I Went To The Seaside And All I Got You Was This Dumb Post

I wasn't going to post at all today because Mrs Bhagpuss and I went to the seaside with Beryl so time was short when we got back. Well, I say seaside... for strict journalistic accuracy, I guess I should make that estuary. The real sea is just a tad too far from where we live for a comfortable day trip with a small dog. 

Still, the Victorians apparently didn't care much for the difference, since they built a very nice little town where the river widens out and goes tidal. There's a lovely walk along the headland, a promenade, a pier, some nice pebble beaches and plenty of rock pools for Beryl to paddle in, so who's counting?

As I said, I didn't think I'd have time for a post but it occurred to me I had a couple or three odds and ends I'd wanted to fit in somewhere and this seemed like as good an opportunity as I was going to get, so here we are. It might be Wednesday but it's Friday in my mind... or something like that. 

AI Predicts The Future!

First up, that Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent Competition. A few weeks back I posted about it in somewhat desultory fashion at the end of a piece about Google's AI chatbot, Bard. I wasn't very excited by any of the shortlist so I asked Bard "Who do you think will win and why?". 

Somewhat to my surprise, Bard had a very definite opinion, predicting, with some confidence, "I think that N’famady Kouyaté has a strong chance of winning." The result of the Battle of the Bands final, as reported by NME, although apparently not on the Glasto official site itself, as far as I can see, was announced yesterday. Guess who won?

Yep. Got it in one: N’famady Kouyaté.

Now, to be fair, I also had the balofonist down as the likely winner before I even asked Bard but even so... I wonder if Bard picks lottery numbers? 

We Mean It In A Loving Way!

In another callback to an earlier post, here's a video I meant to share a while ago but never found a suitable slot for. Oh, alright then, I forgot all about it. Happy now?

I thought it was funny but I guess you'd have to know the show. I wonder how much crossover there actually was, at the time it was originally broadcast, between the short-lived, cult TV series and people who actually play tabletop roleplaying games? I mean, it's not like D&D plays the same central of role in Freaks and Geeks that it does in Stranger Things. It's more of a bolt-on towards the end.

While I'm on the subject, I don't believe I've seen a single review of Honor Among Thieves anywhere in this part of the blogosphere. Did I miss someone's take on it or has no-one really had anything to say? Surely people must have seen it by now. I'd have thought a big-budget, critically-acclaimed, commercially successful movie based on a core component of our collective hobby might have triggered at least some kind of response. Then again, I haven't seen it and I think this is probably the first time I've mentioned it, so I can hardly talk, can I? 

And That's A Wrap!

Since TV's come up, here's another news story I spotted that I thought might be worth a note. It finally occurred to me that the third season of Stargirl hadn't turned up on Prime, so I did some googling and found it isn't going to happen. The Prime thing, that is. The third season of Stargirl, that's done. It's been and gone.

Why Prime isn't showing Season 3, when they showed 1 & 2 is anyone's guess. Well, money, I suppose. I'll have to watch it on DVD, which is fine. I'd like a hard copy to keep. I'd get the box of all three seasons, if they did one, which they don't. Whoever they are.

At least I know there isn't going to be a fourth season. The show's been cancelled. In an unusual move, though, two separate endings to Season 3 were shot; one for if they got renewed and one for if they didn't. It means the final season has a proper ending, for once.

I believe we were talking about that a while back. It seems like something showrunners and writers maybe ought to be considering as default option these days, although I guess it would be weird for the cast to shoot alternate endings for every season. Kind of like a recurring premonition of their own doom. 

It wouldn't be that hard to do, though. Most shows I can think of would be pretty easy to wrap up at the end of most seasons because what tends to happen is they tie a neat bow around the season arc anyway, then stick a foreboding cliffhanger on the end of that. Just crop it a bit and don't screen the lead-in to the series you didn't get. 

It Didn't Look Like This In The Shop!

And finally, I made BFF status with the latest on my Phantom hit-list, Urian. It happened a bit faster than I was expecting because I had a bit of luck with the latest event, the generically-named Fireworks Celebration, which is giving away handfuls of Ornate Gift Boxes, each worth a thousand points of Affection.

My glee was short-lived when I made the damn dress and put it on. I was - not unreasonably, I think - expecting it to look identical to the outfit Urian herself wears. The ones I got from Jenny, Johanne and Ave do. 

