#it’s not actually Every show (notable exceptions include doctor who) but I’ve seen it a lot

[ravenlilyrose]

Hypothesis: Any TV show that runs for [undefined, high number] seasons eventually starts to write even their main characters as their one or two most defining character traits and at least somewhat forgets the depth the characters initially had in earlier seasons.

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #404

“death doesn’t answer when i cried for help”

The person you had the strongest feelings for dies, do you care? I'd be fucking devastated. It wouldn't feel real. Is there something you’re happy about at the moment? A few things. I'm still on that high of my APAP mask working, like I'm actually getting some fucking quality sleep, and I think I'm noticing the effects of my TMS therapy finally, too. My PTSD has most notably been much more bearable, and my interests are beginning to spread again. Do you want someone dead? No. Do you ever wonder what your ex is up to? I mean yeah, I think that's pretty normal, even for someone without my issues. Have you ever fed or taken care of a stray animal? Oh, many times. What is something you tend to worry about? My health and future. What is something you do that is unhealthy? Sit at the computer for way too long. I'm absolutely certain my vision is as poor as it is partially because of me endlessly staring at screens. What is something you do that is good for you? I'm not afraid to prioritize my mental health. What last caused you to force a smile? I was watching a Mark video for the first time in a while and was just reminded of how much I love and appreciate that moron. What was the last video game you played? Was it fun? Because you said "video" game, I guess I'll exclude computer ones, in which case I'm pretty sure it was Silent Hill 2. Given it's one of my all-time favorite games, of course I think it's fun. It's one hell of an emotional ride. What is something not many people know about you? The fact I was a dancer for many years would probably surprise people once they have a good idea of me and what I like. What word describes your basic style? Lazy, honestly. I dress for comfort, and given that's usually just pj pants and a tank top... yeah, I don't put much effort into my clothing when I'm going most places. Have you ever been told you were going to Hell? She kinda beat around the bush, but yes. Have you ever wanted to kill yourself? On more than one occasion. If yes, what convinced you not to go through with it? Well, I did OD once, but on the other occasions, it was the fear of the unknown that deterred me. Have you ever rejected a guy, only to have him push the issue by asking “why?” and insisting that you just need to get to know him better? Omg no, thank god. I would NOT handle that well. Is there something that you believe everyone should do and you can’t believe that some people don’t do it (e.g., recycle or go to the dentist regularly)? I didn't know 'til a survey question asked it that there are people who don't brush their tongue when brushing their teeth. Like holy shit dude, there are SO many germs on your tongue, clean that shit. Regarding the last good choice (healthy choice, kind choice, selfless choice, etc.) you made, what was your real motivation behind it? Ummmm the nearest that comes to mind is I guess taking my meds? I mean I do that every single day, but it's still a healthy choice for me. The motivation was because I am very serious about doing what I can for my mental wellbeing. What is something that you have had to practice at to get the hang of it? If you can’t think of anything, that’s okay, what’s something you are currently practicing at and trying to master? I really can't think of something for the first half of the question, but I can tell you that right now I'm attempting to force a routine of applying a therapy technique called "opposite action" into my daily life, where you, well, do the exact opposite of what your depression tells you to not do. It is WAY harder than it sounds, but I'm doing it with reading 30 minutes a day! Have you ever gone to the store to buy something, like a video game, when it came out at midnight? Not to my recollection, no. Regarding the last novel you read, was there a romance included? If so, was it central to the plot? The last novel I finished, yes. It wasn't central to the plot. Have you ever done relaxation meditations or listened to relaxation guides or positive-thinking/healing recordings? No, except in therapy when different therapists wanted me to experiment with it during a session. They just don't work for me. Do you have any interests that are also often shared by children? Yeah. Those are the one I'm especially self-conscious about. there something that could be a solitary activity but you really only like to do it with other people (e.g., watching movies, playing video games, etc.)? Watching movies or TV. Are you satisfied with the interior design or decoration in your home? Or do you think it needs a total home makeover? A makeover would be nice... Is there something that you’d like to own but you can’t find it anywhere? If not, can you a remember a time when you wanted something? Did you ever end up finding it or did you eventually stop wanting it? OKAY SO I actually have seen this custom-made once long after deciding I wanted it, but it was RIDICULOUSLY expensive. There's a location in the Silent Hill games called Heaven's Night, and I'd love love LOVE to commission someone to duplicate the neon pink sign of it to hang in my room. Hopefully one day I could still do it. Who makes you smile the most? Probably my cat, honestly. What piercings do you want/have? I've talked about the piercings I have, but I'll talk about those I want. My #1 is absolutely collarbone dermals, but as I've explained a billion times, I want to lose weight so the bones are more prominent for the sake of contrast; you can't really see my collarbones now, so I just think it'd look pretty dumb and random to just have random piercings somewhere around there with no dimension. I also want way more in my ears, dermals in my back dimples also once I've lost weight, my right nostril for the dozenth time (but this time I'll wear a hoop), and while I'd absolutely adore an undereye microdermal as well, it'd be pointless with glasses. :/ What's your favorite website? KM is my pride and joy and really feels like my online home, so despite using sites like YouTube more, that 'ole RP site has to be my fave. Do you own a fish tank with fish? No. I had fish bowls (AWFUL idea) as a kid, but never tanks Do you like the movie 300? Never seen it. Do you pop your knuckles? NOOOOOOOOOOO. I absolutely hate the sound. It makes me cringe and shiver. Do you have Photoshop? Yes. It comes in the Adobe CC photography bundle I have. Do you use tinypic or photobucket? I used Photobucket back in the day. Now I just upload to imgur. What’s your favourite song from the 1980s? You're talking to someone who adores classic rock/metal, haha. How about the 1990s? There are way too many songs to choose from. Have you won anything recently? No. How often do you make Excel tables? What for? Never. What was the last baby animal you saw in the wild? There was a poor fawn as roadkill on the highway recently. :/ Are you always available or online? Preeeetty much. Do you have dietary restrictions? Or do you just eat what you like? I can eat whatever. Do you prefer gold, silver or steel jewelry? Or no jewelry at all? Steel. I'm allergic to silver, and I think steel is more subtle than gold. Have you been binge-watching any shows lately? If so, what? No. If you dye your hair, do you do it yourself or go to a salon? I do it at a salon. If you have any, do you like your in-laws? I don’t have any. Would it bother you, if your partner had cut contact with their parents? If they had a good reason, no. Have you ever wondered whether you were adopted? As a kid I did because I thought Mom was meaner to me than my siblings, lol. What’s the best physical feeling in the entire universe? ........... This question is a setup lmfao. Have you ever grown a berry bush? No. Have you done something new to your hair recently? No. It's been the same for quite a while. I wanna dye it badly. Do you have bad anxiety? If so, do you take any kind of medication for it? I'm diagnosed with generalized and social anxiety, so yeah. I take Klonopin once and day and Ativan as needed for attacks. One thing you’ve experienced that you thought you never would have? HA, the first thing to come to mind was being noticed by Mark by making a viral (in the community, anyway) gif of he and his doggy. I shit you not, I couldn't sleep for three days lmfao. What was the last thing someone said to you that kept repeating over & over in your head? That I gained fucking seven pounds in two months at my last doctor appointment. I wanted to scream. How often do you have late nights out? Never. I'm a homebody. If you could, would you work from home? Do you think that would make you more or less productive? No. It would absolutely make me less productive. If you had the ability to change the weather, what would you change it to right now? Cool with a nice breeze, mostly clear skies, crisp air... That'd be nice right now. Is there something that you really need to do, but can’t seem to get motivated to do it? I say it all the time: finish decorating my room. It's funny, because I KNOW I'll feel more at home and cozy with my bedroom more personalized. Most disturbing movie you have ever seen? Paranormal Entity. The ending was... a lot. Has a life goal or dream ever come true for you yet? If yes, what is it? If no, do you think you’ll achieve it? Not that I can think of. .-. I hope I can achieve some... Have you ever had food poisoning? No, thank God. What are you listening to? "The Man Who Made a Monster" by Dance With the Dead. Do you think there will be a WWIII? I find it inevitable at some point down humanity's future. People are too hateful for it not to eventually. Has anyone ever asked you if you were emo? Yeah. Has someone ever liked you that you never thought would? Maybe? Idk. In all honesty, can a person be too nice? Yes, in some instances. Has one of your friend’s boyfriends ever tried to cheat on them with you? Yes, when I was around 12. And I let it happen. It's one of my biggest regrets. Is mental abuse really as bad as physical abuse? Of course it is. Emotional abuse can cut just as deep as some physical blows, or even deeper. Do you shop at Sephora for make-up? No. Zelda: Twilight Princess or Ocarina of Time? I'm actually not into TLoZ. Do you own a rosary? I did as a kid growing up in a Catholic Sunday school. If you were homeless, how would you cope? If I had no loved ones in my life and no sign of things getting better, I'm honestly preeetty sure I'd end my life.

[monkey-network]

My Issues with Butch Hartman

Call this the sequel to my post on Mr. Enter. But honestly compared to Enter, Butch Hartman has made himself look far worse in so little time. Not only with how he uses his influence, but he basically showed his true colors not long after he left Nickelodeon. With Enter, the worst you can say about him is his opinions on media and his politics. With Hartman, there is a surprisingly lot more under his belt that made the hate towards him .

To preface this, while I’m gonna shit on this dude, I’m not shaming anyone who still likes his past content. With that said, bibbity Boppity boopity. Let’s look at the fucking scoopity.

The Telltale Oaxis

This really takes the cake as the scummiest thing Butch has done. Words and opinions can be one thing, but using your platform to basically trick some people out of their money for a project you abandoned for the most part grinds me gears a lot more. As bad as his marketing strategy was, at least Enter provided effort in his indiegogo project beforehand for god’s sake. Oaxis is one of the most pitiable crowdfunded projects I’ve seen.

It’s nearly two years since Butch got Oaxis funded and what have gotten beyond pure dead silence. Nearly two years and little to no significant updates for Oaxis’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, his Youtube, or the site’s official account. No wait, that last part’s kind of a lie. They had monthly updates on the official site up until September 2019. Could’ve posted this on their social medias but you take what you can get. 

The major takeaway from the updates, in all fairness, was that the kickstarter wasn’t enough and they still need to raise more funds for the service. The “capital-building” stage he calls it where he’s looking for more investors in addition to getting actual programs onto the service. That and Oaxis is a big vision for Butch and his wife in spite of not only giving up the monthly updates and basically secluding any mention of Oaxis from any place else. That’s basically it and I legit feel sorry for everyone that couldn’t get their refund back.

This isn’t HBO Max or Disney+ where you just expect them to have something together after their initial announcement because they’re already media conglomerates, this is an independent project. One that people, your fans included Butch, put over 200K thinking you would at least give people something. But beyond a “sizzle reel” that said nothing aside from Oaxis going to be a thing, you have presented jack after two years. I don’t expect the ins and outs of every business meeting with executives, but staying silent about everything except for monthly newsletters that offer very little encouraging progress and hasn’t updated since September of last year is not a good sign. And I’m especially hard on this topic, Butch, because this is the biggest point where it is seriously hard to trust you. It’s not criticizing your ego when after having too many cracks in your story, you really haven’t put your money where your mouth is.

I don’t wanna presume the guy’s given up on it, hoping everybody would forget it after a while, but he’s really put the effort in to make Oaxis feel like a afterthought. I’m not an expert in business, but even I can believe that after his non-apology for not being upfront with his initial intentions, that he’d try to provide updates on the project to not come off as the scam artist people have accused him as. Even with his Youtube channel that I’ll get to later, I don’t think it’s hard consistently posting about your so called vision if you have that much faith in its success. You’ve already gotten thousands of bucks initially with the crowdfund, people deserve more than your pitiful wishful platitudes and I unfortunately can’t believe you’ll have anything after a few years. It’s not that everyone forgot about it, but you mostly took the money and ran. If Butch pops up with something if he sees this somehow, I’ll eat that crow, but I sincerely doubt it after this long. Like at least post something on the Twitter, I get depressed just looking at it; that account is the textbook definition of famine.

The Childhood Reposter

I’ve brought up Butch’s youtube channel a couple times, and it’s when every time I look at it, it’s a little sad. When it comes to major creators, I typically think that after finishing their projects they’d move to newer things. People like Lauren Faust, Mike Judge, CH Greenblatt are all continuing to make new works under differing studios while new creators are getting the spotlight. Butch though? I mean, he has a new cartoon that I swear you’ve never heard about but other than that, the dude looks like he has little to say for himself nowadays beyond the 2 shows he’s famous for, Fairly Odd Parents and Danny Phantom. I would’ve added TUFF Puppy and Bunsen is a Beast but I can see that those two aren’t his major players seeing as how they’re rarely ever mentioned on the channel.

If it’s not some watchmojo level meme video, almost every other video is about either two of those shows in some varied fashion. I get that he “created your childhood” and made credulous bank from Nickelodeon, but it’s like Danny Phantom is all that stands between him and having an audience. That and drawing anime characters in his style which is... y’know, I’ll leave that to you. It’s like he retired and yet goes on about the good old days like a fluctuating ego. He’s still making a cartoon but to him that’s hardly a factor compared to his known successes.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to just be known as the guy who made two of your countless beloved cartoons. Not that that’s all he talks about, but it’s the insistence of his legacy that unfortunately gives me Bojack Horseman vibes. He no doubt has a good thing going but I believe that this isn’t gonna last. Just saying, dude has 850K subscribers and unless it’s a real hook like with the recent Danny Phantom/Jake Long death battle, he’s hardly getting a good fraction of views anymore. There’s only so many times you can milk Danny Phantom as your masterpiece before everyone moves on.

