Embarassment Of Riches

An actual Friday Grab-Bag post on a Friday! Can it possibly be true?!

Yes, it can. As we cruise towards the end of Blaugust I have a couple of completed posts in the bank and no work to get in the way because I'm home for two weeks recuperating from my recent minor op. Consequently, I feel quite confident in throwing away a few ideas I could potentially have blown up into whole posts. 

First I Look At The Purse

Case in point: I spent half an hour last night cobbling together this awkward composite of my currency window in EverQuest II. I had it in mind to write a piece about how out of hand these special currencies can get in long-running games.

That's a lot of tokens, tickets, coins and crystals. Seventy-four, to be exact. I very much doubt I could tell you what more than half of them are for without looking it up. Whether they're even valid any more, whether the vendors who take them are still in game or whether, if they aren't, they'll be back again next year, are all questions about which I have even less of a clue.

I was thinking about it because I logged into EQII last night in the hope of doing the new quest that got added for Oceansfull this year, only to find the event finished on Tuesday. I'd been so wrapped up in Dawnlands I forgot all about it.

The end of Oceansfull also marks the end of the Summer Jubilee but the vendors are still up until the end of the month, in case you want to spend whatever tokens you still have left. I was going to do that, which is how I came to be looking at my currency window in the first place.

It occured to me that, more than most MMORPGs I can think of, EQII thrives on excess. In other games a panel like this might be considered an embarrassment; in EQII it's more of an endorsement. This, after all, is the game where damage numbers are quantified in the quadrillions. Blizzard might feel the need to squish big numbers; Daybreak just changes the notation.

The current EQII playerbase just dotes on really big numbers and vast amounts of cruft. It's absolutely alienating to incomers but who cares about them? Fortunately, as with most MMORPGs, if you don't go looking for the hidden nine-tenths of the game, you'll never even know it's there, lurking in the deep, dark waters down below. 

Speaking of which...

It's in the trees! It's coming!

Not having to deal with a huge bunch of outdated content is one reason we all gravitate towards shiny, new MMORPGs, right? It's not that they're any easier to understand but at least we can all be ignorant together. 

Once I'm in, it doesn't take much more than the lure of some new systems and mechanics to get me started but there are a lot of new games these days. In what is fast becoming a looser, sloppier genre as boundaries between MMORPGs, survival and crafting games shift and blur, there just isn't time to try all of them.

When you see a trailer like that one, though...

I imagine everyone's getting Secret World vibes but looking into it further it would seem to be a mash-up of TSW and Fallen Earth. I was a little surprised NetEase would want to go there. I mean, the whole post-apocalyptic "all the nightmares came today" routine hasn't exactly set the genre alight thus far.

The website looks slick but isn't as encouraging as you'd hope when you take a closer look. Yet again, the translation lets the whole thing down. It really is starting to bug me, the way even major players in the market seem incapable of finishing the job when it comes to editing the text. I'm pretty sure no-one would let an artist get away with a six-fingered hand so why is it okay to sign off on mismatched grammatical numeracies like these?

Build home, create team and fight monsters...

Plant, animal and human infected by Stardust will transform into disfigured monsters called Aberrant.

It's like no-one knows the differrence between singular and plural - or that there even is a difference. 

Other than a dodgy translation (And when has that ever stopped me playing anything?) the main strike against Once Human is that it seems to be a shooter. I am not keen on shooters although at least it's a third-person shooter which, if I have to, I prefer. 

The official gameplay trailer that came out a few days ago makes the whole thing look a lot less inviting than the one I embedded. It's way too dark and most of it seems to be cut-scenes not gameplay anyway but I've pre-registered and wishlisted it on Steam, anyway. We'll see what happens. 

No Secrets

For the first time since the game launched back in 2012 I declined to pre-order the latest expansion for Guild Wars 2. It went live yesterday and I still haven't bought it. 

I was very amused by Paeroka's admission that she had to look up the name of the expansion before she could write her post about it. When I first heard what ArenaNet had chosen to call it, I thought it was a truly terrible name for an expansion and it really hasn't grown on me since. 

Being charitable, it sounds more like a parody than anything, but I very much doubt ANet are playing meta games with their livelihood. That leaves the distinct possibility that someone genuinely thinks "Secrets of the Obscure" is an awesome thing to call a game. If that's true, I really hope that someone is about fourteen because if they're any older it would be really embarassing...

Leaving aside the name, there's nothing much in the package that calls to me. I quite like the sound of the rifts, even if it is a feature we've seen in multiple mmorpgs already. I'm mildly curious to see what's inside the floating wizard tower. The easier access to a flying mount is overdue but welcome.

Watching the launch trailer, what really surprised me is how old the game looks. It really seems to hark back to another era. I'm so used now to cleaner, flatter surfaces with less clutter. All the extraneous detail I used to think exemplified the art team's stellar reputation now reminds me of those long, instrumental passages in prog rock epics.

GW2 looks like a very adolescent game from a team with a very adolescent outlook is what I think I'm saying. I never really noticed it while I was playing but it's hard to miss now I've had a lengthy break. Sometimes you need to go away and come back before you can see what's right in front of you. 

Tell 'Em Eda Sent You

Singularity Six certainly aren't sitting back and letting things ride since Palia's reasonably successful and passably well-received launch earlier in the month. I was quite surprised to hear about the game's first holiday event, Maji Market, which begins in just a few days. 

On the face of it, the event looks lore-appopriate, accessible and entertaining, which is pretty much all you could hope for from something like this. I hadn't been planning on going back to Palia quite yet. It's altogether too similar in some important ways to Dawnlands, which I much prefer, and also to Valheim, which would probably have been next on my list of games to revisit, following the long-awaited (By me, anyway) Hildir's Request update (Of which more later. Although not a lot more...)

I was going to wait until I heard something definite about the squashing of the "You just lost all your progress" bug, which is kind of off-putting, but this little affair looks like fun so I might risk it. The event runs for almost the whole of September, so there's no rush. 

If It Wasn't For Bad Timing I'd Have No Timing At All

Had Dawnlands not happened along, this is what I'd almost certainly be playing right now. From the moment I heard Iron Crown planned to hand control of challenge and difficulty in Valheim over to the players, I had it in mind to start a new playthrough. Later, when I recklessly charged into the Mistlands and lost not one but two corpses there, along with my best and second-best armor, I made a back-up plan to reset my original world when the update arrived, should that prove to be possible.

