in quite a while. Still, it hasn't been all that many - maybe half a dozen - but at least I feel like I'm getting into a rhythm. I'm optimistic for next year. I mean, one a month wouldn't be too much to shoot for, would it?

Two of the movies I watched in 2024 starred one of my top three current favorite actors, Aubrey Plaza. She's in the select group of people whose name on a cast list is all the information I require to add it to my watch-list.

In this case that could easily have led to disappointment and possibly anger. Not because there's anything intrinsically wrong with the movie. Just because Aubrey Plaza is hardly in it.

Okay, that's a slight exaggeration. She's probably present for about a third of the running time. The thing is, I have only ever seen My Old Ass referred to by the various movie and entertainment sites I follow as a movie "starring Aubrey Plaza", a claim that, not unreasonably, led me to believe she would be playing the lead. 

She is not. The lead is played by Maisy Stella and very well she plays it, too. Maisie is Elliot, just turned eighteen, in her last summer at home before leaving for college in the big city. Aubrey Plaza plays the same character at thirty-nine. 

Not to dwell too much on the plot, which once again has complete internal consistency and works perfectly even though objectively it makes literally no sense whatsoever, what happens is that Maisie takes a bunch of shrooms and hallucinates her older self, who proceeds to give her enigmatic advice about her future while bantering with her in a most amusing fashion.

When this happens, the film has already been running for a while. By the time the older Elliot (or her hallucinatory imago) disappear, maybe half an hour has passed and Aubrey Plaza been on screen for about ten minutes of it. 

It was at that point that I began wondering how they were going to keep her in the picture for the rest of the running time. It turns out it wasn't going to be a problem. They weren't.

For most of the rest of the movie, all we hear of Aubrey is her voice on Elliot's mobile phone which, through some form of metaphysical magic, she is able to use to talk to her older self from two decades in the past. Then even that stops and for quite a while there's no Aubrey at all until she makes a brief, visible and possibly physical return right at the end.

As I say, this could have led to my feeling somewhat cheated but fortunately Maisy Stella provides an entirely satisfactory substitute. The supporting cast, for once, is neither extensive nor particularly foregrounded, everyone pretty much sticking to their supporting roles and doing so solidly, without anyone being especially noticeable or memorable.

The exception, at least from my perspective, was Percy Hynes White as Chad, who stood out from the rest mainly because I did not like him at all for most of the time he was on screen. I did, eventually, come around to him but more through the writing than his performance, which I found quite annoying. You'e supposed to think he's a good guy, though, and I guess if you like goofy puppy-dog types, it tracks.

The script is by Megan Park, who also directed, doing a great job in both departments. This is a very high concept coming of age story and the absolute best thing about it is the way no-one ever attempts to explain how any of it is happening. The set-up verges on magical realism and the last thing you need with that is any kind of pseudo-scientific rationale.

At under ninety minutes, My Old Ass is short and bittersweet and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Even if I still do kind of feel like I was short-changed on the whole Aubrey Plaza deal.

Superman

Is it a movie? Is it a TV show? No, it's a Trailer!

I don't watch a lot of movies but I do watch a lot of trailers. They're a bit like demos for games, I think; sometimes the trailer's all you need.

That absolutely does not apply to the first trailer for the Superman movie, the one that's coming out next July, directed by James Gunn of Guardians of the Galaxy fame, now heir to the cursed throne of the DC Cinematic Universe. The link popped up in my NME feed yesterday, with the teaser headline "First ‘Superman’ trailer sees Krypto the Superdog make his live-action debut." 

I was more than a little curious to see the non-CGI Dog of Steel so I clicked through right away. And he's sooo cute! I mean, seriously! Krypto has been a lot of things since he first appeared in Adventure Comics #210 nearly seventy years ago but I don't believe "cute" has often been one of them. 

Most of that is down to his signature look. I've never been sure what breed he's meant to be - he looks like some kind of cross between a Staffie and a Labrador - but whatever it is, it doesn't scream cuddly ickle doggy. 

This time, instead of the smooth-haired look he's sported for all those decades, they've gone for a much rougher, tousled, almost-terrier appearance and I am so totally here for it! It's these small changes that sometimes make all the difference and even as a long-time fan, this make-over works for me.

It's not just Krypto, though. For a Superman fan, the whole trailer is just amazing. It hits exactly the right tone and sustains it for entire the 2.17 run time. I quite literally felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck watching this one and the moment it ended I watched it again, at which point I admit to tearing up a little.

If the YouTube comments are anything to go by, I was not alone in my immensely positive response. Superman has been made over so many times it's hard to believ upermae actor there could ever be a version that feels fresh but this promises to be the one. It's certainly going down well with actual DC comic fans, if not with those of former Superman actor Henry Cavill, which should at least make for good pre-release word of mouth.