The Holy Boast

I wanna make this short because I’m not a huge talker of religion, but I stand to say that you should NOT, under any circumstance, believe BPD, PTSD, autism, fucking heart & kidney failure can be “cured” or “healed” through sermons of prayer. This here? This is genuinely something else.

https://www.healingjourneys.today/

For clarity, this was a gospel conference hosted by Butch and his wife and yes, they openly proclaim that BPD, austism, and heart disease can be cured through prayer of holy worship.

Now, I’m gonna give a full disclosure right here because this most certainly biases my point here, like I’m gonna own this. But my grandpa was a religious man that suffer from health problems. He notably prayed to carry on, yes, but at the same time he sought medical help. Even he told me that prayers wasn’t gonna keep the pacemaker going, he went to the doctors and actually did more than read the bible to improve himself. He unfortunately passed, but he was in his 70s and I honestly couldn’t believe, as hard as I try, that he was gonna live forever. My grandpa would’ve no doubt died far earlier if he followed this conference’s logic.

My point is that this is personally unsettling. I seriously cannot believe this is how autism and religion works and it blows my mind that him and his wife thought this conference was a suitable idea. I’m not bashing them as christians, but thinking mental disorders and bodily diseases can be done away with motivational seminars because that’s basically what they are is a legit slap to the face. And the seedling idea that they’ve done this before blows my mind.

The Financial Flaker

This is very recent and everything is generally explained in the 12 minute video but long story short: Butch hired an artist and never paid them for their work. The artist in question, Kuro, describes what happened between him and Butch in this video and provides receipts. Can’t really add anything to this myself beyond this just builds to the idea that Butch cannot be trusted as a professional business maker. I believe he still has people working for him but from this video, it tells me that Hartman will gladly use those lower than him in favorable pursuits and will gladly throw ignorance when he wants to because his cartoon veteran status presents that shield from thinking he can do no wrong, which can mean throttling his hires.  Let’s end this.

The Conclusion

When I get down to it, Butch is almost a Machiavellian character in a way. It’s amazing how much the trust people have had with Hartman have evaporated in less than a couple years. It’s amazing how much his ego has truly shown after he stopped being a namestay in Nickelodeon. Haven’t even mentioned the times he arrogantly deflected criticism because he was a namestay at Nick and how a couple who’ve worked with are well aware of his ego. I can’t help but believe that even after everything, he claims ignorance to his fall from grace and keeps going. Even when more and more are knowing his true self, he’s mostly just doing what he’s been doing for the past few years.

It’s respectable in a way, but shows that the world will move on without him. Again, if you like Danny Phantom and Fairly OddParents, I won’t judge you for it nor say you should be ashamed. This isn’t about cancelling Butch, or get him to stop spreading whatever wacky things he believes in. It’s my personal take of how this man whom I once respected because of what he made before has lost every bit of that from me. It really feels like he grew up with that “I Created Your Childhood” mentality being a 4 time showrunner for almost a couple decades. And when he finally left Nickelodeon, I guess the chance to be that stand out self-made success got to his head and he finally showed his true colors. I now find it hard to believe Butch cares about the little guy that were his fans as much as he rides off his success and others who tolerate him. As such, like JK Rowling, more are seeing this side of him and leaving him behind. Meanwhile Butch is gonna chug on until he just loses steam. It’s kinda like Icarus where the guy will make every effort to fly to the sun. But sooner or later, he’s gonna fall, and in the end I doubt anyone’s gonna care to see it. I know he won’t.

[blackjack-15]

A Cursed Half-Game: Thoughts on: The Curse of Blackmoor Manor (CUR)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH, DOG, CAR, DDI, SHA

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with links to previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: mention of MHM, CUR, “The Bluebeard Room”(Nancy Drew Mystery), mention of Harry Potter, mention of Twilight.

The Intro:

Alright, time to pay the piper.

I haven’t exactly made it a secret that CUR is one of my least favorite games in this meta series, which is why I’ve kind of been dreading writing this meta. It’s not that I have nothing to say — quite the opposite — but more that I was worried about my own internal bias would make this meta boring, heavily one-sided, and (most of all) unpleasant to read. And while I’ve talked about games I dislike before (SCK and FIN primarily), CUR sits at many people’s #1 or #2 slots of Nancy Drew Games of all time, and there’s not much critique of it out there.

To make a long, rambling story short, I was most of all worried about being a lone, pedantic, soap-box bore rather than actually just working through the game. With that in mind, the first run-through of this meta was too much of a “compliment sandwich” type review, and didn’t say anything productive. And I hated writing it.

So instead, I’m just gonna play this straight. Let’s dive in, shall we?

The Curse of Blackmoor Manor is the first in a sequence of games that goes from CUR through CRE that I refer to as the “Jetsetting Games”, where HER decided to experiment with the locale of their games and be more (though not completely) conservative with their actual plots.

