#a conundrum i completely made up entirely for myself but one i deal with regardless... sad... a cage of my own making..

[thirdtimed]

this is my first time crossposting art between tumblr & twitter for a fandom and its been so intriguing learning the ins and outs of twitter as a platform for art. i like its higher visibility in a sense but loathe it at the same time. i feel very shy on twitter. tumblr on the other hand naturally lends itself better for sharing thoughts/rambling in my opinion (lack of character limit, for one, and a smaller userbase for another). i feel really spoiled now with tumblr's lack of automatic crop & ability to add more than 4 images to a post

[hotshotblackburn]

Spoiler Alert: the following is some Real Fallen London Crack Theorizing and is probably completely nullified by some bit of writing that I don’t remember or know about. It’s about the Masters of the Bazaar, and the Sins of the Masters, and Secret Masters, and Seeking, and why false-winter in Fallen London must be godawful because it looks like snow but it smells like ammonia and rotting fish. Or something like that. Anyways, lot of lore spoilers below the cut about the Masters.

Okay so first off, sins of the Masters. If you haven’t read them, here’s the link: https://www.failbettergames.com/a-secret-about-the-masters/

There’s eleven of these bad boys recorded (”eleven pilgrims who travelled from a cold and windy waste“), and Failbetter has confirmed in the past there are eleven Masters currently operating in London (with a few weird ones): Wines, Veils, Stones, Spices, Pages, Fires, Irons, Cups, Mirrors, Apples, and Hearts (with the weird ones being Chimes, Sacks, and Eaten)

Now, Seeking spoilers: Eaten was not always Eaten. His name will not be said here, but suffice to say he too was once a pilgrim from on high. He is clearly not one of the eleven Masters currently operating in London, but he is one of the eleven Masters that apparently came from the Wilderness. So we have Wines, Veils, Spices, Pages, Fires, Irons, Cups, Mirrors, Apples, Hearts, Stones and REDACTED as our merry band of bats. That makes twelve (perhaps one goes unnoticed, and so only eleven are seen)

But wait! As it turns out from Nemesis (spoilers) and some other sources (spoilers?), Mr Apples also trades as Mr Hearts. And Mr Cups is also Mr Mirrors. If these are different titles for the same bats, then we have Hearts/Apples, Cups/Mirrors, REDACTED, Wines, Veils, Spices, Pages, Stones, Irons, and Fires. Only ten bats, not eleven or twelve. And if we look at the Masters currently publically active in London, we have only nine, not eleven. Where are the missing two bats?

Well, you could always just count Apples/Hearts and Cups/Mirrors as two different Masters. That’s probably the sensible option. But that would be boring, and this is real crack theory hours, so I’m going to discard that idea (well, only partially for the second duo) and go with something much more wild...

...

...

...

Mr Chimes was originally a real Master and he became the first Mr Sacks. 

Okay, wait, hear me out before you leave.

So let’s consider our sins here, and where I initially placed the Masters: hoarding - Stones light-bringing - Fires impersonation, and the delivery of false testimony - Mirrors? (or perhaps Cups?) perpetration of the crimes of knife and of candle - Irons idleness, and the dwelling-on of dreams - Spices runtery, aberration, - REDACTED pursuit of a Treachery - Apples/Hearts failure and defeat; a fall from king to beggar - Wines glass-whispering. And worse: charity - Cups? (or perhaps Mirrors?) truth-strangling - Pages violation of the Order of Days, “which determines the hour of the hunt, the feast, the council, the bargain, and the slaughter” - Veils Others have said their interpretations, and you may have yours as well; I will not go too much into my reasons for why I assigned each of them as that is not the point of this crack theorizing. but consider the crudity with which Apples/Hearts are considered to be the same bat while Mirrors and Cups are given their own separate positions. Why would the latter be separate and the former the same? Why not the other way around? Or what if....

What if, originally, there was another Master? Let’s call them, hmmm...Chimes. Has a nice sound to it, eh? Eh? I’ll see myself out. 

Now there IS a Chimes in Fallen London! They preside over the House of Fallen Chimes, and while you can pay real world money to go visit their and interact with them and more money during Christmas I’m going to spoiler all that and say community knowledge is Chimes doesn’t exist. It’s just the other Masters pretending to be Chimes. Now (jumping ahead a bit) the same can be said for Mr Sacks. Mr Sacks is supposedly a series of beings based off the other Masters, although not them. So technically, Chimes does not exist and Sacks does not exist, they’re just roles put on by the others. 

