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No offense to Stephen King, but people are citing the wrong apocalypse fiction.

by Aaron Williams on April 3, 2020 at 2:05 AM
Posted In: The Idiot Box

If you find post-apocalyptic fiction a little upsetting nowadays, feel free to skip this post.

For those out there who dig “what happened after” stories, you’ve probably seen comparisons of COVID-19 to the novel, “The Stand,” where a weaponized flu strain wipes out most of humanity. There’s also a Dean Koontz novel being brought up called “The Eyes of Darkness,” but it’s for a “prediction” in the text that’s not really a prediction. Anyway, these and other tales of humans vs. viruses don’t really parallel the current pandemic, in my opinion, and there’s an often-overlooked gem that was canceled too soon but is still worth watching, I think: Jeremiah.

Here’s the opening from the first season. It hasn’t aged very well, but you can get a feel for the aesthetic:

The setup for their humans-b-gone is called “The Big Death,” where a virus that can be transmitted by touch kills everyone over the age of puberty, leaving a world where kids had to raise themselves in the aftermath now run things. The main character, Jeremiah, thinks his father might still be alive, and in searching for him, he finds a brewing conflict between a group of survivors at a place called “Thunder Mountain” and those who want to take over the world by force. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but my main arguments for seeing it are:

• J. Michael Straczynski wrote it, so the plot is thought out, well-structured, and… sadly had to be rushed at the end.
• If you liked Samwise Gamgee from the Lord of the Rings movies, Sean Astin appears as an intriguing character named “Mr. Smith.” He talks to God, by the way.
• The world as presented in this show is one of the reasons I couldn’t ever get into Jericho, because I liked this one so much better.

The main issue with the show is that the suits at Showtime canceled it after only two seasons. They told JMS this around the middle of season 2, so he had to cram two to three seasons worth of plot into the shows remaining. Things move very fast, and while you get a sense of where the show was headed, it would’ve been nice to see it in its entirety.

So if this is something you might want to take in, it’s streaming on iTunes and Amazon Prime. And in a kind of weird parallel to our current obsession with toilet paper, there’s a scene where the chance to use a working toilet after years of roughing it is given cinematography and music normally reserved for romantic reunions. You gotta love that, right?

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Free games from itch.io (and one other)…

by Aaron Williams on March 18, 2020 at 1:13 PM
Posted In: Video Gaming

Itch.io has a large number of free games available for your self-isolation needs.

There’s also Goat of Duty on Steam, which is currently sans cost. It’s a multiplayer goat-based FPS where physics seem to be a bit optional and goats are outfitted with robot arms with which they can wield weapons.

It’s not the strangest game I’ve heard of, to be fair.

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A souvenir for the convention we’re all a part of…

by Aaron Williams on March 17, 2020 at 1:56 AM
Posted In: Om Nom Nom!, T-Shirts

So there’s an event coming to town that’s so big it’s literally closing everything else down that isn’t involved with the sale and transportation of toilet paper, and I thought it deserved a commemorative t-shirt:

Be sure to look at the back graphics at Offworld Designs for even more questionable humor.

While this is all in fun, please do follow the CDC’s guidelines and stay as safe as possible out there. We’re in somewhat uncharted territory, and while I like to satirize, I also plan to sanitize, and I hope everyone else can manage to do the same. And here’s hoping all of our conventions and game-gatherings are back in our nation’s many multi-purpose areas as soon as possible.

In my neck of the woods, school is postponed until April 3rd at least, which means my wife and I are trying to come up with a halfway decent simulation of 4th grade for our son while he looks longingly at the Xbox and PC. I’m not sure what I’m qualified to teach, though I’m sure I’ll be given several choices in short order. I just hope there’s not a quiz when it’s all said and done.

During this shut-in time, I’m also trying my hand at crafting some ginger beer, though I’m sure it’s far from the best, as I’ve been making do with boiled (then cooled) water rather than distilled. I’m leaving it in the bottles to get fizzy, so there’s a bit o’ alcohol in my beverage product along with authentic yeast-sludge at the bottom. I’m told by a professional taster of mixed drinks that I’ve maybe created a weak wine cooler, booze-wise. Still, my goal was carbonation and more ginger than the usual store-bought stuff, so I think I succeeded. Also, it appears to be difficult to give myself food poisoning with this method, so that’s a big thumbs up.

