(This post reuses some stuff I wrote on Brontoforumus, 2022-08-26.)
Episode 6: Madam, I'm Adam
The always-great Stephen Tobolowsky plays the eponymous Adam, a man who comes home one night to find there are other people in his house and there's no evidence he ever existed. He tells Jimmy and Byers that he's from another universe and in this one he doesn't exist.
That's right: it's a riff on Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
Or is it? In an amusingly specific third-act twist, it turns out it's actually a riff on a different Philip K Dick story.
It's got its problems, including some ableist language: several of the characters in this one are little people and they're repeatedly referred to by the M-word, and look, there was a time that word wasn't considered a slur, but 2001 was not it. There's also a moment where Langly loses his temper with Adam and calls him a "re-" before stopping himself. I guess they at least knew that one was too far, but jeez, you guys.
And there are some problems on the plot side. I'd really like to know more about Lois and why she is doing the things she is doing! Like, is she just a sex pervert? I kinda feel like she might just be a sex pervert.
But still! Flaws aside, I really liked this one.
Episode 8: Maximum Byers
You know those TV episodes where the good guys go undercover in a prison to try to exonerate an innocent man? This is one of those, with Byers and Jimmy going to prison.
It's got a couple of uncomfortable racial stereotypes, including the violent Latino and the wise Black man. And it's got some tonal shifts that maybe work to the detriment of its overall consistency but, to my mind, make it more interesting.
Episode 11: The Lying Game
Guest-starring Mitch Pileggi as Skinner, who just can't stop getting accused of murdering people. Also guest-starring Mitch Pileggi as Jimmy pretending to be Skinner.
Content warning: like the film it takes its name from, this episode treats a character being trans as a plot twist, and, while it's a sensitive portrayal for 2001, the other characters describe her using some phrases that wouldn't be considered appropriate today.
I listened to a recent episode of the Retronauts podcast focused on Final Fantasy ROM hacks, hosted by Nadia Oxford and featuring guests Andrew Vestal and my old friend Steve Tramer.
Unfortunately podcasts aren't exactly the ideal medium for helping people find things on the Internet, so I've gone ahead and taken the liberty of putting together a list of the ROM hacks (and at least one fan game) they mentioned, with links.
I haven't played most of these, but FF6 T-Edition is great, and these guys have pretty good taste in 8- and 16-bit Final Fantasy games. Andrew's Unofficial SquareSoft Homepage was the best Square fan site back in the early days of the Web (or at least the best English-language one), and Steve loaned me a fair few Square games back when we were kids. (We, ah, also managed to work FF6's Opera House scene into a Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic we wrote when we were 12, but try not to hold that against us.)
I think these are all the hacks, translations, and fan games they mentioned in the episode, but if I missed any or got any wrong, drop me a line and let me know.
This website moved to a new hosting provider last week; the old one shut down.
I've been feeling kinda weirdly melancholy about that, actually.
I'd been at that last hosting provider since 2007. And that hosting provider was my first Real Job -- the one where I moved out of my grandparents' house and got my own place.
It was a lousy job and the pay was shit -- I'm making more than three times as much now for a job that's nowhere near as stressful -- but my brain still associates it with a pivotal moment in my life.
And I was kinda off in the middle of North Bumfuck and didn't know anybody on that side of town, and it was lonely sometimes, but I had friends around the valley who'd come visit. So I also associate it with old friends. Including an old girlfriend.
It had its moments, y'know? It was my first real taste of adulting.
It's kinda funny, looking through my old posts and thinking about how I've changed. I used to variously refer to Halloween and New Year's Eve as "my favorite holiday". Now they just kind of go by without me paying too much attention to them.
I'm forty, I don't go to parties anymore, most of the friends I used to go to parties with moved out of town. I've mostly stayed within a few miles of where I was born. When I stay up late I get a headache, and my opinion of fireworks has changed significantly since I got a dog. And all that was before the once-in-a-century pandemic. Except for the being forty part; that's new.
It's not that I don't like nostalgia or looking back. Hell's bells, moving my website to a new server makes me nostalgic for a shitty job I quit 15 years ago. It doesn't take much. I don't need New Year's Eve to wax nostalgic, and what good is a three-day weekend if I spend a day of it with a headache from staying up too late?
Anyway, the website's been migrated to a new host. Hit up the contact page if you find anything that's not working. Unless it's the mobile sidebar; I already know about that. You know what I'm nostalgic for? WordPress 4.
