#if the end of the Ireland arc got anything it got THAT at least

[juniperhillpatient]

no one understands how hard it can be for me to relax like I think my body & brain would rather die than relax i forced myself to put away my laptop & it wasn’t easy but I did I absolutely forced myself to put it up & I put on a video essay to sit back in bed & relax to but I disagree with everything this guy is saying so I can’t relax I’m going insane

[archester-creations]

Wisp Trails

It was cold, in the woods, late at night. At least here it was. He'd gone to Ireland with his family and Marion had somehow convinced him to follow them outside, close to midnight. Before promptly losing him. Jaune sighed as he pushed away a low branch. A breath cloud followed the action. Small and fogged in the crisp weather. It did feel nice, with his light jacket. All he wished was that Marion hadn't ditched him. Or that they'd find him. Before he got completely lost in the woods.

Not that he wasn't completely lost already. He was not the Arc with the best sense of direction. With a sigh he looked around again. A crimson light bounced in the woods close by. As Jaune stared, it floated a few paces further away before it floated back. Like it wanted him to follow. Jaune took a step toward it. Immediately it floated backward what Jaune thought might be a step and stayed there.

“You want me to follow you…?” Jaune asked the light. It bobbed up and down. A clear yes. He stepped closer to the light and the light strayed away again. For several minutes, Jaune followed the light. While Jaune tripped over unseen branches, the light gracefully flickered along its path. Every time it seemed he might catch it, it disappeared only to reappear several steps further ahead.

Time sort of lost meaning, though that wasn't very rare for Jaune. It only struck Jaune as weird when one step started in the woods and ended in the front yard of the house they were renting. He looked around for the light. Only to see nothing but the stars and moon. There wasn't even a hint of the crimson light. If Jaune didn't know better he'd think he found his way back alone. But there was no way he could've.

“There you are! I thought I'd be free of you forever,” Marion said, the front door open to wash Jaune in light.

“You wish,” Jaune said absently. How weird. It was almost eerie. Except Jaune truly didn't think there was anything bad about whatever or whoever led him back.

“What are you staring at?” Marion asked from right beside him. Jaune didn't jump, but it was a near thing.

“I don't know,” Jaune said. “A floating light?”

“A floating light?” Marion asked, an eyebrow raised with a disbelieving curl to their mouth.

“Yes,” Jaune said defensively. “Maybe. It helped me back.”

“... uh huh.” Marion directed him into the house and he followed.

“It did!” Jaune said.

“What did what?” Denise asked.

“Jauney here says some floating light led him back to the house,” Marion said.

“Oh, I read about this! They were in the book Maëlys made me read!” Delphine said excitedly, hands holding her weight above the table in such a way Jaune was surprised she didn't tip the whole thing over. “That's a will-o’-the-wisp!”

“Will-o’-the-wisp?” Jaune repeated.

“Lanterns carried by the dead to lure travelers off their paths and to their dooms.” Delphine moved so she could wiggle her fingers, voice bouncing on the final word. Jaune rolled his eyes.

“No way,” he said. This light helped him get back. Not led him to his doom.

“Alright, maybe not that dramatically,” Delphine said. “But they do make travelers lost and confused in the woods, so it could bring your doom.”

“He probably just wasn't as lost as he thought he was and saw some swamp gas that pointed him in the right direction,” Maëlys said.

“That's boring,” Delphine said.

“Swamp gas sounds kinda cool to me,” Denise said.

“That's just because you think it sounds like farting,” Delphine said.

Denise shrugged.

A will-o’-the-wisp… It seemed so unlikely. Though it did lead him. And he never saw anything but the light. Which was odd, because the light should've let him see something. Something that was leading him. Shouldn't it have?

The next night, Jaune couldn't sleep. Which wasn't very rare, except the reason he couldn't sleep was because he kept thinking about the crimson light. Surely he was an easy target. So if Delphine was right, why did it get him unlost? He looked outside his window like that'd give him an answer.

A crimson light flickered in the distance. He sat up. That was it. That was the light. The will-o’-the-wisp that had guided him. Jaune scrambled out of bed, just barely remembering to be careful so he wouldn't wake Marion, and snuck out of the house. During the day, Denise and Delphine had dragged them around the forest to see what they could find. Jaune liked to think he'd be able to find his way better because of that. Though he'd forgotten his flashlight. It wasn't needed to follow a light, anyhow. Probably.

Of course, that seemed to be the case until his hair got tangled in a branch. It tugged him back and Jaune cursed. Probably too loudly for this late. He reached back to try to untangle it. This sucked. Not being able to see his hair made it virtually impossible. Everytime he got one piece untangled it seemed the rest just tangled worse. If he'd braided it before going to bed like M’man said, this wouldn't have happened. The more he struggled, the more raw his fingertips felt. The more the stung. The more the struggle felt worthless. Then, just as he was about to give up and just spend the night out here, hands batted his away. He dropped his gratefully.

“Thank you so much, Marion,” he said as he lowered his head. Not only did his arms and fingers feel kind of sore, his neck did too. “And don't laugh at-” Blue, almost purple, eyes that seemed to glow. His mind went back to the crimson light. “me.”

There's a moment of pause where Jaune is sure he didn't breathe. “... I won't make fun of you.” The words were said in an echoing Irish brogue. It felt like they rattled in his chest.

“Tha-” Jaune licked his lips. “Thank you.”

The… being… nodded and looked up to untangle his hair.

“Are you a, uh, will-o’-the-wisp?” Jaune asked.

“If that's what you wish to call me.”

“I'd call you your name. I'm Jaune.” Jaune said and the hands in his hair paused.

“I'm Cardin,” Cardin said as he started again. His breath fanned cold air across Jaune’s forehead. It sent a shiver down his spine. One he knew was not just from the cold. In fact, he felt a little warm so close to this being. He wondered if Cardin would be able to make out the colour high on his cheeks with the glow of his eyes. If he did, maybe he'd think it was from the cold night.

It took a few minutes, and they were spent in silence, but Jaune was soon free. Once Cardin moved back he was able to breathe a bit easier. “Thank you.”

Cardin nodded and took further steps back. Now, Jaune was able to see the crimson light locked within a silver lantern, held in Cardin's left hand. He hadn't seen Cardin pick it up. Somehow, Jaune got the feeling Cardin was about to leave. Or maybe disappear.

“I wanted to ask you something,” Jaune said before he could.

Cardin made a curious noise.

“Why did you help me? My one sister said will-o’-the-wisps confuse people,” Jaune asked.

In the light of the lantern, Jaune saw Cardin's cheeks glow crimson. A crimson very similar to his light. It was hard to tell whether or not they were actually glowing. Like spots of fire. At least he was not the only one blushing. “I don't like foreign travelers stuck in my forest. Though if I find you out here again, I just might turn you about.”

Jaune didn't believe him. He didn't call him out on it, either. “So I'd see you again if I came out here? Like, tomorrow night after midnight?”

“If you're dumb enough,” Cardin said, an eyebrow raised. It sounded like a warning. Not a convincing one by any means, but a warning. Jaune smiled.

“Then I'll see you tomorrow night. Now, uh…”

With a sigh, Cardin pointed Jaune in the right direction.

Just as promised, Jaune went to see Cardin again the next night. As well as all the following nights they stayed at that house. While he complained at first, Cardin never followed up on his threat.

“Can we come back here next year?” Jaune asked his m’man a few days later while they packed for their journey to their next stop in England. “I really like this house.”

“We'll have to see,” M’man chuckled. Jaune crossed his fingers. He hoped he could see Cardin again.

[falkenscreen]

Star Trek: Voyager

Yes this show ended some time ago; that doesn’t mean that it’s not still underrated.

A relative late convert to Star Trek, this author committed to traversing the Delta Quadrant having finished The Original Series, The Next Generation, Discovery & Picard to date. Deep Space Nine is next; like the Doctor I don’t know anything about this ‘Dominion’ but they seem important and we’ll get there.

Having now finished Voyager, here’s the (spoiler-filled) thoughts of someone who came to the bridge afresh and savoured the light-hearted nature of the show. Yes TNG demanded more attention and the episodes herein that do are generally better, but for relaxed, semi-serialised adventure Voyager is a high point.

We’ll start with the negative and get to the fun stuff.

From the get-go there was a jarring disconnect between the premise and goals of the show. If a ship more advanced than any in the region is travelling really fast in one direction they’re not going to keep running into the same people; better begetting a saga poised for episodic rather than serialised fiction. The writers and audience were evidently a little tired at this point of TNG’s slavish devotion to wrapping everything up in 40-odd minutes so wanted to try variations on a theme; it was the right approach for the time accompanied by a smart premise that didn’t match.

And a stellar premise it was only set to be buoyed by the Federation-Marquis dynamic. Also partly squandered, corresponding grounds for strong tension and stories were left by the wayside – characterised by Chakotay’s ill-established, apparently immediate and seemingly endless trust in Janeway; together major failings of the show.

On continuity, and just so it’s out of the way; no they don’t show it but it’s clear the crew just manufactured more photon torpedoes like they did so much else.

Commencing with one of the best episodes, there is rarely a subsequent moment as character-defining as Janeway destroying the array. Don’t get me wrong, Kate Mulgrew is great, but she alike Kirk and Picard are, as fleshed out as they become, for stretches bare variations on a tired theme; young headstrong hotshot dedicates their life to the stars to become a reasoned, seasoned Commander. ‘Tapestry’ did it best and there was no need to explore this further.

Voyager had a general problem with characters that took several seasons to grow; it was a long time before Neelix stopped being grating and his earnestness became endearing. There is too very little you can relay about Tuvak beyond his being a Vulcan and a little sardonic, or Harry besides his yearning for advancement or Chakotay aside his membership of the Marquis and focus on his cultural background.

The stand-out worst episode of the entire show was Chakotay finding out that the Sky Spirits central to his people’s religion were actually from the Delta Quadrant; you can garner Robert Beltran’s clear ambivalence (at best) to such material. This author is aware of the significant tension between the actor and others on set; I can understand the frustration at a lead cast member belittling the series in public but the directions and emphasis the character took in later seasons was something else, as were the music cues whenever his or some others’ cultures came up.

Star Trek, and notably The Original Series, is often (but not always) shrewd for both telling stories addressing the place of culture, religion and community in people’s lives while not overly if at all drawing attention to particular characters’ backgrounds. To Beltran’s credit, he only made the disaffection perceptible on screen in the episodes that were of poor taste, as opposed to the ones that were just bad. There are many lousy episodes of The Original Series but what near always makes it enjoyable is Shatner et al’s absolute commitment to the bit. One of the very worst episodes of Voyager is the one where Harry is lead to believe that he’s actually from a planet in the Delta Quadrant full of attractive women; yet no one in Star Trek ever needs to look bored reading their lines. There are good ones and bad ones and we’re along for the whole ride.

There’s also that one where Tom and the Captain turn into salamanders, start life on a random planet and somehow transform back into their usual selves with these shenanigans never brought up again. Yeah that was awful but it was preceded by a generally decent few acts centred on exceeding warp limits; reputation aside it wasn’t quite down there.

On Alpha Quadrant folks being in the Delta Quadrant, as much as I missed the Klingons they did not need to rock up latently and near the very end; there were plenty of better ways to give B’Elanna an arc. One of the more interesting characters, she offered a variation on Worf’s overwhelming pride as a Klingon, though she barely got enough episodes to shine and these were predominantly featured much later on. And when the show stopped pretending Tom was the cocky pilot we’ve seen dozens of times before he too managed to get a whole lot more interesting.

It would have made a lot more sense for McNeill to just directly continue his character from TNG’s ‘The First Duty;’ alas.

Also welcome were the insights into the Borg; even if they became a lot less eerie it was great to learn that much more about them, though nothing, save the introduction of Seven, bettered the recuperating drones who were the ship’s first Borg encounter. The Borg children were also very funny (the related Voyager pick-ups in Picard were excellent) and should have stayed on the ship longer so Seven could say more things like “fun will now commence;” she can only say “Naomi Wildman” deadpan, as good as it was, so many times.

Heralded by such a superb actress, Seven and the Doctor thrillingly shared dual arcs akin but distinct to Data’s and each other’s, permitting us to relish their gradual growth and revel in their leaps forward. Seven’s narrowing down of eligible crewmen, unlike Chakotay’s later courting, was a particular highlight, as was her month of isolation when the crew were in stasis and the one where the Doctor overtook her node.

The Doctor however emerges the best character, far and above all others save the near as interesting Seven. Picardo’s charisma and stage presence, well-befitting an exaggeratedly humanistic, bombastic piece of programming, only propelled the most relatable arcs in the series; his desire to fit in and, as any, make a contribution. The Doctor’s opening number in ‘Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy,’ but one occasion where Picardo’s vocal abilities were graciously integrated into the series, by this author’s judgement is the funniest sequence in seven seasons.

‘Message in a Bottle’ with the Doctor centre was too among the very best of the series. Mining any opportunity for comedy we can nonetheless be grateful, alike TNG, that they kept the bald jokes to about one per season.

As asides, it was lovely to see Reginald Barclay return and realise his aspirations in one of the best and most heart-warming episodes of the saga, while the singular and very obvious inspiration one episode draws from Predator proved amusing for just being so unabashed.  

‘Scorpion’ was amazing as was anything to do with Species 8472. Captain Proton, acknowledging the entire franchise’s schlocky roots, was a definite recurring highlight, with Mulgrew in one installment clearly having no end of fun alike the cast’s enjoyable turns in late 90’s Los Angeles alongside Sarah Silverman. Speaking of guest stars, seeing The Rock was a nice surprise though with hindsight they may never have cast him given Star Trek shrewdly chose to not have celebrity appearances overshadow the show. But hey, they can’t see the future; at least cleverly opting to obscure Jason Alexander in piles of costuming.

‘Year of Hell’ is good, but the premise befitted an entire season and alike the lacklustre finale nothing really matters (with some well-executed exceptions) if you can just go back in or erase time. There were many, many episodes that shouldn’t have been contained within forty minutes and deserved longer-form devotion, ala ‘30 Days.’ ‘Timeless’was a much better (and unusually technically-focused) variation on the aforementioned themes and it was fun to catch Geordi, as it was Deanna and especially Sulu. ‘The Omega Directive’ was cool; ‘The Thaw’ was great.

The fable-esque nature of the franchise has always been enjoyable and digestible given the show is partially aimed at kids, though there are episodes where it’s just a little too direct, and characters take a little too much pause. ‘Alice,’ the one where Tom almost cheats with his ship as an overly obvious parallel about why you shouldn’t have sex with other people if you have a girlfriend, if a good lesson, in execution was a tad much.

On reflection this author was surprised to discover some of the least generally favoured episodes, among them the Fairhaven double. It may be my great personal affection for Ireland but it makes perfect sense that given the time available this sort of world would be created and characters might pursue holo-relationships, a theme underexplored in Voyager yet still covered to great effect. The established technical deficiencies of holo-technology in such regular use should not come as a surprise when they recur.  

The one where Kes comes back was actually a later highlight; her character was never very well handled and no it wasn’t that blast off into the sunset but sometimes old friends lose their way and it’s the job of old friends to set them on the right path.

Most surprising was the dislike directed at ‘Tuvix.’ The difference between Voyager and much heavier sci-fi is that herein characters make a lot of decisions that are hard, not ones that are difficult. The destruction of the array was devastating but not morally questionable within the confines of the show. As a tangent, you could argue that had Janeway made the decision to return to the Alpha Quadrant at the beginning of the series that it would have been the morally correct decision given that, as we see in ‘Hope and Fear,’ another highlight, the ship would not otherwise have been a factor in much disorder and destruction. The show was not however so expansive philosophically as to greatly tread such ground as the franchise otherwise managed in the likes of ‘City on the Edge of Forever.’

In ‘Tuvix’ Janeway, a figure, like Chakotay, who often shifted characterisation to fit the requirements of any given story, was faced with a difficult decision with no easy moral out nor ethically unquestionable approach. It was a refreshing change and correspondingly dark denouement to boot apparent in the likes of ‘Latent Image,’ another fine instalment with the Doctor.

‘Eye of the Needle,’ the only episode this author has watched twice to date and a deeply empathetic early high point, save ‘Balance of Terror’ is the best treatment of the guarded but necessarily relatable Romulans (I haven’t seen all the movies!). ‘The Void’ bookends the show as a later stand out while the in respects not dissimilar ‘Night’ bears one of the darkest challenges and finest, most resonant endings.

This brings us to the ‘best episode;’ one featured regularly in top ten lists but seemingly not a very favourite.

‘Blink of an Eye’ is everything that is exceptional and aspirational about Star Trek. Stranded in the stratosphere of a planet where time passes with greater rapidity, the curious presence of Voyager in the skies begins to influence the society to the point where the inhabitants develop space travel to face the spectre.

A commentary on the Prime Directive as deft as any and a relatively novel variation on both the time travel and petri dish tropes resplendent throughout sci-fi and Star Trek, the episode is also a fabulous meta-commentary on the place of the franchise in popular culture much less crude than Janeway bemoaning the Doctor’s fleeting interplanetary fans’ obsession with every aspect of his personal life. Incorporating a fair bit more science than is typically par, the astronaut’s moving decision to help them, as with his staring into the heavens as Voyager finally departs, speaks to the selfless ethos and sense of overwhelming curiosity so intrinsic to the most basic lore of Star Trek, the most beloved episodes and all that Gene Roddenberry best achieved.