And while the experts say alcohol and ginger are unproven to help prevent disease, I’m going to pretend they do, especially as my favorite saucepan now smells like ginger snaps. At least I’ve got a t-shirt to remember this experience, in case I actually manage to make some kind of ginger-moonshine concoction that makes recalling the past a bit of a challenge. 🙂

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A new sci-fi YouTube series that’s got a homemade vibe.

by Aaron Williams on March 11, 2020 at 3:54 PM
Posted In: Articus Pharticus, It's got Robots and Lasers, Mystery Clip Theater

There’s a YouTube channel I’ve been meaning to feature here, and I think that time has come. It’s called “CreateSciFi,” and what I love about it is the many videos about building your own spaceships from common household items. It’s a testament to what was called “kit bashing” as well as the techniques that film studios once used to create their stellar vessels: You had someone in a model shop, and they got creative with existing model kits, hardware, and whatever was at hand.

Note: This is where I insert my pet theory that the Borg Cube was originally made from all the spare model kit trees that the people who built the miniature spaceships had lying around.

So anyway, the channel has launched a series called Zenith Run which is fun to look at given its retro-film aesthetic and all the handmade props:

Be warned, if you delve too deeply into their video archive, you might find yourself at your local Dollar Tree store picking up random objects with the intent of gluing them together.

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A long-overdue linkdump.

by Aaron Williams on January 24, 2020 at 2:06 AM
Posted In: It Came from the Internet, Science ahoy!, Tabletop Gaming, You call that noise "music?"

Because the song is a bit tarnished from Fallout 76, I vote that “Country Roads” be featured in the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077:

If the game bombs, we might have to consider the idea that John Denver has cursed his own music and haunting all projects that license it.

Moving on:

• Firstly, rest in peace to Monty Python alum, Sir Terry Jones. Apart from his work in one of the most famous comedy groups in the world, I’ll always remember him for his very enjoyable BBC series, Medieval Lives and Crusades. The “living paintings” in that latter one really stuck with me.

• From the Lovecraft story, “From Beyond,” here’s one propmaker’s version of the Tillinghast Device. It’s perfect for your next cult rave.

• And turning to actual issues of mental health, here’s an interesting look at a notebook from an asylum inmate in the 1930’s and the odd journey they took.

• Here’s some truly loaded dice for your next D&D session: They’ve got sapphires and a $300 price tag, so even if you roll a 1, you can claim it’s only the finest quality critical failure.

• Speaking of special-interest items of rare quality, if there’s a zombie in your life that turns up where its nose used to be at pedestrian gray matter, perhaps it would prefer to dine on a hunk of human brain that survived for 2600 years. That’s some well-aged nosh, there.

• Turning to the theater, start coming up with joke names for songs and see which ones actually show up in the upcoming Karate Kid musical. I can’t wait to see the “wax on, wax off” choreography along with a chorus line of people sweeping the leg.

• And our ending game is a bit like the one available on Steam called “Hidden Folks.” This one is Heartreasure, and your goal is to click on hearts to unlock new areas. Sometimes the unlock for one place is in another, so if you can’t find the trigger, move on to a different zone. Also, it helps to be able to tell where notes are on a treble scale.

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Do you own the original Skyrim? Need a time sink?

by Aaron Williams on December 23, 2019 at 7:12 PM
Posted In: Stuff with magic and swords, Video Gaming

You need to go get Enderal. I gave this a spin mostly out of spite, as I’ve had the original edition of Skyrim in my Steam library since it launched. I wanted to get the DLC for the game the same way I’d gotten it for Fallout 3: Wait for it to go on sale, get it cheap, then either play it or play the mods that used the new assets.

It never got down to the low prices of F3’s content, and soon after it should have, the special edition of Skyrim came out and all things involving the older version never went on sale and couldn’t be found via Steam’s search function.

Anyway, one of Steam’s new features is suggesting games based on ones you’ve played, and it suggested this free game called Enderal. It’s basically a total conversion mod for the original Elder Scrolls V game, no DLC required. If you only have the special edition, you might be able to get Enderal working, but the instructions are kind of extensive. Since I had the “antique” edition, I downloaded the game just to give my old version of Skyrim a way to thumb its nose at its younger, sexier replacement.

I took it for a spin for a few hours, and I haven’t seen anything that was in the trailer, except for one of the ninja-mask looking dudes, making me wonder just how huge this thing might be. So far it feels pretty massive, and it’s also pretty brutal if you’re used to other Bethesda-style games. I’d leveled up quite a bit, going for a lot of powers involving magical fire and electricity, and I’d still get murdered if more than two wolves came at me at once. Exploration is rewarding, but it’s also something you don’t do lightly. In this game, magic causes something called “Arcane Fever,” which will eventually turn you into a monster if you let it get too bad. It’s a bummer, therefore, that all the healing potions I came across caused my fever to increase.