Now, it ought to be said that Valheim has always allowed players to get their hands on the controls the devs use. There are console commands that let you change the game in all kinds of ways. Using those is a bit like delving into regedit, though; not for the faint-hearted or fat-fingered.

The new version should be much simpler and more straightforward. Whether I have the interest or the will to start over, especially now I'm basically playing Valheim with an anime skin in Dawnlands anyway, very much remains to be seen. Valheim does strike me as one of those games you're never really quite done with so I wouldn't discount the possibility. Not going to happen for a while, though.

I would have confirmed a few more of the details on this entry only Steam seems to have choked on the download and it's looking as if I might need to uninstall and reinstall Valheim before I can check it out for myself. That's definitely not happening today.

At this point, which is the end of the post, traditionally I'd slip in a music video. As it happens, one of those stashed Blaugust posts I mentioned right at the top is my latest "What I've Been Listening To Lately" collection and I pretty much threw everything good in there. 

Give me a minute. I'm sure I can come up with something... ah, ok, here... how about...

Real Life - Art School Girlfriend

That should do it. All good now? Okay, then.

Bye!

I Built A Treehouse - Take #2

Blaugust is doing strange things to my head. As I write this I have yet to hit publish on my last Dawnlands post, in which I talk about having played for sixteen hours. I'm up to nearly twenty-six hours now but by the time this appears it might be thirty or thirty-five. (Right in the middle, in fact. Just checked and as of 09.15 on the 24th I've played for 32.4 hours.)

Whatever the tally, it will very definitely have gone up. I'm finding Dawlands there and thereabouts as compulsive as Valheim and I haven't even started building yet. 

It might seem a little invidious to keep comparing the two games but I can't stress enough just how solidly Dawnlands is modelled on Iron Crown's break-out hit. This next part will be incredibly familiar to anyone who played Valheim. It's almost verging on Santayana's aphorism "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

Today, I shut the door to keep Beryl out (It's okay. Mrs Bhagpuss was home to respond to any of the little princess's urgent needs.) so I could take another crack at the second boss, Guya of the Forest.

First, as you'll no doubt recall me mentioning in a previous post, I had to locate Guya's summoning spot (Or "Sealing" as it is in Dawnlands.) via a combination of questing and exploration. As sometimes happened in Valheim, I'd already happened upon one location even before I got the pointer to it and later on I found a second while out exploring, so that was no problem.

To wake Guya up so I could send her back to sleep again or whatever happens when you "Seal" one of these things, first I had to get hold of three Crimson Eyes. These drop off the Giant Goblins (Or maybe they're Goblin Giants.) in the instanced dungeons. 

There's one Giant per dungeon and they drop one eye every time. They're not cyclopses so I imagine it's someone else's eye. 

To get three of them, you need to clear three dungeons. I'm not sure whether the dungeons respawn. I haven't been in the same one twice yet to check. They don't in Valheim so they probably don't in Dawnlands either. The mechanics of the two games aren't always entirely identical. though, so I ought to test it to be sure.

It didn't take me long to find three dungeons and killing the Giants is ridiculously easy, for the simple but bizarre reason that they're too big to get through the doorways. I can't begin to imagine how they ever got in there in the first place. 

In every case so far I've just been able to stand outside the room and pump the Giant full of arrows at no risk whatsoever. Sometimes they just stand there and take it. Sometimes they rage and roar and swipe at me with their clubs. Either way, they die and I'm fine.

Some may see that as a bug. I see it as a feature. Games like this are as much about imprrovisation and using the environment to your advantage as they are about traditional gaming skills and fast reflexes. Valheim rewards preparation and planning ahead and so does Dawnlands. If you just rush in and whale away you're almost bound to fail.

So of course, when I summoned Guya for the first time, that's just what I did. Rushed, whaled, failed.

In my defence, it worked for the first boss, Kenda. I killed him on my first attempt without coming close to dying, just by tanking and spanking. That led me to believe, erroneously as it turned out, that regional bosses in Dawnlands were going to be super-easy. They are not.

This doesn't feel ominous at all...

Guya battered me and poisoned me and sent me to my resurrection spot in a matter of seconds. Since I'd not remembered to open the nearby teleport beacon (Didn't even see it...) I had to ride all the way back from my home in the Grasslands just to find that Guya had despawned.

Now that is different from Valheim. In the viking afterlife, once you call up one of those legendary creatures it hangs around until you send it packing. I remember The Elder stomping around for several days the first time I failed to kill him, knocking down trees and generally making the area around his summoning stone uninhabitable.

I was more annoyed to discover the three Crimson Eyes needed to call Guya back had vanished from my pack. Or at least I thought they had...

It was probably just as well I had to go kill three more giants for three more eyes before I could try again. Otherwise I'd almost certainly have re-summoned Guya and gotten myself killed a second time. I can be stubborn like that sometimes.

It took me a couple of sessions to locate three more dungeons, which gave me time not only to improve my armor and supply myself with some extra consumables but also to do a bit of research on the best way to go about killing Guya. Once again, what I found is not going to come as much of a surprise to anyone who got as far as Bonemass, the third boss in Valheim. Or, for that matter, anyone who read one of the many posts about killing Bonemass that peppered the blogosphere back in the spring of '21.

Yes, the trick to killing Guya is to climb up on something high so he can't reach you. Then you either fill him full of arrows or poke him with a spear. I watched a couple of YouTube videos of people doing it and of course I thought I could do it better. I mean, all these guys did was hop up onto some rocks. So primitive!

I forgot to take any pictures of my rockhouse so here's one of my raft instead.

I built a treehouse. Well, a rockhouse. I located a handy rock outcropping right next to the Sealing circle. I cut down every tree in the immediate vicinity. I traded in a few recipe pages to learn how to make wooden ladders, floors and walls. Then I started to build.

I was concerned that when I ran towards the rocks with Guya's poisonous breath hot on my neck I might panic and fall off the ladder, so I built a wide ramp all the way to the top. I even got out my pick and chipped away some of the rock that was jutting out betwen the struts. You could have ridden an elephant up there by the time I was done.

My next worry was that even if I got to the top safely, I'd fall off trying to get a good shot. The rocks were only just wide enough to stand on safely so it wasn't an irrational fear. 

I built a platform but I fell off that a couple of times as I was building it so I built some walls as well. Then I needed another ladder to get from one level to another because of course there were two levels. I put a couple of chests there to store stuff and threw in a workbench for good measure. That way  I could be sure I wouldn't run out of arrows and even if my Hunter's Bow broke, I could make myself another.

