I need to catch up on my Supernatural backlog, but in the meantime, I was impressed with the production values and the raft of cameo appearances by actors from the actual show in this Ghostbusters-esque send-up of everyone’s favorite pretty-boy-monster-hunters show:
An additional bit of meta-humor comes from Reddit (with a “salty lingo ahoy” warning), where one user called “accordingtothelore” plays things very straight while posting all of their comments as Sam Winchester without actually referencing him being a character on a TV show. This assumes, of course, that Sam’s laptop hasn’t become haunted and gained the ability to post to message boards in other realities.
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Aretha Franklin passed away. Her music and talent were unimpeachable, and her place in popular culture is so enormous that it’s practically expected over movie credits, on the radio, on commercials, and so forth. I just wanted to point out two things her memory conjures for me from my misspent youth. The first one is an animated video for her song “Respect” from the venerable cartoon, Tiny Toons Adventures:
This other one is just a snippet, really, but it’s firmly lodged in my brain-meats. The refrain from her song “Freeway of Love” was included in Weird Al’s “Polka Party,” a polka mashup of hits from the mid-80’s:
It’s around the 1 minute 32 second mark, should you (for some strange reason) not want to listen to the whole thing.
She was also nickname-dropped in an episode of The Real Ghostbusters cartoon, Don’t Forget the Motor City, but that was about all they could do without paying a royalty, I think.
There you have one trivia-filled mind’s obscure memories of Aretha Franklin. She will be missed, though her music will live on, even in unexpected places like these.
There is, indeed. Patrick Stewart has confirmed he’ll be returning as Captain Jean-Luc Picard for a new CBS All-Access series. This is in addition to Star Trek: Discovery and a spin-off series called Short Treks.
All that’s known at the moment is that the series will explore the next chapter in Picard’s life, and that it won’t be a reboot of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Maybe we’ll finally find out if Livingston the lionfish was really running the ship or not?
Sadly, I can’t be among those currently rolling dice and cosplaying their hearts out in Indianapolis, but I can cobble together some celebratory stuff that everyone can enjoy:
• Going further off on tangent as you need food to go with your drinks, the photoblog We Want Plates is all about showcasing the oddball ways some places serve food on anything but actual plates.
• The usual flash game rounds out this post with Stickman Boost 2. Run, jump, double jump, wall jump, and grab power-ups while collecting coins and avoiding your stickman’s untimely demise (like you do).
About a year or so ago I bought No Man’s Sky for my son to play with. He’d seen the trailers and I figured that it’d be a decent first spaceflight sim, as he was already into Minecraft, which just lacked spaceships (sans mods). Then came the controversy over how the game that was teased wasn’t the one players received.
It still kind of isn’t, if a living, breathing, undiscovered universe is what you were wanting. However, it’s got enough going for it now that I’d say it’s worth picking up on sale, with a few caveats.
Firstly, let me just say that whatever the game does when it loads, it takes a really long time:
I’m not running it from a solid state drive, but it out-drags Fallout 4 for loading times, at least initially. There are some loading bits in-game that are covered up with warp drive effects and what have you, but those weren’t terribly noticeable unless a lot of asteroids, enemy ships, terrain features, etc. joined in and drove up the lag factor. Basically, once it’s loaded up, it does okay.
I played it on survival mode, because I like a bit of challenge. However, that challenge comes at a cost: Risking a lot of work. I got killed because I started out on a planet that was slowly making me freeze to death, and I didn’t reach my ship or any shelter in time to beef up my space suit’s resistance to the elements. Unfortunately (as if death weren’t enough), I lost the gizmos I’d spent an hour or two gathering resources to build along with that life. It made the thought of having to risk death to go even farther from my ship to replace those resources a groan-worthy concept, and I wound up deleting the save file and just starting over.
The game is better at telegraphing what you should do next than previous versions, but I think I missed something important: Having a base probably helps with the whole “I died and lost everything” concept. I didn’t get far into base building or getting a freighter, but you can add a lot of extra storage in those sorts of places. You’ll need it, as the game still isn’t terribly good at letting you know what you might need in the future and if it’s rare or not. It also doesn’t do terribly well without consulting a wiki at letting you know if the thing it says you need is something you find or something you manufacture in a multi-step process. I suppose Minecraft was the same way until they added the recipe book, so it’s probably not a deal-killer.