It’s also an amazing meditation on first contact principles and pitfalls which unlike many episodes doesn’t borrow story bones from TNG.

A more than welcome reprieve from a pandemic, I didn’t spend as long in the Delta Quadrant as the crew but for what I did I was glad to relish with them.

Star Trek: Voyager is now streaming on Netflix

[thedeathdeelers]

drinny anon back again, i was vaguely productive yesterday but today i got to spend like a couple of hours waiting for an appointment in which nobody expected anything productive out of me!! so i got to finish faerie tales snd dragonflies AND start Slytherin Squad.

faerie tales was SO good, i absolutely loved their interactions there- ginny slowly starting to understand narcissa and eventually warm up to her with draco’s help was really nice. bu the BALL!! the ball had me so in love because i am a SIMP and ginny is very beautiful. but it‘s okay because draco was also a simp. and he kissed her!!! they actually kissed surrounded by fairies, that’s genuinely so romantic-

watching everything fall apart because of. all the lying. that was not very fun. did not enjoy (i was just feeling too much of ginny and draco’s pain.) the ending was so sweet though- i loved that fred and george helped draco make his romantic gestures. and the proposal at the end was... both coming full circle and just very very sweet. (even if the faeries were unnecessarily bitchy with the piece of strawberry cake.)

SLYTHERIN SQUAD!! i am absolutely in love with this story because ginny and draco are both very badass and i love seeing the slytherins together. it was a little disconcerting to have theo be a bouncy, incompetent kid because most fics i’ve seen so far have him as quiet, studious, and deadly, but it was interesting. the mix between humour and gravity in the story is absolutely perfect, honestly, because even the serious bits that could easily make me cry in another story are couched in humour and i want to cry just a little bit less. draco’s old mindset of ”if someone else fails me, at least it won’t be my fault” is one of those moments.

daphne’s original oh-so-fake reaction to ginny was wonderful, but i love her slowly getting closer to ginny. her wingmen-to-lovers arc with blaise is so sweet, i think i have a new trope i want fics in.

the squad’s interaction with yaxley before the trial-everything-went-to-shit was a huge mix of funny and sad for me- it was just all too clear that the squad was quite a lot of death eater. HATED seeing blaise get hurt though. only good thing about that is that with just blaise, daphne, warrington and goyle left, i actually felt comfortable that there won’t be major backstabbing. at least, i hope not.

i haven’t even talked about the drinny in there yet, but it’s just so good- them warming up to each other slowly and then all at once was so good. and the quidditch pitch and pushing each other into the lake and ice cream and then narcissa’s reaction to the article was just. so good.

oh, and the attack on the nott house in ireland was really nice. i mean, technically it went terribly, but it really showcases that the squad work together and work together well.

harry, hermione and ron in there... well. it’s weird. they’re pretty unbending, but not too unreasonable- and i see them being like that, it’s not like they’re exactly out of character. still, the fredmione thing made me double-take, i am stunned at how that happened even if fred survived the battle of hogwarts. the weasleys being The new leaders of the wizarding world is pretty funny, though, even if it’s just ron as Badass Auror, harry as head auror and hermione and DMLE head. a lot of clout in one family.

as you can see, i’m really enjoying this one- it really pulled me in and i’m so glad it’s a long fic (90k of this heaven? YES)

i cant tell you how happy it makes me to see someone discovering this ship and getting to read all the really good fics for the first time 😍 iM SO DAMN EXCITED FOR YOU ANON!!!!

i absolutely love how quickly you’re going théorie these rn and just having you tell me your thought process as you read these is making me miss this pairing sm! also it’s bringing back random snippets of fics i remember reading ages ago so hopefully i’ll eventually remember more recs soon

wingman to lovers lmaoooo love that 😂

also ya i get what you mean about theo- but i guess we never really got much out of that character in canon? so people just kinda went with the quiet stoic studious version- i love this author’s interpretation tho, and it suits his role in the fic 👀

some fics sometimes paint the golden trio as being these extremely unreasonable people which puts me off a story usually. o don’t remember it being the case in this fic but maybe i’m wrong? i especially hâte the ones where harry’s just this massive asshole- like i’m not a fan of harry but that’s just? so OOC?

but ya i only ever liked romione so it’s always a ride when i’m reading and BAM she’s being shipped with someone else lmao

but DRINNY IS THE FOCUS so it’s fine 😂

HOPE YOU ENJOY THE REST OF THIS FIC 👀

[gffa]

Hii I'm new to the Fandom and I'm obsessed with your blog! I ADORE your point of view really its making me love star wars more and more, my question is do you have any recommendations on which books to read to understand more about the lore and where cannon is right now??

Hi!  I’m glad if I can help you like SW lore more and thank you for such kind words, I deeply appreciate them.  And, oh, what a tricky question that is, without meaning to be!A lot depends on which part of the SW lore you’re looking for–are you looking for technical terms or character backstory tidbits?  Lore on Force woo?  The stories that help better inform the structure of Star Wars?  Because I feel like my answers would be different for each of those!So, I’m going to do a “here’s what I think is the best places to start when getting into SW supplementary material” list:1.  THE TV SERIESIf you haven’t watched The Clone Wars and Rebels yet, those should be first on your list!  TCW is there to help give you the bigger picture of just how awful the Clone Wars were, how politics dragged everything down into the mud, and will give you a ton of feelings on established characters.  I’m currently in the middle of a rewatch and its kicking up all these feelings I had and you can really tell that this is what George Lucas’ world looks like when they have the time to explore it.  (Though, hell, even with this show, it only covers things in broad strokes, especially because it is still aimed at younger audiences, too.)And Rebels is just a really great series by itself, but it also does a fantastic job of showing you just how complicated the war against the Empire was, how hard it was to wind together these various minor factions into one bigger Rebellion, as well as it does a lot to show what it’s like for Jedi after the genocide of their people.  It also has some killer cameos and resolution to things started in TCW and moments of confrontation for all the characters.Both of those really only have minor moments of exploring the Force Woo Lore (but there’s really not one singular place that explains it, imo, it’s something you have to piece together to see the bigger picture), but they’re fantastic for echoing the narrative structure of Star Wars and its themes.2.  THE COMICSThey’re the next best stop, they are also really great stories in terms of the character arcs, as well as the next best place to get more on the themes of Star Wars.  There have been so many moments, more than anywhere else, that I have wanted to just absolutely (virtually) SCREAM, because HOLY SHIT THAT WAS A HELL OF A MOMENT or HOLY SHIT THAT UNDERSTOOD STAR WARS SO WELL or just had really amazing moments.  I would recommend starting with:- The Star Wars 2015 comic (by Jason Aaron) and read it concurrently with Darth Vader vol. 1 (by Kieron Gillen), as they’re meant to go together.- Then read Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith (by Charles Soule)- After that, in any order:  Age of the Republic comics (by Jody Houser), Obi-Wan & Anakin (by Charles Soule), Jedi of the Republic - Mace Windu (by Matt Owens), and Kanan: The Last Padawan (by Greg Wiseman).- I also really enjoy the Star Wars Adventures comics from IDW, the Poe Dameron comics (by Charles Soul) are incredible and give a lot of context to the sequel trilogy and Shattered Empire does a lot in the same vein.3.  THE NOVELSNovels are trickier, because some are good for lore but aren’t necessarily stories I would recommend to new fans, others are amazing stories but don’t necessarily have a lot of lore.  So, I’m going to focus on the books that I think do the most bridge work and help you understand the bigger picture of Star Wars:- The Star Wars Battlefront II video game (okay, not a book, bear with me) does an amazing job of giving more context to how the Empire ended and how it connected to the First Order.  You can do a search on YouTube for “Battlefront 2 game movie” or similar search parameters and watch it like a movie, it’s about two hours and it’s wonderful.  Fall in love with the characters with me, understand why Jakku was important, and get some amazing cameos (and stunning planets) for the OT trio!- The Aftermath trilogy by Chuck Wendig also does a ton of showing how the Empire’s fall wasn’t instantaneous after Endor’s moon, as well as the faltering early steps of the New Republic, and a ragtag bunch who hunt down Imperial war criminals and all come to love each other AND I LOVE THEM, sobs.  I would add in the caveat that I think these work massively better as audiobooks, so check if your library has them and maybe you can check them out on-line and be prepared to give the books a little time to grow on you.- Bloodline by Claudia Gray shows Leia six years before TFA and the New Republic still faltering and how she discovers the early origins of the First Order and loses her position in the Senate and starts up the Resistance.  It’s at its best when it’s a Leia book, but it also does do a lot of groundwork for the connections between the OT and the ST!- From a Certain Point of View by various authors, is a collection of short stories, many of which are hits and many of which are misses, but the hits are amazing.  If nothing else, “Master & Apprentice” (by Claudia Gray–not to be confused with the full novel of the same title), “Time of Death” (by Cavan Scott), “There Is Another” (by Gary D. Shmidt), and “An Incident Report” (by Daniel Mallory Ortberg) are all MUST READS.  I read all of them and I’m glad I did, but if a story isn’t gripping you, feel free to skim over it for the next, they’re only connected by theme, not events.- I loved both Spark of the Resistance (by Justina Ireland) and Resistance Reborn (by Rebecca Roanhorse) as books set between TLJ and TROS, where I grew even more fond of the characters getting to have adventures together.  I also thought the Dooku: Jedi Lost audiodrama was probably the best PT era canon book to recommend, too.4.  THE GUIDEBOOKSGuidebooks are more fun when you’re already invested and just want to look up a thing or two, but there’s at least one that I think is a must-read from cover to cover:  Star Wars Propaganda: A History of Persuasive Art in the Galaxy by Pablo Hidalgo.  It doesn’t sound like it would be that interesting–a history told through art?  But it’s an absolutely stellar bird’s eye view and explanation of how things happened in the GFFA, how the Clone Wars happened, how the Republic fell, how the Empire rose, how the Rebellion fought back, how the New Republic rose, how the First Order knocked it all down again.5.  ANYTHING ELSE?I love the game Jedi: Fallen Order and I think it does an amazing job of staying true to the Jedi Order, their culture, and the themes of Star Wars.  You can do the same thing of looking for a movie-version on YouTube, it should be about four hours long to cover the majority of the game, and I absolutely fell in love with the characters and the world, it was clear they really cared about the story and the lore and making this feel like a game where you got to experience becoming a Jedi.This isn’t a list of “stories I thought were good” but ones aimed at establishing the best understanding of the bigger galaxy, as well as stories that I thought were really good for new fans!  While I put them generally in the order I would suggest them, if something’s not working for you, feel free to drop it and move on to another thing, either coming back later to the dropped one or not, because this should be fun and not boring work.HOPEFULLY THAT’S A GOOD PLACE TO GET YOU STARTED and if someone else would suggest a good Starting Place For A New Fan, feel free to chime in!

[vroenis]

Lost Legacy Exemplifies Naughty Dog’s Cultural Crisis

There’s a discussion about Ocean’s 8 that positions its existence around whether or not it's necessary as a counterpoint to the Ocean’s reboot - the Ocean’s Cinematic Universe - if you will (what a world we live in) - that it was only made as a gender flip of the reboot that spawned two sequels, three films in total cast almost entirely with men.

My perspective is that as much as I generally enjoyed the Ocean’s reboots for what they were, Ocean’s Eleven should have been a cast entirely with women in the first place.

The heroes we both need and deserve.

Massive spoilers for the original 1960 Lewis Milestone version and the Steven Soderbergh one in 2001 of Ocean’s Eleven - Soderbergh’s flip is of-course that they get to keep the money at the end so that they have to potentially give it back in the sequel he knew he’d be able to make, whereas I doubt Milestone knew he’d ever get a sequel back in the early 60′s so the rub for film-making back then is to burn the money at the end. Nevertheless even for the early 2000′s, the boldest of moves would have been to cast it with women, not to be progressive but also to be progressive, tho that’s still an absurd thought that to cast women is progressive - but to be smart. Ocean’s 8 is a fantastic film, deftly written, paced, acted, shot and edited. Would the world have responded to it in like-kind? I know how *I* would have responded to it, I think you can answer for yourself how societal cultures may have responded at any point from 2001 thru to now. In any case, I have Ocean’s 8 on blu-ray. I love it.

A reader asked me whether I’d played Uncharted: The Lost Legacy after kindly reading through my bludgeoning of Uncharted 4, and seeing as they were patient enough to endure that blood-letting, I felt I owed them and probably Naughty Dog the time of day to give Uncharted-And-A-Half a chance, and I’m really glad I did. Fair warning, there’s a lot I didn’t like about Lost Legacy, and there’s going to be some more pain - a lot of pain. I don’t think any of my tumblr audience is quite on the rest of my socials, but anyone who’s connected to me anywhere else on the Wire was subject to my frustrations as I played thru the game on Saturday, including the blurred image of my Google Keep notes I took while playing the game in preparation for this journal. I keep notes now.

Nevertheless, I can say that on the assumption that the Uncharted series is wrapped, or at least in the narrative arc with these characters as we know them, that Lost Legacy is easily without question my favourite Uncharted game by far.

On that assumption that Uncharted is more or less done, now’s as good a time as any to take a top-down look at the franchise as a whole. I know I already did a fair bit of that in the last piece, but some broader thoughts on what the series does and says have solidified while playing Lost Legacy, and I’ll discuss them as a lead-in to my thoughts on the game.

Again - this is going to be riddled with spoilers for Uncharted: The Lost Legacy and most likely the entire Uncharted series, so if you’ve not played them and are interested in doing so, or don’t want to see them heavily critiqued, please stop here.

The first game was released in 2007 and was apparently in development for roughly three years. What was happening up to and around 2004 to 2007? September 11 had happened in 2001, the world was at war in the Middle East in Afghanistan and second invasion of Iraq had begun in 2003, Hurricane Katrina happened in 2005 - the same year the IRA ended armed conflict in Northern Ireland, 2005 saw the outbreak of H5N1 Avian Flu - topical right now. There are so many more, I can’t list them all here - lots of momentous events that in some way or another highlight community awareness in some way - that’s probably a bit of an obtuse statement but hopefully it’ll string together in a sec. What struck me and a bunch of my friends odd about the first, then the second and then somehow every Uncharted game since, is that Naughty Dog seem to choose an ethnicity for their antagonists and scratch the surface of “what if this element of their cultural violence is bad”, but then leave it so shallow that it remains a caricature and comes off as casually and carelessly racist. The first game frames the theme around Nazis, but the actual enemies are anything but. Yes, they’re intended to be mercenaries, but they’re hardly nondescript, they’re absolutely of very specific ethnicity.

From the second game onward, Naughty Dog seem to want to make use of real world settings and do some nuanced research on actual sociopolitical conflict and I always feel uneasy about how its presented. Lost Legacy begins much the same way and I worried about the tone going in. An active war-zone in India as gravitas to your setting that is then almost completely abandoned until the very end? This is my problem with how the writers treat setting in Uncharted. They use very real conflicts that have real-world consequences for people in which actual lives are lost to inject gravity into their narrative and then quickly discard it for the sake of shenanigans once the wise-cracking starts when the tone shifts gear and the characters themselves take centre-stage in the foreground.

Here’s the thing.

The character’s are enough. I *love* these characters. Their story is fantastic. Nadine’s and Chloe’s story was the best and most cohesive of the entire series. Also it only took me roughly six hours to play thru and I only feel like half of that was wasted! That’s still probably being too generous but I’m grasping for positives, here. Still - I don’t know why the senior production team has never had confidence in the core of their product which is the charm of their characters and the play dynamic - Uncharted is primarily about *seeing* and *doing* - for the most part, unfortunately, separately.

The dialogue between Chloe and Nadine is extremely interesting, it is absolutely the best thing in the game, yet it keeps getting interrupted by stupid gameplay beats due to poor timing of rolling up on level locations. Uncharted 4 was supposed to have locations hidden around levels where you could engage in dialogue between characters but I barely found them - why hide such interesting content in your game?? It’s completely absurd. Then the only few I did find were between Elena and Nathan altho I really don’t think those were meant to be hidden, and they were so poorly written and I hated them so much, I didn’t care to discover any more. Again - no disrespect at all to Nolan North and Troy Baker whom I absolutely adore and respect, but I didn’t find anything engaging or interesting *at all* about the brother narrative. I didn’t care one bit what that nonsense was about. What about Sully? Where’s Sully’s story?? I’m just so - so glad we got a story for Chloe, and that at least Nadine got some great screen time too as a part of it and that it all presented so well.

Before I continue to praise what went well, there are a few things I can’t let pass. While the driving has thankfully improved and controls quite well now, the exclusion of a minimap or GPS HUD element is interesting. I’m fairly certain it’s intentional as to not detract from the game’s clean, cinematic look, to not break immersion, but this just generates a horrific breakdown in actual player experience for me. Without any navigational assists, I constantly got lost and stopped every 20 meters to check the map, frequently driving into dead-ends, off cliffs and past where I wanted or needed to go. The game isn’t a 30 hour open-world experience with distinct and varied landmarks the player will familiarise themselves with and learn to navigate by, for the most part the level is fairly homogeneous in object geometry.

