Stranger Things Season 5 - A Rambling Review

I came late to Stranger Things, mostly because I came late to Netflix. The two are symbiotes, of course. You can't have one without the other.

When I did finally get a Netflix account, it wasn't to watch the platform's flagship show. I subbed for The Umbrella Academy but once I was in I started to work my way through all the other shows that interested me. And even then, Stranger Things wasn't all that close to the top of my list.

That was Netflix marketing department's fault. By then, I'd had a certain amount of involuntary exposure to the show through advertising and merchandise and all of it had confirmed a couple of things in my mind: it was some kind of kids' show and it was all about 'eighties nostalgia. If I'd stopped to parse that I might have seen the paradox: kids have no nostalgia for the eighties (They might have anemoia but that doesn't sell subscriptions.) 

I also had the vaguest notion the show had some kind of fantasy or science fiction edge but if I thought about it at all I figured it would be something like a junior version of The X-Files, one of those Monster of the Week kind of deals. And then I watched the first season and it wasn't quite like that at all. 

I just checked my notes to see if what I've written today tallies with what I wrote back when I first mentioned the show here, five years ago. It tracks almost exactly, even to the repetition of the same reference points and analogies. It's reassuring and worrying to see that kind of consistency.

So, here we are, more than a decade after the show began, half a decade after I started watching it. And now it's over. There will be no more. (Probably. Never say never where money's involved. Also the Duffers have said there will be more. Just not more of the same.) 

How did Stranger Things go out? Banging or whimpering?

Hmm. I'm going to say upfront that I loved the final episode. It was two hours long and I don't watch anything that length any more. I was dreading having to sit there for a whole two hours, let alone having to do it with the existential fear of disappointment hanging over me like a fog. 

And then the hours just flew by. I didn't notice time passing at all, until right at the end, when I was hoping there was more of it left than there was. The finale was an unalloyed joy from beginning to end. A triumph.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the whole of the final season. All eight episodes. I even appreciated the odd cadence Netflix chose, split around Christmas and the New Year. It did have the intended effect of making the whole thing feel like an event.

So, what did I like about it? Oh, just liitle things, like how it looked, how it sounded, the dialog, the characters, the action.... 

There were a few things I was less sure about... 

Ah, yes. Reviews always focus on the negatives, don't they? It's what people like to read and what reviewers like to write about. Why shy away from it?

Okay, it's the plot. Everyone knows it's the plot, right? 

I'd need to re-watch to be absolutely certain but my memory tells me the first three season were plotted extremely precisely. Chokingly tight. No holes to be found.

Then there was Season Four, where the threads began to unravel and the holes began to appear. And now, in Season Five, there are more holes than thread and you could drive Murray's truck through some of them. Sideways. 

This is where the inevitable SPOILER WARNING appears. Imagine a siren and flashing lights. 

We'd be here a long, long time if I tried to list all the moments I widened my eyes and mouthed a silently "Really?" A couple stand out, the kidnapping of Derek's family in Episode 3 most notably. Glaringly. Incomprehensibly.

Nothing at all about it makes any sense whatsoever. How it's done. Why it's done. That it's done. But even giving all of that a pass, which would be a loooong Hail Mary, once it's done, the entire farrago is just... forgotten.

Having been drugged, kidnapped, threatened and traumatized, Derek, one of several excellent additions to the ever-growing cast, goes on to play a significant part in the rest of the season. His parents and sister, likewise drugged and kidnapped, along with having their house almost completely destroyed, are literally never heard of again. 

The last I remember seeing of them, they were still tied up and unconscious in a deserted barn, somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. None of the cast ever mentions either them or the incident again, other than for a couple of ironic call-backs, when the idea of further kidnappings are vetoed.

Oh, wait... except there's that key plot point a few episodes later, when Derek is dissuaded from backing Holly's attempt to convince the other children of Henry's villainy, by Henry showing him a vision of the his parents and sister lying dead, blood seeping from their eyes.  

Now he cares! Has he spared a thought for them any time since? Has he hell! But then, why should he? Neither has anyone else, most especially not the writers.

It may be there's something I'm forgetting here. Was there a brief explanation I missed, a fleeting scene where the rest of Derek's family are shown, safe and well? Not traumatized at all. Not being interviewed by the authorities about the whole lunatic experience. Remind me of it in the comments, please, if I missed it. I'd like to go back and see it happen.

One thing I definitely didn't miss, because it happens All. The. Time. is the vast number of murders committed by many, perhaps most, of the main cast. How many soldiers do they kill? It seems like it has to be hundreds. Nancy and Hopper alone must have scores of confirmed kills to their names. And no-one cares.

Granted, the soldiers are The Enemy. Well, one of the enemies. Granted, the whole Hawkins/Upside Down deal is a head-fuck. Even so, the complete lack of affect shown by every single character, whenever they shoot or stab or blow someone up is... surprising.

Not as surprising, however, as the complete absence of any consequences whatsoever. If I had to name the single most unbelievable aspect of the entire final season, it would have to be the "18 Months Later" coda, in which the army appears to have completely capitulated, left Hawkins and given everyone a pass for everything that happened, including having killed maybe hundreds of serving members of the U.S. military. 