Unfortunately, whereas Urian's original is made of silk, the reproduction seems to be more like taffeta. It looks stiff and uncomfortable instead of free-flowing and instead of billowing, the long train sticks out to one side like a wonky bustle. It's not awful but it's not what I was expecting. 

I haven't decided whose look to appropriate next. I'll have to think a little more carefully about what the outfit's going to look like on my character, this time. Probably should have been doing that all along...

In other Noah's Heart news, there was another server merge recently. I didn't check who merged with whom but I'm guessing my server was the recipient because it seemed fairly busy before. Now it's busier still. 

How many more merges there'll be before the game goes dark I wouldn't like to say. Noah's Heart has such a minimal web presence I have to assume it's not going to be around for long. I hope it at least makes it to the first anniversary. I'd love to be able to say I played every day for a year straight.

And that's all I have for today. Let's be honest - it's a lot more than I thought I had!

Gamigo, Amazon Prime And Netflix Walk Into A Blog...

An odds and ends day today, I think. I can sense one or two larger topics looming out there in the mists but I can't quite make them out just yet, let alone line them up in my sights. I guess we'll just have to see what loose ideas I can find rolling around in the back of the land rover and make do with those.

How did I get into this metaphor and how do I make it stop?

Maybe it was listening to Gamigo's extremely bizarre opening pitch for their new MMO. Yes, apparently they're making one. Or someone is. I was under the impression Gamigo mostly bought the games other people had made, usually in some kind of fire sale. At least, that's how they got hold of Rift and ArcheAge and Trove. 

How's that going for them, then? Trove is probably doing quite nicely. It usually seems to be. Rift is languishing in the same maintenance limbo where it's been for about as long as I can remember. And ArcheAge has just been sold to Kakao.

Well, I say "sold". I can't actually see any figures in any of the press releases or news stories. They all say something like "Kakao Games will act as publisher for Korean developer XL Games!" or "Kakao Games is the New Publisher for ArcheAge" without explaining how that came about.

Given some of the harsh things I've read about Gamigo's custody of the Trion portfolio so far, I imagine a lot of ArcheAge players will be quite excited about the change of publisher but as an outside observer I'm more interested in some background about how and why it's happening. Did a contract expire? Was the game not making enough money to be worth continued investment? Was this an opportunity to resell at a profit? Was that the plan all along? Does it make it more likely Rift could be shunted off to yet another owner?

We rarely get to know the background to these moves. We just get to jump through a whole set of hoops when we transfer our accounts from one set of faceless landlords to the next. No word on that yet but I'm sure it's coming.

In the meantime, Gamigo just spat out the first gobbet of information about a new mmo they're going to be hosting. I say "mmo" rather than "mmorpg" for the simple reason that as yet we know almost nothing about it, not even what it's called.

It's a tried and trusted approach, the mysterious, staggered reveal. We've all seen it before. If you don't have a big IP to wave in everyone's face, it's a reliable way of building interest where none existed before. Gamigo look to be playing that card for everything it's worth and then some.

So far all we have is a video. A video that lasts six minutes and shows... absolutely nothing. The entire thing from start to finish consists of a single, static shot of a planet and a star. Over the course of the video the planet moves very slowly from right to left until by the end the star is occluded by maybe thirty per cent of the planetary mass.

That would be a meditative, calming, almost zen-like experience if it wasn't for the voiceover. As the planet crawls almost imperceptibly across the screen a really rather good actor reads a moderately well-written horror story in which a mother sacrifices her child in order to kill a demon. Or something.

It's a lot more nuanced than that. There are some odd, intriguing hints as to the setting and a discomfiting twist at the end. I am not going to attempt to summarize it. It's embedded above. No need to watch the screen while you listen.

And that's all we get, for now. Gamigo's Twitter feed promises more if people join in the fun: "Every 10 retweets will reveal more from this mystery." I'll wait for the summary, thanks.

If I had to guess, which I don't but I'm going to anyway, I'd say it's going to be a hack-and-slash horror-inflected gorefest themed around demon-hunting. If so, hard pass. The storytelling in the first teaser is good enough to make me withhold judgment until we find out more, though. One to keep an eye on, for now, at least.

What's that you say? It's not my show? Pardon me, but I think you'll find you're wrong.

The second season of Stargirl ended yesterday. Well, it did where I am. Probably already finished somewhere else. We tend to get most of the superhero TV shows late over here.

I really liked it although it was certainly less fluid and well-constructed than the first season, which was quite tightly structured by comparison. Season two also looked visibly cheaper than season one, which would be because less money was spent on it. I know, obvious. Doesn't always follow, though.

The show passed from the now-defunct DC Universe to the CW between seasons and you can tell. The CW never seems to have much of a budget for anything but in a way I think it helps. I like their take on fantasy and superhero storytelling in part because of the way they turn necessity into virtue. The lack of any budget for big, spectacular special effects and long drawn-out super-powered slugfests means they have to focus a lot harder on the characters and particularly their lives out of costume. That's always been the aspect of super-heroics that interests me the most.

The CW trades on teen soap operas with a superhero skin is what I'm saying. Most of their shows I've seen could be Beverly Hills 90210 with spandex and super-powers. Whether that works or not depends more on the strength of the acting and the script than who can punch who through a wall and mostly the both the scripts and the acting are of real comic-book quality.

That's a compliment, by the way. I'm a comic-book fan and a super-hero comic book fan at that. A mainstream super-hero comic book fan, even. I like cheesy dialog and plot twists that would never happen. I like logical inconsistencies and predictable outcomes. 

This is my anxious face. At least I think it is. Honestly, I'm better at the happy stuff.

I particularly like stylized characters who represent archetypes and Stargirl is chock-full of those. Some of the regular characters might struggle to show more than three emotions. Or as many as three for that matter.

That's what I'm looking for in something like this and Stargirl provides it reliably. The lead character (aka Courtney Whitmore, played by Brec Bassinger) is just ridiculously likeable, as is her stepfather, Pat Dugan (Luke Wilson), the ex-sidekick formerly and embarrassingly known as Stripesy. There are moments in Season Two where each of them is tasked with showing us their dark side and in both cases it's one of the least scary transformations I've ever seen.

Which is absolutely perfect. The two of them are the living embodiment of that version of the American super hero that has no dark side. No amount of provocation can bring to the surface something that isn't there to begin with. It does rip giant holes in the plot but who cares? It's what those kind of comics were always meant to be about and it's super-refreshing to see that inner light shine instead of the darkness at the heart of the rotten souls festering inside as exemplified by the likes of the Titans.

The real darkness, both metaphorical and... well, I guess also metaphorical albeit an entirely different metaphor, rests in the unlikely hands of a child and a very old man. Both Milo Stein, as the eight-year old avatar of big bad Eclipso and Jonathan Cake, as immortal not-so-black-as-he's-charcoalled villain the Shade, steal every scene they're in. 

Scariest thing in the whole show. Trust me.

Stein is either a superb actor for his age or someone is a magnificent director of children. He puts more nuance into a single line than most of the supporting actors manage in their entire character arc. Cake, meanwhile, plays the Shade with such arch camp as to appear to have arrived in Blue Valley not from another country or another dimension (both of which he has, in fact, done) but another production entirely, possibly a revival of Blithe Spirit.

Usually, when a season of a show I like comes to an end the first thing I do after the credits roll on the final episode is google whether there's going to be another season. I'm exceptionally happy to report that this time I didn't need to do that. The show ended with a caption announcing a third season entitled "Frenemies".

Since they'd spent the lengthy coda firmly establishing that just about everyone, including all the villains except Sinestro (Who, SPOILER ALERT! finishes the final episode as a piece of half-burnt toast. Yes, really.) were not only hanging around Stargirl's home town but setting up home right next to (or in one case inside) her house, it did seem the stage was being set for the next chapter. I'm just very glad that, for once, those scenes were written with the contracts already in place.

One thing that might be hard to explain to an audience brought up with the MCU or even the Batman and Spiderman movies that preceded the superheroification of cinema is the sheer joy of seeing characters from the comics brought to life on screen. It's something I grew up imagining would never happen. To a disturbing degree it doesn't even matter how well it's done. It's the old dog walking on its hind legs trick. Just to see it done at all is something.

I'm guessing the Dallas has to take whatever movies it can get.

Stargirl, which I guess is at least a peripheral part of what's awkwardly known as the Arrowverse, is almost profligate in the way it throws its references around. Drawing on the decades-long history of the Justice Society of America, there's no shortage of names to drop and characters to introduce but it's weirdly thrilling to be able to watch not just the new, teenage wearers of the Dr. Midnite goggles and the Wildcat claws but their older, timeworn forebears as well. And as for what's playing at the Blue Valley movie theater, well, I'd have to call it fan service - if I thought Prince Ra Man had any fans left. Or had ever had any to begin with.