Some of the puzzles take far too long to mechanically execute, in particular the smashy-slashy statue block jumpy stupid whatever it’s called one and the sliding shadow motif. It doesn’t matter that neither actually takes too long once you know the solution, it’s that they feel long and then are actually over-long and also not interesting to mechanically execute. This is due mostly to clunky character animation and animation smoothing, and part of Naughty Dog’s overall obsession with being cinematic which is something I’ll return to towards the end of this piece, something which has been a strength but will ultimately be to their detriment. While cinematic visuals might be a benefit for traversal, it’s something that absolutely does not suit puzzle-solving. In the example of the statue-block puzzle, the hard reset each time the player is hit means laboriously jogging all the way back to the beginning and starting again - it’s just poor puzzle design having to begin again from a full reset. There’s no satisfaction in having to remember the whole thing and while I didn’t look up the solution online, I’m willing to bet many people will have just dialled up a clip on YouTube and copied it without figuring it out themselves. This is a failure of connecting what’s satisfying about moving in your game and what’s satisfying about solving puzzles, something Crystal Dynamics understood far better in the Tomb Raider reboots, in particular the second outing (Rise of) with their much more environment-centric puzzling.

The sliding shadow puzzle just simply takes way too long to jog around the space, then clip onto the hot-zone for each lever, wait for the animation to lift it, wait for the animation for the pieces to slide, rinse, repeat. Once you know what you have to do, it’s overly frustrating actually having to do it.

It brings me to a weird quirk of design where the puzzle designers perhaps don’t understand something that the environmental designers do. Maybe they didn’t get the same little notes in the Slack channel, or Trello board or Teams pin or whatever. Uncharted level-design has almost no back-tracking, less in each successive game, and it’s almost entirely absent from Lost Legacy - you’d have to look closely to realise you’re navigating the same area you came in thru and almost always moving over it in a different way that’s been modified - now it’s flooded, now there’s a bridge, now you’re swinging or leaping or climbing where you weren’t etc. I feel like this is the Hidetaka Miyazaki Souls/Borne effect of level design in which environments are designed to be both realistic and practical.

Great! Good for the level designers. Did the puzzle designers not get that note? Maybe they did. I need to stop thinking that every poor optimisation is a symptom of ignorance - that’s bad form on my part. What’s more likely is it’s a symptom of either bad leadership, poor tool implementation, lack of time or too narrow or strict an observation of representative vision - by which I mean - they can’t change the way the characters move or animate just for puzzles, because it has to be consistent with the cinematic representation of the game as a whole - and that sucks lemons. It means the overall play experience suffers for the sake of the overall cinematic experience except executing a puzzle isn’t cinematic unless it’s expansive...

Like the positive example I’ll give of the light reflector room. Shoplifted from Uncharted 2′s giant knife that has Nathan climb all over a giant knife, Lost Legacy’s light reflector room has slightly less climbing but is a much larger space, more impressive and a much better example of good puzzling in Uncharted. It’s not difficult to solve but again (I think again?) I’ll argue that you don’t come to Uncharted for difficult puzzles - you don’t come to Tomb Raider for difficult puzzles, either. 

The puzzles in these games should be mostly environmental because they feel good solving them, and solving them should be more about the doing - the playing - and the playing should be moving - running, jumping, climbing etc.

Both the giant knife and the reflector room are a joy to execute because they’re fantastically realised - large cavernous environments that aren’t annoying to navigate, that give you time to appreciate both the scale of the spaces and the details the designers and artists have put into them. Lost Legacy’s is more impressive because you do a lot more puzzling and spend much more time in its vastly larger space, culminating in combat that usually I would be ho-hum about, but I guess exhibits more animation and destruction tech which while scripted, is still impressive nonetheless given how extremely difficult it is to have interactivity still occurring.

I have a few things I want to mention before I begin to wrap up, given it’s going to be a very long wrap - I’d say I’m taking cues from Joseph Anderson but I’ve always been this verbose.

The medallion puzzles were excellent, in part perhaps because they felt like the closest thing to the Tomb Raider reboots’ challenge tombs. Some of them were silly and lazily implemented, the worst offender being you just had to shoot mans and get the medallion from the lock-box that the mans had put it in (pfft), but the best ones were integrated into the environment such that you may well have walked past or thru areas that were puzzles before you knew what they were. This brings up one of the most interesting things I’ve been turning over for quite some time now. Ben Croshaw aka Yahtzee aka Zero Punctuation may have first mentioned “chest high walls” in his first Gears of War video, but it may well have been an Uncharted game. I don’t remember but he will have thrown in mentions of all the generic cover-shooters as a catch-all for how the environments immediately telegraph that Combat™ will happen. It’s a particularly astute remark and speaks volumes of video game design - developers always seem to have very specific design language to separate traversal, combat and puzzling. While I clearly don’t care for combat most days, and yes - I do acknowledge there are some practical concerns for combat that can’t be avoided, I always envisaged design that blurred the lines between puzzle and environment so that you never quite knew what was and wasn’t a puzzle. Everything should be the puzzle. In some senses, Cyan’s old Myst games were a bit like this but in a very rudimentary and crude way - sure, they’re quite old now, but even those had very clear not puzzle areas. It’s a complex and subtle subject, but something of a study of games like Fireproof Games’ The Room would be in order. Understandably smaller scale, but the thinking behind it is definitely adjacent.

Final notes - the young Indian girl in the prologue has amazing animations that you’ll miss entirely unless you swing the camera yourself. A whole team of people or a single animator has spent hours on those animations - that a director or team leader hasn’t forced the player to see and appreciate them is a disservice.

Every section where you have to do something under pressure like run from mans shooting at you or dash through a lengthy section of crumbling cave network etc. is a horrible play experience of not knowing where to go. They’re trying to inject excitement by applying pressure but there’s no clear guidance and no dependence on player skill, so you end in bizarre fail-states due to going in completely the wrong direction that glitches cameras or scene time-outs resulting in check-points and the whole thing just doesn’t scan as a cinematic experience. I hate hate hate them - you’re subject to the same musical swell that’s supposed to be like a movie only to fail again and it comes off as b-grade and pathetic. Every game has had this problem and it is just straight bad design.

Three? Four? Games in a row, Naughty Dog have recycled; 

being pursued on foot by an armoured vehicle crashing through level geometry while you have to run and occasionally shoot/fight mans, 

driving down a shanty-town on a hill pursued by an armoured vehicle - perhaps the same one as previous scene

a big chase scene of lots of vehicles jumping from vehicle to vehicle shooting and/or punching mans that may or may not include...

a train combat sequence where you start at the back of the train and work your way to the front of it shooting mans as you go

This lacks creativity at this point. I think duplicating these once each - so you do them twice total across the franchise is fine, but they hit the same beats in the same way - exactly - every time they appear. It just strikes me as Naughty Dog just not knowing what else to do. At one point, I think it was in Uncharted 4, when driving down the shanty-town on the hill, I literally had a brain-fart not knowing which game I was playing because I swear we did it in 2 and 3. Did we do it in 3?? Look, I don’t know. But it’s getting old. At least we didn’t do it in Lost Legacy, but we did the train and I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of doing the same things in the same way. It could have been a train but it should have been in a way that just wasn’t just another Uncharted train. It hasn’t worn thin, it’s worn out.

Overall, the games look great... but playing them feels like they’re stuck in PS2 and early PS3 era philosophies, like Naughty Dog haven’t evolved and don’t realise that people’s brains function much quicker and can process more, or that the media we consume, the games we play function at a higher level and we can digest more, we’re capable of processing higher functions. I’ve been playing Ubisoft’s The Division 2 and enjoying it more the more I play, much to my surprise. I understand the intent behind the gameplay is extremely different to the single-player experience of Uncharted, however there are some parallels in what it achieves animation wise;

The Division is also a cover shooter but of-course as a multiplayer, open-world live-service game, its intent is to telegraph to the player that the entire environment is a permanent play-space in which to always be playing. It utilises an information-rich GUI that is an always-on system with button icons telling the player what button to press over what surfaces to snap to, vault over, climb up, run to (and snap to cover), open and loot, interact with etc. I don’t know if these can be turned off but I like them on. It’s a pretty amazing feat that almost every environmental object has been mapped as a snap-to-cover and/or climbable object. For this reason, the character movement in Division is pretty quick and snappy, however it still manages to have a decent degree of natural human kinetics in the character rigging which is amazing. This means if you move-off from standing still, there’s a slight delay as your “weight” shifts, same if you change direction. When I say “snap” to cover, it’s not actually instantaneous, your character makes a movement and takes time to do so, yet it’s still not sluggish. Somehow the developers have worked at fine-tuning a balance between not-instant, but not too slow.

This is something that even in Lost Legacy, I feel Naughty Dog simply can’t do. The animations are decent during play - they’re outstanding during cutscenes (we’re getting there), but character models have a really awkward relationship with the environment. They clip awkwardly with ladders and buttons and wheels - with puzzles and levers - getting the grappling hook to prompt is again better than Uncharted 4 but still not ideal. I had far fewer glitch-outs than 4 too, which was a significant improvement, but I still had to animate back and forth a few times to get into hot-zones appropriately and with character kinetics not quite right, it wasn’t exactly easy.

And again to be fair, this stuff is suuuuuper difficult. I don’t mean to talk about this stuff like it’s cooking instant ramen. It’s so freaking tough. Rigging and mapping interactive character models has to be one of the most stupendously difficult things a developer has to do - making it work with all that scripting, getting it to play nice with all those assets and lines and lines of coding for the full experience. I have so much respect for game developers and what an astronomical task it is. So when I say I prefer one development team’s product over another’s, I don’t mean to say that the other team is absolute garbage - there are so many things that might contribute to that final product and we have no idea what’s been going on at Naughty Dog. If the team leaders and producers say they’re happy or even if they don’t, and the decision is made to ship, there’s nothing more they can say or do.

If there was one thing I absolutely loved about this game, it was the two main characters and the story that was told about them. I can excuse the main text as the catalyst that brought them together - even to the point that it’s a story about Chloe ultimately deciding what’s important to her. My issue with this comes full circle with the setting being in a real world conflict. There’s a bit of white savour complex in there in that Asav might be the narrative’s antagonist, but he at least is local. It’s not clear exactly what Chloe’s ethnicity is and I’m not here to judge what her stakes are in it because clearly her character has a sense of home and place in India, but she certainly also has a complex sense of being an outsider. So the point is not to judge, but the game also is unclear on its positioning other than she’s the heroic vehicle of deliverance. See what I mean about theme? This is what I mean by you could have just as easily written almost an identical story about Nadine and Chloe, with very similar interactions, tension, redemption and resolve - even with an antagonist, conflict and a happy ending, but either treated real sociopolitical issues with better care or not set your game in them at all. I’m all for setting games in the real world, but if you’re going to do it, do it right. I’m not the person to ask.

I need to be careful not to direct that criticism at the base-level developers nor at Claudia Black who is the manifestation of Chloe’s voice because she does an amazing job of bringing her to life. The casting of Laura Bailey voicing a black South African Nadine was much more awkward given Nadine’s ethnicity wasn’t decided when she was cast - again that’s on Naughty Dog’s leadership, but I won’t knock Laura Bailey for it. It’s easy to say she should have resigned, perhaps she should have, that’s an economical question only Laura can answer and I’m sure it’s not an easy one. Suffice to say, VO work isn’t lucrative.

What a side-track.

I don’t think I ever cared about Nathan. I think I always cared about Elena, and not because WAIFU and also not because WHITE KNIGHT or whatever other bullshit reasons stupid alphagamerz will spit from their frontheads. Elena’s just more interesting, probably because Nathan is written like a design document and Elena’s written like a human being. Naughty Dog want to create a game about adventuring with lush expansive environments, shooty mcshooting and light puzzling. They want it to be cinematic and unrivalled in its quality and they have the smarts to build the tech around it, with Sony’s help. Backed by Sony money, they take VO seriously and do a great job at creating that cinematic experience, coupled with some above-par for video games narrative writing. The problem this introduces for me is Nathan’s raison d'être has to justify everything - action, tension, stupidity...

Nathan Drake really is the design document.

I feel like he’s just the unfortunate side-effect of being central to the game, and it’s typical of my character to just not dig the focus of things and get into subtexts a whole lot more. Often I get into things in the periphery, things adjacent - I don’t love or hate Shakespeare or for that matter Baz Luhrmann but Romeo + Juliet ‘96 is an amazing film and not at all because of the eponymous Romeo and Juliet and again, not for Leonardo di Caprio (spit!) or for Claire Danes (she can stay) but the absolutely divine cast of supporting characters (John Leguizamo will live in my heart forever oh baby).

That Nathan makes stupid decisions is already something that turns me off. That he makes poor decisions because... he’s an orphan? Because... he was bullied? Because... his brother left him? This is why he’s not transparent with his wife? Actually, he’s quite realistic. Except the people like him I’ve known in my life aren’t heroes - they’re pathetic or unreliable or abusive or dangerous. Elena is an adult. She’s not perfect either and that’s also great because neither am I. As a side character she has the conceit of being more nuanced, but as the contra to Nathan, she’s also mature versus his childishness. OOOOAAAAH EVERYONE LOVES A LOVEABLE MANBABY OOAAAH COMEON LIVE A LITTLE EVERYONE’S GOT A LITTLE CHILD STILL IN THEM SOMEWHERE yea fine, I get it, like I’ve said before, yes - he embodies the recklessness and playfulness in us, but that’s a confusing position for a game that frequently tries to ground itself in real world conflict to be taking. You’re reducing him to that but injecting complex and nuanced characters like Elena and now eventually both Chloe and Nadine? I’m telling you now - any male that doesn’t know when it’s appropriate to grow-up, when the time to set aside the playfulness and be TRUTHFUL AND TRANSPARENT WITH HIS PARTNER is a dangerous person and FUCK THAT NOISE. Nathan, as much as I do absolutely - make no mistake - adore Nolan North’s voicing - ends up being another Homer Simpson - as long as you laugh at his stupidity, you’ll excuse it, and you’ll excuse the hurt that’s done by it, and that shit doesn’t fly with me. His redemption was not earned. I say again - Elena should throw him into the sea.

Nadine ends up being a fantastic character, even if she’s given less narrative time, she’s a great example of her behaviour telling more story in contrast to Chloe getting to reveal her past and it’s nice to see them play off one another. I feel Nadine and Chloe as characters hit great story beats in ways Nathan didn’t get to with pretty much any of the other characters in four games - not Sully, not Elena, not his brother, not even Chloe - all told, we never actually get any back-story on Nathan and Chloe and I think we’re better off for it because I don’t care.

Having a quick squiz around tumblr reveals the obvious and rampant shipping of Nadine and Chloe and I couldn’t be happier. I think Naughty Dog knew what they were doing. There were so many moments. Those moments were for us. I think they were subtle enough that the fragile manbabies would have missed them but there’s no fooling us. Some of the babyboiz would have been seething thru their mouthbreething hairmouths and I’m sure probably took to the internet but that’s OK, they can remain unfucked incels for the rest of their lives or worse, serviced by whatever unwashed creatures want to dare fondle them in the dark. The elephant ride and that whole conversation was almost enough for me to forgive the absolute disaster that was Uncharted 4. It was given enough time to breathe, it was absolutely beautiful, and just when you thought they were going to terminate it and apologise for making things too awks, it concludes just perfectly and you get a phone picture that doesn’t have Nadine in frame, yet her presence in that picture is definite, pervasive and emotional. Again, some people may have completely missed it and maybe it chalks up to life experience, but as completely contrived as an artefact of complete fiction as that whole sequence might be, it was one of the most wonderfully tender moments ever created in a video game and I wonder if it makes the whole affair worth it.

In the Uncharted 4 piece, I threw in a few barbs about the most meaningful interactions, and in Lost Legacy, what I really loved was Chloe taking photos of things she thinks are beautiful and interesting on her phone, and feeding the elephant - these were the most meaningful interactions in the game. I love that the photos on the phone didn’t serve any gameplay utility at all, they were there because her character wanted to document her travels, because she thought what she was seeing was cool, and any time in the game, you could pull out your phone and look at what you’d seen. It was such a good and important decision to have the very first picture to be the Indian girl in the market, as that rather than the local conflict, does more to ground you and Chloe as a character in the setting. The game never forces you to look at it as a reminder, but you know it’s there.

I did steal these from the internet, sorry - so if they’re yours, let me know and I’ll be happy to take them down - this one in particular, seeing as it’s a photomode capture. I should have taken my own but I don’t do photomode caps on my first play-thru and there’s no-way I’m replaying this ever again.

It took five games for Naughty Dog to finally get some decent character writing, but a part of me still feels they couldn’t have existed without all the dross of the other games. There’s this immense amount of back-story and labour both the developers and the players had to slog thru to get to this point, and I feel as tho we get here and there’s just too little to show for it. I still really enjoyed the story that was told, the sense of character I felt, but a lot of that was contingent on the Uncharted universe in situ. Lost Legacy feels like a combining of all of Naughty Dog’s narrative motifs - the earnest redemption, the moment of tenderness and connection centred around peaceful animals - it’s a greatest hits of Naughty Dog in the best way possible because each narrative beat hits perfectly. I’m glad I played it with two characters who endeared themselves so much to me, that I truly cared about.

I’ve spend a lot of time praising the strengths of writing for at least Lost Legacy, but for each thing I’ve enjoyed about at least these two characters, there have been so many things I’ve been critical of. I feel like in order to get to the tiniest bit of enjoyment, I had to suffer thru so much. Honestly I don’t know if it really was worth it. It’s hard to know given that who I am now and where my tastes are and have developed as a consequence of my experiences, and I definitely would not replay any of those games again - so where does that leave me? I can’t go back and play The Last Of Us and I absolutely won’t play the second game, I just can’t do Naughty Dog games now, I don’t have it in me.