This kind of overthinking and over-preperation did me no favors in Valheim. You'd think I might have remembered that and you'd be right. I sort of did remember, but I went ahead with the plan anyway. Guess what happened?

If you said "It all went horribly wrong", give yourself a gold star. If you said "It all went hilariously, horribly wrong", give yourself two.

I also didn't take any pictures of the first attempt. Can you blame me? This is from the second.

Remember when I I said you could have ridden an elephant up that ramp? Well, Guya's about the size of an elephant. I summoned her, popped her with an arrow to get her attention, then legged it over to my rockhouse. I scooted up the ladder, turned round and got myself set, only to see Guya coming up the ramp behind me.

From there it turned into one of those chases Benny Hill used to end his shows with, a reference that's now so dated I really ought to retire it for good. I kept jumping off the platform and running around the rocks, trying to put a few arrows into Guya as I ran, then runing up the ramp, hoping he'd get stuck. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn't. Even if he did, he soon got himself free and carried on chasing me, firing poison bolts and summoning mushroom men, who joined in the chase like a much less attractive version of Hills Angels.

At several points I got stuck in the mezzanine I'd so unecessarily added and for a while it got so awkward I just tried to kite Guya around the open clearing. Nothing I was doing was making much of a dent in her massive health pool but I was rapidly running out of both hit points and hope. 

I died, of course. I had remembered to open the teleport beacon this time so I recalled to that just in case proximity would prevent Guya from despawning. It did not.

I was a tad annoyed once again, partly because I knew the fiasco was all my fault but mostly because now I'd have to go farm Giants for eyes all over again. Except, to make an increasingly lengthy story a little shorter, I didn't. 

When I picked up my backpack to recover my stuff, I was dumbfounded to see the three Crimson Eyes still inside. Either they hadn't been consumed this time or, more likely, they hadn't been consumed the first time either but I'd unwittingly auto-stored them in a a chest somewhere.

This post would be a lot shorter if I'd just stood on the stupid rock from the start.

Whatever the reason, it was great news. I set about knocking down most of the ramp to make it no wider than a single ladder. I was ready to knock that down too, after I got up to the top next time, but it wasn't necessary. Guya is too big to use a ladder and though she tries really, really hard, she can't quite scrmble up the side of a rock.

Even so, things didn't go to well when I resummoned her. I got up to my perch easily enough but the platform I'd built kept blocking either my line of sight to Guya or hers to me. If the former, I couldn't hit her; if the latter, she ran around the rocks trying to find a way to me and I couldn't hit her then, either.

We kept that dance up until I abandoned the platform and just stood on the bloody rocks like I should have done from the start. From there, we could see each other but I could hit her and she couldn't hit me, which ad been the plan all along.

Her annoying mushroom men could, though. She summoned them seemingly by the dozen, sometimes right next to me, sometimes below, whne they would run up the ladder on their little legs and swarm over me. They didn't do much damage but they sure were distracting and I kept targeting them by mistake. 

I also kept opening my storage chests by accident, filling the whole screen with a view of my inventory. Once, I even managed to open the workbench. 

The wooden arrows I was firing took the tiniest chunks off Guya's health so I swapped to fire arrows, which didn't do a lot more. I remembered the advice about using a spear and I also remembered I had one that came with lightning charges, so I tried that instead. It did a lot more damage but I kept almost falling off the rock trying to reach so I had to go back to the bow.

It was a mess, frankly. But I got the job done, somehow. Guya keeled over and exploded, leaving a pile of sparkling loot. I ran down the ladder to pick it up and while I was doing that, I died too.

Guya down! On we go!

I died three more times, respawning at the beacon, running back, looting my backpack, killing some mushroom men and passing boars, then falling down dead again. It was night and visibility wasn't great. I couldn't figure out what was wrong. It was making me pretty angry.

Then the sun came up and I finally found out what was doing it. The mushroom men Guya had summoned didn't despawn when she died and several had gotten themselves stuck inside the rock itself. They had been throwing rocks and poison at me without me realizing and even now I knew they were doing it, I still couldn't stop them because the rock was blocking my attacks.

Poetic justice! Karma! What goes around, comes around! All of that. 

So I got out my pickaxe and knocked chunks out of the rock until I could get to the little bastards and then I killed them. It's all about the improv.

With the second boss down, I now have access to Bronze Age tech, along with a breadcrumb quest to the next region which, in another rare departure from the Valheim template, isn't the snowy land I ventured into a while ago but the sun-baked plains.

I've already made an exploratory expedition, just to see the new Shelter and move the main quest along. The plains look stunning. I'd say I can't wait to explore them but actually I can. I'm going to take my time, find some more sheets and open up a lot more recipes before I start looking for tin on the plains to make myself a set of Bronze Armor. 

For that, I'll also need cotton, which I'll have to grow for myself. I've made a hoe and tilled some land. I've bought some seeds and planted them. Now I have to wait for them to grow. It takes eight hours, real time.

People have been complaining about that but I think it's fine. I'm in no rush. I played Valheim for nearly four hundred hours, after all. I've barely started in Dawnlands.

Your Sidekick Has Arrived!

A few weeks back, Belghast wrote a post about stuff he'd been watching. He opened with an extremely strongly-worded piece of advice:  

"I feel like all of you need to stop what you are doing right now and watch Nimona."

to which I would just like to add

 "Go on! Do it! What's keeping you?"

Not that I took Bel's advice myself, you understand. I didn't get around to watching Nimona until yesterday and even then only because I had four hours to kill, sitting in my room at a local clinic, waiting to be called in for a hernia repair operation. (Back home the same day, feeling pretty good, thanks for asking.)

I did kind of know something about Nimona before I heard about it from Bel. I didn't know there was a Netflix adaptation, just that there was a graphic novel of that name. We usually have it in at work and I've put it on the shelf a few times but I've never really looked at it. My loss.

In his rave recommendation, Bel compares Nimona to Lumberjanes, another graphic novel series we often have in. I've had a flick through a few of those but I don't know it well. He also benchmarked Nimona against the new incarnation of '80s Saturday morning great, She-Ra: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. I never watched the original series and inexplicably I haven't yet watched the new one, even though there are five seasons on Netflix and it comes up as a 98% match for me so I have no excuse. It's on the watchlist now.