Stargirl shows on Amazon Prime over here and as we all know Amazon is making strides towards becoming a force in gaming. Competing streaming platform Netflix appears to be harboring ambitions in that direction, too. This week they took their first steps with the release of five games for the platform. I knew it was coming but I got the news by way of what's becoming one of my more reliable news sources for game-related developments - the New Musical Express.

Okay, it's been just NME for a while now. I imagine plenty of people with the website in their feed don't even know or care what the letters stand for any more. It would be passing hard to guess, too, given almost half the items seem to relate to things other than music, especially video games.

As the article says, the initial tranche of games (Five in all.) includes two Stranger Things titles. I was a late-comer to Stranger Things but when I finally found it I was mightily impressed, particularly with the riveting third season. The thought of a game set in that milieu was more than a little intriguing, certainly interesting enough to get me to the Google Play store to check it out.

Funny. I must have missed the episode with all the gnomes.

Unfortunately, having looked as closely at the two titles as it's possible to do without going so far as to download and install them, I decided they weren't for me. They also don't appear to be new games, although I admit to finding the whole thing totally confusing on that score. There are YouTube walkthroughs for Stranger Things: 1984 from as long ago as 2017 and even the current Netflix version was apparently available in Poland back in August, while according to IMDB, Stranger Things 3: The Game came out in 2019.

I'm not quite sure why we should be expected to get excited about Netflix making some old mobile games available on its platform. I was expecting something a bit more impressive. I suppose if they'd been games I'd wanted to play it might have made a difference but even with the Stranger Things connection I do not want to go back to the kind of graphics and gameplay that I suffered through in the period the show depicts. There are quite a few things I miss about the '80s but eighties video games are not one of them.

I didn't look at the other three games, all of which look even less like anything I'd ever care about. I'll wait until Netflix offers up something more suited to my tastes, which I fully expect to be never.

And that'll do for now, I guess. Probably better think of something for tomorrow where I can use some genuine screenshots I took myself. I don't think screen grabs from TV shows count for IntPiPoMo even if I did take longer choosing and editing them than it took me to write the while damn post...

Stargirl Interlude

By the time I'd watched three seasons of the brutal, nihilistic Titans, followed immediately by two seasons of the occasionally sadistic if mostly playful Umbrella Academy, I was more than ready for something lighter, fluffier and, above all, more unironically and unequivocally heroic. There were several more superhero shows waiting in my Netflix watchlist - Defenders, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage - but before I could take a look to see if any of them might fit the bill I got an alert from my alternate streaming service, Amazon Prime.

I've found the prompts from both Prime and Netflix reliably useful so far. Their algorithms seem to be working well for me. This one felt exceptionally well-judged. It came at exactly the right moment, it featured a character whose guest appearances in another show I'd very much enjoyed and best of all I had absolutely no idea the show even existed.

The show in question is Stargirl, which is, I believe, the latest to roll off the DC Universe production line. As a lifelong DC fan I was very slow to pick up on the bleedthrough from comics to small screen. I'm still very much playing catch-up. Now I'm back in the fold, though, I do try to keep up with what's happening and I would have been quite annoyed with myself for missing this one.

Luckily, I didn't. I might not have known anyone was making a Stargirl tv show but thanks to the Prime prompt I still managed to watch the first season at the earleist opportunity. Earliest in the U.K. at least. We get everything good late.

So, was it any good? And did it manage to wash away some of the bitter aftertaste left by the self-serving cynicism of the aforementioned shows?

Well... yes and no. To both questions.

Whether you're likely to think Stargirl is any good or not depends on your tolerance for typical teen angst as served up by any number of previous CW dramas. That's somewhat misleading, since the CW didn't make Stargirl. DC Universe did. Only DC Universe is no more and Stargirl, whose second season has been commissioned, has gone not to HBO Max but to the CW. Which, honestly, does feel like its natural home.

Even with my extremely high tolerance for high school drama, I was hoping the show would keep the school stuff in the background. It does, although whether it will when the production moves across is another matter. But that's a problem for another day, another Season.