As readers of this site (if any) are no doubt aware, there are a lot of things that make me feel nostalgic. Moving is one of those things.
It's a goodbye of sorts. "Beginnings and endings," as my high school drama teacher used to say on closing night.
I'm finally getting rid of the old Ikea furniture I bought when I moved into my first apartment in 2006. And I think about those times -- first apartment, first furniture, first flatscreen TV, first car, first full-time job --, and mostly they were lonely. I was out in north Phoenix, 25 miles away from anybody I knew, working a shit job and getting paid about a third of the fair market value of my work. The wonderful world of IT in the post-dotcom-crash era.
But, y'know, it wasn't all bad. It's not like I was completely isolated. I had friends who'd make that 25-mile drive, from Glendale or Scottsdale or Fountain Hills or wherever they happened to be. Other folks going through the same thing I was, twentysomething kids figuring out how to adult. Watching Firefly and Justice League and walking to the outdoor mall nextdoor to see Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters. We had some good times.
And y'know, what would nostalgia be without thinking about old girlfriends?
One of those friends I spent some time with, back at that old apartment, was a woman I used to date. We'd gotten reacquainted since. There's something about having somebody to talk to who knows you that well, but the both of you coming back older and, hopefully, wiser -- at least, wise enough not to do anything stupid like try to date again. At any rate, I think she was going through some similar stuff in those days; I don't know if she was as lonely as I was (she always had an easier time making friends), but she was probably even more miserable in her job. And we were there for each other.
And I'm looking through some of the other stuff I'm packing, or leaving, and my mind's moving on a few years, to another move, and another girlfriend. And that move was one of the most consequential decisions of my life, though it didn't seem like it at the time.
In 2009, I moved in with a woman I'd been dating for six months or so. I'm not sure we were entirely clear that that was what we were doing at the time; she still had her own apartment. But her brother was staying at her place, and she kept staying at my place, and eventually we realized my place was actually our place.
Our first home. And I'm putting stuff in boxes and bags and I think of the good times and the hard times we went through there. I pack meds and I think of nights we spent in hospitals, and I think those nights were what forged our relationship into something lasting. Even more than the wedding, I muse, as I take down the wedding photo hanging on the wall.
I pack my laptop and remember I bought it after the last one was stolen. I pack dog toys and I think of the puppy we brought home a few days later.
And then we moved again. Seven years ago, to the week -- I remember because it was the Fourth of July and it was pouring rain.
And if that other house was our first home, this one was the first house that was our house. With the custom cabinetry, the closet space for my comic collection, the big shed where I have too much old shit that I've at least pared down a little now that we're moving.
I'll miss the place. It's been a great place to live these seven years. Hell, just in the past year we've hunkered down here during COVID-19 and dealt with the aforementioned puppy's recovery from hip surgery. (She likes to jump into our bed with us, so we broke down our bedframe and put the mattress right on the floor to stop her from jumping. It was hell on our backs, but she's recovered nicely.)
The places I've been, the people who've been there with me, even the furniture I've bought and all the assorted shit I've accumulated over the years -- well, at least I'm getting rid of some of it -- all that's part of the story. Most of it has a memory attached. Good ones, bad ones -- and on balance, I'd say mostly good.
I'll miss this place. But the new place is good too. Someday I'll be thinking back on all the memories I'll have made there. Beginnings and endings, huh? Yeah, I can see that.
The other day I got some Chinese takeout. We got to the end of our meal and opened our fortune cookies.
The first fortune said, "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." Which is not a fortune, it is a Ben Franklin quote.
The second fortune said, "A penny saved is a penny earned." What the hell? Did we get a bunch of Ben Franklin fortune cookies?
And the third said, "Taxes are a fine on success."
Okay, what the actual fuck? All of a sudden we've switched from Ben Franklin fortune cookies to Libertarian fortune cookies.
And look, dude, I don't know what writing cookie fortunes pays? But if your job is writing cookie fortunes, then I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that whatever taxes you're paying are not a punishment for your massive financial successes.
Poor Libertarians baffle me. Back when I worked in the PetSmart phone bank, there was a guy who sat across from me who was a young Libertarian. One time, somebody asked if he'd voted for Obama; he responded, "No; he wants to raise my taxes."
I thought, "Motherfucker, we have the same job; I know what you make and Obama has definitely not raised your taxes," but I did not say it, because I try not to talk politics at work, or to address my coworkers as "motherfucker."