The plot is intriguing thus far, and the perk tree seems to have something to do with all this talk of alternate realities, which is a pretty neat reason for how you can pick up powers out of thin air. You also learn skills via books, and there are books for every skill. It does seem a little strange that some of them are for skills you probably wouldn’t want others to have, but then again I found a merchant selling magic items that enhance werewolf powers, so maybe they’re a lot more fatalistic.

The mechanics from Skyrim are still present, so it’s not totally alien. Alchemy still works the same with you having to taste everything once in order to figure out its initial use. The combat AI isn’t the greatest, but I’m not complaining. If it wasn’t for bad pathfinding and enemies getting stuck on the terrain in places, I would’ve died even more. The magic skills seem beefier, and I went with them largely because your starting weapons aren’t very impressive. I suppose if I’d chosen the memories/skills that helped with archery or swordplay, that would’ve helped. Still, I found the electrical spells very satisfying, though keeping one’s mana high enough last multiple enemies is still a distant dream and why I kept a number of melee weapons in my inventory.

There are quite a few cutscenes in this game, especially early on. I should also say that not all the voice actors are pros; I suspect a lot of volunteer work was involved, but most of the ones I heard did a decent job. That said, some dialog exchanges can be pretty long, but you can discover quests, make friendships or strengthen relationships with NPCs, and can gain “knowledge points” that earn you XP as well as stat boosts, eventually. I guess what I’m pointing out is that this game is pretty story-rich, so don’t go in expecting that all you’ll need is a quest marker and more hit points than whoever it’s pointing you to.

So if you’ve got the setup, I recommend getting Enderal from Steam and trying it out. All you could possibly lose is all of your free time for the foreseeable future, so why not? 🙂

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Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut Digital Classic Edition is FREE from Good Old Games for a limited time.

by Aaron Williams on December 11, 2019 at 12:42 PM
Posted In: It's got Robots and Lasers, Video Gaming

And by “a limited time,” they mean just under two days as of this post. Here’s their store page for Wasteland 2, and I give it a recommend if you like party-based computer role-playing games. It’s got more polished in-game animation than the original Fallout games, but the “cutscenes” are a little slide-showy. It’s got some decisions for you to make, plot twists involving various party members, and a showdown at the end that can be made easier or more difficult depending on the actions you took getting there.

It’s worth playing, especially for free. I’m guessing it’s to generate buzz for the upcoming Wasteland 3, whose release date is “early 2020”:

I think the in-game lore is just that at some point, a military facility (pre- or post-war) decided that robotic arachnids was the key to ruling the battlefield and put them into mass production (even spilling over into Fallout New Vegas’ DLC, Old World Blues).

I may also have to add that trailer’s version of “Land of Confusion” to my playlist. If you want to hear it without all the explosions and narration, here it is.

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Ghostbusters Afterlife

by Aaron Williams on December 9, 2019 at 11:52 AM
Posted In: Cineplexia, From the Mouth of Madness, Nostalgia!

This trailer just dropped, and it intrigues me on several levels:

For starters, this is a proper sequel to the original Ghostbusters movies, and it’s kind of what I’d hoped the premise of the 2016 film was going to be: In-universe acknowledgement that previous events in New York had happened, ghosts are real, etc. As for what’s going on in the film itself, I have some theories:

I believe we see a revamped Slimer (or a close relative) being Proton Pack’d and what appears to be the foreleg from one of Zuul’s temple dogs…

…which tells me the ghosts and other entities from the first movie(s?) are still around. The mention of fracking, earthquakes, and the mineshaft makes me think that Egon Spengler used some kind of underground setup to store all the ghosts from the first two movies, and that storage arrangement is failing. Perhaps this is a commentary on environmental impacts of waste from fracking or nuclear power?

The film wisely sounds like it’s staying lighthearted while not going for the SNL comedy of the previous movies, which is fine with me. While I liked the humor as a kid, I was also fascinated with the technology and lore. If this movie finally spawns some kind of “expanded universe,” I’d love it if they went the route of the many Ghostbusters fan clubs where any future movies (or even TV shows) would feature branch offices in different locales. I find the Iowa Black Squadron 13 Ghostbusters especially intriguing just based on the name alone.

And I know the 2016 film comes in for a lot of criticism, but I want to mention what bugged me the most about any movie in the entire franchise. It was this:

I know it was the second film, but I couldn’t come up with a satisfying in-universe reason for this logo being in the actual movie. The only one that even remotely makes sense is that Peter Venkman is a Deadpool-like consciousness, fully aware that he’s really an actor playing a part in a movie sequel. Him working a “2” into their company mascot is him breaking the 4th wall for his own amusement.