At no point in the entire history of the show have we seen the slightest sign of compassion from the military-industrial complex that forms the real villain in the show. Okay, alright, there was that part in Season Three (Or was it Four?) with the scientist guy who started it all and Eleven. I'll give them that. But that was one person, one time...

In fact, wasn't the absolute intransigence and indefatigable persistence of the military the specific and only reason Eleven had to make her grand sacrifice? They will never give up. That's what Kali said. Looks like she was wrong about that. Dead wrong, in her case. And Eleven's, unless you believe Mike. (I believe! Yeah, no I don't.)

Also, while I'm on the subject of Kali and Eleven's suicide pact to save the world, what about all those pregnant women? Didn't they all have Kali's blood in them already? Don't the military already have what they need? Eleven's blood would just be insurance. How does her vanishing put a final stop to the whole thing? Barely an inconvenience.

Of course, that all presumes that a) I understand the plot and b) the plot makes sense. I don't believe either of those propositions to be true.

And it doesn't matter. Not one jot. I loved that finale episode and I thoroughly enjoyed all the others leading up to it. The thing about Season Five of Stranger Things is that it's the show finally going full comic-book superhero. And I'm a lifelong superhero comics fan. If there's one thing I do not need to enjoy my superhero comics, it's a plot that makes any sense at all. 

Logic and proportion are two of the things that fall sloppy dead in Season 5. Another is the good old 'eighties. That whole super-accurate recreation of the Decade Taste Forgot (Title to be decided in a cage match with the 1970s.) is barely an after-thought in the last season. How could it be anything else? All the action takes place in either a militarized zone or another dimension. No-one has time for leg-warmers and Tiffany.

Do we miss the eighties vibe? I don't imagine so. I wasn't that keen on it in the first place. For that matter, I wasn't particularly struck by all the endless references to Dungeons and Dragons, either. Those seemed like just another 'eighties trope at the start but by the end there was a whole meta-fictional underpinning going on that threatened to turn the entire show into something completely other and I'm not convinced D&D can carry that weight.

Speaking of, I have another candidate for the most unbelievable thing that happens in the fifth season. It's that final scene, when Holly and her pals storm down into the basement to play D&D and there are more girls than boys. Playing D&D. In the 1980s. Yeah, right...

Anyway, I could go on for another few thousand words, nitpicking the plot. I'm not for one moment suggesting that wouldn't be fun. It's why we watch these things as much as any other reason, isn't it? But it would obscure the main message here, which is that I really liked the final season, in all the ways that matter. It pressed all the right buttons at all the right times. The dopamine hits were very real, especially whenever Nancy pulled that trigger.

I'll finish by mentioning something that kept occurring to me as I watched, especially in the last two episodes. It felt just like the way Buffy went out. That whole thing, where the team keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, until they literally need a bus or a truck just to get everyone to the fights. I loved that in Buffy and if anything I think it works even better here. Cometh the hour, cometh...everyone.

That's the most inspiring part of the narrative. The way so many people just get on board as soon as they understand even a little of what's going on. Hardly anyone questions it. The way everyone has the capacity to be a hero in their own way. 

There was a lot of that in Season 4, especially with Erica and Max, but in Season 5 it seems like anyone can join the gang. It leads to a lot of very unwieldy group scenes but the spiritual message is Anyone Can Be A Slayer. 

Er.. sorry... crossed the streams again, there.

In the end, none of it made sense but I loved it anyway. And you can put that on the posters. 

Christmas, Cryptic, Coke, Charli XCX And All The Rest

I didn't post yesterday, even though I could have. It felt like skipping school, by which I don't mean it felt fun. I was never one of those kids who enjoyed an unjustified day off. I could never quite forget I ought to be somewhere else. This was a little bit like that. Especially since I knew I had a busy few days coming up, what with work and other things, so I legitimately wouldn't be posting then. 

Also, there's the post count to think about. I hit the big three hundred in 2024 and it's on the cards for 2025. I need another 48 posts in thirty-three days. With the Advent Calendar to come it's doable. But only if I don't keep bunking off...

Speaking of which, let's start there.

The Inventory Full Advent Calendar 2025 

2022 was the first year I did one. I went with stock images and a single tune, all of which I sourced myself. It was hella fun so I did it again in 2023.

That was the year I tried to get the LLMs to find me some obscure Christmas songs, a job they signally sucked at, choosing instead to just make stuff up. AIs were still cute and funny then, like puppies. 

Not that everyone agreed. I had more success using AI image generators for the pictures but it lost me at least two readers, who made a point of letting me know they were going in the comments. I imagine quite a few more just stumped off in silence.

It didn't stop me calling on AI for help the following year but I did at least make some allowance for reader sensitivity. In 2024 I had the brilliant idea of doubling up with two tunes for each day, one Naughty, one Nice. I picked all the songs myself but for the images I used my own photos for the nice numbers and had AI do the nasty ones. That way, people could opt out of AI and still get to open a door every day.

It was a lot of work, not just the double-posting but because I also decided not to look at any pre-existing lists of Christmas songs. Too much work, in fact, which is why this year it's back to one window a day, although some days, when you open the flaps, you may find more than one song. 

This year, too, in keeping with my mild disillusionment with the way AI is going, there will be no AI involvement at all. The pictures will all be Public Domain images sourced from art galleries, museums and any other archives I can find. 

That has turned out to be a lot more work than you'd think. I can see why people use AI. It saves so much time. I'm already thinking that next year I might start with an AI image and then distress it, the way I do the non-AI pictures I use for music posts. That feels like it would be both faster and more fun and also legitimately involve at least some degree of human creativity.

As for the songs, I learned from last year's experience. Trying to find a couple of dozen unusual or obscure Christmas songs without looking at any lists or collections or playlists of unusual or obscure Christmas songs anyone else has done is a) really hard work and b) exhausting. 

This time I haven't even attempted to be original. I looked through a lot of other people's Christmas lists and cherry-picked. That led to me finding other songs that weren't on the lists,   so at least some of it is my own work. It sure went a lot faster this time, anyway, and I felt a lot less burned out by the end.

It's still quite annoying not to talk about the songs as I post them but I think that would kind of defeat the point of an Advent Calendar. The last couple of years, Redbeard has been kind enough to leave a comment on each day's entry, which gave me the chance to monologue about them in reply. If no-one comments this year, which is more than likely, I'll just have to do a separate post at the end. Don't think I won't!

Next up...

Oh, this is a Grab-Bag post, by the way. Did I not mention that?

Good News/Bad News

 

Which is it? Hell if I know. When I read that Embracer was selling Arc Games and Cryptic and that it was a management buyout, I had a couple of thoughts. The first was "I guess that's good news for Cryptic" and the second "Who is Arc Games?"  

Generally speaking, I'd say that if you're playing an MMORPG and the company that owns it sells it to someone else, you'd probably prefer it went to the people already making the content for it. Always assuming you're enjoying the game, that is. It seems like the safest option, aesthetically and emotionally, although possibly not financially.

Also, if your game was currently owned by Embracer, I guess you'd be forgiven for thinking anyone else would be an improvement. Then I read the article about the buyout on MassivelyOP, which clarified some things and confused others. 

Arc Games is what Perfect World Entertainment (PWE) turned into. It looks like it's some of Arc's management team that's mostly involved in the buyout, funded by Chinese company XD. As MOP points out, though, Embracer had already gutted Cryptic and handed the remnants over to one of Embracer's own divisions, DECA, while apparently Arc Games remained responsible for publishing Neverwinter, Champions and Star Trek Online. So that's as clear as concrete.

I haven't played any of Cryptic's games in years but I have at some point played them all. Champions I just didn't get on with. STO, I thought, was a decent enough game but I have very little affection for the Star Trek IP and I think you'd need quite a bit to want to keep playing for long.

Neverwinter, though, I did like. I played it a fair bit, on and off, although in common with most of the literally hundreds of MMOs I've dabbled with over the years, I never got all that far. There are a couple of dozen posts about it here, though, and of the three, it's the only one I occasionally think of going back to visit.

Whether this latest development makes that more or less likely is hard to predict. If it's just a case of changing the names on the board-room door then no, I guess it doesn't. If it actually leads to a material difference in the way the game is developed, then yes, maybe.

The real question, as always, is who is playing any of these games now anyway? I guess someone must be because the buyer, fancifully named Project Golden Arc, paid  Embracer $30m, which seems at the same time a lot and not much. Thirty million for three established and operating MMOs sounds pretty cheap when you consider EG7 paid ten times that for Daybreak just five years ago. On the other hand, I repeat, who plays Cryptic MMOs in 2025? Looked at that way, it sounds like a lot of money after all.

I'm guessing this will be an ongoing story. I look forward to further developments.

Oh God, Not More AI Nonsense...

I could probably do two or three posts a week just on news items about AI that turn up in my feeds. Most of them I read and forget about but a few really demand some kind of comment or examination. Especially the ones about music. Here's an example.

Right after I published yesterday's post, I got the news that Warner had done a deal with Suno. This follows a deal Udio signed with UMG last month. Udio and Suno are the two leading generative AIs involved in creating music, Suno being by far the superior of the pair, in my opinion.

Until very recently, both were facing lawsuits from the three giants of the record industry, two of which are Warner and UMG. As far as I can tell, Warner is still suing Udio and UMG is still suing Suno. The third, Sony, is suing both of them. I guess the music stopped when it came to Sony and the parcel was already all unwrapped. Pity there wasn't a third AI in there, then they could all have gone home with prizes.

This is exactly what we should have expected, anyway. The way the whole AI scene is going now feels like a mirror of what happened to all the previous technical innovations that threatened the huge media conglomerates. First they try to close them down and then they buy them out. After that it's either close them down themselves or assimilate the technology and use it for their own purposes. 

It's great for the sell-outs, who get a big payday and don't have to go to jail, but it's rarely - probably never - good news for either the current users or the artists trying to protect themselves from their predations. Arguably, it may be good news for all the hundreds of millions of people who didn't even know the tech existed until the majors repackaged it and sold it to them. That's how we got Spotify, after all. Then again, look how well that turned out...

Immediately I read the news, I went straight to Suno to see how they were spinning it. I was not impressed.  They claim "You’ll still be able to create original songs the way you love today." but I very much doubt that will last long. They've already announced changes, coming "soon", meaning "a paid Suno account will be required to download songs from the product, with each paid tier enabling a specific number of downloads each month."