I guess poor Libertarians are just an object example of Ronald Wright's quote, paraphrasing John Steinbeck: "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
If you're a longtime reader of Satellite News (mst3kinfo.com) like me, you know that it's got a pretty good comments section, except for two things:
A particularly obnoxious and persistent troll by the name of EricJ who insists on pissing in everyone's cornflakes; and
A bunch of other posters with poor self-control who insist on responding to him.
And so, in the tradition of my Hide Techdirt Comments script, I've written a userscript that will block EricJ and replies that quote him. Works with Greasemonkey, Tampermonkey, and presumably any other similar userscript plugins that may be out there.
If there's anybody else who bothers you, you can add other usernames to the blacklistedUsers array, too.
And ordinarily, I wouldn't even name the troll I was talking about, because the entire point here is that you shouldn't give trolls the attention they crave -- but I figure you know, this post might prove useful to other Satellite News commenters, so I should probably put his name in it so that maybe somebody will find it while searching for a way to block all comments from, and replies to, The Original EricJ on mst3kinfo.com.
Enjoy.
// ==UserScript==
// @name Hide Satellite News Comments
// @namespace http://corporate-sellout.com
// @description Hide comments on mst3kinfo.com, based on user
// @include http://www.mst3kinfo.com/?p=*
// @require http://www.mst3kinfo.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js
// ==/UserScript==
// List of users whose comments you want to hide --
// you can add more names to this list, but let's be honest, you want to block EricJ.
const blacklistedUsers = [
'The Original EricJ'
];
const $ = jQuery;
// Comment class
// Constructor
function Comment(node) {
this.node = node;
this.nameBlock = $('.comment-author > .fn > a', this.node);
this.name = this.nameBlock.text();
this.quotedUserBlock = $('a[href^="#comment"]', this.node);
this.quotedUser = this.quotedUserBlock.length === 1
? this.quotedUserBlock.text()
: '';
}
// Functions
Comment.prototype = {
constructor: Comment,
check: function() {
if(
blacklistedUsers.includes(this.name)
|| (this.quotedUser !== '' && blacklistedUsers.includes(this.quotedUser))
) {
this.node.remove();
return true;
}
return false;
}
};
$('.comment').each(function() {
const cmt = new Comment($(this));
cmt.check();
});
License
I'm not a lawyer, but my opinion as a programmer is that this script is too short, simple, and obvious to be copyrightable. As such, I claim no copyright, and offer no license, because none is needed. Use it however you want, with the standard disclaimer that it comes with absolutely no warranty.
It's from developer 6 Eyes Studio and publisher 1C Entertainment, and it's an unabashed homage to Final Fantasy Tactics.
I think that's an underserved niche. There are plenty of tactical RPGs (like Fire Emblem) and their close cousins, turn-based strategy games (like XCOM). But most of them don't feel quite like Final Fantasy Tactics or its predecessor, Tactics Ogre.
Fell Seal does. Its storyline isn't quite as complex or as epic as those games', and its soundtrack is fine but doesn't feel as inspired as theirs. (After a round of Fell Seal, I tend to find myself humming tunes from FFT -- though FS's tunes are beginning to stick in my head themselves now.) But its mechanics? Those are damned impressive. Especially from such a small team (per their The Team page, two leads and nineteen contractors).
As of this writing, I'm eight hours or so in. I haven't seen every map; I haven't unlocked every class. But what I've seen so far has kept me excited and engaged in that FFT "just one more fight" way. Every class so far has been useful; every skill tree seems well-considered. And look, FFT is one of my favorite games of all time, but it's not perfect; there are a whole lot of useless skills in there, such as most of the Archer class's "Charge +n" abilities, and Cloud's Limit Breaks for the same reason. Fell Seal doesn't have a charge mechanic; abilities all execute right away. And I haven't found a class yet with abilities that weren't useful (though I admit I'm not quite sure about Gadgeteer just yet). Beyond your basic classes (Merceneries are a well-rounded base class, Menders heal, Wizards damage from a distance, Knights damage from up close, Scoundrels are quick and maneuverable), you get some more interesting choices, like the Plague Doctor, who has debuff-focused attacks but also a base AoE ability that removes debuffs and heals a small amount of HP. There are useful passive skills, too: Wizards can learn an ability that prevents offensive magic from harming allies or healing magic from healing enemies; it's a major boon for any spellcaster.
I haven't even tried the crafting system yet.
It's not a perfect game -- I don't love the character graphics, and while I do love the environment graphics, the decision to go with hand-drawn environments means you can't rotate the camera, which is inconvenient on some stages (for example, when a character is standing under a tree branch and you can't see them). But it's a damned impressive game, that I've already derived hours of enjoyment from and expect many more. The game has some excellent granular difficulty settings, and while I'm enjoying it on the defaults, I'm also looking forward to playing it again on a harder difficulty sometime.
As of this writing, the game is in Steam Early Access. However, it's scheduled for a release sometime next month, and the version currently on Steam is nearly final; according to the release notes, the only things missing are the ending and a secret bonus dungeon. The price has recently gone up from $20 to $30; I believe that will be the final price on release but I'm not 100% certain. I'd still recommend it if the price went up to $40.
But whether you get it now in Early Access or wait a few weeks for its full release, I heartily recommend this game. If you like tactical RPGs in general, and especially if you like Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics in particular, you should buy Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark. I don't think you'll be disappointed.
Fell Seal is available for Windows, Mac, and GNU/Linux, with Xbox One and PS4 versions on the way; I'm playing the Linux version. There's a free demo at itch.io, though I had some trouble with it (I couldn't get shops or guild halls to work, which left me short one party member on the second battle and made it much harder; I haven't had any issues with the full version of the game).
I thought it was delightful -- albeit that uniquely Coen Brothers type of "delightful" that involves some truly horrifying and disquieting stuff happening at various points over a two-hour period.
One of the things I really loved about it was its format: it's an anthology movie, made up of six stories, each running around 15-30 minutes.
I wrote a blog post years ago titled Form and Function where I discussed how the Internet could, hopefully, eliminate some of the rigid page-count and running-time requirements we're used to in print media and on TV. Buster Scruggs doesn't do that itself -- it's a two-hour movie -- but it's a roadmap for how a TV series could do that.
I saw reports, on the film's release, that it was originally planned as an episodic series. That's not actually the case; Josh Rottenberg asked the Coens about that story in an LA Times interview and Joel said it was always intended as a movie. But the rumor about it being a TV series is believable. You could certainly watch the movie that way, switch it off at the end of each story and come back and watch the next one some other time -- the only thing stopping you is that boy, some of those segments are grim, and the Coens have wisely arranged them so that the nastiest stories are followed by something with a little more levity.
There's no reason you couldn't make a TV series where each episode resembled one of Buster Scruggs's stories -- do a fifteen-minute episode, do a thirty-minute episode, do whatever length the story calls for. Traditional TV requires that your story be told in a half-hour or an hour, minus commercials, but there's no such restriction to online streaming (and even basic cable has been tooling around with episodes that have some variation in their lengths, like Noah Hawley's Legion or Fargo -- say, there's another one that comes right back to Ethan and Joel).
Mostly I see this resulting in longer episodes -- maybe a show goes a full hour instead of forty-five minutes, or a full half-hour instead of twenty-two. But why not shorter? Why not fifteen minutes? Why not fifteen minutes one episode and thirty the next?
The new Twilight Zone series would be perfect for a format like that, but I suspect they'll be keeping it around the half-hour mark. Still, it feels like somebody is bound to start playing with the scripted TV format with episodes of wildly varying lengths, and the recent resurgence of anthology-style shows seems like a good place to do it.
I don't play many new games anymore. I played Spider-Man because it came with my PS4, but since I finished it I've switched to something a couple years older: Final Fantasy 15.
I haven't been playing it long, just...*looks at save file*...Jesus, twelve hours? Anyway, I'm on Chapter 3. And so far I'm really enjoying it.
I dig the setting. Final Fantasy has been doing this "let's juxtapose fantasy with a quasi-modern world" routine since 7, and it's a lot more fully-realized here than it was then. Still not perfect -- city planning does not work that way, guys; you don't pass the limits of a major city and immediately find yourself off in a big empty desert with only an occasional gas station; the transition tends to be more gradual than that -- but still, the dissonance is a lot less glaring than FF7's transition from Midgar to a big empty overworld.
Actually, to a large extent, the dissonance is what I like about it. Taking things that shouldn't go together and then mooshing them together. This is a game that starts off with...well, I can't seem to get the intro to embed (I suspect a music rights thing), but if you haven't seen it, check it out on YouTube.
As I was saying: This is a game that starts out with a barrage of fantasy tropes -- the king in his castle saying farewell to his son, who's leaving to marry a princess to secure peace with the Empire -- and then cuts to the party pushing a broken-down car while Stand By Me plays. It is instantly one of my favorite video game openings ever.