Whether the finished movie will have any significant appeal beyond that demographic, I guess we'll just have to wait until next summer to find out but I hope so. DC - and super-hero movies in general - could do with a hit..

If there's one thing I really hope for this iteration, though, it's that it isn't just the damn origin story all over again. I appreciate the logic of the Groundhog Day approach: there's a new generation of movie-goers every decade and if the huge majority of the audience is going to be 12-24 every single time, you can't just assume everyone knows who your characters are...

But this Superman ffs! Everyone does know who he is. Just take the origin as read and move on.

Which is just what I'm going to do. Laters!

Forthcoming Attractions

I had a post almost ready for today but then I happened across something I felt I just had to share. I also had a couple of other things I've been waiting for a chance to mention and so...

Here we are!

I heard about it from NME, where I get most of my non-MMORPG gaming news these days. As it says in both the news report and the video, there's a demo out in a few days. Next Tuesday, to be precise. August 15 to be even more precise still.

Although I could scarcely be happier about the existence of this thing, I confess I'm somewhat puzzled by the format and the provenance. It's in the style of a first-generation Playstation game but the demo will be available on PC only, through itch.io. 

Since it's a fan-made project, I'm guessing it will only ever be available that way but who knows? I'm more interested in whether it's going to go on being available at all. 

As the developers hasten to make clear, "Blue Rose Team does not own the rights of the series." I'm not sure how far that disclaimer will take them, especially when they haven't even managed to get Mark Frost's name right: "Neither David Lynch nor Mark Forst are affiliatied with this project".

Proof-reading shortcomings aside, the video looks tone-perfect so I hope Messrs. Lynch and Forst .. er, Frost... are willing to let it slide. I'm looking forward to playing the demo and I'll no doubt have more to say about that when I'm done.

Speaking of looking forward to things... it's been a while but it's (almost) here!

It's the final season of Disenchantment, perhaps the least-loved of Matt Groening's creations but my own personal favorite. I'm very sorry this is going to be the last we see of Bean and the gang but at least they're getting a proper ending.

Season 5 Episode 1 debuts on Netflix on 1 September. There are ten episodes, the same as in all previous seasons, making a nice, round fifty in all. 

Other than that I have nothing to add because I've deliberately avoided finding out anything else about it. The last thing I want to do is spoilerize my own fun.

And finally...

I spotted a mention of this yesterday in one of the comic-related blogs I follow. I thought at first it must be a joke but it's not! It's real!

Sometimes I feel like a while back, around the turn of the millennium maybe, someone or something started tapping into my subconscious for tv and movie ideas. I mean, there's no other rational explanation, right? Otherwise, how do you explain something like that? 

It may not be great but it's sure to be a lot better than this. I mean, how could it not be?

At this point, I'd like to say "And that's all I got, folks!" Except it's not. But it is all I'm giving you. 

For now...

I'm Gonna Buy Me A Dog : DCUO

Palawa Joko's deluded fans may think he's all that, what with his Awakened armies and his stolen Inquest tech, but he's a very minor player in the megalomaniac leagues. These past couple of weeks I've been taking time off between beating back Joko's hourly invasions to deal with a much greater threat.

The Anti-Monitor doesn't just want to conquer and rule. He's here to devour. His purpose is to destroy universes. According to the wiki he's "directly responsible for more deaths than any other known DC supervillain, having destroyed thousands of Universes."

Apparently he was first encountered in DC's 1985 mini-series "Crisis On Infinite Earths", which I not only bought and read but even reviewed at some length in one of the fanzines I was writing for at the time. I remember the piece I wrote but I don't remember him at all.

He's back now, looming over Metropolis, occasionally intoning threats in a booming, robotic monotone, while his endless minions attempt to convert the population into anti-matter. I've been zipping around on my flying discs trying, rather successfully, to put a crimp in his nefarious plans.

Once a week I've even met him face to face in a raid instance, where I and seven of my closest friends-I've-never-met-before have given him a surprisingly hard time, considering he eats universes for breakfast. You might not think a cosmic entity hundreds of feet tall, responsible for the deaths of Supergirl and The Flash, able to "effortlessly withstand blows from Superman" would be bothered by a slightly-built girl hitting him on the ankle with a stick but apparently you'd be wrong.

 The continued existence of the known universe aside, the reason I'm doing this is to get a dog. Krypto, to be precise.

I mentioned my intention to dognap the El family pet in a previous post and now I'm happy to report the deed is done. In the end I did put down a part-payment via the cash shop. The event runs another week, ending on January 31, so I would almost certainly have had time to earn the whole 140 Qwardian Crowns required before the clock ran out but why take the risk?

I was up to 112 QCs this morning but I decided to cough up the 540 Daybreak Cash required and buy another fifty. That's effectively my free monthly stipend for All Access membership, which I rarely spend, although I think Daybreak have just about the best in-game cash shop in MMOs.