That seems weird to me. I guess it depends how many downloads you get. If it exactly matches the maximum number of songs you can make under a given payment plan, then it's a non-issue. If it's fewer, though, then it makes very little sense. Why let anyone download a percentage of the songs you allow them to make? Unless, I suppose, you intend to charge them extra for the rest. Double-dipping, I think they call it...

We'll see the details soon enough but it's not going to affect me directly. I have already downloaded all my finished songs as MP3s and burned most of them onto CD so they can't do much about that. I have a few days left before my current Pro subscription runs out and I'm currently downloading everything again, this time in .wav format, along with a bunch of the also-rans, too. 

I'm sure as hell not going to download everything I've made. There are several thousand versions of songs of mine on Suno now because you literally cannot delete anything you ever make. Most of them I never want to hear again, so I won't be wasting hard drive space on them. I still own the copyrights under Suno's own agreement anyway, so they can just sit there forever as far as I'm concerned.

I will not be renewing my subscription when it ends, either. Unless, of course, they offer me another huge discount. Then I might. I also might come back for another go when all those Warner artists, who must be just so excited so be signing away their rights so we can all start remixing their work, which looks like being the game plan. That sounds like a fun toy. I have a whole post on that but it's still brewing.

You Don't Have To Be An AI To Deepfake

Is deepfake a verb? It is now. 

This made me smile. We hear so much about AI copies of famous people, both their images and their voices, it was oddly refreshing to read about such an old-school, analog way of doing much the same thing. 

Johnny Cash's estate is suing Coca Cola over a commercial Coke has been running for a few months, in which - allegedly - a Johnny Cash tribute singer was hired to sing in the lamented country star's signature style. For about five seconds, while some guy (If we're supposed to know who he is, I don't..) wanders through a crowd of sports fans. 

It hardly seems worth complaining about, let alone paying lawyers, but I guess if you have a brand you have to protect it somehow. Shame to think of Johnny Cash as a brand but that's the 21st Century for you.

Some TV Talking 

I had plans today to review the second season of Man on the Inside, along with a quick sidebar on the first episode of Stranger Things, Season 5 but a full review is a post of its own so I'll just say of MotI I liked it but not as much as the first season. Not sure the format can stand a third. It already seems to have turned into more of a family dramedy than a comedy crime show. A full review may or may not follow.

ST 5.1 was a trip, though. I was genuinely taken aback by just how big a deal it felt, especially given I came late to the party. If this was the old days of broadcast television it would have been one of those water-cooler moments, I guess.

Netflix has taken the Wednesday option and pumped it up, dropping the season in three parts, with the final episode also being screened in 350 movie theaters across the USA. It is the streamer's most successful series ever, so I guess they want to make the most of this last hurrah.

The first tranche is four episodes and I did consider watching all of them back-to-back. They're all somewhere around 70-80 minutes long so it's an afternoon, not a whole day. 

In the end I opted to stick to my established practice and just watch one every evening. I watched the first last night. It started slow and ended fast. I was gripped from the intro to the credits and I am not going to say anything about it other than that. I'm doing my absolute best to avoid all spoilers, including what anyone else thinks about it, which believe me has not been easy, so I won't contribute to anyone else's problems if they haven't already seen it.

Always Leave 'Em Singing

Yes, the obligatory musical ending. I have so many songs bookmarked now. Any opportunity to shed one gratefully taken.

House - Charli XCX (Feat. John Cale)

From the soundtrack of Emerald Fennel's adaptation of Wuthering Heights, already controversial before it's even been released. My first and so far only experience of Emerald Fennel's work was her novel Monsters, which at the time I thought was the most amoral Young Adult book I'd ever read. 

It still is and I still do. Only now she's famous so we have it faced out with a Recommends card. Which I did not write. But I would have, if anyone had asked me.

John Cale, of course, among his many, many accolades, is the man I saw perform at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, only a handful of years after the crimes in question, wearing a copy of the signature mask used by the infamous Cambridge Rapist. Even in a hall full of worshipers and admirers, it caused something of a stir. 

Among this company, Charli looks like the nice, polite, well-behaved one...

Rag-Tag Grab-Bag. Sold As Seen. No Refunds

For once, I have several meaty posts I want to write but I can't seem to find the time to write any of them. Certainly not today. Tomorrow I don't have much planned, though, and it's forecast to rain heavily all day so maybe then...

For now, though, I think this is going to have to be a bit of an ad hoc rummage down the back of the bookmarks. Again. 

Let's start with a PSA.

Are You Experienced?

EverQuest II is.  275% experienced. From yesterday until 10.00AM PST on 19 November, all Live servers plus Varsoon and Zarrakon are getting a 275% server bonus to adventure and tradeskill xp. Anashti Sul, the Origins server, where players are supposed to enjoy the journey or something, I guess, are getting just 14%. 

This is in celebration of Darkpaw breaking $100k in donations to Extra Life this year. There's also a 45% increase in the chance of rare drops, double currency rewards and double loot drops in "current expansions". 

This is great news if you want to fill your bags with crap level a character up to 125. Before level l00, a 275% bonus on xp from mob kills and quests is huuuuuge. From 100 to 125 the xp from kills will be meaningless but as I understand it the bonus will still apply to quest xp, which is already huuuuuuge in some of the relevant expansions so presumably it will now be huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge! 