I'm not sure what I'd compare Nimona to. It might just about the most openly allegorical movie I've ever seen. I mean, the Narnia stories are positively elliptical compared to this. Nimona herself is pretty much a living metaphor, whose entire back-story is a plot point. 

All of that could be off-putting - no-one likes to be hammered over the head with subtext. In the case of Nimona, though, it just works.

There are several reasons why, one of the strongest being that, as Bel mentioned, it is "exceptionally well-written". It really is, even though I would say the bar for Young Adult writing these days is very high indeed. cf The Owl House et al. Op cit. (That's enough Latin. Ed.)

The plot is mostly coherent (There were a few moments...) but the dialog is positively scintillating. I laughed out loud several times. The visual gags are absolutely top class throughout and they just never stop. Characterisation is nuanced and subtle for something of this length (I'm increasingly of the opinion that it's just asking too much of movies to match the depth of characterisation of TV series. They just don't have the time to do it, even the really long ones.) 

I count visual gags in with "writing", generally, because someone has to script them. If we're going to talk about the actual visuals, though, Nimona is about as good as I've ever seen. If you want a full breakdown of just why it's so good, Flying Walrus says it better than I could.

The sense of movement is stunning - kinetic barely begins to cover it. In the city scenes, everything seems to be moving, all the time and yet nothing ever feels awkwardly "busy". The fight scenes are just batshit insane.

On the surface, everything seems sharply stylised but behind it sits an almost overwhelming depth of world-building detail. The entire movie, from the bait&switch opening to the elegaic ending hits precisely the right visual note to match the tone of the writing. It's just a joy from start to end. 

The soundtrack is a joy too, from the original music to the licensed songs. The movie also has more quotable lines per minute than just about anything this side of Withnail and I. I know I'm going to be using "Something, something, something... we win." over and over, along with "Let's break stuff" and "Metal!" although I might find it a bit harder to shoehorn "Who do you want to kill first?" or "This is the part where you run" into general conversation.

Perhaps the greatest of Nimona's many strengths, though, is the voice acting. Everyone is great - there's a lovely cameo from RuPaul -  but the two leads are just absolutely perfect. 

Riz Ahmed plays Ballister Boldheart, about to be the first commoner ever to be raised to the rank of Knight, until something goes disastrously wrong at his dubbing ceremony (No more spoilers!) His slightly underplayed sense of anger, confusion and exasperation drives the plot forward perfectly, plus he has great comic timing.

Riz also plays superbly off Chloë Grace Moretz as Nimona, as she tears the roof off (Literally, more than once.) in what is quite possibly the most Chloë Grace Moretz performance in the most Chloë Grace Moretz role of all time. She says it's her favorite and I believe her.

Seriously, if you have even the smallest admiration or affection for Chloë Grace Moretz, you owe it to yourself to see this movie.

Nimora is a Netflix production so I was very confused as to why they seemed to want to keep it a secret. If there's one thing you can say for the streaming services, it's that they're never behind in coming forward where their own productions are concerned. Both Prime and Netflix are constantly pushing their badged product in front of everything else so why did I have to wait for Bel to do Netflix' job for them before I even knew it existed?

According to IMDB, the film, while in production for Netflix by Blue Sky Studios, "was cancelled following Disney's shutdown of the studio in early 2021". It was "revived by Annapurna and Netflix the following year." when "DNEG Animation completed all visuals for the finished film, including the titles, animation, and End Credits." 

I guess, with a history like that, it just kind of fell through the cracks. As Bel says "it sounds like it is a sheer miracle that this came out at all." That it ended up being so very good is... well, whatever comes beyond miraculous. 

And after all that, it would be just rude not to watch it, wouldn't it?

So what are you waiting for?

Kitty's Got Claws!

I fear my time in Noah's Heart may be drawing to a close. You'd think maybe I'd gotten bored with what is, after all, a fairly ropy mobile port that the developer pretty much stopped bothering with after about six months. Or maybe it's just the sudden surge of competition from other, rather better, mobile ports or from dedicated PC games or their expansions. There's a lot going on.

It isn't any of those things. I'm still very happy with Noah's Heart in general. I still have plenty to do there. There's a good deal of the world I haven't explored yet. I haven't even finished the main storyline.

For a couple of months it was enough just to explore the delighful environments, level my character and do my best to follow the confusing plot. Then for a few months more I enjoyed the Seasons, each of which came with a convoluted storyline of its own. 

Eventually, though, the Seasons sputtered to a close. We haven't had a new one for a long time although, since the last two or three were almost impossible to follow, thanks to the truly terrible translations, and obviously padded with pointless boss fights just to make them last longer, I can't say I was sorry to see them go.

About all the game gets now are rotating "events", most of which exist only to drive business in the cash shop. There are still a few, new "holidays", which do have the odd worthwhile reward but a year after launch the game seems to exist in some kind of stasis that looks very much like maintenance mode.

As a player, I don't have an issue with maintenance-mode MMORPGs. If the gameplay is satisfying and the content deep enough, a good MMORPG has almost infinite replayability. It's one reason I've not been keen to see the creeping reliance on linear narratives in the genre - it's probably the least-replayable content of all, while at the same time being possibly the most costly to produce.

Noah's Heart clearly hasn't had either the time or the funding to develop the kind of deep, nested, recursive content that keeps games like EverQuest II or Star Wars: the Old Republic ticking over indefinitely, even through times of content drought. Even so, as I said, I'm still a way from exhausting everything it has to show me.

So why do I suspect I might be moving on sooner rather than later? Because I've run out of clothes I want, that's why! If I do drift away it won't be through any fault of the game. It'll be because I can't find anything new to wear!

As has probably been apparent from the posts I've written about the game this year, my primary motivation for logging in every day has been fashion. I've been grinding away, cooking lunch and dinner for various Phantoms, using home-cooked food made with vegetables I dug out of the ground and meat from animals I slaughtered.  Mostly wolves, weirdly.

It's been a time-consuming but satisfying process and I'd be happy to carry on but I've run out of looks I want to copy. Tonight (Well, tonight as I write this post. Heaven knows how long ago it'll have been by the time this gets published.) I finally made Gretel's outfit, the Heroic Mortality set. 

It was the last one I wanted and even then I only really wanted it for the leather jacket. The piped, zipper-leg jeans aren't bad either but the shoes don't really seem to go with the ensemble at all. I won't be wearing those when I have several pairs of boots that work so much better.