It's full of things I could and would use, from good consumables like Tracking Scrolls to gorgeous Prestige Houses. There's also a very extensive range of player-designed housing and cosmetic items. Remember Player Studio? Well that turned out to be one of SOE's wild ideas that lasted.

DCUO isn't one of the games that benefits from the ingenuity of player-creators, presumably either for technical or, more likely, licensing reasons. It's a pity because it's a perfect setting for it, what with the limitless potential for costumes in a super-hero game and the well-developed and implemented addition of quality housing via the Base system.

Speaking of bases, mine is coming along nicely. Quite a lot of housing items drop from the reward crates of events and there are frequently free hand-outs with new releases and updates. It's not up to the standards of even one of my lesser domiciles in EQ2 yet, but it's beginning to feel quite like home.

The one thing I was really missing was a house pet. I love my house pets in EQ2. They wander about as though they own the place, flapping and buzzing and whirring. It makes the place feel lived in.

My DCUO base is a bit cavernous and forbidding but the addition of a cheerful, lively pet makes a big difference. And Krypto really fills the bill. A YouTuber named Torikumu put together a nice video showing all the hound's best moves, which saves me the trouble. I wonder where he got that cat at the end?

In a piece of very poor timing I bought the crate just fifteen minutes before the server came down for weekly maintenance so I had to scrabble a bit to get everything placed and working in time to take a few screenshots. I'm looking forward to getting back in to spend some quality time with the pooch.

I'm not much of a dog person but Krypto and I do have a lot of history. I followed his adventures when I was a small child. My very favorite comic, growing up, was The Legion of Super-Heroes, with Superboy a close second and Krypto featured regularly in both.

It's kind of incredible when I think about it. More than fifty years on, both Superboy and the LSH aren't just still around, they've moved further towards the core of the culture than anyone back then could conceivably have imagined possible.

The Anti-Monitor event has been a lot of fun and the rewards have been excellent. Krypto was one of the more costly items on the event vendor and well worth saving up for but there are a load more goodies there worth having. If I have any Qwardian Crowns left over at the end of the week I'll be spending them on a few upgrades.

That Dog : DCUO

The main reason I still check Massively OP every day is for moments like this. I'd have been irked if I'd missed the chance to have Krypto running (or flying) around my superhero base.

Very irked. Not, it probably goes without saying, as irked as I'd be if I'd missed out on Streaky the Supercat (sadly not on offer - yet). I'd be be irked and then some. ("Irked" is an odd word, isn't it? Also, repeating it doesn't make it any less odd. Rather the reverse, in fact.)

Ahem. Getting back to the point, or at least to somewhere from which the point might possibly be seen with a decent pair of binoculars, I was a big fan of The Legion of Super Pets back when they were a thing, which was when I would have been about eight or nine, I guess.

From memory, the line-up was Krypto (Superboy's dog), Streaky (Supergirl's cat), Comet (Supergirl's horse), Beppo the Super-Monkey (some kind of lab animal?) and Proto (Chameleon Boy's pet). Four of the five had the powers of any Kryptonian, which made the Animal Avengers (as no-one ever called them, not least for reasons of copyright) pretty much the most dangerous bunch of animals ever to form a pack.

I do like to blend in.

Proto was merely a shapechanger, which you might have thought would have left him (it?) with a severe sense of inferiority but I seem to remember he (it?) was also the only one with human rather than animal thought processes. That made him the boss so it all worked out.

I haven't fact-checked any of that so don't quote me - imagining for a moment that any circumstance could possibly arise where you felt the need to. So far as I know, the LSP isn't about to make a comeback but you can never be absolutely sure.

Anyhoo...

I haven't played DCUO since November, when I got invited to join a guild and rashly accepted. I even suggested it might lead to regular team play. It didn't. I stopped playing altogether.

Thanks! I thought so.

 That was mostly down to bad timing. Things got very busy very quickly at work and it was all I could manage for a few weeks to come home and get a few dailies done in GW2. Unsurprisingly, when I logged in today to see about getting this dog, I found I'd been dumped from the DC Bombshells, so that's my putative grouping career over before it started. Although I got two more League invites this morning so maybe not.

For the time being, I cracked on with the new stuff alone. It's the sixth anniversary event, apparently, which surprised me. It feels like a lot longer than that since I finished the beta and made my first character when the game went live. Time is weird.

Things went a lot more easily than last time, when I was doing the Earth-3 event. I can't have spent more than five minutes skimming around The Watchtower before I found the right Terminal to get the starter quest and the right portal to enter the new zone.

I say "new". It's Metropolis with a sunrise filter. The antimatter glow matched my new look beautifully. I spent the first few minutes posing for myself and taking endless vanity shots.

Hang on a moment...isn't that the Sydney Opera House?