I haven't tested it personally, so don't take my word for it. Go try it for yourself. I also haven't confirmed what I've heard about the final five levels to the 130 cap, which is that in the expansions aimed at those levels, bonus xp does not apply to quests at all. That's by design, not because they've been specifically excluded.  

I have tested it on a Level 125 character in the expansion before the cap went to 130, though, and it seemed to work there. I was getting almost 10% of the level for a basic kill quest hand-in, which seemed like a lot. 

If I can find a gap in my schedule, I'll put in some time and see how far I can get a couple of characters who are sitting at 125. It would be nice to have them at 130 for the new expansion.And I might get one of my lower-levels out and blitz some dungeons just for fun. When it comes to xp, I like big buffs. I cannot lie.

The Whole of the Luna

As I suspected, Amazon's recent withdrawal from the games market has indeed put paid to Prime Gaming. I got one, presumably final, email from the Prime Gaming blog that handed everything off to the Luna website and since then... nothing. I guess it's up to Prime Members to remember to go check to see if anything new is available from now on.

If so, here's where to look. I'm not going to go through the slate for November one by one but just for completeness' sake, here are the games, the dates they become available and where you can claim them from:

Already available: 

New Tales from the Borderlands [Epic Games Store]
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Sun Series [GOG Code]
Gas Station Simulator [Epic Games Store] 
Lovecraft's Untold Stories [Epic Games Store] 

From November 13: 

Another World: 20th Anniversary Edition [GOG Code] 
Fallout 76 [PC via Microsoft Games Store] 
Fort Solis [GOG Code] 
Dark City: Kyiv Collector's Edition [Amazon Games App]

From November 20:

PlateUp! [Epic Games Store]
Dungeons & Dragons: Krynn Series [GOG Code]
Dream Tactics [GOG Code]

From November 26:

Big Adventure: Trip to Europe 6 Collector's Edition [Legacy Games Code]
Gunslugs [GOG Code]

I don't remember seeing the Microsoft Store come up before as a place to claim Prime giveaways. Not sure I like that development much. Also, I notice there's only one game you can play through the Amazon Games app itself. I imagine that's on the way out, too. It'll all be freebies from third-party platforms by 2026 or that's my bet.

Stranger Than Strange

There's a new trailer out for the final season of Stranger Things. It's the first five minutes of the first episode, which seems to be a thing now. Netflix did the same for Wednesday back in the summer.

I haven't watched it and I'm not sharing it. I watched the Wedneday one and posted it here, because it was really good. But I regretted it later. Watching it, mostly, although if I regretted watching it then logically I should also regret sharing it, unless I was trying to give people a degraded experience when they came to the show itself. (I wasn't, by the way...)

The problem with the Wednesday First Five Minutes Trailer (And this is a spoiler of a kind, if you haven't watched the show yet, although if you haven't gotten around to it by now I'm guessing you 're not really going to care...) is that it raises completely inappropriate expectations for the rest of the season. It makes it look as though in Season 2, Wednesday is going to be working as a kind of bounty hunter, tracking down and capturing dangerous criminals. 

That is very much not what the rest of the season is about . The trailer is basically Wednesday's "What I Did On My Holidays" report. When I came to watch  the full first episode I was a little irritated by what felt like a bit of a bait&switch by the marketing department. It definitely fed into my mild disappointment with the first half of the season.

I have no idea if the Stranger Things trailer plays any similar tricks but I don't intend to risk it. I'm really looking forward to the show and I'm more than happy to wait until it arrives before I see any of it.

I will happily share this with everyone, though:

That's a trailer for the upcoming Stranger Things animated spin-off series, Tales From '85. The Duffer brothers said a while back that they planned on doing more with the Stranger Things IP and this is one of those things. 

It's a cartoon that's supposed to remind everyone of the kind we all watched in the '80s, which makes sense. When Stranger Things first appeared, all the publicity about it went on and on about how it was either an homage to or a recreation of the 1980s. It was one of the things that put me off watching the show until much later.

In the latter seasons that whole eighties vibe seems largely to have vanished. The action may take place in the same decade but all the focus is either on the weirdness or the military, neither of which seems particularly grounded in any time period, not on the everday small-town lives of a bunch of young kids in the decade of Madonna and MTV. Plus the kids aren't so young any more, either.

The cartoon show, which has a completely different cast of voice actors, has the opportunity to reconnect with that original, nostalgic concept. Whether it will, or whether we'll want it to, is another question. We won't have too long to wait to find out. It's coming in 2026, although exactly when it will run is still a mystery.

And Finally

Anyone remember a song called iPod Touch that I included in a music post a while back? I thought it was great. I still think it's great. It's by Ninajirachi and it's from her album I Love My Computer, which is also great. 

At the time I thought she was some obscure hyperpopper I'd been lucky to discover. If I thougt about it at all, I'd have guessed hardly anyone was listening to her. Although actually I didn't think about it at all. 

Turns out she's a much bigger deal than I knew. She just won Australian Album of the Year at the TripleJ awards. She also won Australian Music Video of the Year for Fuck My Computer, which you can find in that post I just linked so I won't link it again here. She won Australian awards as a teen, too. She's a big deal in Oz, apparently.

This will explain.

I didn't even know she was Australian. 

Tomorrow, a proper post. Maybe. Let's hope so. 

The Horror! The Horror!

What would it take to get me to resubscribe to Netflix, which I put on pause two months ago? 