Naughty Dog have spent the better part of two decades developing tech for visual fidelity specifically for the Playstation hardware platforms (PS3 and 4). They’ve also been doing it by overworking their staff, many of which have left out of frustration or necessity. The problem they face is that as industry tools in general improve, there will no gap between games developed by Naughty Dog and any other contemporary studio from a visual perspective. Make no mistake - the Uncharted games are absolutely chock-full of objects, geometry and animation - somehow miraculously so on the Playstation platform in comparison to other games with the exception of other first-party and exclusive games receiving similar support from Sony such as Guerilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn and Sucker Punch’s forthcoming Ghost of Tsushima. There are probably other similar examples for the previous generation on PS3.

Yes, there’s a certain style of game Naughty Dog create as far as narrative goes but because it’s becoming more cinematic, that style is judged more and more by cinematic standards and at best it’s barely semi-professional aside from the outstanding voice work. There are few striking visual motifs that set Naughty Dog games apart from a design perspective, and the gameplay and mechanical constructions that once distinguished them at least a little from others are ever diminishing at increasing rates - more-so as their work practices make the level of quality they set out to achieve ever more unsustainable.

Lost Legacy encapsulates a lot of what I feel about video games as a whole at the moment - as an industry and as a culture. It’s a snapshot of a culture that’s achieving wonderful, beautiful things that are in ways huge - immense, yet somehow can feel so small in comparison to some of the challenges it faces. It’s an industry and culture experiencing a period of great upheaval, where after years upon years of malpractice, terrible things somehow still endure. It’s a space where sometimes it feels like a battle to find the tiniest shred of beauty buried in the dirt and ash, and there doesn’t seem to be an end to the frustration that working thru it brings about while grass-roots labourers continue to be burned.

Like many things in life, both at my age and at the level I guess a person gets to at the exposure rate of a thing, I’ve cut back a great deal on my engagement time with video games, so I’m a lot less patient with the functions and mechanisms of a game. There’s a labour element of video games that I feel developers might think is somehow necessary and there’s a component of that which is true, just not quite in the way they think it is, and it takes a unique frame of thinking to break out of traditional design to understand it. Again I’m not saying there’s anything special about how I understand games - there’s nothing at all original in my thoughts - I’ve shoplifted them wholesale from a hundred other people back from when I used to read Gamasutra and even now when I read designers and the people I follow and talk to on Twitter etc. There’s also absolutely nothing wrong with traditions and the people that enjoy them - just because they’re not my thing any more doesn’t mean they’re bad. It just means I’ve moved to something else and I shouldn’t engage with them.

That, I think, is what I’m waiting for. Kentucky Route Zero, Howling Dogs, Dear Esther, Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, a whole bunch of others - these are the games I feel are pushing past the boundaries of tradition. Then the moments Uncharted takes itself out of its traditions - Nadine and Chloe’s elephant ride, Chloe’s phone pictures, Elena and Nathan’s house tours especially as Cassie - that’s when I think now you’re running! Run with it! Look, I’m still playing The Division - I’m still moving and shooting and enjoying it.

But we can do so much more. Many developers are doing more. We as an audience need to play more All of us together need to do and play more.

(The epilogue is me figuring I talk a lot of shit about AAA games and nary a word about KRZ, Howling Dogs, Dear Esther and the rest and I get it, but oooooo howdy is it really difficult for me to talk pragmatically about games I actually love)

[cromulentbookreview]

Puntastic!

“The first thing you should know about me, the truest most important thing, is that I ain’t never really had friends” - Jane McKeene 

Because this blog is for cromulent book reviews rather than reviews of standalones or first books of a series, I’m going to keep on going with my streak of reviewing sequels. I’m sure nobody has a problem with it, as nobody reads this blog.

And by that, I mean: Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland!

I absolutely love Westerns. I was raised on Westerns. And, living in the Pacific Northwest, basically all of the history of where I live is a combination of a Western and the Oregon Trail game. 

(Fun fact: as a wee little beeb growing up in rural Oregon back in the Days of Yore ((you know, the 90s)), we played Oregon Trail on ancient DOS computers. Oh man the day when you could snag one of the color computers, instead of just the black-and-green ones…God, I’m old.)

Anyway, Westerns! I love them.

Westerns, yay!

I also like stories with zombies. 

Zombies, yay! 

And when you combine them in a story starring two badass young women of color, you get Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation! I loved Dread Nation, because, like I said, its a Western with zombies starring two badass young women who can (and will!) kick ass and take names. Dread Nation came out in 2018, which somehow feels like it was both forever ago and just yesterday. I don’t know, time means nothing these days, and it means even less when you’re sleep-deprived. Still, Dread Nation is one of many books I’ve kept on my radar because the moment I was done, I needed a sequel sometime yesterday. And the moment Deathless Divide hit Edelweiss, I hit that request button so fast - well, I mean, I clicked with normal speed, then had to wait for my crappy rural internet to kick in, but I got there eventually.

The horror...

Just one more fun story then I’ll get to the review, I promise! I got a physical ARC of Deathless Divide because I won a pun contest Justina Ireland held on Twitter. Special thanks to my sister, who knows all the best puns and introduced me to the concept of Caribbean Pie Rates. I’m generally more of a loser rather than a winner, so winning a pun contest on Twitter was the highlight of my 2019.

Ok - Deathless Divide!

We begin exactly where Dread Nation left off - Jane and Katherine (NOT Kate, only Jane is allowed to call her Kate) have barely escaped the shit-show town of Summerland, Kansas with their lives. Now, along with Jane’s kind-of-sort-of boyfriend, Jackson and a ragtag band of survivors, they make for the nearby town of Nicodemus, which promises some sort of safety from the coming zombie shambler hoard.

Only, in a world full of zombies shamblers, there is no such thing as safety.

Things go quickly from bad to tragic on the way to Nicodemus, and our two favorite zombie shambler harvesters barely make it there either. Nicodemus promises some semblance of safety: the walls are well-fortified, and the town seems far more welcoming to black people than Summerland, and there are even a few of Jane and Katherine’s classmates from Miss Preston’s School of Combat. There is one major problem, though: it’s still Kansas, and the dead are still coming.

Heh. That would happen in Kansas. Beautiful, scenic Kansas.

Once in Nicodemus, Jane is arrested, as word of her more lethal shenanigans in Summerland has gotten there already. Also there already are a few others who also managed to escape the ill-fated hellhole that was Summerland, like Daniel Redfern, who has somehow wrangled himself a position as Sheriff, and Gideon Carr, the infuriatingly gorgeous mad scientist tinkering with a vaccine against the dead. Gideon wants to test his vaccine on the entire town, and he wants Jane to help him convince people that the experiment is safe. Jane, stuck in the town prison, just wants everyone to get the hell out of Nicodemus as soon as possible because there is a massive hoard of the dead coming and there’s no walls or vaccines or anything that will save them except getting the hell out. 

Running is their best option for survival.

But the zombies shamblers aren’t the only threat to humanity’s survival. There’s also pure, human stupidity to contend with. The people of Nicodemus are convinced their walls will hold. They’re convinced Gideon’s bullshit vaccine will protect them. 

It does not go well.

For those of you who have, like me, been waiting longingly for a sequel to Dread Nation, you will not be disappointed - Deathless Divide is every bit as exciting, thought provoking and heartbreaking as its predecessor. The best part about this book is that, while Dread Nation was narrated entirely by Jane, Deathless Divide alternates between Jane’s POV and Katherine’s. It’s awesome to finally see things from Katherine’s perspective - in Dread Nation we only ever see her through Jane’s eyes, and in Deathless Divide we get to know her a lot better, including her struggles with anxiety and her feelings about her close but sometimes fraught relationship with Jane. 

Deathless Divide is more than just a zombie Western (a genre I of which I absolutely need more) - it is a story of friendship, vengeance and maintaining your humanity in a world determined to strip it from you. As a sequel, Deathless Divide is exquisite- it expands on the world introduced to us in Dread Nation, provides us with a whole new perspective with Katherine's POV, and there is plenty of zombie-related action. The book may be 500 pages, but it really doesn't feel like it. You'll want to binge it all in one go, and then be left wanting more in the end. Speaking of which - I have high hopes for a third book. I've got my fingers crossed that, in the hypothetical book 3, Jane and Katherine get a chance to hang out with Bass Reeves, because I get the feeling that, in this universe, Bass Reeves is not only the badass bounty hunter he was in our universe, but also a kickass shambler harvester. 

I mean, come on. The man brought in over 3,000 felons and shot and killed 14 people in self-defense. He would be a zombie-killing machine! Just look at that mustache!

Dear HBO: yes, it was awesome to see Bass Reeves featured on Watchmen (which, if you haven’t watched it yet, what are you doing, stop everything and just binge the whole thing right now).

But! I’m still waiting for my six part miniseries dedicated to the life and adventures of one of the coolest people to ever to have existed, ever.

Me, waiting for HBO’s Bass Reeves TV series:

And now for a moment in which I fall into a history-related research hole!

Late in Deathless Divide Ireland mentions the fact that, at the time, it was illegal to be a black person in Oregon. This is true. In 1844, the territory banned black people from living there altogether. And, even though the territory was made up mostly of people who disapproved of slavery, well...A guy going from Missouri to Oregon back in the late 1870s wrote about the prevailing attitude toward his fellow settlers: “Many [poor whites who migrated to Oregon from slave states] hated slavery, but a much larger number of them hated free negroes worse even than slaves.”*

Yeah, Oregon. I love my home state, but we…well, we are not very diverse. Most Oregonians are white, myself included. Only 2% of Oregonians are black, and this is because of Oregon’s long history of being shitty to people who aren’t white, which you can read all about here and here and here and here and also here. Apparently it all stems back to an incident in Oregon City back in 1844 known as the Comstock Incident, but it really, it was all just racism.

Accurate.

I was a grown-ass adult when I learned all about this section of Oregon’s history. They didn’t teach us about this when you’re growing up in rural Oregon in the 90s. No, it was all “Manifest Destiny!” and “let’s build little mini covered wagons and pull them around the school yard while dressed in bonnets and shit.” Meanwhile, the reality was that the whole state was basically a Sundown State.

Oregon, my Oregon, you crazy-ass State. I love you, but you were definitely founded as a racist utopia. That, in the alt-history of Deathless Divide the exclusion laws were never repealed is no surprise. Technically such laws were all invalidated when Oregon ratified the 14th Amendment on September 19, 1866. But Section 35, which made it illegal for black people to even move here, wasn’t repealed until 1926. Don’t think that made things easier for black people in Oregon, though! It didn’t. It really didn’t.

Damn it, Oregon. At least it’s pretty here.

RECOMMENDED FOR: Anyone whose interest is piqued when they hear the phrase “zombie Western.”

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR: Anyone who can’t handle badass young women killing zombies or being badass while also being protagonists of color. 

RELEASE DATE: February 4, 2020

RATING: 5/5

ZOMBIE RATING:

ANTICIPATION LEVEL FOR POSSIBLE THIRD BOOK: Sagarmatha

* REFERENCE:

Brooks, Cheryl A (2004). "Race, Politics, and Denial: Why Oregon Forgot to Ratify the Fourteenth Amendment" (PDF). Oregon Law Review. 83: 731–762 – via University of Oregon.

[xenodile]

A while back I mentioned I had it in me to give a long sorta discourse-y post about Blizzard Entertainment, well here it is.

Blizzard, as a company, suffers primarily from 2 major issues:

1) It’s totally creatively bankrupt

2) It is actively racist/homophobic.

The two issues are closely linked but it’s caught in a “chicken or the egg” situation.  Are they so racist because they have no original ideas and racial stereotypes are easy to use, or are they so lacking in creativity because they’re racist at their core and don’t care about coming up with better ideas?

I’ve been playing Blizzard games for just about half my life now.

I started with WoW back in 2004, which then got me into Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Diablo 3, Overwatch, etc.

I’m going to start with Warcraft since it is Blizzard’s biggest and longest-running IP.

Warcraft is built on insensitive racist caricatures and recycled ideas.  The humans in Warcraft are all predominantly white and themed after medieval Britain.  Dwarves and gnomes, the other human-like races, are also white, with Dwarves being modeled after Ireland/Scotland and gnomes being a joke race that never get taken seriously ever.

I don’t think Warcraft had any black people in it at all until World of Warcraft because the inability to make a black person would have set off some red flags.

Every non-white ethnicity is instead represented as non-human, monstrous races.

Caribbean/African nationalities are all blanket covered by the trolls, lanky tusked cannibals that practice bastardized Hollywood voodoo, worship loa, speak with stereotypical Jamaican accents, and wear wooden masks, lead by their high king Rastakhan.

First Nation/Native Americans are covered by the Tauren, hulking cow people that carve totems, wear eagle feathers, and worship the Earth Mother.

The Chinese are literally just bipedal panda bears.  They’re always fat, love to drink, and all know kung fu.

Mongolians and Huns are represented by the centaur, who are consistently described in universe as “the bastard children of a demigod” and are stupid, smelly, and barbarous, to the point of having a cloud of swarming flies baked into their character models.

At least until Blizzard forgot about the centaur and replaced them with the Yaungol, subtle I know, a variant of Tauren that are based on yaks instead of cows, but just as rapacious and violent as the aforementioned centaur.

Orcs were originally Always Chaotic Evil savages stolen wholesale from Tolkien and Warhammer, but after Blizzard retconned them to justify having playable Good Orcs, they were modeled to somewhat evoke South American nations and Australian aborigines, living in mud/clay buildings, having brown(ish) skin, and wearing face paints.  At least until Blizzard decided to make orcs always evil again and threw that idea out the window in favor of being bloodthirsty savages all the time.

Inuit people are depicted as fat, mono-gendered walrus people called tuskarr.

And I’d like to give special mention to the Draenei, Warcraft’s stand-ins for Eastern European Jews/Romani.  Sporting comedic slavic accents, the Draenei are the exiled members of an alien species that goes on to become the primary antagonist and source of all problems in the Warcraft timeline.  They even had their own clumsy version of the Holocaust at the hands of the orcs and evil members of their own race.

That’s right!  The “good” Draenei, that suffered the from their Fantasy Holocaust and talk with funny accents, make up only 10% of their race!  The remaining 90% of their race are literal demons and the source of all evil in the universe.

And in an alternate universe, those good Draenei turn into an ethnic cleansing facist empire if they’re not actively oppressed!  I wish I was making this up!

The unifying trend here is that all of these “other” races, with the exception of the draenei, are uniformly depicted as being stupid and primitive.  Despite being culturally older than the humans, dwarves, and gnomes, they are consistently shown as being afraid or intimidated of the superior technology of the humans and their human-like allies, and easily cowed when their “primitive” idols and gods are defeated.

In addition to this, humans have been the de facto heroes of Warcraft since its inception.  Human protagonists are always core to the plot and have the most agency.

Meanwhile, non-human characters are not allowed to be anything other than a stereotypical example of whatever culture they’re a parody of.  Tauren can’t be anything other than a mystical Native American that helps the hero go on a spirit journey to learn something.  Trolls can’t be anything besides the wily and savage fighter that the hero is never sure they can really trust.  Draenei are not allowed to be relevant at all unless they’re fighting against their evil counterparts or dying heroically.

In addition to that, I cannot think of a single canonically gay character in the Warcraft franchise.  Not a one.

This is what brings me to Overwatch.  The very first thing I ever heard about Overwatch was “It has an LGBT+ cast”.  Before I even heard what the gameplay was, the fact that it had a “progressive” cast was a selling point.

And then it took Blizzard, what, a year and a half of the game being out for them to actually follow up and say which character is gay?

Think about it.  Everyone that liked Overwatch touted it as being this inclusive win for LGBT representation yet for the longest time, none of the characters were actually LGBT.  The community did Blizzard’s work for them and just made up who they wanted to be gay and/or trans, until Blizzard finally settled on Tracer and 76.

It also dips slightly in Warcraft’s niche of “foreign nationalities can’t stop reminding you how foreign they are”.  Every non-American character cannot STOP peppering words or phrases of their home language into their english dialogue.  

When I directly compare it to its most obvious competitor, Team Fortress 2, which also sported a multi-ethnic cast, I can’t ignore how much of Overwatch’s roster uses their ethnicity as the core of their personality.

When I look at Overwatch, I can’t help but see it as insincere.  I’ve seen Blizzard blatantly and shamelessly turn non-white cultures into literal monsters for the past 15 years, and I’m supposed to just believe that they suddenly turned over a new leaf?

Their second biggest IP, Starcraft, has a grand total of 3 black named characters, and they are respectively:

An eldritch monster in disguise that promptly changes to a white guy disguise

A mentally disturbed assassin with a caribbean accent and plays with voodoo dolls that becomes totally irrelevant after his personal story arc ends.

A stereotypical General Army Man that dies in the first set of missions of Heart of the Swarm.

So yeah.  For as much as I love Warcraft, and Blizzard games as a whole, the whole thing is undeniably built on a core of American/European ethnocentrism, with Overwatch being what I can only call a marketing experiment.