What really surprised me when I tried the jacket on were the claws. There's no indication in the schematic that the outfit comes with white gloves, tipped with long, curving, vicious metal talons. They're clearly visible in the dressing room view so I should have noticed them when I was trying the look out weeks ago but either I'd forgotten or I was concentrating so hard on the overall appearance I failed to register the fine details.

It's a great bonus. I love claws. It's just a shame that the claws from Gretel's top can't be mixed with Sisyphus's tail but as I said, when I wrote about it at the time, the tail is also part of a piece that goes in the same slot.

Last time I was faced with choosing which Phantom to curry favor with next it took me the best part of an hour to make up my mind. I looked at all the possible outfits I could get and tried the various pieces out in all kinds of combinations before committing myself for the long haul I knew it would take.

I really don't think I want to go through that again. I haven't acquired any new Phantoms since then so I'd be looking at the same choices, every one of which I didn't consider worth the effort last time. It's a classic case of diminishing returns.

Without the motivating factor of a new look, I'm not sure I'll have the determination to keep logging in every day. I wanted to complete an unbroken year-long run of "playing" every day and I've done that. I've already skipped a couple of days since, so the streak is broken, which is the very best thing that can happen to any streak.

I'm not planning on backing away from the game altogether. For a start, if I miss a whole week I risk getting booted from my guild, which has fairly strict activity requirements. I could ask them to put me on hiatus but since I've barely spoken to any of them it seems a bit cheeky. The guild is still surprisingly active, too. I may not say much but I hear a lot of other people chatting.

I do also have a possible, alternative motivation in housing. I still have a couple of housing levels left before I cap out and I haven't put anything like as much effort in decorating my house as I could have done. I'm a little wary, though, of getting too involved with the housing system in a game that very well might go belly up in a few months. 

We had yet another server merge last week and I find it hard to imagine the developers can be making much money out of the game any more. They most definitely aren't going to keep a server up out of the goodness of their hearts. As I said the other day, it's entirely possible the game will vanish before my interest in playing it does.

For the time being, I'll probably keep logging in and doing my dailies but not every day any more. If it happens that most days becomes sometimes becomes hardly ever then so be it. It's been a good run.

Before I quit, though, I'll definitely spend all the tokens I've saved up for the gacha draw. I have more than seven hundred of them. Who knows? I might pull a new Phantom with a must-have outfit. Then I'll be back to doing my dailies for sure, at least until I've got my new frock.

Or my new leather jacket. Can't have too many leather jackets, after all.

Motive And Opportunity

Week four of Blaugust already! Actually, there are five weeks of Blaugust according to Bel's plan:

• Welcome to Blaugust
• Introduce Yourself
• Creator Appreciation
• Staying Motivated
• Lessons Learned

I hadn't noticed before but it's an interesting breakdown. The first week is about the event, the second about the blogger, the third about the outside world but the last two are - at least in part - about the process.

I do like writing about my process. Whether anyone wants to hear about it is another matter.

So, "staying motivated", eh? Is that a problem?

Clearly it is for a lot of would-be bloggers. People blog all the time about how they're not blogging. They blog about how they'd like to be blogging but can't find the time or the ideas or the enthusiasm or how they don't have the energy or the determination.

Some bloggers I read blog about this sort of thing quite often and yet they keep on blogging. It seems as though just working through whatever issue they're having with blogging by writing a blog post about it gets them over the hump, at least until the next hump comes along.

Others, having explained why they aren't blogging, stop. Sometimes they stop for a while then come back. Sometimes they stop for good (Although you can never say never in blogland. I've seen blogs flicker back to life after years of silence.)

It seems to me that bloggers roughly fall out into a handful of types, some of which require a lot more in the way of motivation than others. Since I don't want to second-guess how anyone else thinks or to divide complex human beings into trite categories (Heh. Of course I want to - I just don't have the time right now...) I'll stick to talking about the box I'm in: Compulsive Writers.

Compulsive writers need very little motivation. Honestly, the problem we have is knowing when to stop. We just like the sound of our own voices too much ever to shut up. We rarely run out of things to write about because we're writing stories or articles or think pieces in our heads all day, every day, anyway. On the rare occasions we can't think of anything to write about, we'll just find something someone else wrote about already and write about that.

As a compulsive writer, blogging is just the platform I happen to be using right now. Before I blogged I used the comment sections of other peoples' blogs (Seriously, I used to leave comments almost as long as the posts I write now. The comments I leave these days are long enough but back then it was waaaay out of control...) 

Before that I wrote thousands upon thousands of words on forums and before that I produced print zines on a bi-monthly schedule (Sometimes monthly.) for a decade and a half. Before that I was in full-time education and had my hands full writing endless essays. I was told more than once by the people who had to read those essays that maybe I could try writing less, which I'm not sure is something students often have to be told.

Given that background, I can sometimes find it difficult to empathize with others, who find getting the words down on paper harder than I do. (Or screen, I guess. The language hasn't really caught up yet.) In previous years, my advice has often been simply "Just write". If you're stuck for ideas or aren't feeling it, just sit down, start hitting the keys and see what comes out. 

In my experience, something always will. You're reading the proof of that now. I had no idea what I was going to write about this morning. I just had my breakfast (Black tea, one thick slice of wholemeal toast with butter, Beryl shared the toast.), came back upstairs to my Summer Palace (Used to be a bedroom, now it's my study for all the months when heating's not required.) thought about it for maybe ninety seconds, then started writing.

It's not an infallible process. Not quite. Very - very - occasionally, I'll sit down and won't be able to get started at all. I don't keep a record but I'd guess that happens at most three or four times a year. Because I'm not being paid to do this and I'm not on any kind of dumb streak that "can't" be broken (Seriously, streaks suck. Do not get yourself stuck with a streak, ever!), about the only time it makes any difference at all is during Blaugust. 

Other than that, on the extremely rare occasions I would normally be writing a blog post but don't feel like it, I just don't write a blog post that day. I don't believe there have ever been two days in a row when that happened. 

During Blaugust, though, there's this idea that you have to write every day. It's a mistaken idea. The rules, if you can even call them that, make it abundantly clear. These days, there are awards for posting once, five, fifteen or twenty-five times. No need to aim for the top. You can pick whatever target you feel you can hit.

And yet it's easy to forget all that and fall back into the original pattern of the event just the same. The Blaugustian consciousness stubbornly retains the original target of thirty-one posts in thirty-one days which, once again erroneously under the current ruleset, quickly becomes "a post every day for the whole of August". 