The game doesn't retain quite that level of quality throughout. But even where it falls short, I like it, at least so far. I like ambitious failures. Here's how Brent described it:
As long as you keep the "FF15 has been in development for 10 years" fact firmly in mind the whole exercise is interesting from a how-do-you-make-something-mostly-complete-out-of-this aspect.
Did you notice the one part of the game where there was supposed to be a rad as fuck boss but they only got as far as modeling and not rigging the rad as fuck boss so they had you go and take a look at how rad as fuck the boss's model is and everybody comments on how rad as fuck the model looks and then you get a cutscene explaining why you don't need to actually fight the rad as fuck boss and then you just fuck off?
Not gonna lie, I love stuff like that. It's like the best kind of soup, the "if you've got it, just toss it in the pot" kind.
I love stuff like that too.
And you know what else is overambitious about this game? Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy 15.
Kingsglaive is a movie that occurs before and during the first chapter of FF15. It fleshes out some major plot points -- in a way that's, frankly, kind of ill-conceived, because there's at least one major scene in FF15 that lacks some pretty important context if you haven't seen the movie.
Spoilers for Kingsglaive and the ending of the first chapter of Final Fantasy 15 follow.
At the end of the first chapter of FF15, the kingdom of Lucis falls. And in the game, you don't really have a lot of context about just what the hell is going on. You've never seen the Emperor or General Glauca before, and you're given little context for who they are. Clearly the big spiky guy stabbing the king is a bad guy, but...you're given no other information on who he is or what his deal is, except that the peace agreement was a ruse and Niflheim has sacked Insomnia.
Do you even see the general again? I don't know. He kinda gets incinerated at the end of Kingsglaive, but maybe he gets better. I don't know for sure, but...it kinda looks like the game shows a scary-looking dude murdering the protagonist's father, never explains who he is, and then maybe he never appears again? That's...not great storytelling. That makes Kingsglaive less an ancillary cross-media spinoff and more an essential part of the story that is neither included with the game nor explained by it.
But I'm underselling just how baffling the entire endeavor is.
Because shunting a major, game-changing event off into a spinoff movie isn't the weirdest thing about it. It isn't even the weirdest thing about that scene.
Because the climax of Kingsglaive -- the betrayal at the signing ceremony, the fall of Lucis -- is intercut with Nyx and Lunafreya fighting a giant monster. And not just any giant monster.
The movie cuts back and forth between the fall of Lucis -- guards being stabbed, bombs dropping on the city, the Emperor pulling a gun on the King -- and the octopus who tried to drop a 4-ton weight on an opera.
It is insanely, spectacularly wrong, and it is absolutely hands-down my favorite scene in the movie.
How did this happen? What was the thought process here? "Newcomers to Final Fantasy will just see a generic monster. But longtime fans will be wracked with the giggles!"
Obviously Final Fantasy is self-referential as all hell, and some of that was to be expected. But there's a pretty big difference between, say, playing the main Final Fantasy theme as background music early in the movie, and introducing Ultros during the climax.
But there's also something quintessentially Final Fantasy about it. This series is chock-full of sudden and inexplicable tonal shifts. I've talked about this before, back in my Final Fantasy 7 and Iconic Images post in 2011: FF7 goes from Barret's somber battle to the death with Dyne straight to chocobo racing. Bombs dropping while the heroes fight a tonally-inappropriate Easter egg? Just like the games!
And something that weird and singular saves the movie from being boring.
Because Kingsglaive is boring. It's very pretty; as a two-hour tech demo, it definitely demos the tech. But the characters are thinly-sketched, the villains' motivations and the plot twists don't make a whole lot of sense, and the climax feels like a Godzilla movie without the fun or the charm. It feels like the movie is focused entirely on showing really cool locations, monsters, and fights. It does that. But not much else.
In its own way, the Ultros fight is one more of those striking juxtapositions I like so much. Final Fantasy 15 starts out with high fantasy tropes and then immediately swerves into being a road trip movie. And Kingsglaive intercuts the serious and the silly. It doesn't really work, exactly, but I still love it.
There's an old Simpsons line where Marge tells Homer she doesn't hate him for failing, she loves him for trying. Whatever FF15's faults -- and I'm sure I'll find more of them as I get farther in the game -- they seem to be the result of overambition. And you know what? That's a good kind of failure. An interesting kind. Square Enix tried some things nobody else had ever done here. In some cases, at least, it turns out that there's a good reason nobody else has done those things. But if you're going to mess up, at least find a new and interesting and, perhaps, spectacular way to do it.