[zareleonis]

My Star Wars Top 10 of 2018

This year I fell massively in love with Star Wars, learned more about a galaxy far, far away that I ever expected and started this blog, first to liveblog Star Wars Rebels, and later to share my thoughts on whatever new (and old!) Star Wars media I came across. In honor of what, in my mind, was a really fun year for Star Wars, I wanted to share my top 10 list of my favorite Star Wars things that came out this year, across different kinds of media. Read more because it’s really long :P

Honorable Mention: Flight of the Falcon multimedia series (by multiple authors and artists)

Okay, if I’m honest, this gets honorable mention spot, mostly because I felt like putting it in top 10 when it’s really a BUNCH of comics and books would be totally cheating :P One of the more fun things to come out of Solo: A Star Wars Story, this series of loosely connected books and comics whose main connecting factor is the Millennium Falcon (and Bazine Netal’s hunt for it!) is an absolute joy. Cavan Scott knocks it out of the park with the ridiculously fun Choose Your Destiny: A Luke and Leia Adventure. IDW Comics does what’s it does best by bringing together some exciting and unexpected pairs of characters for the last couple months of Star Wars Adventures. In Lando’s Luck Justina Ireland gave us the coolest darn Princess in Star Wars since Leia, Rinetta Gan. And they’re not even done yet, with 2 more comics and Pirate’s Price left to go!

10. Star Wars: Scum and Villainy: Case Files on the Galaxy’s Most Notorious by Pablo Hidalgo

What an awesome and fun book! So much great art, and Pablo Hidalgo always gives 100% with his work. It’s such a creative concept, following Tan Divo and and his descendants, as they report on the criminals and rebels of their day. I completely geeked out over how it gave soooo much neat new information about characters and organizations from ALL OVER the Star Wars universe. It’s an absolute blast!

9. Solo: A Star Wars Story: Tales from Vandor by Jason Fry

This book is AMAZING. Even among the “replica journal” style books that Studio Fun puts out, it stands out as super unique, written from the point of view of the Midnight, the bartender at The Lodge on Vandor (where Han meets Lando), as if he is telling the story to a guest. It’s such a fun outsider’s point of view of Han and the other characters of Solo. The best part though, is the parts of the book that are just a shameless love letter to Star Wars Legends, with nods to stuff like The Wookiee Storybook, LEGO Star Wars: The Padawan Menace and several novels. Jason Fry’s love for the franchise really shines through.

8. Star Wars: Poe Dameron by Charles Soule and penciller Angel Unzueta

This year we said a bittersweet goodbye to Marvel’s monthly Star Wars: Poe Dameron and goodness gracious it was good. Between the Legend Found arc that was to be the original ending and the final The Awakening arc, where Black Squadron is reunited after The Last Jedi, this comic really touched my heart. The last couple pages of issues 25 and 31 still make me cry. :’)

7. Solo: A Star Wars Story directed by Ron Howard and screenplay by Lawrence and Jon Kasdan

THIS MOVIE IS CRIMINALLY UNDERRATED AND I’M MAD AT EVERYONE WHO LET IT FLOP. I’ll admit I wasn’t exactly desperate for a Han Solo Backstory Movie, but Solo was just AWESOME. Just some good, raw, Star Wars-y fun that you can’t help but smile the whole way through. It might not be groundbreaking, but it introduced some super cool characters in L3-37, Qi’ra and Enfys Nest, gave us Maul’s grand triumphant return to the public at large and has INCREDIBLY charming performances by Alden Ehrenreich and Donald Glover as the Han and Lando we all come to love.

6. The Mighty Chewbacca in the Forest of Fear! by Tom Angleberger

If Solo, is good, this kid’s book written to accompany it is even better. I mean, Chewbacca meets K-2SO meets Tooka cats meets teenage bounty hunter/librarian?? On a planet with scary monsters and a spooky evil Force user? Also Cassian is there?? And the daughter of This Funny Hat Dude from Return of the Jedi? Hell yeah!!!!!

The book is hysterical, ridiculously fun and I can’t recommend it enough. I just have to say if you do get it, try and grab the audiobook it’s got a full cast of voices for the main characters including Marc Thompson giving his best Shyriiwook as Chewbacca. I laughed so hard I cried at the narration and a K-2SO’s lines done out loud. You won’t regret it!

5. Star Wars: Women of the Galaxy by Amy Ratcliffe and eighteen awesome artists!

THIS is one of the coolest Star Wars books out there and a celebration of all the women we know and love (and sometimes hate) in a galaxy far, far away. It’s such a wonderful collaboration, created by all women (& non-binary) artists and author. I love that it’s got characters from practically everything—movies, books, comics, video games, you name it! We even got to see characters like Jas Emari for the first time which makes me SO HAPPY. it’s one of the books I come back to all the time just to flip through it and enjoy the illustrations.

4. Star Wars Resistance created by Dave Filoni and executive produced by Athena Yvette Portillo, Justin Ridge, and Brandon Auman

I LOVE RESISTANCE SO MUCH!! I didn’t quiiite know what to expect with the new animated series, but was super excited and it hasn’t disappointed one bit. It’s such a fun show and really enjoyable to have a Star Wars show that is almost just ‘slice of life’ compared to the others. The animation is so cool to me and the characters really cute. I’m ridiculously charmed by all of them, especially our main man Kazuda Xiono and really hyped to see where these characters go. It’s more happy and fun than anything, but I know it will break my heart to pieces soon enough (KAZUDA XIONO. HOME PLANET: HOSNIAN PRIME). I hope more people give it a chance because it really is awesome!

3. Star Wars Adventures: Tales from Vader's Castle by Cavan Scott and various artists

LET THIS BE MY LOVE LETTER TO CAVAN SCOTT AND ALL THE COOL AND AWESOME STUFF HE’S DONE WITH THE STAR WARS UNIVERSE!! I was soooo excited when these came out because it’s such an AWESOME idea, I mean? Star Wars Horror story one-shots connected by a wider plot??? YES PLEASE AND THANK YOU. Doubly so when they star Lina Graf, of the Adventures in Wild Space series by Cavan Scott and Tom Huddleston. I was soooo excited to see her again and it’s amazing to see how she’s grown from a young kid to a brave and capable pilot and Commander in the Rebellion.

Then the individual stories are just awesome. It was a joy to see Kanan and Hera back together again after Rebels (or, well, pre-Rebels). The Dooku story was just amazing and such an enthusiastic tribute to Christopher Lee as Dracula. The Frozen inspired Han and Chewie story was also pretty great and I LOVE that it referenced the events of The Mighty Chewbacca in the Forest of Fear! And, my personal favorite story, the spooky ewok story featuring a young Chief Chirpa and Logray was brilliant and I enjoyed getting a closer first-hand look at ewoks (something we don’t have much of, at least in canon!). All in all just an absolute masterpiece in my book and a great reminder of why IDW Comics’ Star Wars stuff has been so freaking awesome.

2. Join the Resistance: Attack on Starkiller Base by Ben Blacker and Ben Acker and illustrated by Annie Wu

I’M BACK AT IT YELLING ABOUT WHY MORE PEOPLE NEED TO CARE ABOUT THESE WONDERFUL, CHARMING LITTLE KIDS’ BOOKS!! This was such a perfect end to the J-Squadron kids’ story. To me, this series is such a hidden gem and I really hope more people give it a chance. It was wonderful how all the characters’ stories closed out. I loved seeing Jo finally openly defy his parents, Mattis putting his faith in the Force and his friends, the return of Klimo, AG-90 and Dec fighting as brothers but growing stronger for it, and Lorica becoming the hero everybody thought she was. There’s so many fun cameos, from Rey, to Hux to Poe and Black Squadron, with the backdrop of the actual climactic battle in The Force Awakens.

And, one thing I really want to talk about that I love, is how the book (in tandem with the first two) give us the first gay character in a Star Wars kids book, with Dec Hansen. I wish they could’ve said it a bit more explicitly, but we actually got the kid and his friends talking about it in the books? And, with most of the LGBT characters falling more on the “scum and villainy” circles of the galaxy, it’s so refreshing to see a brave and unambiguously heroic gay teenage starfighter pilot trainee. Like, holy shit that actually happened!!!! ANYWAYS READ THIS SERIES I LOVE THEM AND YOU SHOULD TOO.

Oh, also, Annie Wu’s illustrations are AWESOME and I hope she does more Star Wars stuff (Pirate’s Price, out in a week!)

1. Star Wars Rebels created by Dave Filoni, Simon Kinberg and Carrie Beck

I don’t think there’s way I could place anything but Rebels at #1. This show changed my life in so many ways and I’m just. ridiculously thankful it exists. without Rebels, I wouldn’t have this blog, I wouldn’t be up to my ears obsessed with Star Wars and I there’s so many friends I wouldn’t have either. It’s touched my heart in a way that.... gosh I don’t know if I can even think about anything that resonates with me quite in the way Star Wars Rebels has. Pretty sure most if not all of my followers have seen Rebels, haha, but if you haven’t. You won’t regret it. Well, you might. It hurts. I hate to say, but it does. But even if the end destination leaves you heartbroken and uh prone to randomly bursting into tears about it, you will never regret the journey. Everything I learned and experienced with Ezra, Kanan, Hera, Sabine, Zeb and Chopper is beyond precious to me and I’m thankful it exists because it made my year in so many ways.

[yeonchi]

Doctor Who: The Hiatusbreaker Update

In other fandoms, people have always talked about how their favourite show has been ruined by something. I never thought I’d see myself at the eye of the storm until The Timeless Children. I’ve let a lot of other things go up to that point, but this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The main reason why I wanted to make this update was to address my thoughts on the Series 12 finale, share some post-review reflections on previous episodes and talk about how I intend to deal with this series going forward. This post also coincides with a special watchalong of The Timeless Children (not part of Doctor Who: Lockdown) as part of the Doctor Who Day celebrations for 2020.

At the moment, I don’t have any Doctor Who-related things planned between Revolution of the Daleks and Series 13. I wrote a post back in May talking about some of the Doctor Who-related things released during lockdown, but I don’t have anything else at the moment. I have considered reviewing some old episodes in a special series, but I don’t know if there would be any point in it. I have been covering my personal project in the Kisekae Insights series, which is heavily influenced from Doctor Who (and tokusatsu), so feel free to check it out.

Going back to The Timeless Children

I usually write my reviews without having read other reviews in order to minimise bias. As such, there have been cases where I’ve had to address things I’ve missed in the review of the next episode, mostly because I’ve read other reviews addressing them. After mulling over my thoughts for the past 6-7 months, I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to write a follow-up about the Series 12 finale, and here it is.

One thing I would like to reiterate from my review of that episode is how Chibnall managed to diversify and whitewash the Doctor at the same time. If we’re supposed to believe, from the Master’s words, that the Doctor is the Timeless Child, then it means two things; the Doctor has been diversified thanks to Ruth and the Timeless Child’s incarnations, while the Timeless Child was whitewashed thanks to the previous known incarnations of the Doctor, who were all played by white actors. The only thing left is for the series to confirm the connection between the Doctor, Ruth and the Timeless Child, which is basically the only reason why I’m still watching this series at this point. Even if Chibnall decides to reverse the heavy retcons caused by the episode (which I think is highly unlikely), I’m still not going to forgive him for this.

That being said, I feel that the Timeless Child arc can go either one of two ways, given the information we already have. A good outcome would be to say that Ruth is the Timeless Child and the Doctor is merely a clone of her, which is why they have the same body, but not the same memories of each other, except maybe a link (which was how the Doctor managed to use the Timeless Child’s memories to get out of the Matrix). The bad outcome, which is what I think we’re heading for, is that the Doctor is the Timeless Child and that her previously known incarnations came after Ruth. This is just a quick and simple breakdown I thought up; the arc could go in a different way that we weren’t expecting, which could potentially be better or worse than what we’ve seen already.

Why did I pinpoint Ruth as the “final” incarnation of the Timeless Child, so to speak? I think that the older Brendan getting his memories removed in the visions of Ireland in the Matrix is actually Ruth after she was turned in to the Division. Ruth wanted to leave the Division and they were willing to grant her wish, but they had to capture her first so they could remove her memories, which is how Fugitive of the Judoon happened. As such, the “Morbius Doctors” could be placed between the Timeless Child’s incarnations and Ruth, if we’re playing by their logic.

There was something else that I missed from that episode. Some reviewers stated that when Tecteun was experimenting on the Timeless Child in order to uncover the secret of regeneration, she was essentially killing them multiple times, which is more horrifying given the fact that they are a child and the incarnations shown are played by children. I can understand why these reviewers would think that, given that the regeneration of a Time Lord means the death of an incarnation and the birth of a new one, but honestly, the thought never crossed my mind when I first watched the episode. It didn’t have any bearing on my opinions when I wrote the review and even if it did, they wouldn’t change much.

I honestly can’t believe how the episode tried to pull an Ultraman Orb and have the Doctor essentially telling herself that she isn’t limited by who she was after giving us a 45-minute canon-breaking exposition dump. It’s almost like Chibnall thought we would forget about this arc because it either didn’t matter or because there were more pressing things happening at the time, but luckily for him, a lot of people managed to see through that. In pretty much every Ultraman series since Orb in 2016, there’s always an arc that shows the main character having an identity crisis, then gaining a new power after overcoming it.

Putting that into perspective, Doctor Who has previously explored the Doctor’s dark side and other aspects that he either forgot or never thought he had in the first place. At the same time, it has also explored how the Doctor serves as a hero, a healer, or just a doctor. The “forgotten past” thing was already explored previously with the War Doctor; the Timeless Child arc only served to give the Doctor excessive mystery and elevate the Doctor to an even godlier status beyond the Time Lords, who were already godly enough as they were.

And let’s not forget how this arc irreparably broke canon in a way nobody else would have dared to do. I don’t understand how some people felt this was groundbreaking when it only served to complicate the story even more. Anyone who unironically thinks this probably doesn’t care as much about canon integrity than I do. Kamen Rider Zi-O has been criticised by fans for breaking canon integrity, but I don’t have much of a problem with it since everything was returned to normal in the end (or at least it had to). Producer Shinichiro Shirakura is another source of ire for fans in regards to canon integrity (among other things), but I digress. I’ve compared Chibnall to Shirakura before, but if I had a choice, I’d probably pick the latter over the former.

It goes without saying that the Timeless Child arc would have been less problematic if it were done earlier, say in place of the Steven Moffat era. The Moffat era cemented the twelve regeneration limit and established that the Eleventh Doctor was the final incarnation in the Doctor’s first regeneration cycle; before Series 7, the Timeless Child arc as it is would have fit perfectly well with or without the regeneration cycle question.

Moffat era hindsight aside, it also goes without saying that that arc would have been less problematic if the Timeless Child wasn’t the Doctor. As I said in that episode, they could have been some unknown kid that Tecteun and the Time Lords were exploiting for their powers of regeneration. From there, we could still explore the Timeless Child’s origin and confirm their link to the Doctor by saying that the Doctor (as we know him) was actually a clone of the Timeless Child (like I theorised for the arc’s good outcome).

Some people believe that the arc would have been better if the Master was actually the Timeless Child, but personally, I don’t think it would work that way. The Master’s past is just as complicated as the Doctor’s and let’s not forget that there is still the question of Ruth’s existence to be answered. Like I said, I would rather have the Timeless Child be an entirely original character altogether instead of shoehorning it into an established character’s history, particularly in a show with 57 years of history behind it. I wouldn’t even wish this arc on my worst enemy, to be honest.

With or without this arc, I think that destroying Gallifrey for a second time, after it was anticlimactically restored in Hell Bent, is just unnecessary. That episode aside, how has nobody managed to think up of a story arc for the Valeyard in the years since the revival of the series? We’ve gone past the window for the Valeyard’s creation and all we got out of it was some allusions in the Moffat era.

Remember that we only have the Master’s words and redacted Matrix information as evidence for the Doctor being the Timeless Child; we still don’t have any solid proof on how that came to be. We don’t even fully know how Ruth fits in to all this. I look forward to seeing a resolution to this in Series 13.

Loose thoughts on previous episodes

Continuing with the pattern from the above segment, I’m going to give some post-review follow-ups for some important things in the rest of Series 12 and some episodes in Series 11.

Racism - Looking back at Rosa, I compared the instances of racism shown in that episode to some examples of left-wing racism I’ve heard from right-wing YouTubers and I��ve noticed that the left aren’t as blatant about it or they dress it up so that it doesn’t look like they’re being racist. In contrast, according to the left, right-wing racism seems more obvious even when disguised (particularly in the past when discrimination was accepted as a way of life), though I guess it only seems that way because news spreads fast in mainstream media and social media, sometimes putting comments out of context.

Jack Robertson - Remember that Donald Trump expy from Arachnids in the UK? I’m honestly wondering if Doctor Who unintentionally predicted Joe Biden while trying to satirise Trump because it was mentioned in that episode that Robertson was only running for president in 2020 because he hated Trump for decades. That being said, I still think it’s unlikely that Robertson would have run as a Republican presidential candidate. Also, I can’t believe I missed the opportunity to use “Yaz’s Mum” as a running gag in the review for that episode given how it was used in the episode itself.

LGBT representation - In the review for Resolution, I mentioned that Richard (the security guard at MDZ) being gay doesn’t feel shoehorned compared to Frankie in Arachnids in the UK. I’ll own up to missing the mark on that one because I’m straight and I didn’t realise that Richard being killed 25 seconds after his debut made him just as shoehorned as Frankie (who was also killed in the episode). In contrast, LGBT characters who weren’t as shoehorned in Series 11 were Angstrom in The Ghost Monument (whose wife was killed by the Stenza, onore Tim Shaw) and James I in The Witchhunters (based in historical belief). I still think that they did it better in Praxeus with Jake and Adam. Also, let’s not forget that LGBT representation has been a thing in Doctor Who since the 90′s, with the debut of Jack Harkness in 2005 and the retconnings of past companions’ sexual orientations (like saying “oh, they were gay all along” which I’m a bit iffy on).

