Games, Music, TV, Books... It Must Be The Grab-Bag!

Today, I believe we shall have a grab-bag of various odds and ends. Even though it is Thursday. Because tomorrow I believe we shall have a music post and on the weekend we shall have nothing at all. Because I have to work.

So, let us see what is in the bag. 

Oh, look! Surprise, surprise! Another email from Playable Worlds! It must be a day ending in "y".And what do they have to tell us this time? Something new and unexpected!

Painting The Galaxy Red

It seems Stars Reach has a story. Who knew? Seriously, though. Anyone?

I mean, they have been putting out those really rather quite good short stories on the website while pretty much telling no-one they were doing it but other than that I'm not sure we've heard anything about any lore underpinning the game.

It's an exaggeration to say there's a story. And after all, the game doesn't need one. Raph is very keen to let everyone know Stars Reach is a "true sandbox". Apparently, though, there is some lore behind it all. Well, a paragraph, at least:

"You are one of 8 kinds of humans who have destroyed their homeworlds. Thanks to the TransPlanetary League, a government formed by the eight types of humanity, you have been given a second chance to leave your homeworld behind to head out into the larger galaxy. They’ll hand you a simple blaster, starter tools, and basic training before letting you loose to make a new life among the stars."

There you go. Now you know.  You're basically the scum of the galaxy, one of the surviving members of a bunch of losers who somehow managed to fuck up their own planets so badly they can't live there any more. Now the whole gang of environmental criminals has come together to spread their incompetence and destruction far and wide across the entire galaxy. 

It's not what I'd call an inspiring start. It's dangerously close to "Colonialization: the Space Sim". I was particularly unimpressed to learn that the first and presumably most important item the authorities issue you with is a gun. Get out there, kill anything that gets in your way, take their stuff. Pretty much Colonialism 101, isn't it? 

I'm not sure PW is reading the room here. This sort of stuff isn't going down too well in certain circles just now but it's too popular altogether in others. Which side do you want to be on? 

Less controversially but equally surprisingly, there's a whole lot more in the email about stuff that's not in the pre-alpha. Things like character stats (There are nine of them, apparently.) and quests (There will be some and you'll be able to make your own, too.). There's also a map of the galaxy although it's unclear if it's just an indication of how things will work in general or a specific, accurate map of all the locations that are going to be in the game. 

There's even a flow-chart of what you can do in Stars Reach. Or more accurately will be able to do when it's there. It's mostly not there now, I'm fairly sure...

One thing that did catch my attention was this: 

"A planet is a zone. A part of space is a zone. Zones are connected by wormholes." 

I guess that pretty much puts paid to the idea of spaceships. It's going to be old-school zoning, albeit dressed up as going through "wormholes", I guess. Which is what we're seeing in pre-alpha, minus the wormholes part.

Why Call Her Back From Heaven?

There's going to be a Buffy reboot and Sarah Michelle Gellar is going to be in it!

Really good news. If it ever happens. It's kind of a long way out still but getting closer all the time.

According to Variety, the project is currently "nearing a pilot order" with Hulu, which I think means that someone might be about to green-light a pilot that might get picked up for a series. Sarah Michelle Gellar is also "in final talks" to star in it, so that's not even a certainty, either. 

If it ever happens, it sounds like they have a solid framework, anyway. SMG (Weird acronym...) would appear as a "recurring character" in a mentor role to a new Slayer, which I guess makes her the reboot's Giles. There is the small problem of the way the original series ended, which was with hundreds - maybe thousands - of Slayers appearing across the world but I'm sure that's easily solvable with magic.

The new show, if it comes, will be directed by the Oscar-winning Chloé Zhao. The Zuckerman sisters will write and act as showrunners and Dolly Parton is signed up as Executive Producer, as she was for the original. If they can't get commissioned with a team like that then the money-men really do know nothing.

I'm optimistic but of course, even if it goes ahead, it'll be a looooong wait.

When She's On Her Way To Hell

Sabrina, that is. Sadly, I don't have news of a Chilling Adventures reboot but I am here to recommend Sarah Rees Brennan's trilogy of novelizations of the TV show. I got the set for Christmas, I've just finished the third book and they're all excellent.

Novelizations of TV shows and movies are often so much better than they need to be but these are really outstanding. Not only are they very well-written indeed, they're beautifully designed and packaged as a set. If we had them at work, which of course we don't because we never have the books I want to read, they'd make an excellent display.

The most impressive thing about the trilogy, though, is the way it adds insight into what you see and hear in the show itself. One thing novels handle much better than television or the movies is interior monologue and there's often plenty of that in novelizations but SRB (Much better.) goes well beyond the normal "here's what they were thinking in that scene you remember". 