Nancy’s summoned to these cases for small, every day reasons — helping a neighbor, helping a friend, having fun with friends on a trip, an internship, etc. etc. — and a large part of the game is devoted towards the “oooh look we’re in this Weird Place!! This is so Weird and Cool! Look at this place!”. This isn’t a bad thing — two of my personal favorite games fall within this section — but it does represent a marked shift from the Classic (SCK—FIN) and Expanded (SSH—SHA) Games.

CUR as a game is perfectly emblematic of the Jetsetting Games; the setting (England and Blackmoor Manor) takes up most of the narrative room in the game, dictating what Nancy finds suspicious and what she ignores, and presents challenges that are simply due to the setting. Decoding cockney, the (horrific) old architecture and decorations, the “family legacy” spanning centuries — all of this relies on the setting rather than being justified within the mystery itself.

It continues with the full-screen approach that SHA presented, allowing for larger visual puzzles and more work being put into the actual setting, a quality that CUR largely benefits from, excepting the fact that it shows just how ugly some of the rooms really are.

CUR is also memorable for being the first absence of Bess and George, Nancy’s erstwhile phone compatriots, since their introduction, and the reoccurrence of Ned as a phone contact. I do find the absence of Bess and George a little odd in a game featuring one of Nancy’s (and thus one of Bess and George’s) neighbors, but Ned has been absent for the entire Expanded Games saga, so his presence is a fair trade-off.

I could go into the fact that I find it very curious and telling that the appearance of the Hardy Boys usually shunts Ned off to the side, if not out of the whole game, but that has nothing to do with CUR itself…so I shall forbear until a later date.

Though I don’t usually go into the actual book that the game is based on most of the time, it’s impossible to resist in this case.

CUR is actually based (loosely) on a book called “The Bluebeard Room”, notable for including the Cliché Trifecta — drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll — not to mention giving Nancy multiple romantic entanglements and being the book where Ned and Nancy decide to date other people. The title of the book is a reference to a room in Penvellyn Castle that Linda (or, in the book, Lisa) is forbidden to go into by Hugh.

“The Bluebeard Room” has two main plots that actually converge into one about 2/3 of the way through the book: drugs and witchcraft. A Penvellyn ancestor (who, oddly enough, is also Linda’s ancestor) from the 1700s was burned at the stake on supposition of witchcraft, leading those who still practiced it to form a secret coven, sending Nancy “elf darts” (which apparently look like arrowheads) as warnings/threats. The coven turns to drug smuggling and selling, but keeps the room in Penvellyn Castle previously used for witchcraft for their drug trade, threatening Hugh in order to keep it secret.

Nancy comes in because Linda is still her old neighbor and her mother still asks Nancy to go investigate why her daughter looks so sickly after her marriage. Linda’s mother suspects Hugh of poisoning his new wife, which is a great dark turn that I wish the game had kept. Nancy, hearing about this in the first chapter, faffs around a bit with the lead singer of a British band and sleuths about drugs for half the book (9 out of 18 chapters) before going to investigate this majorly time-sensitive issue.

In the biggest change from the game, there’s something actually physically wrong with Linda — she’s being poisoned. She’s worried that the townspeople don’t like her, but other than that and Ethel (a local retired games mistress and drug dealer in this book) doing fake seances to scare her and Nancy, she’s totally fine, psychologically speaking.

Nancy figures out that Ethel’s the one poisoning her via an “herbal remedy” and takes it to a doctor, but the doctor says that it’s harmless — due to the fact that the doctor is part of the Witch/Drug Coven as well. This discovery doesn’t really impact the plot, and Linda’s only real symptom is repeated sleepwalking towards various cliff-like structures so that Nancy can save her at the last moment.

This poisoning subplot is instead changed to psychological manipulation and gaslighting in CUR, and the entirety of the drug/witchcraft coven is taken out, leaving just the inciting incident and the new “poisoning”. Without the coven, Her Interactive had to find a new plot and a new culprit, and instead decided to take the incredibly minor genealogical plot in the book and blow it up to be the main plotline of the game.

In CUR, the Penvellyns take main stage, and a few Holmesian twists (the move from Polpenny to Dartmoor, the mysterious “beast” of Blackmoor) are thrown in to round out the game. CUR also takes one look at witchcraft and shakes its head, instead relying on more realistic things like Bad Science, Bad History, and Werewolves to carry the “haunting” aspect instead. The “Bluebeard Room” changes from a locked room to a secret passage, and Linda is shoved behind a curtain, never to be animated seen. Hugh Penvellyn is a ghost, only able to be called a few times, and Ethel is remarkably innocent, considering she’s the main bad guy in the book.