BUT...let’s go back a bit. Let’s say there was, in fact, a Chimes. That allows us to solve for the Cups and Mirrors vs Hearts and Apples conundrum; Hearts and Apples are the same Master and treated as one bat/one sin, and Cups and Mirrors are also treated as the same Master with one bat/one sin (but what about King Twelve? Consider the nature of mirrors, and the nature of Beasts). Let us put Cups as being guilty of glass-whispering (and worse, charity). And Chimes? Chimes, well, that would make them guilty of impersonation, and the delivery of false testimony.

It fits, doesn’t it? Other Masters impersonate Chimes, but Chimes impersonated others. Perhaps he originally collected sound - the sound of music, and the sound of singing, and the sound of voices - and that allowed him to screech in a voice that was not his own. He could sound like Fires, or Spices, or Wines; he would have to learn Pages’ unique vocabulary and Irons’ handwriting, but this would not be out of the question. And this talent for impersonation...he could use it to pretend to be others. To speak as them. To speak for them. Impersonation, and false testimony. 

What happens next? The theory spirals from here. He could still be at the House of Chimes, pretending to be the others. But if that is the case, why do we see multiple Masters pretending to be Chimes during Christmastime? And why has it been made clear he is an unusual case? 

Which brings us to Sacks.

The subject of Nomen and the Crimson Beast of Winter is largely beyond the topic of this crack theory, except to say that they are made with blood and lacre and that it is quite possible to destroy the Sackses at Christmas without impeding the arrival of future Sackses. But consider that you can see a unique Noman within the Bazaar if you claim its unique Home Comfort at Christmastime. It is like no other Noman described. It is, to be fair, not really described like a Master...but considering I’ve written this much I really want to get the whole thing down so I’m not gonna let that stop me. 

What if that was the original Mr Sacks? The one that appeared from 2009-2011, before the Twelve Days of Mr Sacks? Chimes was an original Master, but he is no longer around. Sacks was not an original Master, yet something unique like him exists within the depths of the Bazaar. All the other Masters impersonate both, whether in the flesh or in the lacre. 

What if Mr Chimes died? Perhaps not died as we know, but effectively - lacre is *quite* final. Perhaps it was an accident; perhaps the Masters did not realize quite what lacre did to a body; perhaps it was merely the fortuitous occasion for a murder. Regardless, what if he died after being subsumed in lacre? Except instead of exploding, something happened that was...different. My theorizing falls short here. But something happened, perhaps, and although Mr Chimes died something else was born.

Mr Sacks, who demands gifts. HO HO HO.

This is a terrible mistake. Chimes is not the Runt, and he will be missed. There are certain procedures that must be followed. So rather than own to up to what might have been a mistake, or hide the existence of Chimes entirely, the rest of the Masters conceal it. Chimes had always been able to pretend to be them; why could the reverse not be true? So Mr Chimes lives as they always did, even though the title is little more than the other Masters taking turns to keep up the charade. And Mr Sacks, the mysterious Master who appeared at some point between arrival and the Fifth City, is explained away as just the Masters engaging in local festive traditions. Certainly their decision to create Nomen of themselves and send them out every year is their own decision, and not at all a coverup for the fact that one of their own who was actually necessary died. Mr Sacks’ opinions on all of this are mostly unexplored. 

(At some point Mr Mirrors also becomes a real thing, but the Mr Chimes/Mr Sacks thing is ridiculous enough as is without getting into mirrors and reality)

So there you have it. The original pilgrims from the Wilderness were Wines, Spices, Veils, Pages, Stones, Irons, Fires, Chimes, Hearts/Apples, Cups and REDACTED; eleven bats (though a Master who held domain over dreams and could see into the Is-Not might detect a certain shadow following Cups...if this shadow were its own being, would that not make them twelve instead?)

And now there are really eleven: Wines, Spices, Veils, Pages, Stones, Irons, Fires, Hearts/Apples, Cups/Mirrors, REDACTED/Eaten, and Chimes/Sacks. 

Yes, this all makes perfect sense. 110% Pure Canon, no doubt. 

TL;DR - Chimes was a real Master, they tripped and fell into a lacre pit and became the first Mr Sacks, because they were actually a big deal rather than an aberrant runt the other Masters have to pretend to be Chimes (and make their Nomen pretend to be Sacks) in order to avoid the Bazaar or the other immortals around asking awkward questions about internal affairs. No one notices this because the original Chimes/Sacks was really good at impersonating the personalities of others, which was why they were on this dumb mission to begin with.