The three books all employ a different technique and within each there are several more. Only Sabrina ever gives her thoughts in first person but in one of the volumes all the characters' thoughts are represented in idiosyncratic mental registers that sometimes align with but more often diverge from what's shown in the series.

It was so well-done that at first I thought it was being done badly. I felt the author was contradicting both the canonical content of the show and her own, earlier interpretation. As I read on, though, I began to realize she was doing something much more subtle and clever - allowing us to hear not just the private thoughts of the characters but to hear those thoughts from each character's own, unmediated perspective, something often quite different from the way the character wants others to perceive them.

It's a damn good trick if you can pull it off and Brennan very much can. Unfortunately, the trick she apparently couldn't manage was to get the publishers (Scholastic, possibly the last publisher you'd expect to publish a book with a dedication from the author that literally ends with "Hail Satan".) to stump up for more than three books once the series got canned, so the third book ends right in the middle of a tale now most unlikely ever to be told. 

The upshot of all of this is that I really, really want to re-watch the entire series again and also that I'm now extremely likely to read anything else by Sarah Rees Brennan I can get my hands on. She's written some original fantasy but she seems to specialize in novelizations of YA supernatural series. I'm going to have to get hold of her Shadowhunters and WINX adaptations, one of which was published under the name Ava Corrigan for some reason, although she can't have been more uncomfortable being known as the author of a WINX spin-off as I will be if anyone asks me what I'm reading, when I'm reading it in the lunch room at work.

Also, I need to read the comic-book continuation of Chilling Adventures, which was brutally curtailed at the end of Season 4 by the evil Netflix, that ultimate villain no televised hero can ever defeat. The continued adventures of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in comic-book form after the series ended were absolutely top-notch so, once again, I'm optimistic.

Home Is The Hunter

Blizzard is finally getting around to adding housing to World of Warcraft and Grimtooth of Not All Hunters is feeling ambivalent about it. So would I be, if I could be bothered feeling anything at all.

It's a mark of how far I've drifted from the anchor that held me to the MMORPG scene for so long that I haven't even felt a momentary urge to revisit Guild Wars 2 to see what the housing there is like. Now I find I don't feel much more inclined to revisit WoW to check out the accommodation there, either.

Of course, at the moment there's nothing to see. Not even a prototype. Some artist's impressions, like the architect's models you see in the showrooms of house-builders, and that's all.

We do have some idea now of what Blizzard intends, though, and I have to say it doesn't look at all bad. MassivelyOP reported yesterday on what they're calling "the design pillars for World of Warcraft's accessible neighborhood housing". It's an encouraging document, including as it does "Boundless Self-Expression" as the first and foremost pillar. I think that means decorating. If so, I'm all for it.

The second pillar, "Deeply Social", interests me not at all but the third, "Long-Lasting Journey" is welcome news. At least, it is as far as it goes, which isn't nearly far enough. 

Despite calling it "an evergreen addition to the game", the timescales to which the press release alludes - "multiple patches and into future expansions" - don't feel as reassuring as they should. Once you add housing, it needs to be there for the lifetime of the game. If not, don't bother.

Grimtooth's take on all this is interesting since it focuses not on the housing players are going to see but on the cost to Blizzard of adding it to the game, particularly in terms of server load. I've rarely seen anyone even mention this side of the housing issue before and I've certainly never thought much about it myself. 

Maybe it explains why Yoshi P. always seems so reluctant to give every Final Fantasy XIV player free access to the housing they want. I always thought that was to create artificial scarcity and thereby instill FOMO but maybe it's more like fear of drowning the rest of the game in housing-induced lag.

Just about every other MMORPG manages to provide housing of one sort or another, though, so I'm sure Blizzard can do it. I don't imagine I'll care enough to re-sub but if there's a shack or a hut going for players on the Endless Free Trial then I'll be happy to grab mine. I'm guessing that won't be until next year but who knows? It is in the Roadmap for 2025, I believe.

And that'll do for now. As always, let's finish with a song, even if we're getting a whole post full of them tomorrow.

Woman Driver - The Pill

There are two bands (At least.) called The Pill. This is the one I like. They remind me of Shampoo, a bit, as well as a certain other band from the same place they come from, the Isle of Wight. You know who I mean.

We might have another from them tomorrow.

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

Just the header image but the process was interesting. I wanted to use a composite shot of Buffy and Sabrina. I could have found a couple of pictures and photo-shoppped them together myself but I'd been at this for a while and I was in a hurry so I googled for one someone else had done. I found a good one but then I started to get uncomfortable about just pinching it so I thought I'd mess around with it and make the provenance a bit less obvious.