In the end, CUR has very little resemblance to its source material, and while it’s certainly not the only game that does this, I feel like it’s a great shame. Just including the whole spousal poisoning angle and letting us see Linda (if only at the beginning) would vastly improve the game — and before you say that spousal poisoning is too dark for HER, this is the same game that includes witch-burning as an integral point of history and has an outwardly abusive villain, so I think it’s a fair shot to include it.

The Title:

The Curse of Blackmoor Manor at first glance looks like your typical ‘haunting’ title…until you realize that it has little to do with the game itself.

For starters, the manor that Nancy explores is rarely referred to as “Blackmoor Manor”, so it’s easy to forget that the manor itself, according to the title, is supposed to be at the center of the mystery, when it’s really just a location to bottle Nancy into so that they had an excuse for not sending her to a pub.

The curse is also then at the center of the mystery via the title, and while it’s a part of it, I wouldn’t say it was the focus either. Even worse that the title places the curse on the manor, rather than on the inhabitants — The Curse of the Penvellyns (a bad title in itself for multiple reasons) would have at least been a more on-the-nose title while still keeping itself vague.

The problem that the title exposes is that this game leans way too heavily on the “ooh isn’t this spooky look at it” side and not enough on actual plot. “The Curse of Blackmoor Manor” shows immediately that Linda’s not the focus of the mystery, that the villain’s got to be a Penvellyn — if the manor is cursed, then it’s got something do to with the family, after all — which before the game really begins in earnest, already boils us down to the two actual Penvellyns in the cast.

Nancy, Linda, and Nigel are outsiders, and neither Hugh nor Ethel appear enough to be the villain by HER’s preestablished conventions, so the title has already closed opportunities, rather than opened them up, which is what a good title should do.

What really gets me is that this title is a great title…but not a great title for this game. I feel like it’s a waste of a really good, provocative title on a game that doesn’t live up to it nor is defined by it, and I think that’s a real shame.

And speaking of living up to things and closed opportunities, let’s take a look at the mystery.

The Mystery:

Mrs. Petrov, Nancy’s neighbor, asks her help to go see what’s wrong with her recently-married daughter who now resides in her husband’s native England.

Because when you’re worried about your child, send the recent high school graduate in your neighborhood rather than going yourself. Alas, the Plot Must, so away Nancy goes on a jet plane to Merry Olde England.

Nancy discovers that it might not be so Merry after all when she arrives and immediately hears howling and snuffling, running into the Manor for safety from the possible werewolf outside. (Yes, this game drops the Werewolf Bomb that early.) Linda refuses to talk much to Nancy, claiming that the girl detective wouldn’t be able to help her, and Nancy finds that most of the rest of the inhabitants of the house aren’t too keen on her presence either.

With the help of Ned (in his first appearance since FIN!), a lycanthropy researcher (yes, I know) named Paliki Vadas, and a talking, possibly immortal parrot, Nancy must solve the case, figure out what’s going on with Linda, and along the way uncover a creepy family cult centuries in the making.

The bare bones of this mystery are quite similar to a lot of the Nancy Drew games, and are solid on their own. Besides the fact that we’re missing the usual suspect in cases like these — aka the spouse — it’s a fairly cut-and-dried plot, which is a plus to the game as it has to sell quite a few very odd things.

Even adding in the werewolf stuff (which, once again, occurs too early in the game), the mystery still isn’t too out there…until you remember that the werewolf stuff also includes ridiculously anachronistic technology, dubious history, an immortal parrot (parrots of Lulu’s size and coloring would live at most 50 years, not the 80+ she’s got under her wing), and a secret family society. While one or two of those can (and have) go together and still make for a solid, believable mystery, having all of them occur at once does stretch this mystery further than it should be.

The mystery as laid out in the beginning is a solid 7/10, but as it is added to over the course of the game degrades until you’re looking at something silly, unbelievable, and just plain odd, placing it at around a 3/10. The “twist” of who the culprit really is only works if you’re the type to pass over a child as a suspect, so if you’re not that type, it doesn’t add to the mystery at all.

What really hurts the mystery (and the game) the most is that CUR is, at best, plot-optional (if not plot-avoidant). While the puzzles are front-and-center (infuriatingly so in some portions, where Nancy can do five or six puzzles in a row without any real story push behind them), what little story there is often hides behind events that are hard (or sometimes impossible) to trigger and require a guide to achieve even most of them (like the guinea pig note, which requires Nancy to enter a room before doing the puzzle that guards the room).

Even then, there’s no guarantee that you’ll hear Brigitte’s ballad, that you’ll see Linda roaming, or anything else that gives you a better chance at unpacking the mystery. (In my latest playthrough with my friend, who played for the first time, we only got one “haunting” scene, despite setting alarms throughout the night to attempt to trigger them for at least a week in-game).