[casualarsonist]

No Man’s Sky (PS4) review

A while back I posted a first impressions run-down of my initial thoughts on No Man’s Sky. 

https://casualarsonist.tumblr.com/post/164330011115/no-mans-sky-in-2017-a-first-impressions-review

In it you can find the perspective of someone who was somewhere within the first fifty hours of having an amazing time, and I think it’s a good companion piece to the feelings expressed here. I bought the game for £10 on the Playstation store after a great deal of umm-ing and ah-ing and following the aftermath of the PR meltdown catalysed by Sean Murray and Hello Games’ numerous unfulfilled promises preceding the game’s launch, and upon loading it up I found the incredible size of the game, the beauty of its landscapes, and the utterly unique feeling of dropping down on the middle of a life-sized alien planet with nothing with the sound of the wind howling along a desolate landscape absolutely captivating. But, for some reason, after about fifty hours of engaging gameplay, I just kind of dropped it and never went back. If I recall correctly, it might have had something to do with a PS Store sale and a bunch of other shorter games that distracted me…

You know what it’s like…

But regardless of the reason, I didn’t go back to No Man’s Sky for months. It was only after coming home late one night last week and not feeling like I was ready to go to bed that I sat in the dark, booted the ol’ PS4 up and clicked ‘play’ on the game to remind myself of what was going on. The interesting thing is that after giving myself some time, space, and perspective, coming back to it after all that time away laid bare a fact about the game that had remained hidden to me right up until that moment. A fact that defines the end experience for the player as much as its ambition defines the beginning. 

No Man’s Sky is a first-person space exploration game developed by the small 16-man studio, ‘Hello Games’. Having only ever released the side-scrolling racing/platformer ‘Joe Danger’ games, No Man’s Sky was a huge shift from the studio’s base of experience, and an incredible up-scale in scope from anything they had previously attempted. The player awakens on a planet next to the busted shell of their crashed ship. Beyond them lies an enormous, procedurally-generated expanse filled with alien plant and animal life, and rock and mineral deposits, all harvestable for the base resources required to get your ship up and running again. One may find bodies of water, underground caves, outposts both abandoned or inhabited by intelligent lifeforms belonging to one of three alien races, as well as totems that teach you the various languages of the galaxy word by word, and strange monoliths or temples that will offer rewards or punishments to the player for the way they choose to interact with them. Mysterious robots called Sentinels patrol about, sometimes passively, other times aggressively depending on the planet you’re on. The first experience is both incredible and overwhelming, and yet simple to engage with and amazing in scope. You’ll likely spend hours mining mineral deposits dry just for the sake of it. You can sit down with a partner and enjoy the exploration as much as a viewer as you can as a participant, and this to date the only game that my girlfriend is happy to play with me and I with her, which made it a satisfying and enjoyable social experience despite there being no formal multiplayer element.

Once you gather enough resources to repair your ship and regain the means with which to lift off, you can either fly around the planet exploring further and further afield, or take a seamless journey off-world and into the local system, traversing from planet to planet without loading screens, unlocking story missions, gathering more resources to trade or craft components for your ship, fight space pirates or becomes a space pirate yourself or even leave that system entirely and explore other planetary systems. The core feature of the gameplay here is exploration, and it’s important to understand this before you decide to buy, because those expecting to be allowed to blast their way across the galaxy are going to be sorely disappointed with No Man’s Sky’s relatively passive intentions. 

Also the space combat is shit.

What can’t be understated is the scale of the game. No Man’s Sky is absolutely. fucking. enormous. There are literally quintillions of technically ‘unique�� planets to explore. Each has its own climate, colour palette, flora, fauna, quantity of life, size…one planet might be a tiny barren rock devoid of all organic life, but with great spires of pure gold jutting out from the ground; the next might be a verdant paradise brimming with creatures in every direction; another might be a radioactive water planet in which most of its bounty lies submerged beneath a purple sea; and yet another may be covered in snow and have floating islands of rock, and giant deposits of metal sinking deep into the ground. The diversity of the variables is impressive, but given the number of planets you’ll likely explore, you will start to see repetition in the different pieces sooner rather than later. 

This is not aided by the fact that most of the intelligent creatures you come across will be, for all intents and purposes, the same in their functions. Some will give you small dialogue options in which you’re rewarded for saying or doing the right thing, others will offer to trade, and others still will have nothing to offer you at all. Any radiant quests you might encounter all come from a single quest vendor in each system, located at the same place in each system’s space station. And the radiant quests themselves are only ever of a handful of different types, meaning that, while they are useful for gathering credits, or perhaps eventually earning special rare items or weapons, they will never require any large degree of effort on the part of the player in order to complete them and quickly become activities that you perform by rote.

On the plus side, travel time = wank time. 