I ran it through a couple of filters in Paint.net, trimmed it a bit, removed all the text and finally re-rendered it as an ink sketch. It looked good but still altogether too much like the original, so I had the bright idea of laundering it through AI. I uploaded the image to NightCafe and let Flux Schnell have a run at it with the prompt "Movie poster, technicolor, widescreen, 1950s"

At the default settings, that produced something utterly unrecognizable, as if the AI had completely ignored the uploaded image altogether. I pushed the Noise Weight slider all the way back to zero to make the model stick rigidly to the starting image and that gave me the version above. About all it seems to have done is make Buffy's face a little harder and add a night scene with a car in the deep background, which I rather like.

The interesting part about all this to me is what it does or doesn't do to the ownership of the image and the rights that adhere to it. The picture I started with came from YouTube and was almost certainly constructed from other images from elsewhere on the web, presumably culled directly from the shows' PR materials. The image at the top of this post is an AI-generated interpretation of an algorithmically produced "sketch" based on a modified copy of a screen-grab from YouTube, taken using the Screenshot facility provided by YouTube itself. 

I'm not sure that's any cleaner, morally or legally, than just stealing the image would have been in the first place, although as far as I understand it, as an AI image it now can't be legally claimed by anyone. I'll credit the creator anyway. It's a channel called Doing OK.

"Look What The Black Cat Dragged In!"

Don't think I even have time tonight for the promised (Or is that threatened?) Narnia mash-up. I have all the pictures but as I learned last night I'm not capable of just putting them up and walking away. I have to editorialise and in the end it takes as long as writing a proper post, so that's kind of missing the point.

Luckily I have the old fall-back to fall back on. Music videos! Got a couple and a couple of reasons for using them, too. Always good to have a reason.

The first is something I wanted to crowbar into yesterday's post but couldn't find a delicate way to do it. Delicate crowbarring. Now, there's a concept to conjure with. Conjuring with crowbars, even better. What was I talking about?

Oh, yes, the video. It's Nine Stories by Hazel English. Pretty obvious why I wanted to get it in somehow. Better now than never.

It's a slice of sweet indie pop with a bubbling beat and a vocal that sounds like it was recorded through a sock. Several socks. Probably thermal. I don't want to come over like one of those fathers in a 1960s teensploitation movie but I really can't understand the words. 

Of course, by "understand" I mean "make out". I can understand what they mean, now I read them at Genius.com. They're pretty simple to understand or they seem to be. I know lyrics are seldom as surfaced as they appear but it's what I'm going with for now. 

The only conection with the book that gives the song its title would appear to be the first few lines

"You lent me Nine Stories
While you starred in mine
We talked about J.D
In your car..."

It's enough. I mean, I didn't even talk about him.

The other video is "3 Small Words", a candypop slammer from the soundtrack to Josie and the Pussycats, done live by Letters To Cleo, whose singer, Kay Handley, was the voice of Josie in the movie (Something which takes more digging to authenticate than it should.) and the always entertaining Charly Bliss, who are currently supporting LTC on tour, a billing order that surprised me. 

The result is one of the most mood-lifting spectacles I've seen for quite a while.

Seriously, if that doesn't at least make you remember what it felt like to be happy, you may want to check your pulse. I had that much energy once, you know and some of it was even my own.

Other than the sheer, innocent, exuberant joy of it, the reason (Remember, I said I had one.) for wanting to put it up is because Riverdale is back in my thoughts and back on Netflix. Last time I mentioned the show (I'd link but I can't find the post. Maybe I only thought-wrote it.) we'd just gotten to the end of Season Five and everything had gone totally telenovella. 

I wasn't sure there was going to be another season but not only is there, it's now! It's also short. Five episodes. Actually, that's just half a season. Then it goes on hiatus for a few months to return in March next year.

That would be good enough but there's more. So much more. Remember how peeved I was over the way longish-running shows seem to get cancelled these days with no view to giving the fans either the catharsis they need or the satisfaction they deserve? One of those shows was The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which ended (BIG spoiler...) with Sabrina dead and gone to heaven. It was kinda cool but kinda fucking annoying at the same time.

When it happened, I wondered why, since TCAOS and Riverdale both take place in the same 'verse and have the same showrunner, some sort of deal couldn't have been worked out to integrate the two. Well guess what!

Oh, you guessed. I kinda teed that one up a little, didn't I? The picture at the top of the post may have been a clue, too.

Season Six of Riverdale, which is "in-canon and within the continuity" features the return of everyone's favorite teenage witch. Just like in the trailer (I could give you a couple of thousand words on that trailer, by the way. Maybe just on Cheryl.) Sabrina doesn't turn up until the end but I'm hoping she'll be sticking around for the second half of the season, when it finally gets here.