You need every haunting to actually make this a fair-play mystery, and the fact that you can miss all of them shows that they didn’t care about the plot/story.

All of the puzzles and garish rooms and promises of nightly hauntings can have the effect of duping the player into thinking more is going on plot-wise than it seems, but when you take it apart, all you have is some spooky music and flashes, and an endless stream of Halloween-at-the-school-gym puzzles without much of anything to tie them together.

The Suspects:

Linda Penvellyn is the person that Nancy’s hired to help, and is the source of one of the most far-fetched plots in any Nancy Drew game. Due to circumstances out of her control, Linda believes that she’s been cursed for exploring a secret passageway and is turning into a werewolf. Because of this, she’s taken to eating incredibly rare meat, shutting herself in her curtained bed, and only roaming around at night for fear of discovery. She refuses to talk to Nancy because she wants the girl detective to leave before she’s cursed too.

Had the game been done better, Linda would have been a heart-wrenching character — a young woman alone in a new house and new country where no one seems to like her and her spouse, who is the whole reason she’s in that situation, is rarely present, leaving her with unknown and unfriendly in-laws. On top of that, she’s being gaslit in order to think that she’s turning into a werewolf, her hands are growing terrifying amounts of hair, and her own brain is sabotaging her. Even when someone she knows turns up to help, she’s terrified that she’ll go through the same thing as well, and thus keeps to herself as much as possible.

However, because most of this is glossed over in the game, Linda gets little sympathy and is instead treated as strange and possibly dangerous, but ultimately as a character of little weight. She doesn’t speak much and she’s never animated, and the most humanity we get of her is her worry for Nancy and whatever her mother says about her.

Linda is thus a non-entity as a character and as a possible culprit, and is mainly just there to give Nancy a reason to be there so that she can unravel the actual “focus” (such as it is) of the game: The Penvellyn Secret. And speaking of…

Ethel Bossiny is Jane’s tutor and the most terrifying part of the game by a long shot, courtesy of her multiple jump scares. Though not a Penvellyn herself, Ethel is a keeper of their Secret, and is part of a long line of tutors to the Penvellyns, helping each “chosen” Penvellyn learn their history, navigate the ludicrous series of puzzle guards, and leave their own to protect the Sacred Penvellyn Rock.

Sarcasm aside, Ethel would be a good choice for the culprit — not the least of which because she’s one of the villains in the source material — except for the fact that she shows up too little to be the actual culprit. By this point in the series, HER has hammered out its formula pretty well, establishing the 4-suspects-to-a-plot standard and requiring that the baddie must be able to be interrogated. As Ethel only shows herself to Nancy twice, the game’s interface itself spoils the fact that she’s not the culprit.

Her section in this meta is short because, frankly, the game doesn’t care about her — not even enough to really give her any backstory at all besides her job — so why should I?

Her charge, on the other hand, has a little more to do.

Jane Penvellyn is Hugh’s bratty daughter and Linda’s abusive step-daughter. She enjoys being raised by her (from all appearances, highly irresponsible) mother and resents being taken back to England because her father remarried (though she Doesn’t Mind being the next Initiate). That alone would make for an understandable character (though at 12 [and as a character who is supposed to have at least reached puberty], Jane is just slightly too old to not have that feel a little childish), but Jane takes it to the next level.

Faced with the common feeling of kids whose parents are divorced, Jane is upset that her parents didn’t remarry, and decides to make it everyone else’s problem. She first experiments on her guinea pig, killing it, then (instead of stopping there like most people because hey something has died) turning her experiment onto her step-mother, gaslighting her (and putting hair growth serum in her lotion) into believing that she’s turning into a werewolf. Jane continues this after Linda becomes a recluse suffering from paranoia, depression, and a lack of nutrition, trying to get her to crack so completely that she leaves.

Jane is one of the most horrific Nancy Drew villains due to her sheer lack of remorse. The ending tries to play it down like “oh Jane stop pranking your stepmother, you silly thing, here’s a slap on the wrist” but like…her being a tween doesn’t make what she’s doing any less horrific.

She’s also not particularly clever, getting away with this simply because no one bothers to check on her or to be more than just slightly helpful to Linda in a hands-off sort of way.

The whole game hinges on the fact that HER thought that no one would consider the 12-year-old as a suspect…except, like in Ethel’s case, the mechanics of the game work against them, as Jane is firmly in the “suspect” territory due to her availability and the fact that Nancy can question her. Once again, if the concept of “a child can’t be a suspect” doesn’t work on you, then there’s no reason at all that the player won’t figure it out in the first 1/3 of the game.