My secondary complaint is how ABC re-recorded a lot of Lorenzo Music’s voice work as Peter Venkman in the cartoon The Real Ghostbusters with Dave Coulier in reruns of seasons one and two. Still, the show had Babylon 5’s J. Michael Straczynski as the series’ story editor and he wrote several episodes. For his sake, I’ll forgive them a little for sticking a Full House alum in my Ghostbusters cartoon.

I seem to have really gone off-point here, so as usual, I’m hopeful but cautious. If this is good, then the next letter-writing campaign probably shouldn’t focus on the next sequel per se: It should be to tell the suits at Sony to not muck about with it like they have with so many other films they’ve meddled to death.

And hey, if they decide to go the TV route, Supernatural is coming to a close, and a ghost-themed series with proton packs might be a good replacement, right? 🙂

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Does this mean I like Muzak?

by Aaron Williams on December 7, 2019 at 2:08 PM
Posted In: It Came from the Internet, You call that noise "music?"

Me as a kid in a mall: “Ugh, they just had someone record an instrumental version of a cool pop song so they could pipe it out over the shoppers who might get over-excited if they heard the original.”

The internet: “Do you like Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky?'”

This makes me wonder if those old “lounge music” versions of songs we once heard in our nation’s elevators would be considered novel if they’d been presented ironically?

Anyway, if you enjoyed this balalaika-based tribute, the Клюква Шоу channel has even more for your listening pleasure.

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Post-Turkey Day Linkdump

by Aaron Williams on December 1, 2019 at 11:43 AM
Posted In: Articus Pharticus, Cineplexia, It Came from the Internet, It's got Robots and Lasers, Science ahoy!, Tabletop Gaming, Video Gaming

It was “turkey day” this week, so naturally I tuned into the Mystery Science Theater 3000 channel on Twitch that’s now showing most of the episodes 24/7, minus those they can’t get the rebroadcast rights to (like the various Godzilla movies). It reminded me of one of my favorite comedy bits from the host segments, and since I now have this song running through my head, I have to inflict it on everyone else. From their send-up of The Starfighters, here’s the United Servo Academy Men’s Chorus singing their Academy’s hymn:

If you go looking for the lyrics to that last bit where Tom launches into “Hinky-Dinky Parlez-Vous,” be warned that there are multiple versions that seem to be the result of a competition to be the most risque.

Now that we’re all MSTie eyed (see what I did there?), here’s some other items I ran across:

• Remember the Numa Numa guy? He’s become an electronica musician and has a posted YouTube playlist of the tracks from his album, Haunted House of Pancakes.

• Some may call this a more resilient way of archiving data, others (like me) see it as one step closer to having holo-crystals, but Microsoft has successfully archived the first Superman movie on a piece of glass. This kind of makes the whole “Phantom Zone” scene kind of meta, now that I think about it.

• “Marbling.” No, it’s not about meat or how Martha Stewart applies paint to make Christmas baubles look like they’re made of marble. It’s a cool technique for making those psychedelic end pages for books you may have run across in your local castle library.

• Speaking of books, here’s a blog of the sorts of novels I recall devouring back before all this “lit-RPG” stuff came along: Let’s Read TSR covers any book penned about Dragonlance, The Forgotten Realms, and all those other campaign settings everyone always wants to have revived when a new edition of D&D comes out.

• From the “things I never knew about a given celebrity” files comes news that Sir Rod Stewart is really into model trains. I love the idea that he’d request hotel space to work on some of the buildings while on tour.

• Do you know how fast your star was going? A star has been ejected from the Milky Way galaxy at about 1,700 km per second. Hopefully this departure was amicable and it won’t be returning as some kind of vengeful sapient star-monster or anything.

• Another departure that has returned (for now) is Star Trek IV, which I hope will have more sci-fi and no references to a previous Star Trek IV, though the theme music to that film was good enough that I wouldn’t begrudge the composer a few referential stings in the soundtrack.

• An artist has created the Elder Gods’ gaming dice, I think. I mean, it sure looks like you could use them to roll a square root of -1.

• This is an older item from February of this year, but I didn’t know that Canada had a hair-freezing contest. Since the colder months are upon us, I thought it’d be a good time to inspire any would-be competitors to start training for the 2020 competition.

• Our game o’ the moment is Ghostly Tricks. It’s a puzzle game where you have to use your ability to have your ghost leave your body to solve puzzles. There’s also a life-force mechanic, so keep in mind you don’t always have to use *your* life-force to get things done…

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