Yeah, that'll do it.

That's the first six minutes of the second season, apparently, which makes it one heck of an in media res opening, if true. Also hooky as hell. It's like a series of riffs on the character but then that's what the entire Addams Family franchise is built on, so give the people what they want I guess.

It's certainly what I want although I was very suspicious at the start. I'm not a big fan of plotlines involving serial killers and it seemed a bit off-brand for Wednesday. The six minute clip sold it, though. Now I'm wondering if the plan is to transition Wednesday into some kind of crime show: Wednesday Addams - Psychic P.I. That would be a swerve.

 

Nah. I think we're good. Back to school we go. Wednesday Season 2 starts tomorrow.  

Of course, the other thing that would have gotten me to re-sub would have been the final series of Stranger Things, now due in the autumn, I believe. I came very late to that one. It had been going for a couple of seasons before I started watching (Didn't have Netflix before then.) and it turned out to be nothing like I expected. 

 Stranger Things has such a long, convoluted narrative arc I really ought to do some kind of a rewatch before it starts up again. But who has the time? Even this super-condensed catch-up compilation for just one season of Wednesday is twenty minutes long!

That's the thing about TV series - they take soooo loooong to re-watch. Which is one reason I'm becoming increasingly fond of novelizations. It's a form so disrespected it barely merits contempt in literary quarters, where its very existence is seldom acknowledged. It's something the authors who work in the field appear to find exhillaratingly liberating. 

The more adaptations and spin-off novels I read, the more I come to realize how much I've been missing by ignoring them all these years. As I said back in February, I recently read the three adaptations of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, a show I very much wished had lasted longer than the four seasons Netflix allowed it, and they were excellent. So were most of the Buffy novels I read. 

I have just acquired a Stranger Things novel - Rebel Robin - which I haven't started yet. If that's good I'll see if I can find the rest of those and then after that I might start on Roswell and/or Roswell: New Mexico. It's amazing how many shows do get longish runs of throwaway paperbacks dedicated to them.

Curiously, all of the shows I've named so far, with the possible exception of the Roswell twins, are more than arguably part of the broader horror genre. Although I have always said - and believed - that I don't like "horror". I'm slowly coming to realise that doesn't seem to be a position well-supported by the evidence.  

Indeed, it was only in the last couple of weeks, as I was digitizing and editing one of the two novel-length pieces of fiction I wrote in the 'nineties, that it occured to me both of those could quite reasonably be described as at the very least horror-adjacent, if not straight-up genre horror. There's certainly a lot of ritual and blood magic, demonic possession and vampirism going on, anyway. Weird I never noticed it at the time. I think I thought I was writing urban fantasy.

SciFi, horror and super-hero TV shows often end up being adapted into video games too, although I would suspect with considerably less artistic success than most novelizations. The stakes there must be many orders of magnitude higher - it costs a lot to make a video game, a lot of people are involved and visibility is very high. Spin-off novels, by contrast, cost next to nothing to produce, have only a couple of people making the decisions on what goes into them and release to a deadening critical silence, even if they sell really well. 

With that in mind, I wouldn't put a great deal of confidence in the quality of the proposed video games Netflix is reportedly planning to spin up out of some of its most successful properties, Stranger Things among them. I'm sure we'd all love a Secret World style game set in the Stranger Things universe but I somehow don't think that'll be what we get.

All the same, best to never write anything off until you've had a good look at it. That's a lesson I'm learning all the time. 

Apparently I like horror now. Who knew? 

Certainly not me.

Endings And Beginnings: A (Pretty Much) Spoiler-Free Spot-Take On Stranger Things Season Four And Umbrella Academy Season Three

Last night I watched the Season Four finale of Stranger Things. The night before I watched the Season Three finale of Umbrella Academy. Netflix chose to release both seasons as a package, although for Stranger Things they split the season in two, for either aesthetic or commercial reasons, depending who you ask.

I chose to watch both shows on my own schedule, one episode per evening, giving me just enough time to process each instalment and still be able to remember the plot. Seriously, with shows that release one episode a week I can barely remember what happened the last time. How we all managed back in the bad old days of broadcast TV I can hardly imagine. Or remember, obviously.

The reviews for both series that I've seen mostly fall into the "good but not great" category, with everyone liking Stranger Things but critics being happier with Umbrella Academy than audiences. As you'd expect, a lot of the commentary tends to be comparative, not so much with other shows as with each's own previous seasons.

On a snap rating, I'd give both shows a high mark on their latest outings but therein lies a problem. My unconsidered opinion is of limited value. I've said before that I'm easily pleased and it's no exaggeration. If I like something enough to bother with it at all, there's a strong chance I'll like it a lot, or at least I'll believe I do. 

I tend to get drawn in quickly and easily and not to notice flaws on a first viewing. It's why I follow the Rule of Three: once for the experience, twice to compare, third time to decide.

Only who has the time? I'm pretty sure the finale of Stranger Things is the longest single episode of a serialized TV show I've ever seen: two hours and nineteen minutes. Although it could have been even longer. 

When it comes to putting particular seasons or episodes in some kind of qualitative order within the context of the life of the show, I run into a different problem. Or perhaps I should say a different iteration of the same old one: I struggle to remember something I watched weeks, months or years ago.