At least early on, this isn’t a game for the impatient. You’ll probably start out on a planet with a hostile environment, so your suit’s protective meter will start to drop immediately, even more so if there’s inclement weather. You can hop back into your ship, duck into a building, or take refuge in a cave to let that meter recharge. You can also use sodium or one of its many refined forms to fill this protective bar back towards full, but I found I ran out of it in short order, probably due to the lack of the stuff being near where I started out. Anyway, I found myself sitting and twiddling my space-gauntleted thumbs a lot waiting for storms to blow over.
One complaint about the game that I can completely understand is that the marketing appeared to promise a universe to discover, as if you’d be the first person to visit the various planets across the galaxy. However, every planet is littered with alien artifacts, ruins, structures, outposts, and a bunch of robots called “Sentinels.” I skimmed the lore, and the Sentinels were made to fight off an invading race by injecting said race’s eggs with nanites that turned the resulting mechano-creature against the invaders. Now, they’re described as “gardeners” of every planet. They fly around and make sure nobody does anything to disrupt the worlds they protect. “Disruption” includes mining, resource gathering, killing wildlife, or (in some cases) by daring to exist. When roused, you get a Grand Theft Auto-style infamy rating of one to five angry-Sentinel icons. The higher you go, the larger and more deadly the robo-cops are that come after you. These are, I think, the mechs that that you can see in the most recent trailer. I wouldn’t know since the normal flying-camera version is more than enough to send me running for my ship.
The game has a meta-narrative I’ve heard about from various YouTubers, and it may not be to everyone’s liking. It’s ambitious, in a kind of “big idea about reality sci-fi” sort of way, but I’m not sure this was the right game to deliver it. You’ll have to judge for yourselves, but only if you find base building and resource gathering a fun way to spend an afternoon.
Lest I leave you with my own light experiences to go by, I want to share a video that had some pretty helpful tips on getting over the early game hump of a lack of resources and money. I haven’t been able to use his tip on getting a better ship, as my use of the signal booster only showed me where some ruins and trading outposts are. Procedural generation must hate me, I guess:
By now, everyone’s probably seen the trailer for the upcoming DC movie, Shazam. If not, it looks a lot like this:
But this isn’t the first live-action appearance of this superhero. In 1941, a 12-part serial was produced called The Adventures of Captain Marvel which can be viewed in all its glory in this YouTube playlist.
He later appeared on TV screens in 1974, which is where I first ran into the character. Here’s the first three minutes of an episode from his three-season run, ending with the “Shazam!” transformation and a trampoline-and-bluescreen-of-a-dude-lying-down technique of making a person appear to fly. Fast-forward to about 2:30 to see that and skip a lot of ACTING!:
In 1979, he showed up in a comedy (their words, not mine) special called Legends of the Superheroes. I give them an “A” for effort on the costumes, at least:
It’s probably still more dignified than the attempt at a live-action Justice League show where David Ogden Stiers played Martian Manhunter.
In 1981, Captain Marvel/Shazam became part of a TV show called The Kid Super Power Hour with Shazam. This was the intro for his segments:
He appeared in many DC/WB animated series, though not as much as the writers would’ve liked. Apparently, there were rights issues afoot, so a planned conflict between Shazam and Superman was delayed several years. Originally, they would’ve faced off in the Superman Animated Series in the year 2000, but instead had to wait to have it happen in a 2005 episode of Justice League Unlimited entitled “Clash.”
One other notable appearance was in a series of shorts that appeared on Cartoon Network. This one, entitled “Stamina,” won an Emmy:
I love the old RV from the 70’s live-action series.
In closing, the whole Captain Marvel/Shazam name kerfuffle apparently came about when Marvel Comics trademarked the name “Captain Marvel” for its character who was given his powers by the alien race, the Kree. Fawcett, the original publishers of comics starring Captain “Shazam!” Marvel had quit producing the comic in the 1960’s, and Marvel’s Captain Marvel appeared in 1967. When DC acquired Fawcett’s version of the Captain in 1972, Marvel’s trademark meant DC owned the lightning-bolt-on-chest version of Captain Marvel, but they couldn’t market him under his original moniker. They instead did so under the now-famous word “Shazam,” and that eventually became his official name.
At least, that’s how I think it went down. Anyway, due to legal reasons, Captain Marvel is either a Marvel Comics character or the former name of the guy in red we now call Shazam. Also, the 70’s and 80’s were really weird times for television.
There’s an Invader Zim movie coming called “Enter the Florpus.” For a trailer that has no dialog, it’s pretty compelling (if you grew up on Zim, the X-Files, 80’s and 90’s animation, etc.):
Glory to the Irken Empire and the Almighty Tallest!
Sadly, I can’t be among those currently rolling dice and cosplaying their hearts out in Indianapolis, but I can cobble together some celebratory stuff that everyone can enjoy:
