#//Because the weird thing about embedded elements is that any time the function that contains them runs

[zichqecs-hoard]

Oh I see 🤔 Hmm... yeah, messing with the reload commands can be a little fiddly, in my testing anything after a reload like that does not display. If I do eh...”\![reload,shell] shell has been reloaded” in script input, I can see “she” type out, and then the shell reloads and the rest is cut off. I think because these commands are probably expected to be used in a debug way?

You could consider having the alternates as completely separate shells instead, and locking it off so that the user can’t switch between them manually (though if you did that, you would need some additional code to prevent switches from the ghost explorer as well, if manual switches are undesirable). That way you could just give each shell its own menu in the first place, and not need the shell reload command.

The downside being, I think the blip would be more noticeable that way, and you would also need code to make the new shell loading in move to the same position that the other shell was when it was unloaded. I’ve done it before, it’s not impossible, but it is a bit of a pain 😅 If you did it that way, you could chain the balloon change command onto OnShellChanged.

That’s probably not ideal unless you’re really desperate though, I imagine it’d be difficult to switch over everything you have to deal with a multiple shell system depending on how far you are into it.

Another thought... you could set a variable in the OnSwitchMenu function like shellchange = 1 (and in that case, I would recommend changing it to an \![embed] tag rather than an embedded element, just in case the user cancels the script before it finishes executing. Or, you could use \t in the changing script to prevent the user from cancelling!), and then in one of the events that fires after the shell reloads, like OnNotifySelfInfo, check for that variable, and if it’s 1 set it to 2. Then in OnSecondChange, if it’s 2, change the balloon and reset the variable to 0. (Notify events can’t run scripts on their own, but if you don’t mind a 1 second wait you can shunt it off to OnSecondChange. It’s not my favorite method, but it’ll work in a pinch. You have to be careful with OnSecondChange though - under almost no circumstances do you want to end up outputting a script every second; it’ll interrupt your balloons and make the ghost unpleasant to use.)

That idea is definitely janky 😂 You could also try a timerraise (that’s timer raise, not time raise) command after the reload command instead, if you don’t mind waiting a second or two, and have the event that it raises change the balloon. That may come with its own kind of jank (can’t guarantee how long it’ll take the shell to switch in all environments), but it may be worth testing out to see if it’ll suit your needs.

But by far I think the most solid method, at least for changing the balloon, would actually be to combine your balloons into one. A lot of my ghosts have done this lately, where each balloon has multiple color options combined into a single balloon, and I use OnTranslate to change the balloon tags appropriately (but only if the ghost is currently on that balloon). SSP Angel is a good example of this! They go a bit overboard with the customization, in your case it should be a lot simpler. It should be as simple as an if check to make sure your custom balloon is being used, like if SHIORI3FW.BalloonName == “Aster Tooltip”, and then a check for which mode the ghost is in, and a set of replace commands if it’s in the mode with the alt coloration.

That method has a few benefits, primarily that it makes the script more straightforward so the balloon change always happens, and it cuts out any loading time for the balloon. And with OnTranslate handling the color changes, you can keep writing balloon tags as normal. (Side note, I do not recommend trying to use embedded elements for this instead. I used to do that with tags like %(b2) and %(b4), but then I found out that if I asked my ghosts to repeat the last dialogue just after I changed colors, they’d use the wrong one! So I let OnTranslate handle it now.)

I suppose eh... the problem is it’s difficult to have the reload shell command and a balloon change command in the same script and guarantee it’s not going to behave strangely. So I think the best solution, if you’re able to, is to eliminate one of those, and combining the balloons would do just that. But if that doesn’t suit your needs for whatever reason, maybe those other methods will work 🤔 just test them thoroughly, I suspect they would be plagued with issues of their own 😂

Ooh wait, I have one other idea. Have you considered using a change shell command, and simply switching to the same shell that you’re currently using? I think that would still have the effect of reloading it, but you get the benefit of the OnShellChanged event firing! That way you could set a variable, do the change, and then have OnShellChanged check if that variable is set and perform the rest of the change/dialogue on its end. \![change,shell,%(SHIORI3FW.ShellName)] should change you to the current shell, no matter what it is (uh, these SHIORI3FW variables I’m using assume you’re using YAYA and not AYA, since they come standard with YAYA specifically. I’m guessing you’re using YAYA if you’re using my guide, but I’ll make the note anyways.)

SORRY THAT’S A LOT but hopefully at least one of those things is helpful 😂

I think I can with certainty say I'm past the halfway point with this. there's not that much random dialogue left to make up

I can only hope the switch works as intended on other computers, since a different timing left them mid-transition. it seems like it doesn't interrupt the bubbles switch but it's only if the menu switch/shell reset comes at a specific point before it 🤔

sakurascript is really weird with calling functions, but I Think if you call it as a variable ( %(function) ) it doesn't interrupt the script?? maybe??

[Image ID:

Two gifs showing off Vega complaining about the messiness of Windows' system32 folder, providing the user with a link to open it and see for themselves, and the right click context menu changing its color scheme alongside Vega switching to Rigel.

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[aion-rsa]

Outlander: Duncan Lacroix Reflects On Murtagh’s Season 5 Journey

https://ift.tt/32BTreD

The following contains spoilers for Outlander season 5.

Rewatching Outlander season 5 on the newly released DVD & Blu-ray set will remind fans once again how hard it was to say goodbye to Murtagh this past season. It turns out it was just as hard for Murtagh actor Duncan Lacroix to say goodbye as well.

Murtagh in season 1 quickly became a fan favorite because of his position in the Fraser family. He was Jamie’s (Sam Heughan) godfather and sworn to protect his position as Laird. As Claire (Caitriona Balfe) adjusted to Highland life, Murtagh is also there to lend a helping hand. “I was extremely grateful as an actor, and I was aware that I was very grateful for the fans’ reaction to that character as well,” Lacroix says.

Outlander fans who read the novels know Murtagh originally dies during the Battle of Culloden at the end of season 2. The decision to keep Murtagh in the story was developed much earlier than fans would expect. Lacroix recalls “I was talking to a couple of producers and they said, ‘Well, we want to keep you alive because we want some sense of continuity rather than kill everyone off from the first couple of seasons and just have Claire and Jamie left.’”

Adding that thread of continuity on the show began with Lacroix filming Murtagh’s role in the battle. He recalled: “You literally could not see a thing so we’re just running blindly and your sense of distance just goes, so it’s just like, ‘Okay, any second now I’m going to come across someone,’ just out of the blue. Knees were flying into faces. People earned their money that day.” Jamie and Murtagh bonded through the shared trauma of Culloden but were then separated by the British transporting Highlander rebels to the American colonies. 

Originally the writers planned for Murtagh to return in season 3 as part of the Jamaica storyline but those plans were scrapped in favor of his reappearance in season 4. “I would have liked, in an ideal world, to have explored what was happening to him in those intervening years once he was sent to North Carolina,” Lacroix says. “All the stuff you don’t see happen on screen, and how that affects him and how that makes the character you see that comes back in season four.”

Along with wishing to explore more of Murtagh’s journey towards becoming a Regulator, Lacroix also wanted the chance to work with departed cast member Tobias Menzies. “He’s a very interesting cat.” Lacroix says. “I would have liked to have had a few more scenes with him somehow. Especially as Black Jack, he brought such an incredible intensity to that role and he’s such a brave actor.”  

Murtagh’s evolution into the leader of the Regulator rebellion in season 4 caused a stir for Outlander fans who read the series. Jamie’s conflict between Governor Tryon’s demands for a militia to fight the Regulators and his sympathies towards fellow Highland Scots was presented in a more abstract fashion. The decision to personalize the conflict not only gave Lacroix another chance to develop Murtagh as a character but also a chance to expand his own knowledge. 

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“It’s a history that I was aware of before,” he says. “And I just had done British history in school, imperialism, and colonialism, but it was interesting to find the nitty-gritty detail because I hadn’t heard about The Regulators and that element of the American story before.” Murtagh becoming the face of the rebellion allowed first-time viewers a path towards understanding the world of Fraser’s Ridge.

Murtagh’s storyline was not just memorable due to the politics of the time, but also because of the added dimension of Murtagh’s relationship with Jocasta Cameron (Maria Doyle Kennedy). Fans not only appreciated the expansion of a beloved character but also how the relationship upended television and genre tropes. It is incredibly rare to see two characters “of a certain age” falling in love and having a physical relationship. Lacroix says of these scenes with Doyle Kennedy “I think the script was there for that, but there were things you just can’t account for…But there was professional chemistry there that just seemed to work magically.” 

All of the relationship and political tension comes to a head during the season 5 episode “The Ballad of Roger Mac”. Murtagh’s Regulators face Governor Tryon’s troops in a battle they’re sure to lose. Despite repeated warnings from Jamie and Roger Mackenzie (Rik Rankin) that the government will squash the rebellion, Murtagh is resolved to stand up for the poor farmers.

The experience of filming Murtagh’s final battle was also a moment in contrast compared to Culloden. “There was a huge amount of energy in season two, it was so much more fun because we were just pelting around in our kilts, bumping into each other, demolishing, stumbling,” he says. “[Season five] was more laden with emotion. We were both aware it was the end of that character and it was going to be a special moment.”

As a result, the directing of the Battle of Alamance Creek scenes had a different feel. “Stephen [Woolfenden] is very good on knowing that at this stage of the game, the characters are so embedded in us, there’s not a lot of direction that needs to be done character-wise,” Lacroix says. “It was all about two stages staging, blocking it, and then just letting us go at it.”

Fans were moved to tears by Lacroix’s performance, as Murtagh was dying on Claire’s operating table. “I tried to show the physicality of what would happen if you were shot, and hyperventilating,” Lacroix says. “But all the emotion was on his side, so kudos to Sam because he was sensational.” 

Just as fans grieved for the end of Murtagh’s story, Lacroix had to process the end.“It’s weird. When you’re in there doing it season after season, you don’t think that much, and then when I was filming the death scene, it all sank in,” he says. “I got really emotional, not just for the scene, but just for the whole experience coming to an end.”

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s anyone’s guess as to when Lacroix will pop up in a series or movie again. But when he does, rest assured that the character he’s playing will have the same steely resolve as Murtagh��

The post Outlander: Duncan Lacroix Reflects On Murtagh’s Season 5 Journey appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Doc Savage, Gothic novels, Underwater, Appendix N

Horror (Cemetery Dance): Up until the publication of The Monk in March of 1796, the Gothics mostly followed Walpole’s formula. The books usually featured a mystery or threat to the main character, an evil villain threatening the virtue of a virginal female, supernatural elements such as a ghost or an ancestral curse, and secret passages in crumbling mansions or castles. That template carried over into the next century, as evidenced by the bulk of the stories published in the pulps during the 1930s.

Cinema (cbr.com): MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: A Doc Savage movie was cast and ready to go when they abruptly changed to an entirely different film at the last minute. In the mid-1960s, the success of heroes from novels and comic books like James Bond and Batman led to producers looking to see whatever other 20th Century heroes that could be adapted into films. Producers Mark Goodson & Bill Todman (best known for their TV game shows) decided to pick Doc Savage to turn into a matinee idol.

Westerns (Six Gun Justice): Gordon D. Shirreffs (1914 – 1996) started writing in 1945, after serving in World War in Alaska and the Aleutian Campaign. Coached by published boy’s adventure writer Frederick Nelson Litten at the Chicago campus of Northwestern University, Shirreffs broke into the young people’s market with pieces in Boy’s Life, Young Catholic Messenger and the later pulps like Dime Western, Ace High, and Six-gun Western. Experiences at Fort Bliss during the war served Shirreffs well in nailing down the gritty scenery of the Southwest, a setting that served him well throughout his career.

Cinema (Bloody Disgusting): While William Eubank‘s Underwater kicks off with immediate intensity, wasting no time plunging Kristen Stewart and the rest of the cast into the deep sea nightmare we bought a ticket to experience, it admittedly lags a bit around the middle, and unquestionably could’ve used a tad bit more monster mayhem to pick up the energy. The film’s monsters, with their massive gaping maws and spindly, Cloverfield-reminiscent legs, only actually kill one character in the entire movie, and for the most part we only catch glimpses of them in the darkness.

Science Fiction (Gizmodo): Futuristic militaries are a staple in science fiction. With their powered armor and laser guns, military science fiction novels are among the most exciting reads out there. Except for one problem. Most are not really about warfare. While military SF involves military personnel and technology, the cores of the stories tend to focus on elements other than warfare. Before I’m tracked down and shot for saying that, let me qualify that statement.

H. P. Lovecraft (The Mary Sue): When it comes to adapting the works of H.P. Lovecraft, it can be hard for some creators to decide whether they should ignore the racist politics that are embedded into the work, or address it head-on. As a Black fan of Lovecraft, I have long come to terms with the fact that he would dislike my existence, but still, find it endlessly frustrating when his “fans” insist on making excuses for his behavior.

Robert E. Howard (Black Gate): When I was around 12 in the basement of a friend’s house, I found an old copy of Weird Tales (I’m not sure about the magazine, but it must have been a pulp) and read my first Conan story. I loved it; not just for the action—I was a big fan of action stories—but because Conan was a barbarian. He was outside the settled boundaries of propriety and decorum. He made himself up as he went along. He wasn’t a woman, but I was already so sunk into the abhorrence of womanhood that that actually worked in his favor. Conan was outlaw fiction. I knew my own path forward was to be an outlaw.

Appendix N (Goodman Games): John Anthony Bellairs was born on January 17th, 1938 in Marshall, Michigan, which he described as “full of strange and enormous old houses, and the place must have worked on [his] imagination.” A shy and overweight child, he “would walk back and forth between [his] home and Catholic school and have medieval fantasies featuring [himself] as the hero.” He found refuge in books, excelling in college as an English major and even appearing on an episode of the TV quiz show G.E. College Bowl in 1959, where he recited the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in fluent Middle English.

D&D (Jon Mollison): It’s time to break the seals and talks bout why you should run your D&D crew through Autarch’s Nethercity.  But first we need to tuck all the sensitive and classified data behind the fold. Don’t click next unless you want to have the Secrets revealed through antiseptic blogging rather than rich play at the table.

Biography (DMR Books): Well, Crom willing, I’m here to celebrate Robert E. Howard’s birthday, despite the slings and arrows and technical glitches of outrageous fortune. I thought it would be fitting to review David C. Smith’s Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography which came out just over a year ago. I’ve had several people ask me online about it and where it rates alongside the other two big REH bios. Let’s take a look.

Blogging (Brain Leakage): Doing that forced me to create some regular columns, like my ‘Pocky-clypse Now reviews and my Kitbashing D&D series. Both of those proved to be popular, and have managed to get me some regular readers. Several posts of mine got shared in regular PulpRev and OSR gaming blog roundups, like Castalia House Sensor Sweep, The DMRtian Chronicles, and Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog. Each time that happened, I’ve reached a wider audience and gained new readers.

Art (Dark Worlds Quarterly): When you do find something new, it is usually very new. But every once in a while you stumble upon something old that is new. Blue Book’s covers and interior art were such a delight. Here was a collection of Burroughs artwork that you just never see. Not in the old fanzines, not in the non-fiction books. It is almost like we all forgot they existed.

Fiction (DMR Books): Pulp magazines are just plain awesome. For readers of old-time literature, they’re colorful time capsules of the nostalgic past that any time traveler would love to visit, and they’ve held a fascination for me since I learned of their existence.  I couldn’t say how many times I’ve fantasized of stepping into a turn-of-the-century Five and Dime and plucking mint issues of Argosy and Weird Tales off the racks–imagine gazing on freshly printed copies of the February 1912 issue of The All-Story which contained the opening chapters of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Under the Moons of Mars… holy freaking smokes!

Robert E. Howard (Adventures Fantastic): I don’t know when “The House of Arabu” was written. It wasn’t published until 1952 in The Avon Fantasy Reader #18 under the title “The Witch From Hell’s Kitchen”. I like Howard’s original title much better. The story has been reprinted several times, but it isn’t as well known as much of Howard’s other sword and sorcery. I did notice that the version reprinted in The Ultimate Triumph had a slightly different closing line than the version in The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard.

Tolkien (Tolkien and Fantasy): Christopher Tolkien has passed away in the night of 15/16 January 2020 at the age of 95. These two men taught me more than I can express about the literary life and what it means to be, and how to go about being, a literary scholar. I became friends with Humphrey in the summer of 1978 when I attended a summer program in Oxford. A few years later Humphrey put me in touch with Christopher. Though I had some excellent and helpful teachers in college, none of them affected me as profoundly, or as lastingly, as did these friendships with Humphrey and Christopher.

Leigh Brackett (Wasteland & Sky): As an example, I just finished reading Leigh Brackett’s Last Call from Sector 9G and had some thoughts about it. For one, the story was written in 1955 and it doesn’t quite feel like it. The era was full of misery and strife in her field, and yet she produced this gem in Planet Stories that could have just as easily come out of Weird Tales in 1929. It has a more timeless feel.

Fiction (Frontier Partisans): I woke up this morning thinking about old-school historical potboilers. Yeah, I know. But you all know by now that my mind functions this way…Actually, there’s a straightforward explanation for why I roused from my slumbers with visions of F. van Wyck Mason dancing through my head. I hit the pillow after scrolling through a Kindle series of novels set during the French & Indian War.

Pulp/Cinema (Don Herron): I didn’t have anything particular in mind, but then pulp expert John Locke jumped into the fray. “One of my sub-hobbies is spotting pulp mags in movies,” John just wrote to inform me. “My latest is a doozie. “It shows a Navy man reading a Fight Stories. “Better yet, the issue has a Sailor Steve Costigan story by Howard.

Writing (Emperor Ponders): Well, sure, but before my mind was even able to process that, what struck me the most was how uncomfortably written the entire thing is (or, at least, the first paragraph.) And I don’t mean typos, grammar errors, and such, but something that is deeper and harder to explain but is quintaessentially modern.

Gaming (R’lyeh Reviews): Conan the Barbarian is a supplement for Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of published by Modiphius Entertainment. It is the first in the ‘Conan the…’ series of supplements which focus on and take their inspiration from Conan himself at various stages of his life and what he was doing. Over this series, the supplements will track our titular character’s growth and progress as he gains in skills and abilities and talents. Thus this first supplement looks at Conan as a young man and his life among the people of his homeland, at the beginning of his career which will take him from barbarian to king, essentially the equivalent of a starting player character.

Sensor Sweep: Doc Savage, Gothic novels, Underwater, Appendix N published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/