The exact part of Metropolis didn't seem all that familiar, now I come to think about it. I can't remember a marina with luxury yachts from any of my previous adventures. Maybe we're on the other side of the river, that part I've always looked at from on high and wondered why I couldn't go there.

This time the event didn't start with a compulsory group instance. It was straight into the usual collection of daily tasks. I've done enough of these now to realize they are always the same. You always have to kill some Officers or Leaders, destroy some Devices or Portals, Convert or Deprogram some citizens and reverse some Process or other. Plus there's an open-world group event where you just pile on.

I did all those and I did the solo instance as well. That was nice and short although the boss at the end was a bit tough. Probably shouldn't have started with that one. It went a lot better after the second death, when I stopped to renew my acquaintance with what my combat abilities actually do.

Flushed with undeserved confidence I decided to finish the session by queuing for the instance that completes the opening quest sequence. It turned out to be an eight-person "Event", which is a raid in DCUO terms.

That's me. The one with the scythe.

It went better than you might expect. Certainly better than I expected. Once I'd worked out how to queue as DPS I got an invite in a couple of minutes. I accepted and zoned in.

The loading screen offered me a tip about the importance of communication. It reminded me that co-operation was essential for success and that the game has built-in voice chat for that very purpose. It was strongly suggested that I use it or, if not, then I should at least talk in type. I joined my seven team-mates and we began.

No-one spoke, of course. There was no co-ordination, no co-operation and no communication. The mechanics were - fortunately - very simple and yet half the team ignored them. Players were fighting irrelevant NPCs in scattered clusters or alone while the Shards of Anti-Matter we were meant to be destroying went untouched.

Many "Vote" requests popped. Permission to leave the instance came up twice and was denied. Those players left anyway. Then someone else left. A request to open the instance to new recruits came up for voting and was denied.

I can't help feeling there's a pun here that I'm missing...

At this point I hadn't voted at all and it occurred to me that maybe my disavowal of my democratic responsibility was being read by the game as a default "No". I figured out how to vote and clicked "Yes" but the next vote still failed.

By then we were down to three players. I thought it unlikely three of us would beat a Boss intended for eight so when the next vote to open the instance to recruiting came up I made sure to Vote Yes. Finally the vote passed and in a matter of seconds we were back to full strength.

At that point we'd whittled down six of the nine Shards we were supposed to be handling as the "B Team" (as Oracle actually described us), while the "A Team" of real DC Superheroes (aka the NPCs) were runing a holding operation on the Anti-Monitor, the Big Bad set on devouring our universe. Literally. He eats universes. It's what he does.

The five new recruits seemed to be a lot more competent than the five dropouts. The rest of the Shards dropped in quick time and we joined the real heroes on the main target. It was slow progress for a while but we chipped away at his health bar, as you do, and I began to see light at the end of the tunnel.

After a single run through the dailies and main quest there was plenty I could have afforded but I'm holding out for the dog.

There was a frisson of uncertainty when we had to break off and kill twenty shadow demons before ten of them could get to the Anti-Monitor and charge him up (or something). He was running well ahead of us for a while but the final score was 20-7 in our favor.

We all piled back on him and he died fairly quickly after that. The Window of Unavoidable Judgment popped to show us all how we'd done and I looked for my name at the foot of the list. And didn't find it.

I thought at first I wasn't on the list at all. We'd had thirteen people in our eight-person instance in total. Maybe I dropped off the bottom. But no! I finally spotted my name - near the top. In second place on the DPS list, no less!

I tried to take a screenshot but of course I had it set to hide the UI so it didn't come out. You'll just have to take my word for it.

How many Qwardian Coins do you reckon that cost?

What I read into this unexpected proof of competence is that, as an Anniversary event, this thing has been tuned for players of the lowest possible skill level. I mean, I have no skill at all. I literally don't know what most of the buttons do and as for the complicated combos you're supposed to learn...

I just mash the mouse buttons as fast as possible and hit keys 1 to 6 at random to fire off specials. I don't know what they do either but I work on the principle that if they're off cooldown I might as well use them.

So long as I stick to the easy stuff it works. I played for over two hours. I had fun. I dinged a level. I made some money. I got some items for my base. I got an upgrade for one of my jewelry slots. Most importantly, though, I came away with 37 Qwardian Crowns, the currency needed to buy items from the event vendor.

Krypto costs 140 QC. I'm not sure how long the event runs but I would think I ought to be able to manage another three or four sessions before it finishes, which should give me more than enough. Especially if, like last year, there's a double QC weekend somewhere along the way.

Thirty seven down, a hundred and three to go.

If I do run into time trouble I have a fallback position. You can buy Qwardian Crowns for Daybreak Cash. The exchange rate is something like 450DBC for 50QC. If I find myself pushed for time I'll be happy to top up what I need from my 18k reservoir of unspent funny money.

I mean to have you, Krypto, even if it must be Pay To Win!