The other thing you'll probably need to have if you're going to enjoy Stargirl is an extremely robust suspension of disbelief. Even by the standards of superhero comics there's one heck of a lot of handwaving required if you're going to get past some of the extremely unlikely choices and decisions made by various characters at pretty much every turn.

I inevitably end up comparing almost every ensemble show with a supernormal teenage cast to the lodestone, Buffy. That's patently unfair but it's often revealing. Take a single, pertinent event that occurs in both shows: the discovery by the title character's mother that she has a daughter who spends her evenings climbing out of her bedroom window to do battle with the superpowerful entities who infest the supposedly sleepy small town in which they live.

How long did it take Joyce Summers to come to terms with the knowledge that Buffy was a Slayer? Did she ever, really? It was a long, slow, traumatic process for both of them, one which I sometimes found difficult to watch. Stargirl's mother, Barbara, adjusts to the news within twenty-four hours, mostly by dint of a bit of googling.

Almost every character seems to have a moment like that. Some have several. And even if you're coping well with their apparent emotional flexibility you still need to deal with their astonishing technological prowess. Stargirl's step-dad, Starman's sidekick Stripesy in a former life, somehow manages to construct - out of old car parts, no less -  a "robot" that acts as as a cross between a Transformer and one of Iron Man's suits.

There's a lot of this kind of stuff. I loved it. It was exactly what I was looking for. It could almost have come from the DC comics I grew up with. It has that silly sixties sparkle. Or maybe fifties, because the nineteen-fifties are something of a trope in Stargirl's aesthetics and soundscape, largely via Pat, who gives the impression of having been around back then even though he looks about thirty-eight.

So, all good then? All the blood-smeared scar tissue left by Titans and the Umbrella Academy nicely wiped clean with good, wholesome superheroics? Yeah, not really.

Stargirl herself, along with her once-again sidekicked step-father, now re-branded as S.T.R.I.P.E. are unambiguously honorable, heroic characters. Proper, old-school, duty-driven superheroes. The rest of the teen Justice Society of America, recruited by Stargirl in mid-season, all have significant, well-telegraphed "flaws" (obsessive and self-centered, angry all the time, bitter and betrayed) but they all do a pretty good job of rising above them.

Until one crucial moment in the season finale, that is. When one of them kills someone.

I won't say who kills who because spoilers but it's a genuinely a shocking moment. Not in the stlye of Titans or the Umbrella Academy, where the shock comes from how vicious or violent or psychopathic the supposed heroes are being, but because of how unexpected it is.

And that's good. But it's still a teenage superhero killing someone in a supposedly fluffy show. The rules have changed, after all.

It's tempting to make excuses. After all, while the good guys are, by and large, genuinely good here, the bad guys are really, really bad. Sadistic, brutal, terrifying. There are a lot of them and all of them are completely horrible. I'd struggle to say which one I detested the most.

Which is probably how it should be. Once again, standards have changed. In the sixties the villains would have been buffoons or caricatures. The Injustice Society seem more suited to the eighties and nineties, when sociopaths were very much in vogue.

It's an odd dichotomy, the fifties/sixties heroes up against the eighties/nineties villains. It works, but not comfortably. And heroes still shouldn't kill. Not those heroes.

If what you're after is fundementally decent heroes and existentially evil villains butting heads under comic-book rules, then Stargirl serves it up consistently, even if the premise itself feels far from consistent. It helps that the action is well choreographed, the writing solid and the acting better than decent.

Brec Bassinger as Courtney "Stargirl" Whitmore is close to perfect in the lead and there are some stand-out supporting performances, particularly Luke Wilson as Pat, Stargirl's long-suffering stepdad and Meg De Lacey as Cindy Berman, our hero's ineffably entitled nemesis. Trae Romano, Courtney's "little brother" Mike, steals just about every scene he's in. I could live without the bulldog but at least he doesn't get any lines.

I thoroughly enjoyed every episode and the two-part season finale is one of the better series climaxes I've seen. Except for the slightly bathetic "after the crisis" Christmas cooldown, that is. I'd have left that out.

Of course, as Wilhelm was bemoaning, now we have to wait. That's the problem with watching things when they're new. Plus there's the added frisson of the change of ownership. As I found recently with Lucifer, that can be a bit of a wildcard. I don't find Geoff Johns' promise that Season 2 will be "different" terribly reassuring, either.

Then again, by the time I get to watch it, maybe I won't remember what Season One was like, anyway.