I think I'm finally getting past that misconception. I do now have in my head the clear understanding that it means thirty-one posts in total in August, so if I miss a day I can do double duty to catch up.

That's really not such a comfort, though. I mean, if I'd missed a day it would probably not have been through lack of inspiration or motivation. It most likely wouldn't have been through choice at all. It would have been because some external factor interrupted my flow. It's not enormously helpful to know you can write two posts tomorrow if you didn't have time to write one today.

That was the situation I got myself into last Blaugust and it was mildly stressful. I wasn't lacking in motivation per se but I did get to the point where I found myself slightly resenting the fact that I "had" to write a post when I came home from work, even though I was sometimes too tired and would rather have played a game or watched something on TV instead.

This year I've been dealing with that by writing slightly ahead, so I always have at least two posts finished and ready to slot in, when needed. That in itself, of course, requires motivation to spare. It wouldn't be any kind of solution for someone who didn't have more ideas for posts than they knew what to do with.

I quite often have more ideas for posts than I know what to do with. In normal times, some of them just don't get written. 

I find jotting down the ideas as I get them (Or more likely bookmarking whatever source put the idea in my head in the first place.) is of limited value. It's useful on those days when I don't have some burning concern, fad, fascination or whim to share but mostly what happens is I keep writing posts about other things and the topics I bookmarked go stale. I end up deleting more of them than I ever write about. 

That's also been a problem with my "writing ahead" scheme this Blaugust; most of the prepared posts are in some respect out of date by the time they're published. It's better than having to throw together a scrappy screenshot post in the last hour before bed but it's still not ideal. 

Trying to write thirty-one posts in thirty-one days to meet an arbitrary, self-set target no-one but me cares about is far from the ideal way to go about blogging. It's fun but it's not sustainable, at least not for me. That's why Blaugust has to be an event, not a way of life.

Here's where we come back to that unhelpful advice I tend to give at times like these: write because you want to write; if you don't want to write, don't bother. Take a break, come back another time when you do feel motivated. If you never feel motivated, that's fine. There are a million other ways to spend your time or express yourself. Maybe blogging just isn't the one for you.

As for Blaugust, see the Achievements and Awards as a post hoc record of what you did do in Blaugust, not a preset slate of requirements you have to try and meet. Iif you miss a few you wanted, there's always next year.

That's how it looks from my perspective but it's not much use to people who don't already have the same motivation I do. My motivation for writing blog posts is painfully simple. I just want to write. Conversely, I'm also quite lazy and quite easily satisfied. Blog posts come easily to me in large part because they're a lot easier to write than most other forms I've tried. They're orders of magnitude easier than trying to write fiction for a start!

I love writing and blog posts let me indulge that passion without having to put in too much effort. I also have some latent interests in layout and design, so blogging scratches those itches, too. On that basis, motivation pretty much takes care of itself. My time might be better spent asking myself how I could motivate myself to stop blogging, not the other way around.

And at this point in the first draft there were ten more paragraphs where I did just that - speculated on how I might move on from blogging to something else. Reading those paragraphs back, they didn't seem to add anything so I junked them. They felt out of sync with the rest of the post and they weren't in the spirit of Blaugust, which is supposed to encourage people to take up blogging, not explain why they might want to consider giving it up.

It's not like the post wasn't long enough already without them. Compulsive writers rarely know when to stop, which is why they also need to learn to be competent, even ruthless editors.

More importantly, this week is called "Staying Motivated" not "Telling Everyone Else How To Stay Motivated". I think I've more than covered the brief so I'll leave it at that. If anyone finds it helpful, great. If not, hey, it's another post done!

Twenty-one down, ten to go!

Time Flies By (When You're The Rider Of A Horse)

Dawnlands continues to take up most of my gaming time. Steam tells me I've played for sixteen hours in the last two weeks, although since the game only launched a week ago that can't be right. More accurately, I've played sixteen hours in less than seven days. It would have been more but  I didn't play at all yesterday thanks to having to go to work.

Playing anything for more than two hours a day counts as heavy rotation for me these days. What with walking the dog and keeping up with my self-imposed Blaugust commitments, two hours is about all I can fit in, most days.

I can't blame my shorter sessions entirely on Blaugust and Beryl. I believe I have a natural limit for gaming nowadays that begins to make itself felt around the 100 minute mark. A kind of itch to stop and do something else kicks in around then, even when I'm thoroughly immersed and having a great time. 

It's not a new phenomenon. When I think back, even when I sometimes played MMORPGs all day long, I still rarely played for more than a couple of hours at a stretch before taking a break. Maybe three, if I was in a really good group in Velks or Chardok. I rarely indulged in the kind of marathon sessions I've read about, staying up until dawn without a thought for the consequences.

More appropriately dressed this time. Although not by all that much...

The big difference is that back then I'd string those two-hour sessions together, linked by shorter breaks, until I'd racked up six or eight hours gaming in the day. Now it's more likely to be an hour or two in either the morning or afternoon, very rarely both, then another hour in the evening. 

It might come to three hours altogether but that'll be spread across a couple of games; sometimes three or more. Each day, I tend to do routine logins and dailies in whatever my current fancy or fancies might be. On top of that, I try to fit in one moderately significant thing - a couple of levels or some other form of measurable progression - maybe three or four times a week.

In the daytime I play MMORPGs (Or, now, survival-rpg hybrids as well, I guess...). For a long time I was in the habit of playing single-player games in the evening, usually point&click adventures or similar, but of late I seem to have fallen out of that habit. (I must get back to it. It's a nice change of pace.)

From that, it's clear that sixteen hours in one game in less than a week is out of the normal run of things for me. It's especially unusual in that none of that time at all has been spent on dailies or the like. Dawnlands does have daily quests but they're the kind you have to seek out at a board in the village and I generally forget. It has log-on rewards too but they're unobtrusive, at least by the standards of mobile games, and easily ignored.

Pushing my luck in a dungeon well above my level.

What I do in my two hours is play the game and it's a time-consuming process. I don't seem to have achieved as much as you might expect. Mostly that's because there's a lot to do but it's also because doing some of it can take a while. 

For a start, just getting around can fill up most of a session, something that I'm sure will sound very familiar to all veterans of Valheim. It's not quite as simple as that, though. While you're doing it, everything in Dawnlands seems to happen a lot faster than it did in Valheim and yet when you've finished doing it, time seems to have passed just as slowly. It's a curious paradox.