Perhaps I ought to clarify that. I realize I'm starting to make it sound as though I have some kind of clinical condition. It's not that I can't or don't remember what I've seen or heard at all; it's more that I need a trigger for the memories to fire.

With TV shows, when I write posts like this, I usually begin by looking at a clip or two. Once I've watched a few seconds it all comes flooding back. Well, some of it does. Usually. If nothing comes it probably means I didn't really watch it properly in the first place.

As I write this, I haven't rewatched a single scene from the earlier seasons of Stranger Things or Umbrella Academy, so I can't in good conscience comment on which is better, worse or about the same. All I can do is say how I felt about them in the moment, as I watched, and now, a fw days later, as I look back.

Of the two, it surprises me to say I think I may have enjoyed Umbrella Academy more. If I was going to develop a full-blown critique of the two shows, which I am not, I'm fairly sure I'd come down on the side of Stranger Things being better-structured, conceived and realized but I don't think it could be described as more fun to watch, not least because the first ninety minutes or so of the show I watched last night was one of the tensest TV experiences of my life.

Asmiroth posted an excellent review of Umbrella Academy in which he makes a whole raft of observations that make complete sense to me, most of which I also noticed while I was watching. I commented on the post to say as much. 

Something I was thinking then but forgot to mention was how, despite the overall tone of Asmiroth's post coming over as unsatisfied or disappointed in some undefined fashion, almost all the specifics are positive. 

That makes sense. Umbrella Academy as a show can sometimes feel less than the sum of its parts. It's bursting with distinctive, interesting characters played by excellent, engaging actors, delivering smart, funny dialog, while doing exciting and surprising things.  

It's fast, supple, sparky and almost effortlessly entertaining, all of which makes it a great watch as you're watching it. It doesn't always make a great deal of sense when you think about it afterwards, though, and not just because the whole thing is predicated on time travel, which never makes any kind of sense.

Seriously, I don't believe I'm exaggerating a whit when I say that there has never been and will never be a time-travel narrative of any kind in any medium that holds up to even the mildest, most casual scrutiny. Time travel itself may or not exist - physicists seem to be divided on the theoretical possibilities - but the human mind is simply incapable of processing the concept without analogizing or metaphoring or anecdotalizing and once any of that begins you're already lost. 

I have a super-simple rule with all time-travel tales. I completely ignore anything that gets in the way of the plot. In the case of Umbrella Academy there's a lot to ignore but I can ignore six impossible things before breakfast and still feel satisfied so that doesn't bother me at all.

Poor character development does. Like Asmiroth I was not a fan of Alison's character arc in UA Season Three. In fact, I was so not a fan I may have yelled at the screen a couple of times. I also had a bit of a suspension of disbelief problem over the sequence where Klaus plays in traffic so he can be killed enough times to refine his powers, something which seemed to me to have certain practical impracticalities, not least what the hell anyone driving the vehicles might have thought about it.

Overall, though, I loved Season Three of Umbrella Academy. I really hope there's another because the way this one ends isn't an ending at all, it's a beginning. But that's what you get with time-travel stories.

The end of Stranger Things Season Four also ends with an obvious lead-in to the next but we already know there's going to be a fifth. Netflix could hardly afford for there not to be and the Duffer Brothers have already told us the have it in hand. Millie Bobby Brown, the show's superhero as the iconic Eleven, would like it to be a bloodbath, as would her onscreen boyfriend, Will, but I agree with the Duffers; that wouldn't be Stranger Things.

Above all, Stranger Things is cosy. It started out as a love letter to the lost 1980s, invoking the spirit of Spielberg, The Goonies and Stand By Me. Every season has seen that comfortable setting further questioned, challenged, threatened and yet even as the gates of Hell open beneath Hawkins, Indiana somehow the cosiness has never really scraped away.

It can't. It's no veneer. Stranger Things is cosy through and through. Even a flower-faced devil dog gnawing through the opened ribcage of a fresh killed corpse somehow contrives to look almost cute doing it. The whole show is wholesome. It's like a Twilight Zone version of The Waltons.

That's a compliment, by the way. I loved The Waltons. I watched the entire series, all nine seasons; more than two hundred episodes. I watched them twice, once when they were new in the 1970s and then again when they were repeated in the '80s. I watched them on broadcast TV, when you had to be there when they showed it, not just whenever you felt like watching. Yep, it's a compliment alright.

Millie Bobby Brown complains about how many characters there are. "It’s way too big. Last night, we couldn’t even take one group picture because there was like 50 of us." It's true but it's also kind of the point. 

Eleven and her friends are like a snowball of goodness rolling downhill, bouncing over the evil rocks and picking up more goodness wherever they land. It's one of those series, like Roswell (I love Roswell so much...), where you want more and more people to get in on the secret because everyone who does just gets better as a human being. 

Steve says as much in his heartfelt speech to Nancy, right before they head off on yet another stupid, suicidal adventure and he should know. He's pretty much the poster child for self-actualization.

Stranger Things is a better show than Umbrella Academy. It's a more important show with more important things to say and it says those things more convincingly. I like many more characters in Stranger Things than I do characters in Umbrella Academy. The plot makes more sense, the events it describes have more weight, everything seems to matter more.