The Master - Since O’s debut in the series premiere, I’ve been struggling to fit that incarnation into the rest of the Master’s timeline. This was because in the Series 10 finale, Harold Saxon’s incarnation killed Missy with the full blast from his laser screwdriver, preventing her from regenerating.

Later on, two works were released that essentially confirm O as Missy’s future incarnation. In the Big Finish audio story The Lumiat, Missy used an Elysian field to break herself down and rebuild herself, giving her a new regeneration cycle in the process. The resulting incarnation called herself the Lumiat and had an adventure with a past Missy, only to be shot by her and left on another planet to regenerate.

In the 2021 edition of the Doctor Who Annual, there is a short story detailing a conversation between the Thirteenth Doctor and O. O briefly reminisces about being Missy and how she spent too long in the Doctor’s company. Therefore, we can confirm that O’s incarnation comes after Missy instead of between Saxon and Missy as some people thought.

With this, my theory that Saxon didn’t give Missy the full blast has been debunked, but my theory that the Master wouldn’t want to rob his future selves of chances to spite the Doctor still stands, even if it was unintentionally caused by the Master turning good for a while. I guess the Master’s ability to escape from predicaments is remarkable, yet unquestionable.

Police brutality - At the end of my review on Orphan 55, I expressed my disgust on climate protesters complaining about police brutality because the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong have suffered more police brutality since 2014. After hearing about the police brutality in the various protests that have risen up this year, particularly in regards to the coronavirus and Black Lives Matter, my stance regarding the police has changed and I’m an ACAB person now. I’ll talk more about it in my end-of-year review post.

Chameleon Arch - In Fugitive of the Judoon, Lee Clayton served as Ruth’s “husband”, or protector, while she was hiding from the Time Lords on Earth. If Lee isn’t human, then what is he and how did he manage to disguise as a human? I had thought that Lee was not a Gallifreyan, but his interaction with Gat seemed to imply that he was. But if he was able to disguise himself as a human like Ruth while still being aware of her true nature, then it is possible that Lee also used a Chameleon Arch, just not on the full setting that would transform a Time Lord into a human and give them new memories. In the comic The Forgotten, the Eighth Doctor recalled to Chantir how he convinced the Master that he was half-human through the use of a broken Chameleon Arch, so it is possible that a fully working Chameleon Arch would also be able to do something like that. This is assuming that “bio-shield” is another name for said tool.

“I’m still quite socially awkward” - Yes, this is about that bit at the end of Can You Hear Me? when the Doctor was apparently being dismissive of Graham’s concern about his cancer coming back. I still stand by what I said about the Doctor being socially awkward, but I’ve softened my stance recently and I now believe that the Doctor’s reaction could have been a little different. It could have gone something like this: “I should say a reassuring thing now, shouldn’t I? I’m still quite socially awkward, but I just want you to know that you’ve got me, Ryan and Yaz in the TARDIS, and we’ll be there for you if anything happens, just as you have been there for us.”

I must give credit to this episode for helping me to open up about some of the (girl) friends I’ve lost during my years in high school and to reach out to an old fan of mine who was there when I started my English dub rants. In regards to the former, I’ve recently decided to fully open up about the one crush I had during high school and the storylines I made in my personal project with characters based around me and her. You can find it in Parts 15 and 16 of Kisekae Insights, but be warned - to put it simply, it’s pretty cringe and all over the place. If you decide to read it, then prepare to have your expectations subverted.

Regarding DWexit

Doctor Who Series 13 is currently in production and is projected to premiere in late-2021, with eight episodes instead of ten or eleven (if we’re counting festive specials). In the Series 12 epilogue, I mentioned that there may come a time where I feel that it is time for me to move on from the series, since it hasn’t been as good as it was before, the gaps between series just seem to be getting longer and longer with fewer episodes being made each series and the premiere schedule for each series hasn’t been regular for some time now.

While the main reason for these delays and episode cuts this time around is due to new regulations and protocols implemented as a result of the coronavirus, I think there could be another factor behind it, which is that the executive producers, Chris Chibnall and Matt Strevens, might not want to stress out the production team or themselves because they are inexperienced or because they know how stressful producing 13 episodes and a Christmas special can be (not counting spinoffs). I’ve been as grateful as I can be for being able to have new episodes to watch, but given everything that’s happened, I’m starting to recognise that even my gratefulness has its limits.

To be honest, I’ve never really had that much of a problem with the SJW stuff, which is why I may seem a bit lenient on that front, but I am wary of the criticisms that certain people have made in that regard. The bigger problem for me, in fact, is the possibility of the BBC pandering to China. In 2017, BBC Worldwide signed a deal with Shanghai Media Group for all the existing revival series episodes and spinoffs along with the first right of refusal for all future series up to Series 15 (this means that SMG will always be the first to be offered the rights for the series before the BBC can pass it on if they refuse). I had believed that the series was banned there because science fiction and time travel were its main themes, but I guess that may have just been a rumour.

SJWs somehow being low-key pro-China or whatever aside, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that Doctor Who is beginning to fall in that direction, at least not at this point in time. They’ve mostly stuck to the West in terms of political references, which I’m fine with, but the moment they talk shit about the Hong Kong protesters, that’s going to be a strike in my book.

Speaking of strikes for the series, I only have one for the Timeless Child; the one I gave for casting Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor is one I’m probably going to forgive. I could care less about the Thirteenth Doctor being a woman or an expy of the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors given how the Timeless Child arc turned out so far or is going to turn out in Series 13. The prospect of a second female Doctor (straight after the Thirteenth) doesn’t even seem that much of a problem to me despite me initially framing it that way.

As I said, the only reason why I haven’t given up on this series yet is mostly because I want to know how the Timeless Child arc plays out. Aside from that, I’ve been struggling to decide whether I want to give this series up and if so, when, because Doctor Who and tokusatsu are the only things I have left after giving up (following new) anime and video games years ago (along with Koei Tecmo and their fanbase). As for this review series, I’m planning to end it at the end of the Thirteenth Doctor’s run, because my intention was to review Jodie Whittaker’s episodes of Doctor Who. Barring the possibility of a third strike, I’ll probably remain a casual fan of the series after Whittaker leaves. I’m honestly hoping that Chibnall doesn’t give me a reason to give this series up, but regardless of this, I’ll always remember the Ninth to Twelfth Doctors as my golden era for Doctor Who.

Addressing rumours

I’m not one to talk about rumours like this, but when you’ve got a long time to wait before new episodes, there’s only so much you can do with what you have. Also, after watching The Timeless Children, I heard from Nerdrotic (my other alternative to Bowlestrek besides The Oldest Nerd) that the reveal was actually rumoured in November 2019 and that he predicted that the Doctor would be revealed as originally being female.

Given my thoughts on Series 12, I became sceptical at other rumours I’ve heard about Series 13 and considered whether they would end up being the case. I’m going to address a few rumours that I’ve heard and discuss the probability of them coming true. Coincidentally, they come from Noel of The TARDIS Zone YouTube channel, but I’ll link to this article that has used one of his videos.

TARDIS exterior changing - Apparently, due to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the exterior of the TARDIS might be changed due to how the police are seen by the public. I would probably like it if the chameleon circuit was fixed; like Evolto, the TARDIS could still keep its current exterior as a preferred form, choose a new exterior as a preferred form or adapt to its surroundings. I wouldn’t really like it if the chameleon circuit was fixed only to have it break again in a different form and use Black Lives Matter as a means of justifying it. Aside from this, if people had a problem with the police box design of the TARDIS, why hasn’t there been any major outcry about it before?

Thirteenth Doctor being bisexual - Honestly, given the Yaz favouritism I’ve seen in the series, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up shipping her with the Doctor. Even then, has the Doctor’s sexuality ever come into question or been a question that needs to be answered? We’ve seen Captain Jack kiss the Ninth Doctor in The Parting of the Ways and in the past, the Doctor has never necessarily cared about his sexuality most of the time (particularly in the Classic Series).

Planet of same-sex couples - Didn’t they already do this in The Tsuranga Conundrum? Oh wait, I might have gotten the wrong idea...

Davros is a puppet for a female Kaled warlord (1:21 in video) - “haha Hitler was whipped lol” - I’m sorry, I just had to make that joke given that the Daleks have been compared to the Nazis. I don’t think that would happen because there’s no evidence that some woman was manipulating Hitler behind the scenes. Plus, there’s the problem of Terry Nation’s estate to get past, because people apparently need permission to use other people’s things. I don’t think they would approve.

Thirteen to apologise for past mistakes (1:36 in video) - I don’t see why this needs to be a thing if it ends up happening. There’s a reason why people say things like “don’t dwell on the past, but learn from your mistakes”. It doesn’t mean going back and correcting them because sometimes, there are things that just can’t be helped.

In April 2020, during the first run of Doctor Who: Lockdown, Paul Cornell released a story named The Shadow in the Mirror which showed the Thirteenth Doctor freeing Daughter of Mine from the mirror (every mirror) that the Tenth Doctor trapped her in at the end of Human Nature/The Family of Blood. As I said in the post about Doctor Who: Lockdown, I wouldn’t have seen the need to free Daughter of Mine, let alone the Family of Blood. Remember why the Doctor gave them their punishments in the first place? What’s stopping Daughter of Mine from freeing the rest of her family so they can go back to seeking immortality again?

I think it was pretty short-sighted of Paul Cornell to write that story, plus it was an excuse for him to use the free pass given by The Timeless Children to make the Thirteenth Doctor a Mary Sue. Also, who’s to say that he probably wrote it on a whim once he heard that they were going to do tweetalongs of those episodes?

Chibnall recasting Second, Third and Fourth Doctors as women (from different video) - The rumour says that Ruth would be the replacement for the Second Doctor. I know Chibnall was being stupid with the Timeless Child arc, but surely he isn’t that stupid, because all this will do is complicate canon even more. Therefore, I don’t think it will end up happening, but I wouldn’t really put it past Chibnall to do it; for the record, if I learned about the Timeless Child rumour last year, I would have had the same reaction as well.

Series 13 to be Chibnall and Whittaker’s final season (different source) - Remember “chaos in Cardiff” back in August last year? The state of Doctor Who nowadays must be pretty bad if these rumours are making people hope that they’ll leave sooner rather than later. Usually, revived series showrunners usually work for two Doctors and Doctors usually do three series (as a tradition started by Patrick Troughton in order to prevent being typecast). Jodie Whittaker leaving after Series 13 would be likely since it will be her third series, but Chris Chibnall leaving with her would be strange to see. Honestly, I’m not bothered about when they’ll leave; I’m just here to enjoy the ride.

Christmas Special things

Signs are pointing to Revolution of the Daleks being a Christmas special, so I’m going to presume that that will be the case. Let’s take a look at a couple of things that I’ve heard in preparation for it.

First of all, I’m glad I waited until this point to post this, because at the time of writing this, I just saw confirmation that John Barrowman will be returning as Captain Jack Harkness. As if we didn’t work it out already when he returned in Fugitive of the Judoon. Frankly, I would have been surprised if he didn’t return, given how he didn’t return for The Timeless Children.

Secondly, it’s been reported that this special will mark the departure of Graham and Ryan, but the prospect of them returning in Series 13 hasn’t been ruled out. Tosin Cole has been cast in the AMC drama 61st Street, but given the impact of the coronavirus in the US, production of the series has been scheduled to begin in 2021 (in this article from August), so it wouldn’t be surprising if Ryan had some cameos in Series 13 alongside Graham as well. Such a shame that not a lot of focus was put on Ryan’s dyspraxia.

Look forward to the review when it comes out after Christmas Day or New Year’s Day (if my predictions are wrong).

UPDATE - 30 November 2020: So the trailer for the special has been released and it’s going to be released on New Year’s Day. I probably should have expected this; either the BBC doesn’t think Christmas is politically correct or they would rather put better shows on Christmas Day. Either way, it’ll be a hiatusbreaker episode, just like this post.

I’ve also learnt that Chris Noth is reprising his role as Jack Robertson, which is something I didn’t expect to see. It’ll be interesting to see whether he ends up being president in this episode, though from the looks of the trailer, I wouldn’t think so. His promotion of the Daleks in the trailer (“These machines are going to change the world!”) harkens back to Winston Churchill in Victory of the Daleks, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that episode ends up getting ripped off.

One thing I forgot to mention - what happened to the remaining humans who came back to the 21st century, namely Ravio, Yedlarmi and Ethan? I hope they make an appearance in the special, because it would be a waste of they weren’t.

Before I finish up, there is one more thing I want to mention: why the hell can’t I get into the Doctor /who/ General forums now? Those guys used to be on 4chan, then they moved to 8chan, then they moved to a separate forum when that got shut down and they didn’t bother to go back when it was revived as 8kun. Since the end of Series 12, you need a password to go in now and I’ve been unable to find out why that is the case.

Anyway, that’s it for the hiatusbreaker update. Stay safe and I’ll see you all again at Christmas time.

[newstfionline]

Thursday, October 29, 2020

Rent and debt problems (WSJ) A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that outstanding rent debt in the United States will hit $7.2 billion by the end of 2020, and without additional stimulus spending Moody’s estimates that it could hit $70 billion. They estimate that 12.8 million people will owe an average $5,400 from missed payments, which is significantly higher than the 3.8 million homeowners foreclosed on from 2007 to 2010. Across the U.S., 30 million to 40 million people face possible eviction once moratoriums expire.

A Divided Nation Agrees on One Thing: Many People Want a Gun (NYT) In America, spikes in gun purchases are often driven by fear. But in past years that anxiety has centered on concerns that politicians will pass stricter gun controls. Mass shootings often prompt more gun sales for that reason, as do elections of liberal Democrats. Many gun buyers now are saying they are motivated by a new destabilizing sense that is pushing even people who had considered themselves anti-gun to buy weapons for the first time—and people who already have them to buy more. The nation is on track in 2020 to stockpile at record rates, according to groups that track background checks from FBI data. Across the country, Americans bought 15.1 million guns in the seven months this year from March through September, a 91 percent leap from the same period in 2019, according to seasonally adjusted firearms sales estimates from The Trace, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on gun issues. The FBI has also processed more background checks for gun purchases in just the first nine months of 2020 than it has for any previous full year, FBI data show. “The year 2020 has been just one long advertisement for why someone may want to have a firearm to defend themselves,” said Douglas Jefferson, the vice president for the National African American Gun Association, which has seen the biggest increase in membership this year since the group was formed in 2015.

The ‘Right to Repair’ Movement Gains Ground (NYT) If you buy a product—a car, a smartphone, or even a tractor—and it breaks, should it be easier for you to fix it yourself? Manufacturers of a wide range of products have made it increasingly difficult over the years to repair things, for instance by limiting availability of parts or by putting prohibitions on who gets to tinker with them. It affects not only game consoles or farm equipment, but cellphones, military gear, refrigerators, automobiles and even hospital ventilators, the lifesaving devices that have proven crucial this year in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, a movement known as “right to repair” is starting to make progress in pushing for laws that prohibit restrictions like these. The goal of right-to-repair rules, advocates say, is to require companies to make their parts, tools and information available to consumers and repair shops in order to keep devices from ending up in the scrap heap. They argue that the rules restrict people’s use of devices that they own and encourage a throwaway culture by making repairs too difficult. They also argue that it’s part of a culture of planned obsolescence—the idea that products are designed to be short-lived in order to encourage people to buy more stuff. That contributes to wasted natural resources and energy use at a time when climate change requires movement in the opposite direction.

Peru’s Machu Picchu reopening Sunday after pandemic closure (AP) Except workers repairing roads and signs, Peru’s majestic Incan citadel of Machu Picchu is eerily empty ahead of its reopening Sunday after seven months of closure due to the coronavirus pandemic. The long closure of Peru’s No. 1 tourist draw, which has hammered the local economy, marks the second time it has been shut down since it opened its doors to tourism in 1948. The stone complex built in the 15th century will receive 675 visitors a day starting Sunday, the director of Machu Picchu archaeological park, José Bastante, told The Associated Press. The site is accustomed to receiving 3,000 tourists a day, though it recently passed regulations limiting visitors to 2,244 visitors a day to protect the ruins. Still a large number given experts belief that in the 15th century a maximum of 410 people lived in the citadel on the limits of the Andes mountains and the Amazon.

Evo’s return (Foreign Policy) Evo Morales will return to Bolivia on Nov. 9, the day after President-elect Luis Arce is sworn in. Morales’s return will come just over a year after he was forced out of the country. An outstanding arrest warrant for sedition and terrorism issued for Morales was annulled on Tuesday, paving the way for his return. Meanwhile, hundreds of supporters of the right-wing opposition marched on a military barracks on Tuesday asking for “military help” to stop the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party from regaining power.

New protests loom as Europeans tire of virus restrictions (AP) Protesters set trash bins afire and police responded with hydrant sprays in downtown Rome Tuesday night, part of a day of public outpouring of anger against virus-fighting measures like evening shutdowns for restaurants and bars and the closures of gyms and theaters—a sign of growing discontent across Europe with renewed coronavirus restrictions. It was a fifth straight night of violent protest in Italy, following recent local overnight curfews in metropolises including Naples and Rome. All of Europe is grappling with how to halt a fall resurgence of the virus before its hospitals become overwhelmed again. Nightly curfews have been implemented in French cities. Schools must close at 6 p.m. Schools have been closed in Northern Ireland and the Czech Republic. German officials have ordered de-facto lockdowns in some areas near the Austrian border and new mask-wearing requirements are popping up weekly across the continent, including a nationwide requirement in Russia. Yet in this new round of restrictions, governments are finding a less compliant public. Over the weekend, police used pepper spray against protesters angry over new virus restrictions in Poland. Spanish doctors staged their first national walkout in 25 years on Tuesday to protest poor working conditions. In Britain, anger and frustration at the government’s uneven handling of the pandemic has erupted into a political crisis over the issue of hungry children.