Exploration is the key to everything. The map is a square of featureless blue with the starting point somewhere near the center. The world it conceals is vast and filled with interest, all of which remains invisible and unknown until you go and find it. In this respect, Dawnlands follows the Valheim template almost exactly.

The chart below suggests there are ten biomes, although I'm fairly sure there are only five available in the game right now. I only know the names of two of them (Grassland and Forest.). I've set foot in one more, a wintery snowscape, and I've seen a parched-looking desert from a distance. I'm betting the fifth is "Swampland".

Although I did very tentatively take a look at the snowy place, I'm not planning on exploring any of the rest just yet. Dawnlands employs the exact same progression mechanic as Valheim, in which you need to find a key in a dungeon to mark the location in each biome of a named creature, which you then have to summon using several items you've collected.

As in Valheim, your reward when you defeat each of these creatures is a new tier of crafting recipes, allowing you to make the gear you need to take on the next boss. That already acts as a kind of Must Be This High To Ride mechanic but in Dawnlands the effect is multiplied by the addition of levels, ten more of which become available for each boss you kill.

Kenda, the Grasslands boss was easy. Guya, the Forest boss... not so much.

So far, after sixteen hours I've killed the first boss, located the second, failed to seal him away first time and explored a grand total of 1.22% of the full map. I'm unclear as yet whether every single-player and multiplayer world is procedurally generated as per Valheim or whether we all get the same layout. Either way, I have a lot left to do.

Unlike Valheim, as you slowly push back the fog of war you are at least supplied with some iconography representing what's been revealed. There are symbols for dungeons, settlements, teleporters, monster camps, docks and more. You can also add your own markers although you can't, as I routinely did in Valheim, annotate them with supposedly helpful notes that a few days later will mean little or nothing.

Travel in Dawnlands is much faster than in Valheim. For a start, you can ride a horse. 

The implementation of mounts, like much in the game, has an endearingly idiosyncratic texture.Whoever designed the system doesn't seem to have been able to decide between the absolute convenience of World of Warcraft, where your mount is a weightless, intangible appurtenance that appears and disappears on command, and the worldliness of Fallen Earth, where a horse has to be tethered and stabled and can be attacked by passing predators in just the same way as the player character.

Being unable to choose between these entirely discrete and incompatible approaches, the unknown designer clearly thought "I'll just use both." 

A horse can be summoned at any time, from anywhere, simply by pressing "Y", whereupon it  manifests instantly beside you.  Once summoned, to ride the horse you first have to mount by pressing "F". Then, when you want to dismount, you just press "X". 

At this point your horse does not vanish, as it would in WoW. He merely stands there, cropping whatever passes for grass around his feet. As far as I can tell, he'll stay there indefinitely. There's even a marker on the map to show where he is, just in case you forget, although since you can whistle him to you in a nanosecond I don't know why you'd bother.

Oh, wait... yes I do! It'd be to save his life. Your horse can be attacked and killed by any passing monster. As soon as a goblin spots an unattended horse they'll immediately set upon it, presumably looking for the same things I'm after when I pick off a passing deer or boar - hides and meat.

It's alright for you, Sparky.
You don't have to run back.

Unlike the deer, who run away, or the boars, who fight back, your dumb horse will just stand there, oblivious, until either the monsters kill him or you kill the monsters. When this first happened to me, I was at great pains to intervene, fearing I'd lose ol' Sparky for good, but now I tend to finish whatever I'm doing first before going back to rescue him. 

It turns out that dying does nothing more to my horse than it does to me. Less, in fact, since he doesn't drop any saddlebags he has to go back for. You can watch him expire then hit "Y" and see him re-appear right next to you as though nothing at all had happened.

The logic behind having the mount fully "in the world" while also making him indestructable and instantly available through the UI defeats me but I love it. It combines all the granularity of those Fallen Earth mounts with all the convenience of WoW, it makes absolutely no sense and it's genius.

You can push it even further if you want. Literally. Like all mobs in Dawlands, horses have full collision so you can physically shove them around if you feel the need. 

I tried it once, just for science. Horses despawn in deep water, re-appearing on the nearest bank or shore they just left, but if you're quick, you can dismount and leave them standing in the river up to their fetlocks. I was able to jump off my horse in mid-stream then push him back to dry land. It was pointless but it was fun!

Riding or running aren't the only ways to get about. There's an instant travel system, too. I'd explain exactly how it works but first I'd have to know, myself. 

As far as I can make out, there's a network of Teleport Beacons you can find and, if necessary, cleanse of corruption so you can move between them. The Teleport Beacons are very few and far between, which would be highly restrictive if it wasn't for the fact that you can also teleport to all kinds of other locations as well - any of the icons marked on the map, in fact, which in practical terms means just about everywhere. 

Unfortunately, teleporting to any of them requires a Teleportation Potion every time. The potion is consumed on use and the only place I've found them is on vendors in the Shelters. They're cheap but there's only one vendor in each village, each vendor only has five potions to sell and they're never restocked. If there's a recipe to craft them, I haven't found it yet.

There is another, craftable consumable, called a Reverie Stone. It claims to be able to return you to your last-visited resurrection point, which would normally be wherever you last slept. That's probably your current house, where you keep all your stuff, so it would be very useful. Unfortunately, when I tried one that I'd made, it didn't work. 

It might have been because the specific Reverie Stone I used was bugged or because the system itself was but it could also be that I don't know how to use it properly. The materials to make the stones aren't common but, when and if I get a few more, I'll try to figure out whose fault it is the thing isn't working.

The upshot of all of this is that even though you can theoretically zap about all over the map at will, in practice you end up hoarding your precious potions and going everywhere on horseback instead. You can, of course, also make boats of various kinds and travel longer distances over water but so far I haven't opened any of the recipes past the basic raft nor found any bodies of water large enough to require transportation by vessel. I can swim across a river or ride around a lake!

These are the kinds of quirks that make a game both memorable and absorbing. Or bloody irritating, depending on your point of view. Personally, I love it.

Since this is a post about why I don't seem to have all that much to show for my sixteen hours in the game, I had been meaning to say something about crafting. Making the items themselves is almost instantaneous but refining the raw resources can take quite a while. In a game that's almost wholly reliant on crafted gear, that does tend to slow things down a little.

Looking at how long this post is already, though, and how long it's taken me to write it, I think I'll leave that for another time. Which makes this post something of a metaphor for the game itself, really, now I come to think of it...