Umbrella Academy is more fun though and the characters would be way cooler to hang out with. And it's funnier. It's almost a sitcom at times. Most characters are funny most of the time uinless they're having a moment. Even Victor gets a few one-liners. Alison doesn't, which is why her character is the one that rarely works, this time.

Stranger Things is funny, too, but the funny parts and the serious parts almost feel like different shows. In fact, certain characters in STS4 are funny all the time, like clowns. They seem to have been added to the cast for that specific purpose because characters who used to be the funny ones in earlier seasons have undergone character development and can't just make jokes all the time. (Hi, Erica!).

As I write ths post the thing that always happens is happening. Those occluded memories are coming back, faster and thicker. I don't always need to watch old clips to pull the trigger. Putting words down on paper does it too.

It means I'd better stop before things get out of hand. All I really wanted to do was acknowledge the moment. I thoroughly enjoyed both seasons of both shows. I feel priviliged to be living in a time when such visions are being brought to screen. 

We're very lucky. 

Now, what's next?

Rockin' It!

From the idea-well all but running dry, things seem to have gone full flood again, which is how it usually goes. Another insight to remember for Blaugust. (We are doing Blaugust again this year, right?). 

I've had a post about the Tinkerfest solo dungeon in EverQuest II mentally queued up for days but other things keep bumping it down the line. This morning I have at least three new ideas - things I've done, things I've read or seen that I'd like to bounce off ...

I'll get to them all, eventually. Probably. Maybe. In the meantime, I thought I'd share this article from PC Gamer that I originally saw linked in a news item at NME. Both pieces have the video nicely queued up at the relevant part but I'll embed it here for convenience anyway.

I particularly love the way Winona Ryder not only doesn't know what World of Warcraft is but obviously doesn't even recognize the name. That either puts our hobby into perspective or tells you a lot about Winona. Or both. It's probably both.

I just finished watching Season Four of Stranger Things. It's really excellent. The show has a hyper-reality about it now, or maybe that should be a meta-reality, that makes it very different from the show it was when it began. It's something that happens to many, maybe all, long-running, non-realist shows but it's better managed in this one than in most. Very much looking forward to the Season finale in July and even happier there's another season and several spin-off shows coming along behind.

Just to round this short clip-post out, here's another video I watched for the first time this morning. It's not new and I came across it in a somewhat roundabout way, in a throwaway link in a review of the new μ-Ziq album on Pitchfork.

I don't have any great interest in μ-Ziq although I believe there's at least one CD by him (It's one guy, real name Mike Paradinas, as I learned only today.) somewhere in the house. It'll be Mrs Bhagpuss's, though.

The only reason I clicked through the link was because of the title of the album: Magic Pony Ride. I have a long-standing theory, borne out by much testing, that any band, artist, song, track or album that incorporates the word "pony" is likely to be worth a listen. 

Whether it applies in this case I still don't know because I haven't listened to any of it. Let's do that now... yep, sounds pretty much exactly as I expected. It is, as the Pitchfork review so pithily put it, "dad rock for lapsed ravers".

Which is all very well but I wouldn't have bothered mentioning it if it hadn't been for the link to the webzine's own animated definition of the term "Dad Rock." I felt it was worth featuring here, if only as a warning. This is what complacency can look like, but also comfort. Telling those two apart is a vital life skill.

I'm not even sure if "Dad Rock" gets the job done as a descriptor any more, anyway. Some of the acts in the video would have been at their peak when today's dads were in short pants, if they'd even been born at all. Springsteen, McCartney, Knopfler? They're Grandad Rock by now, aren't they? Is that a thing yet? If not, it needs to be.

And what about Mom Rock? I can't say I've ever heard anyone mention it. The Urban Dictionary claims it's a thing but they claim a lot of things are things, even though no-one else seems to know about them. Do moms get a pass on growing out of being cool or, more likely, do the cultural gatekeepers, whoever they are, just assume moms never were cool to begin with?

Bowling For Soup painted around the lines of the meme with the seminal 1985, a song I dearly love. I respect its musical and lyrical merits, as well as the pitch-perfect video, but mostly I revere it for the way it became weirdly instrumental in shaking me out of my own musical lethargy. 

When I happened across it on Mitch Benn's radio show, I went on to YouTube to see the video he talked about and that, in part, was what jump-started my deep dive into the lost-to-me music of the past and re-instilled my desire to seek out the music of the future.

Kinda ironic, given the lyric, although possibly not as ironic as the other great rekindler of my musical energies, Lana del Rey's Video Games, given it was my then decade-long obsession with mmorpgs that estranged me from music in the first place. Hey, David Harbour! You got off lightly!

Bringing this whole thing full circle and tying it up with a neat little bow, Kate Bush, surely an icon of both Dad and Mom Rock if ever there was one, is currently enjoying her own moment of inter-generational magic, thanks to the inspired use of her timeless classic, Running Up That Hill in Stranger Things. 

Just in case anyone hasn't seen it yet I won't say any more about it, other than it's frickin' epic and that I was surprised to learn La Bush had never had an American Top 10 hit before. Well, she has now. And about time, too.

That's it for now. Not the post I expected to write but the one I wanted to. Another tip for advice week. I should write these down. And I'll get to that EQII Tinkerfest instance post one day, see if I don't. 

Of course, by then I'll have built it up so much everyone's going to be all "is that it?"

Ah, well.

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...