Cake Lady helps wounded soldiers heal, one treat at a time LONDON (AP)—David Wiseman heard Kath Ryan before he met her. He was at the far end of Ward S-4 at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham when shouts of “Cake Lady’s here! Cake Lady’s here!” began rolling through the room full of wounded soldiers, bed by bed. Who was this Cake Lady, he wondered, until he saw a middle-aged woman in a “strange dress” pushing a trolley and handing out cake. “When all you’ve seen is doctors and nurses and the odd relative, it was just a bit of an assault on the senses,” Wiseman remembered. “And she was doling out hugs and, you know, cakes. … She just brought joy into that place.” Since 2009, retired nurse Ryan, 59, has made some 1,260 visits to British hospitals, bonding with the patients as she fed them an estimated 1 million slices of cake. But Ryan brought more than treats. She brought herself—bubbly, irreverent, and fearless. As she could see that most of the injured were in a terrible state, she never asked, “How are you?” “I would go in with the trolley and apron and stand at the end of the bed, and say, ‘Can I lead you into temptation this evening?’” Ryan recalled. “Straight away, they would scream laughing.” One soldier got into the spirit and asked, “What’s on offer, love?” “Anything you want,” Ryan replied. “As long as it’s legal, moral, and on the cake trolley.”

With eye on China, India and U.S. sign accord to deepen military ties (NYT) India and the United States signed a pact Tuesday to share geospatial intelligence, paving the way for deeper military cooperation between the two countries as they confront an increasingly assertive China. The agreement will give India’s armed forces access to a wealth of data from U.S. military satellites to aid in targeting and navigation. The two countries signed the accord in New Delhi during a visit by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper a week before the U.S. presidential election. The agreement is the latest example of how India and the United States—the world’s two largest democracies—are drawing closer together to respond to the challenge of China’s rise. For India, that challenge is no longer theoretical. In June, India and China engaged in their deadliest clash in more than 50 years high in the mountains near the unofficial border between the two countries. Twenty Indian soldiers died, while the number of Chinese casualties remains unknown. India and China are still locked in a dangerous standoff, with tens of thousands of troops preparing to wait out the harsh Himalayan winter.

Typhoon, landslides leave 35 dead, 59 missing in Vietnam (AP) Typhoon Molave set off landslides that killed at least 19 people and left 45 missing in central Vietnam, where ferocious wind and rain blew away roofs and knocked out power in a region of 1.7 million residents, state media said Thursday. The casualties from the landslides bring the over-all death toll from the storm to at least 35, including 12 fishermen whose boats sank Wednesday as the typhoon approached with winds of up to 150 kilometers (93 miles) per hour. Vietnamese officials say it’s the worst typhoon to hit the country in 20 years. At least 59 people remain missing in the landslides and at sea. The toll may rise with many regions still unable to report details of the devastation amid the stormy weather.

Scale of Qatar Airways scandal revealed (Foreign Policy) Female passengers on “10 aircraft in total” were forced into invasive physical examinations at Doha airport on Oct. 2, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said on Wednesday, as the Qatari government apologized publicly and began an investigation into the incident. The women were removed from flights after a newborn baby was found abandoned in one of the airport bathrooms. The Transport Workers’ Union of New South Wales, whose members service Qatar Airways planes in Sydney, condemned “the brutal attack on the human rights of Australian female airline passengers” and is considering industrial action in response. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison pledged a “further response” after reviewing the results of an investigation. He told reporters, “As a father of daughters, I could only shudder at the thought that any woman, Australian or otherwise, would be subjected to that.”

Australia’s second-largest city ends 111-day virus lockdown MELBOURNE, Australia (AP)—Coffee business owner Darren Silverman pulled his van over and wept when he heard on the radio that Melbourne’s pandemic lockdown would be largely lifted on Wednesday after 111 days. Silverman was making a home delivery Monday when the announcement was made that restrictions in Australia’s second-largest city would be relaxed. He was overwhelmed with emotions and a sense of relief. According to the Victoria state government the lockdown changes will allow 6,200 retail stores, 5,800 cafés and restaurants, 1,000 beauty salons and 800 pubs to reopen, impacting 180,000 jobs.

Nigeria considers social media regulation in wake of deadly shooting (Reuters) Nigeria’s information minister said “some form of regulation” could be imposed on social media just a week after protesters spread images and videos of a deadly shooting using Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Images, video and an Instagram live feed from a popular DJ spread news of shootings in Lagos on Oct. 20, when witnesses and rights groups said the military fired on peaceful protesters. The protesters had been demonstrating for nearly two weeks to demand an end to police brutality. The army denied its soldiers were there. Social media helped spread word of the shootings worldwide, and international celebrities from Beyonce and Lewis Hamilton to Pope Francis since called on the country to resolve the conflict peacefully. Information Minister Lai Mohammed told a panel at the National Assembly on Tuesday that “fake news” is one of the biggest challenges facing Nigeria. A spokesman for the minister confirmed the comments, and said “the use of the social media to spread fake news and disinformation means there is the need to do something about it.”

[adamparrishcryingclub]

to feel your heartlines for the fic ask, 4 5 6 7 11 12 14

omg so many questions yay ♥️♥️

4. What’s your favorite line of dialogue?that’s tough with this fic omg I gotta think….I would say:“Patience is a virtue.”

“Your friends are watching us very peculiarly.“ “They think you’re going to break my heart.”

"Do I get a tattoo?” “You can have every inch of bare skin I have left.”

5: What part was hardest to write?The entire arc from Travis’s death to getting Adam on the island. That was really hard to write and it was also really sad. Also! Actually writing Adam’s time on the island too I remember was really hard and figuring out what they would even do when he was there because I wanted Ronan and Adam to get time to be happy together before Adam inevitably had to return to his home life in the states.

6: What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?It was my first completed multi chapter fic :’) and my first dabbling in mature content lol. I really enjoyed playing around with the concept of the movie and the idea of Irish Ronan and American Adam, the pitfalls of meeting again and again and feeling that pull towards the other person but knowing it’s near impossible to make work without great sacrifices. The fact I aged them up (which I’ve done twice now but this was the first time and it was a Risk to me at the time)

7: Where did the title come from?A song!! A very beautiful song that makes me think of the fic now every time I hear it.Heartlines by Broods

11: What do you like best about this fic?I really like how I developed their relationship over key meetings over the period of a year, and it was also the first time I dabbled with online communication as a waypoint to develop their relationship more between physical interactions. I know I got some elements of Irish culture wrong (as a few people have both kindly and not so kindly pointed out lol), but I really love the world I built (a double au I suppose!! jk) and I really love Irish Ronan with his beer company, the love that they share in this. It’s pretty good angst tbh, and I also enjoyed the relationships between the friends I created too. I don’t always feel like I develop them well enough in my fics but I think I did them justice in tfyh

12: What do you like least about this fic?uhhh that despite doing what I considered extensive research into the island and Ireland’s old and current marriage traditions I still got stuff wrong, but too late changing that now. Whoops. It’s fan fiction so not the end of the world but yknow Also if I could I would make it more clear that Ronan and Adam DO have the discussion about Adam’s family history, as it’s heavily implied in his proposal acceptance and his vows that he and Ronan did talk about it but I guess some readers still get confused about that.Also, all the typos and shit that’s still there and I’m far too lazy to fix at this point I’m a monster

14: Is there anything you wanted readers to learn from reading this fic?That I am a sucker for cheesy old romance films? That I love Adam and Ronan a lot. That Africa by Toto is a great song lol. I’m not sure!

What did you feel like you learned from reading it, if anything?

[roslinadama-sinequanon]

Major Crimes-Conspiracy Theory Pt. 1

Anticipation-three things I was waiting for in this episode 1. I wanted to see the rings. I wanted to make sure the ceremony took place since we, you know, didn’t get to actually see it.  2. To hear if Sharon would be called Commander Raydor or Commander Flynn. I’m hoping for Flynn, so that means it will probably be Raydor. 3. To hear Andy refer to Sharon as his wife or Sharon to refer to Andy as her husband. (I got two out of three, the jury is still out over Flynn vs. Raydor)

So, this episode was a light one. I feel like we needed a light episode after the past 5 depressing ones, however, I’m not sure it was the right case for a comedy episode.  

Granted, they were filming this episode long before the shit hit the fan with politicians and entertainers being fired or resigning due to sexual harrassment and assault issues, but, even without everything that’s happening in RL right now, I think it should have been taken a little more seriously. Or at least not had quite so much humor.

Honestly, I think it would have been far more interesting to have this be the storyline that pulled Sharon front and center rather than the trope, life threatening illness. I would love to have seen this storyline used to bring forward Sharon’s own experiences on the force with sexual harassment and also how she dealt with some of that once she was in FID. There could have been great dialogue between Sharon, Andrea, and Amy over this very topic and some of things they have had to deal with. Also, I think it would be interesting for the men to hear this coming from the women they work with and care about. I’m sure some of the things Sharon probably went through would be quite eye opening to Andy. This arc is not over, so I’m hoping, though not really believing, that we still might get some of this from our main characters point of view.

I do love the humorous episodes and I feel like the writers really missed the boat by not writing a classic ProFlynnza episode around Andy’s bachelor party. But, I suppose that would have been too much focus on the characters and the wedding and it would have taken away from the depressing Sharon illness storyline that I still hate and that has cast such a cloud over the whole season.

So, now on to the episode. I promise it’s not full of salt. There were quite a few things I enjoyed, especially considering we didn’t have any talk of Sharon being sick which was GREAT. I would love to be able to put that all behind us, even as I know we have more looming ominously ahead.

Onto the episode--

“Frank Boggs, AKV Security.”

Was it just me or did this guy seem to be a rehash of Dick Tracy? He even looked like Dick Tracy.

“Commander, what are you doing here anyway? I think we can handle an autopsy prelim.”

It sounds like even though they didn’t get to go to Ireland, Andy and Sharon did take some time off for a little honeymoon. I’d like to think they at least got away for a few days up to Santa Barbara or something.

Interesting that Provenza states “Commander, what are you doing here?” I would have thought he would have said “Commander, Flynn what you are both doing here, since I would assume they were honeymooning together. The only thing I can think of was that Provenza was more taking offence that the boss felt the need to come in when he felt he could handle what was going on.

“Nothing random happens in the Palisades.”

I guess I don’t know enough about the Palisades to get all these inside jokes. I do know that Mary lives in the Palisades, but that’s about all I know--and I’m assuming most of America and the rest of the world didn’t get the jokes either.

“Who’s Craig Curtis?”

Andy, Provenza, Sharon and Amy all know their football. Morales is the only one who is lost, after all “It’s not like he was nominated for an Oscar or something.”

“Tackles. Huge TV’s, big burgers, cute girls…Tasteless, the way they dress those waitresses there.”

I do love it when Andy opens mouth and inserts his foot-- and the way he trips all over himself trying to fix things once he gets that narrow eyed look from his wife. Yes his WIFE. He’s not sure if she’s really upset about what he said or not, but I like that she is more amused than anything.

“I should speak to the wrongfully terminated women.”

This is SO something bachelor Andy would have said.

“Don’t apologize again for sleeping with Aidan.”

Okay, so I’m not going to get into how my knickers got all twisted with yet more personal Gusty scenes--we’ve gotten way more of them than the other MAIN couple. What I will say is that when Rusty first starting seeing Gus, I liked Gus. I liked Gus a lot more than I liked Rusty and I felt that Gus was good for Rusty. I liked them as a couple. I didn’t really care about them as a couple, nor was I invested in them and I didn’t really care about seeing any  personal scenes between them, but I was okay with them as a couple. Last season I started to dislike Gus and when Rusty said “good-bye” to him, I really took it to mean good bye. Gus thought they could do the long distance relationship but Rusty knew it was over. And it seemed like that was the logical end of the relationship. Then, this season we have Rusty angsting over Gus, stalking him on social media and Gus not responding to Rusty. Get a clue Russ, the guy is done with you , just like you knew would happen when you said “good bye.” Only now we get more. We find out Gus has been sleeping with Aidan and that he and Rusty are through. Okay, cause I thought you were “through” last season, but, whatever. I really don’t care at all what goes on with these two and hope they stay broken up. This is not a good or healthy relationship.

“A gun…seriously?”

Really? Rusty just leaves his gun laying around? Hardly responsible gun ownership.”

“Man, this calendar is…” Sharon puts her hand out to take it away. “Very offensive Commander.”

Yet again, Wes is so much like Andy.

“You ought to show your tits now cause in a few years no one’s gonna want to see them and you’ll only get hired for your talent.”

OMG, your TALENT. How awful. This scene really hit’s the nail on the head, what with everything going on in the entertainment industry right now. What I found interesting in looking at the reactions of the team to this video, it is the men who are uncomfortable and disgusted--both Andy and Provenza have very visible negative reactions to the video, but Sharon doesn’t. She doesn’t seem to register much in the way of emotion.

I think there are a couple of reasons for this. I’m sure she has had to deal with sexual harassment in the past and this isn‘t as shocking to her as it is to the men. When she asked Jack for a divorce she even made the comment that the time for her needing his ring was long gone. Now that she was in a position of power she didn’t need  what little protection a ring gave her. Sharon is a beautiful woman in a male dominated paramilitary profession, so I feel like she’s experienced some of this first hand. When she was young and just starting out I’m sure she had to learn to keep that professional mask on when she was harassed. Then, she was in FID so I’m sure she saw and heard a hell of a lot when those cases came across her desk and that she probably worked very hard to make sure these guys got punished for their actions. This is the kind of stuff I want to know about Sharon Flynn. Much more interesting than her being sick.

“Gus is struggling to find a decent job.” “Struggling? Why is he struggling?”

First of all I love that Sharon is working on her “thank you” cards--and yes--finally a decent glimpse of the ring. At least there was some continuity with the wedding having taken place, and how like Sharon to get those thank you cards right out.

I loved the amused twist on Rusty’s lips when he tells her Gus is struggling. Mama Bear Flynn has her cub’s back, she seems just as “serves him right” about Gus as Rusty does. Until Rusty says this--- “Because when they stopped sleeping together Aiden fired him and wouldn’t give him a reference.” THAT got her attention.  However much Gus pissed Sharon off, he is now the victim of someone who is breaking the law and as such she jumps to attention making sure Rusty knows that Aidan’s actions are illegal.

I think it’s also interesting to see how far mother and son have come and how more open they are with each other. In a deleted scene (that shouldn’t have been deleted) Sharon wants to talk about overnight guests to the condo. Rusty thinks she’s talking about him and he’s absolutely horrified. He can’t even bring himself to discuss it with her. It turns out that she was referring to her and Andy , and of course he didn’t want to discuss that either, but it looks like they’ve had conversations about Gus sleeping with Aidan.

“Detective Paige, Amy. The man seems to have a thing for attractive young women.” “Well, we’ll do our best but we’re over 30” “You’d never know. Police work keeps you young. Look at my wife.”

BEST line of the whole episode. LOVED IT. Andy is SO frakking adorable. You know he’s been dying to be able to call her his wife, and now that he can he’s going to do it anytime he can. Loved Sharon’s secret little smile, you just know it gives her a little thrill to be called his wife. His beautiful,  young looking wife. And Provenza’s side glance. Very reminiscent of the looks he used to give when Andy started referring to her as Sharon instead of Captain. He’s thinking “Oh Flynn, you sap, you’ve got it SO bad you can’t even see straight.”

“Do you mind, Michael? Some of us are trying to solve a murder.”

This is the first time I’ve heard Andy call Mike, Michael, and I love the way Sharon dropped her forehead onto her hand, like, “Oh, here we go again. Do you really HAVE to get my man all riled up.”

“Did I make mistakes as a husband? Sure. Could I have been more attentive? Absolutely. Should I have slept with so many of her friends, probably not. Bottom line, I treated her like crap. I took her for granted. She left me.”

I don’t know if it’s just me or not, but this guy reminded me so much of Jack Raydor. He even looked a little bit like him. And I got the feeling from the look on her face that Sharon thought so too. I bet she was thinking “I can’t believe I used to put up with a guy like this. Now she has sweet Andy who treats her with such love and respect and who looks at her like the sun rises and sets on her. What I lucky woman.

And by the way. Where was Andy? He was the only member of the team not to go to Tackles. I would have thought it was because he hadn’t been cleared for field duty, but in Sanctuary City 1 he makes the comment that he can be in the field as long as Sharon is present and he was out in the field during that story arc. So, why not now?

“If I leave here today without your signature and a check covering two month’s of Gus’s pay, you have no idea how ugly this is gonna get. Or maybe you do.”

Rusty has learned a lot from his Mama. This scene really reminded me of the scene when Sharon Flynn went to see Sharon Beck in jail and laid down the law to her.

I will end with saying that we got another scene in Aidan’s restaurant when supposedly it was too expensive to film Shandy scenes on location. Those were two restaurant scenes that could have been dates.

Just saying…

[cathygeha]

REVIEW

The Island Girls by Noëlle Harrison

Three sets of sisters who all experience tragedy have their lives overlap and sometimes mirror one another in this poignant story of love and loss.