But perhaps the most important thing that hinders No Man’s Sky’s diversity is the necessary homogenisation of its planets in order to maintain a sustainable gameplay environment. See, whilst the procedural generation allowed Hello Games to create a literal galaxy of planets with comparatively little effort, it also introduces an element of dangerous randomisation into the equation: for instance, say you use your last bit of fuel to travel to a planet that spawns without the materials that can be turned into more fuel, and you get stuck? Say you enter system after system, and every single planet spawns as a barren, uninteresting rock? Say a planet’s climate is so hostile that it kills the player as soon as they leave their ship? The size of the game’s galaxy and sheer number of planets within means that reducing the likelihood that a feature will appear by even 1% might mean that no players will ever see the feature because it ‘only’ appears in six trillion planets that will forever remain unexplored, and so Hello painted themselves into a corner in which they needed to ensure that each planet in the game fulfilled certain basic requirements so as not to render the experience unplayable for any user, whilst also ensuring that each player experienced enough diversity to stave off boredom for as long as possible. The end result is that while there might indeed be many distinct variations in the environments that one travels to, ultimately they are all going to fit within a rather narrow sliver of available options; no gas planets, no water planets, no ice balls, no planets with crushing gravity, and all, after a time, exhibiting fairly homogenised geometry. Looking at it from this perspective is the glass-half-empty approach, and a player coming in with lowered expectations and a positive outlook will find far more wonder in the experience than I’ve just described, but it still remains true that, for all the scope of the project, there are certainly some clear and present boundaries and restraints in the final product. 

And this is what I found myself seeing clearly after coming back to the game following a months-long break: free from the momentum of the wave of wonder I rode for a good fifty hours after starting the game, the first planet I journeyed to was identical to the amalgamated image of all the other planets I’d been to that now existed in my memory. Whilst I had a distinct idea of the things I wanted to see and do in the game I was left innoculated against any overwhelming sense of repetition, but here I was having made my largest jump yet to a system nearly 200 light years away, and the first planet I land on is the epitome of the ‘average’ planet. 

Which begs the question - how would one improve the situation? Because the current release of No Man’s Sky is certainly a step in the right direction when it comes to developing the space exploration genre. Whereas a game like Elite Dangerous might have better performance, a more accurate diversity in planet types, and more engaging controls and combat mechanics, one is limited to a very sparse series of activities in space, and their execution of on-planet traversal is, in a word, tediousandawfulandshit. There is far less to be found in that game on foot than there is in the sky, and far less content overall than No Man’s Sky in total - a game both much cheaper, and easier to pick up and play. I honestly don’t think there is a better middle ground as of yet because the aforementioned randomisation conundrum inhibits too much variation, and to hand-craft a game of this size would literally be impossible. Perhaps we will never get the perfect space game, and perhaps expecting such a thing is folly; I suppose the only change that could have really improved things would have been a managing of expectations.

Incidentally, it’s nearly impossible to find gifs that aren’t from the ‘Queen Elizabeth II tearing Sean Murray a new asshole’ basket. 

The release build of No Man’s Sky was lacking a lot of the narrative and mechanical content, as well as some of the diversity that is in the current release, but even then, had it come out of some dark corner from a little-known indie studio it would be seen as an utter triumph - a milestone in independent games development. Hello Games’ neurotic insistence that their game would be something more than it was killed not only their audience’s goodwill, but also any chance that their game would be seen for the incredible indie accomplishment that it is. Instead, it will only ever be seen as inferior to what they said it would be. And while I think the mainstream awakening that occurred as a result of the scandal is good for consumers and the industry at large, it’s a shame that it happened to a game that deserves much more praise that it gets. 

But I suppose that that is the nature of the current industry climate - the people calling the shots have a dreadful distrust of the quality of their products, and so good games will disappear into the ether if their lucky or be ruined if they’re not, and all because the people controlling public perception can’t help but fuck things up for themselves. No Man’s Sky is the Betamax of video games - a quality product brought down by its parent company’s bungling business tactics. Hello Games told the public what they thought they wanted to hear, and once they’d popped that cork there was no chance of being able to put it back in. But for those that are untarnished by the backlash, I assure you that the game is a huge departure from almost any space exploration game you’ve played before, and any sense of purpose that it may have been missing in the beginning has been restored, at least somewhat. If you can ignore the negative rhetoric (despite the fact that it’s all I’ve talked about for the last two hundred words) then I think you’ll find something wonderful here. Its price tends to fluctuate, and it has gone back up to fifty pounds at the moment, which I feel is a bit steep. But as far as I know, they’re still working on large, free updates, so any discount on this is a steal. 

8/10

Very Good