Us Weirdos Have To Stick Together

For the final day of Blaugust's Creator Appreciation Week, I want to talk about two things: firstly, a TV show I've just finished watching and secondly, the website where I watched it. The show is The Owl House and the website is The Owl Club.

Regular readers may remember I wrote about The Owl House back in July, when I went into some detail about how I was watching it. It was streaming on Disney+ but I didn't want to subscribe at that time. I wanted to buy it on DVD but it wasn't available. 

In the end, I found the first two seasons at the Internet Archive and that's where I watched Season One. I expressed some surprise that offering TV shows, while they were still available on streaming services, would be part of their remit or even legal. It turns out it may be neither. 

Only yesterday I read a piece about the music industry, as represented by megacorps Sony, UMG and Capitol, suing the Archive over copyright, something the big publishing houses have already done. I suspect there's only going to be one winner in that fight.

The iniquity of copyright is a whole, other post so let's set it aside for now. I only mention it because almost immediately after I finished Season One of The Owl House, both it and Season Two were removed from the Internet Archive with the following explanation:

This item is no longer available.

Items may be taken down for various reasons, including by decision of the uploader or due to a violation of our Terms of Use.

I thought that was going to be it for my time with Luz and her friends, at least until I was ready to subscribe to Disney+. something that will eventually happen, I'm sure. Happily, that turned out not to be the case.

I can't now recall just how I came across The Owl Club. I might have been googling to see if the show was available somewhere else or it might just have appered in a link when I was reading about it. However it happened, it was a lucky break.

I'm not exactly clear on just what The Owl Club is, let alone who operates it, other than it seems to exist purely to make the show available to fans, particularly Spanish-speaking fans. There's a Patreon and a page on the website explaining other ways to contribute to keep the project going, which includes telling everyone about it, using the hashtag #SaveTheOwlClub and showing the Owl Club watermark in images taken from the site.

I'm taking it on trust that this is a genuine, fan project, created and run by people who just love the show. It's certainly very professionally made and presented. Watching Seasons Two and Three there went a lot more smoothly than watching Season One at the Archive. Just like watching a regular streaming service.

How long it will stay up is another matter. I imagine one day either the cost of keeping the club going will become too much or, ironically, success in raising funds by raising the profile will draw the attention of lawyers. Until that unhappy day, let's celebrate The Owl Club and the people who made it happen.

So much for the platform. What about the show?

Oh, it's wonderful. It's everything people say it is. 

• 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.  
  

• "Flipping brilliant" - Polygon 

• "...one of Disney’s best animated series in recent years, if not ever" - Gizmodo 

• "The Owl House is going to be one of those shows people talk about for years to come." - Starburst

If you decide to give it a try - and you should - then be aware it takes a while to get going. The first season, particularly the first half, doesn't feel like much more than a pretty good fantasy show for tweens and young teens. 

It takes a good while for the central narrative to establish itself, with each episode feeling quite individuated. It also very much revolves around the concerns and conceits of high school students, albeit demonic ones. 

Those last two paragraphs, you'll notice, could do stand in work as a description of the first season of Buffy. It's an appropriate comparison. Just as Buffy grew from a monster-of-the-week comedy-drama into a complex, disturbing, challenging exploration of grief, growth and redemption, so the Owl House quickly develops its own, unique chiaroscuro of ecstasy and despair. 

Of the three seasons, I found the second the most intense and involving but the third, structured as three 45-50 minute specials and written in the knowledge the show would not be renewed, is probably the most satisfying. To begin at the end, as with Titans, it's amazing just how much difference it makes to the cancellation of a show when the writers have time to prepare for it.

Still, to cut off a show with such potential in its absolute prime has to be counted a tragedy. To cite Buffy again, by the end of Season Three that show was just begining to hit its stride. So was The Owl House. 

Buffy, of course, didn't end when the show did. The story continued in a long run of really excellent comics. I hope some similar future exists for The Owl House. It may. Characters and concepts as strong as these rarely disappear forever.

The show's strength doesn't reside only in the well-realised and consistent characterisation or the frequently-cited and exceptionally welcome social messaging. A big part of the show's impact comes from the unusually detailed and sustained world-building. 

Apart from the first episode of Season Three, which takes place in the human realm (Or Earth, as we call it.) every episode is set primarily in The Boiling Isles. Built on the bones of a Titan, the Boiling Isles are home to an indescribable mix of weird and wonderful creatures, from Tinella (Basically a nose on legs.) to Barcus (Fonzie as a dog.)

The level of detail is mindbending. Every scene is literally playing blink-and-you-missed-it. It's the kind of show where you want to go back and watch it in freeze-frame, an absolute visual delight.

The writing is sharp, funny and poignant and the voice acting is up to bringing out every nuance. What's more, you hear the characters change and grow, not just as they age but also as they assimilate and process experiences both typical of any teenager and exclusive to a fantasy world.

In short, there's pretty much nothing about The Owl House I don't love except the fact that it's over. As with all great TV shows, it's a collaborative enterprise, so picking out individuals for particular praise doesn't always feel appropriate. Still, it's clear from everything I've read about the show that it wouldn't exist in its precise form were it not for the inspiration and influence of creator and showrunner, Dana Terrace.

According to an interview she gave to Vanity Fair, Dana was determined not to compromise her vision for The Owl House, even though it was deemed inappropriate by her bosses and could have cost her her job:

“I was sat down in a conference room and told that I could not, by any means, have any kind of gay storyline among the main characters. I let myself get mad, to absolutely blow up, and storm out of the room. Life is short and I don’t have time for cowardice, I was ready to move on to greener pastures if need be. The stubbornness paid off and a week or two later I was given the all-clear. Luckily, the executives I directly work with have given me nothing but support.”

The unfortunate corollary seems to have been that by making a show that broke with the conventions of the genre within which she was working to such a marked degree, Dana attracted an audience outside the remit of the channel on which it was being shown. Supposedly the main reason for the cancellation was that too many adults tuned in to watch it.

At least by watching it on Internet Archive and The Owl Club I can say I wasn't one of them so my conscience is clear! If you want to watch it, though, the damage has already been done, so go ahead and watch it on Disney+ or Apple TV or even YouTube, since for some reason the whole of Season Three is available for free on Disney's YouTube channel as a two-and-a-half hour movie.

I'm holding out for the DVD box set. I want a copy to keep.