Emer is still dealing with the loss of her beloved sister to cancer when she heads to a small island to do end of life care for Susannah. The two women have a rocky start but become closer with time and as they share what came before they met the two learn of sisters and lovers lost as well as perhaps finding a bit of comfort along the way. The story is told by flipping between the past and present and aa s a result the story unfolds slowly but drew me in and kept me reading till the very end.

What I liked:

* Emer: a good woman, sister and nurse – she has lost her way due to grief and a need to self flagellate but does eventually come around

* Susannah: a woman before her time who escaped her island only to once again return and then never leave again

* Katie: Emer’s sister was one who got lost in love and battered in the process

* Orla: Emer’s sister who died too young

* Rebecca & Lynsey: Katie’s children who are very close to their aunt Emer...and yet distant from her, too.

* Lars: a good man that stuck by Emer in spite of her pushing him away

* The way the book made me see the characters, feel with them and care about the outcome of their lives.

* The island – beautiful but not necessarily a healthy place for sometime

* That at least one couple seems to manage a HEA

What I did not like:

* Being reminded how horrible cancer is and how it respects no man or woman

* The loss of life to cancer and other ways

* The burden Susannah carried for so many years

* Being reminded that those being abused can still love their abuser and not leave

Did I like this book? Yes

Would I read more by this author? Yes

Thank you to NetGalley and Bookouture for the ARC – This is my honest review.

4-5 Stars

BLURB

I guess our life on the island was one which never fit you right. I like to imagine you some days when I look out the window across the harbour, all those miles of sea and land between us. But, sister, we are always connected. When young nurse Emer loses her beloved sister, she is haunted by grief and desperate to escape her memories. Taking a job in Vinalhaven, a rocky outpost in the wild Atlantic, feels like the refuge she so badly needs. Her patient, Susannah, has lived in isolation for many years, since the tragic death of her sister Kate caused her to withdraw from island life. However, when Emer discovers a bundle of letters in a rainbow quilt in her bedroom and shares the story of her own loss, Susannah opens up. She begins to tell the story of Kate’s brutal and secret past, and her marriage to a man with a heart as cold as the ocean. But when Emer starts asking locals about Kate, the island air sizzles with hostility. There are people who would rather that Susannah kept quiet, who have no qualms about threatening Emer. But despite the warnings to stay away, Emer is determined to find out what really happened the night Kate died – and the final secret that is keeping Susannah a prisoner to the past. An unputdownable and unforgettable story of impossible choices and two sisters who would do anything for one another. Set on a bewitching sea-scented island, The Island Girls will burrow into your heart. Perfect for fans of Lisa Wingate, Anita Shreve and The Light Between Oceans.  

AUTHOR BIO

Noelle Harrison is the Irish author of nine novels and five plays and has been translated into over 13 different languages. Her short stories have been published in Lines of Vision, Irish Writing on Irish Art, & Gutter Magazine of New Scottish Writing. In 2016, Noelle co-founded Aurora Writers' Retreats building on 20 years’ experience of teaching creative writing in Ireland, Scotland, Norway and England. 

 @NoelleHarrison

[aurimeanswind]

Cold Breeze—Sunday Chats (11-19-17)

Another week, another Sunday

It’s been a long week for me. Not in actuality, because I’ve slept an average of 10 hours a day every day this week, which is both a good and a bad thing. It’s good because I’ve been sleeping crazy well. It’s bad because it reminds me of my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, of my sometimes inability to drag myself out of bed to do anything. It’s also a common habit I fall into when I know I’m depressed, and while I push back as much as I can against that overwhelming feeling, it’s still there. Ever-present. And it sucks.

It helps to know that the ExtraLife team, now disbanded, is definitely full of the melancholy. We all miss each other. Some more than others, assuredly, but there is just so much love an affection there. I think taking that step back in the aftermath of ExtraLife, the distance, the pride fills me more because of the tight bonds that were just driven home over that week. 

It’s full on Persona-style bonds. Maxed social link meters and unbreakable relationships that serve as tentpole and standing memories and gifts that we all cherish, equally. It’s a comforting feeling, in the sad/loneliness. 

But I digress.

It’s been very good for games! And I’ve sunk my teeth into some big ones this week.

What’s On Tap

Assassin’s Creed Origins

This is the really big one. I’ve spent about 25-ish hours with this title this week.

I love this game, which is super surprising. I wrote a big long thing about all the wild changes they made on this blog, so I’ll refrain from repeating myself here.

One thing I really love in this game is Bayek, the main character. The relationship with him and his wife Aya is just so good. They just fucking love each other so much and its disgusting but sweet and kind of nice. it’s this central bond that the plot swirls around and it’s really strong, unlike other AC games.

I also think the side quest quality in this game is remarkable. It reminds me a ton of The Witcher 3. While I don’t think the voice acting is quite up to that same par, it’s astoundingly excellent. 

I dont’ have many complaints about this game. I really just adore it. And I’m thankful to my friends Barrett and Youssef for recommending it.

Destiny 2

I’ve only been playing a bit here and there, with another playdate with Tony and Greg tonight. It’s been fun playing the game again though, and I’ve excited for the new content coming early next month.

Overwatch

I just wrapped up playing some Overwatch just now, trying out Moira.

Moira is excellent. She is exactly what the healing team in Overwatch needed, a new on-the-ground healer. I feel like Ana is just not an effective healer at all, at least on console where aim and precision is not as strong.

What I love about Moira is that healing is a resource for her, she needs to tap into it, and if you run out, you can’t heal anymore. It means you need to use her primary energy drain weapon, get out there, and be aggressive in order to be able to support your team.

It’s a lot like Doomfist’s shield, which he generates for using his abilities on enemies, and it requires him to use his skillset to then be a better and greater asset to his team.

Moira also heals herself with her attack, so she benefits herself and her own play style by being aggressive.

I really like her. She may take top spot as my primary healer, but I am also incredibly fond of Mercy’s new ultimate, so it’s a toss up. Much like all the many characters I play in Overwatch, it’ll depend on the situation.

Questions

Remember to look for my tweet on Sunday afternoons with the hashtag #SundayChats in it. Reply with your question, and you’re in here.

Let’s do this.

On a personal leve, because I don’t think 2018 will hit the same highs for me, I want there to be more surprises. Again, this is for me, because I think there were huge hit surprises this year for folks like PUBG, but I just didn’t have quite so many hits.

On that note, I hope those surprises come from smaller, indie games. Like I think that was a collection of titles that got lost for me this year because of the stellar AAA games that took the spotlight, but those weird and nuanced and special indie games are some of the best experiences I live for, and I hope with more room in 2018 I’ll be able to get lost in them.

Personally I just use the Twitter app on my phone, and I’m happy with it. Most folks I know swear by Tweetbot, but I’ve never really gotten to use it myself.

As for Desktop, it’s all about Tweetdeck. You can tweet from multiple accounts, and have just multiple timelines open it it. On mine I have a news story feed for games, my timeline, my mentions, my notifications, and then the IP notifications too. It’s the way to go, in my experience.

It was the greatest thing I’ve ever been a part of for about a dozen different reasons.

I’m excited to be able to relive it in the archived videos.

I’d love to visit Hyrule castle town either from Breath of the Wild or Twilight Princess. This is all pre-apocolypse, of course, but especially in BotW it seems like such an incredible and bustling place. I’d love to see the different peoples and cultures of that world melted together in that supreme beauty.

Another one is Hengsha from Deus Ex, because it’s the two-layer city, kind of like Midgar from FF7. I’d just love to see that in person. That’d be more of an architectural look, just to see that crazy design in person and up close.

Another would be Inaba from Persona 4. Just because that place is like a second home for me. I’d love to finally see it in person.

Hrm, that’s tough. I have a lot that I just need to boot up and get through at this point, so it’s likely the ones that I just know I’m not going to get. A big one is Night in the Woods. I’m determined to make Edith Finch happen, but Night in the Woods seems like a really special game that I’m just not going to get to.

That list of indie games is depressingly long for me too. Pyre? Probably won't get to it and I want to play that so bad. Steamworld Dig 2? I may not get to that this year. I’ll definitely play it but probably just not this year, and that’s such a massive bummer for me since I loved the first one so much. The Housemarque games this year too, since I loved all the times I played them in preview settings.

I do still have some time, and I plan on getting through a few good things between now and the end of December. We’ll see what doesn’t make it.

For me its a handful of titles that maybe Nabeshin has thrown out to me. I’d like to try Red Dead Redemption at some point. And 999. Those two are huge standouts, but outside of that, it’s hard for me to think of some franchise that I haven’t dipped my toes into at least a little bit with the given time. 

I should probably play Tokyo Mirage Sessions someday but we’ll see. Still have it sealed in the plastic wrap.

Man, this is so hard. Ideal is tough too, because maybe that implies I’ve been there?

The place I’ve always wanted to go my whole life is Ireland. Its the motherland right? It calls me back. That, and Japan. I’ve wanted to take the journey to the land of the rising sun since I was old enough to barely mutter JRPG. Those are the two places.

Let’s go.

So, for context, I saw Justice League last night and... I really loved it? Like, I loved everything about it?? I feel crazy, like I’m Greg Miller defending Batman V. Superman??

But I think if I saw it again or I took the step back, I could totally see why people dislike it so vehemently. I was honestly shocked because it... well, it felt like Justice League to me. It felt like it was out of an entirely different DC Cinematic Universe. And maybe my expectations were so low? I don’t know.

But anywhere, there are going to be spoilers in my response here, because Liza deserves the best response I can muster for this, since we’re JL believers.

YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.

Boy when Superman shows up and is just straight up like, good, smiling, wise cracking Superman (again, a totally different character than he has been up until then, but I didn’t care because fuck I miss good Superman) I was just grinning ear to ear. They managed to tap into Henry Cavill’s charisma and make him shine as someone I could actually believe is Superman. And just seeing him work with a team and work with other heroes, like, that’s Man of Steel I know and fucking love, and they just nailed it in this movie. It made me so happy. You have no Idea. It’s like I’ve waited my whole life for that.

So yeah, he was my favorite, but I liked everyone! Any second Wonder Woman was on screen was perfect. They made Batman feel so much more like Batman here it was ridiculous. I liked Cyborg a lot, and I feel like they gave him a great arc from self hatred in the beginning to “wanting to live” in the end. Aquaman and Flash were just a ton of fun. 

For me it’s just under Wonder Woman since I thought they just nailed Wonder Woman so well, but I really really loved it, as I’m sure you could tell. I was just a happy kid grinning that my heroes were finally on screen together, and it was rad.

Haha oh my god okay I don’t think I can pick ten different fingers, but I was thinking about this when I grabbed the question. Probably like, someone who’s fingers have powers, like Emperor Palatine or something? I guess Cole McGraff would be the real world video game equivalent, but someone who would let me shoot lightening out of my fingertips. If I could just choose one then one of theres and then the others from all the characters in Until Dawn.

Because why not

#AgentOfChaos

Eh.

It’s fine.

Honestly, the lesson you shared with me Tyler has been a really great one. For folks curious, it’s about Mountain Tops. It’s a great analogy to the higher moments we find ourselves in in life.

https://twitter.com/acegiak/status/924762544383782912

That and one I’ve taken to heart over the last two or so years, which is just to listen, and to care, and to pay attention. You don’t need to interject your opinion in every controversial topic, and far too many people do. But that doesn’t exempt you from paying attention.

We don’t have anything concrete in the works, but we have a lot of ideas. I think PAX East is something to expect us at, and I think more written work in the future is something to anticipate soon too. Not more from who is there, but more and new voices. Exciting voices too, if we can muster it.

I’d totally be down to play Overwatch for 24 hours. I just love the loop of that game. I’d probably hate myself and it at around the 18 hour mark, but I think I could still muster it.

Least willing to do would probably be something best experienced in short bursts, like a Spelunky, or a Flint Hook, or a Cuphead, Some games require breaks and I think those fit into that fine. Doesn’t make them worse or bad by any means, but when you can walk away and come back better rested, those are good picks.

The Checklist

I have been essentially off reading stuff, but it’s worth shouting out a thing my best friend Jazz wrote today, about ExtraLife 2017.

http://brazenbebop.blogspot.com/2017/11/extra-life-2017.html

She is getting into the writing of the content, and I’m excited to support her and see what she comes up with.

I am tired again, but excited to finish some things I’m working on.

Thanks for sticking with me, and for the unending support.

And for taking care of me.

Much love.

Keep it real.

[pluckyredhead]

Daredevil 101: Xtreem Daredevil

Last time on Daredevil 101 (before we detoured into Man Without Fear), Matt had once again faked his death, leaving Karen and Foggy bereft. He’d also gotten himself a keen (read: terrible) new suit of armor. Because what’s better for a gymnast than armor?

But a new look isn’t enough. Matt’s determined to make everyone believe, really and truly, that the old Daredevil is dead:

See??? This Daredevil’s so different!!! He uses a gun!!!

...Except this doesn’t actually make any sense, because Matt’s original plan was to convince people that he wasn’t Daredevil. If Matt’s dead, and the new Daredevil is obviously a different person, won’t that prove more than anything else that Matt was the original Daredevil?

(I mean obviously the whole thing is just an excuse to put Matt in some very on-trend armor and have him growl and wave a gun around, but the story logic should still hold up.)

And what’s Matt doing when he’s not in costume? YOU GUYS IT’S THE DUMBEST THING:

JACK BATLIN. Matt you incredible loser.

Anyway he creates this identity as a Times Square con artist, or “social engineer” as he calls it. It pays the bills, apparently.

Meanwhile, his old friends don’t know what to make of the new Daredevil:

IT’S BECAUSE YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH HIM, FOGBERT

And speaking of love, Elektra’s still around, although this character doesn’t act like any Elektra I know:

This scene exists for no reason other than to show what a manly badass Matt is. Ugh.

Anyway, Matt is uninterested in rekindling things with Elektra, who eventually gives up and leaves town - but he obviously can’t get back together with Karen, either, since she thinks he’s dead. He settles for, um...teaming up with Captain America to dress up in ridiculous costumes and infiltrate a nightclub for hackers?

Literally everything about this page is hilarious. I couldn’t make head or tails of the insane plotline, but please enjoy the fact that they are talking to a stripper (maybe???) named EMOTICON. And the dialogue!!! “Ring-a-ding!” “Maybe they don’t like your rap!” AMAZING. We definitely all talked like this in the 90s. Also: THOSE COSTUMES. What a pair of losers.

But all good or at least entertainingly incoherent things must come to an end. I’m assuming Marvel wanted to wrap up the armored Daredevil business for whatever reason. They informed Chichester that he could write five more issues, then he was done. Pissed, Chichester told them he wanted an Alan Smithee credit, referring to a pseudonym used by directors when they want to disavow any connection with the finished product. So this last profoundly terrible arc is credited to “Alan Smithee” and artist Keith Pollard.

Anyway, it features this guy:

His name is Kruel, which...I mean, this is coming from a writer who named a character Emoticon, so sure. He’s horribly burned and can’t remember how he got that way, but knows it happened years ago and involved quite a few people who are important to Matt: Foggy Nelson, Karen Page, Ben Urich, Glorianna O’Breen, and DA Kathy Malper.

Every time he attacks one of these witnesses - who have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about - some of the memories come back, so he works his way through, starting with Ben:

Luckily, the “new” Daredevil shows up in time to rescue Ben and Doris. But Ben has his suspicions of this allegedly new superhero:

Fool Matt once, shame on you. Fool Matt twice, he jumps out the window and fakes his death.

Anyway, Kruel continues to work his way down the list of witnesses, moving on to Glori, who is ironically photographing Matt’s old apartment for a story for the Bugle:

Unfortunately, Matt doesn’t show up this time:

Yeah. So Glori was written out before Matt even went to Albany, broke up with Foggy with no explanation off page and hasn’t been seen since, and gets brought back for one issue to get thrown out the window by a one-off villain in a story the writer wouldn’t even put his name on. Comics are bullshit.

Matt hears on the news that a Bugle photographer was killed and goes to investigate:

Matt is pretty self-involved in that “everything is about me, I ruin everything” way, but it’s fairly logical to assume that all the people he knows are being attacked because he knows them, because the fact that Glori, Foggy, Karen, Ben, and Kathy were all at the same place before any of them but Foggy had ever met him, especially when Glori should have been in Ireland and Karen should have been in Vermont, stretched credulity a tad.

Anyway, gradually Kruel’s memories come back: he worked for Fisk and stole from him, and Fisk chased him to a remote rural diner where all five of the Daredevil allies above were hanging out for completely random reasons:

You tell ‘em, Karen!

Fisk burns down the diner with Kruel in it, presumably killing him (but not actually, as we know):

So there you go: all of these unconnected people were at this random place at the same time, and then Fisk erased their memories. This is the dumbest fucking story.

Anyway, in the present day Kruel is still making his rounds, and he goes after Foggy next:

Matt lunges for Foggy while Fisk - who has temporarily teamed up with the “new” Daredevil to deal with this threat - keeps Kruel busy:

This page makes me laugh so hard.

Anyway, Matt stops Fisk from killing Kruel and then introduces himself to his lifelong best friend, again:

Fisk in the background there also makes me laugh. He’s so happy for them! Or pissed he didn’t get to do a murder, whatever.

Anyway, that’s the end of this idiocy! Next up: a new writer, a new breakdown, and Foggy finally finds out the truth!