That just leaves me with the familiar quandry: whether to watch the weekly episodes as they drop or to hold my nerve and watch them all in quick succession at the end. I've tried it both ways this year. I waited for The Expanse (Also soon to return.) but I watched each episode of Stargirl as it came. 

My preference is to watch one episode a day. I wish someone would try that for a cadence once in a while. Or maybe they have and it's something I don't watch. 

I don't watch everything. Just the good ones.

Pumpkin, Pumpkin

It's that time of year again. Pumpkins, candles, spooky stories, all that stuff. It's going to be a bit of a strange one out in the real world. Can't imagine too many people wanting to take their kids trick or treating in the middle of a pandemic, although then again...

Nothing to stop the celebrations going ahead as usual in virtuality, though. There's no need to socially distance in cyberspace although ironically most of our characters are probably wearing masks anyway. 

Next week sees the return of the indescribably dubious Mad King shenanigans in Guild Wars 2. Seriously, does anyone at ArenaNet ever actually listen to the argument between Mad King Thorn and The Bloody Prince? It was disturbing enough when I first heard it nearly a decade ago but the world has changed quite a bit since then. There are things that sounded "edgy" in 2012 that just sound completely off in 2020 and that routine is definitely one of them.

Then again, maybe my pop culture compass needs re-calibrating. I watched the first episode of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina last night. It felt like it would be seasonable and I thought it would make a nice wind-down from the harrowing six seasons of Bojack Horseman I just put myself through. I mean, it's Sabrina the Teenage Witch, right? The girl from the Archie comics? The one with the extraordinarily badly-animated cat?

 

Yeah... no. Not really. So, Sabrina's an actual satanist now. And the cat's a demon. And her wacky aunts drain the blood from human corpses for their satanic rituals before eating the leftover flesh for dinner. But, hey, Sabrina's gender politics are impeccable, so there's that. I will, of course, be watching the rest of the series. The first episode was pretty good, even if I did literally have to close my eyes for two whole scenes. A fluffy, relaxing romp, though? I don't think so.

Bad taste dialog notwithstanding, I'll most likely still end up running round and round the Mad King's maze with my Necromancer, firing off ground target AEs and hoovering up the loot. Some people do it all day for the entire event and make tens of thousands of gold or so they claim. It was always mindless but with the addition of the autoloot mastery it's now so mechanical it's hard to stay awake. I can usually manage about an hour before I'm literally nodding off at the keyboard. 

Other than that I probably won't bother with any of the other activities. They're always the same, near as makes no difference, and I've done all of them more than enough times already. 

Nights of the Dead has already begun over in EverQuest II. The options there are staggering. It's one of the big holidays of the year and SOE/Daybreak/Darkpaw add something new every time. In a decade and a half that really adds up.

The quality is high, too. There are several big set piece events - the Hedge Maze, the Haunted Mansion, Wake the Dead and so on - as well as a wealth of collections, achievements, quests and crafting activities. New this year is a series of Overseer quests given by a halfling on the Nektulos Forest docks and an upgraded version of the Headless Horseman public quest, now with new loot.

I did the PQ twice yesterday. It was popular. There were three instances of Nek Forest up whenever I logged in and people were calling the event as it started and sending out raid invites. It took about ten minutes to kill him each time and everyone was very good humored about it.

Drops were good, although I have to wonder what the point is right now, with the panda quests already giving out items for just about every slot that are better than anything else I've had all year and certainly better than the PQ drops I've seen so far.  

If the last few years are anything to go by, the panda quests will upgrade most anything a solo player's likely to be wearing, then a few weeks after that finishes we'll get the expansion and a box on the floor next to the first questgiver will upgrade the panda gear. Then the quest rewards from the signature questline will upgrade the stuff from the box and the drops from the third season of Overseer quests (not yet confirmed but you know there will be one) will upgrade everything from the Sig line and on we go with the dance.

It's how the game works. Nothing is permanent and most things barely last a couple of months. I like it. It gives me things to do along with a spurious sense of purpose and satisfaction but I can see how some people might find it wearing.  

I might do a few of the other Nights of the Dead events just for fun. The PQ requires someone to have the lost necklace from the Hedge Maze to get it started so there's an element of social responsibility there. And even as I fact-check for this post I see there are a couple of events I can't remember ever doing so maybe I'll give those a go, too.

I imagine just about every MMORPG will have some kind of Halloween-related event on the slate. Probably quite a few unmassive live service games, too. Like Christmas, it seems to be a holiday no-one can resist. I never really paid much attention to it at all before I started playing MMORPGs but it's firmly on my calendar now.