Letitia Drake is Linda’s mother in law and the current matron of Blackmoor Manor while Hugh is out doing Diplomatic Things. The most British stereotype ever, Mrs. Drake is Posh and Tightly Laced while secretly a bit more human than she seems, attempting to care for Linda in the most hands-off ways she can think of.

She’s also the source of a dangling plot thread about the inheritance and ownership of Blackmoor Manor, making a fuss about it without it actually mattering.

The inheritance plotline isn’t enough to make Letitia a compelling culprit, however. She’s given book!Ethel’s role of giving Linda herbal remedies, but unlike book!Ethel, these are actually meant to help her, rather than introduce cocaine into the poor woman’s system. Her greenhouse is by far the most visually enjoyable part of the game, and a welcome change from the haphazardly-decorated rooms of the rest of the manor.

Finally, rounding out this estrogen-heavy cast is Nigel Mookerjee, a historian studying the Penvellyns and camping in their library to write the most boring memoirs of all time. He hangs out in the library doing research while the actual history of the library lurks in every corner outside of the library, so bad luck there, Nigel.

Nigel is…I hesitate to call him fully a non-entity, but he’s more of a comic relief character than anything else. He gives Nancy a few pieces of information, but is mainly there to round out the cast and to make the player laugh during what could be a tense game/moments for younger players (scaring him with the statue is probably one of the most overt, in-your-face laugh-out-loud moments in the series).

Nigel is never really in contention for “villain” status, as he has nothing to gain by hurting Linda, and thus pretty much disappears from the player’s (and Nancy’s) mind for the last third of the game — and not just because he runs out screaming. The thing that hurts him most as a character is the fact that either Paliki Vadas or Hugh Penvellyn (voiced by good ol’ Jonah Von Spreecken, in case you were worried that CUR wouldn’t give you your recommended dose of Vitamin J) would have been far more welcome as the fifth suspect (more on that in The Fix), making Nigel seem even more piddling and tiny than he was when he was born.

(Side note: after working as an admissions officer for a private university, I can say that I have had more than a few students begin an essay with some variant of “when I was born, I was very tiny”, so someone at HER either knew what they were doing or got lucky in making a joke.)

The Favorite:

Even though this review tends towards the negative, there are positives to be found.

My favorite moment in the game, sadly, would have to be when Nancy hits on that one statue during the first game in three full years where she can call her boyfriend. Either that or a few of the more subtle hauntings (like seeing Linda in the robe in the hallway — and yes, I do know that it’s slightly sad that that’s one of the more subtle ones).

The other moment that’s up for honors is where Nancy discovers Corbin’s crest (the crest that was lost due to the Penvellyns fleeing to France). Jane is dismissive of him, but Corbin is by far the most interesting Penvellyn — his crest even declares his loyalty to his bloodline, no matter where he was living — and designed the gargoyle puzzle (and ostensibly the curse beyond it).

Corbin is actually the Penvellyn with the most effect on the story (as the curse is what freaks Linda out in the first place) and I think it’s great that Jane doesn’t even realize that she’s a mirror image of him — displaced to Blackmoor, rather than away from it, having ties to a different country, etc. The big difference between the two is that, from what we know of him, Corbin is actually intelligent, subtle, and doesn’t spend his time abusing his relations.

My favorite puzzle in a game that’s pretty much nothing but puzzles is the Cockney Rhyming Slang. Sure, it’s not a traditional puzzle, but it’s super interesting, introduces the players to something they might never have heard of (especially at age 10, the lowest age HER recommends), and is a nice break from…well, all the other puzzles in the game.

I also don’t mind Lulu, as impossibly, ridiculously old as she is. HER does try to sprinkle Trustable Allies throughout the series — Miles the Magnificent Memory Machine being the standout — that Nancy can rely on for the cold, hard truth, and Lulu isn’t a bad attempt at the trope.

Lastly, I do really like that this is the first Nancy Drew game to take us out of the United States. Yes, the location is limited in scope and has nothing but accents to pin it down to anywhere specific, but it’s something new and different, and opened up the world of Nancy Drew to a considerable degree.

The Un-Favorite:

First off, this game does not do enough with Ned to justify his inclusion after so long an absence, and it doesn’t make sense that Bess and George wouldn’t be able to weigh in with Nancy about their neighbor. There should always be a rhyme or reason to why Nancy calls her specific contacts during a case, and this one is particularly egregious.

My least favorite moment in the game is definitely the beginning sequence (tied with the end sequence). The howling of the “beast”, the immediate slap in the face with the visual terror that is the great hall, the feeling of claustrophobia of being stuck in the Manor…none of these are things that excite me to play the game. Add in the last sequence, where past Penvellyns pretty much guaranteed that someone is going to die down there and Jane being a huge brat (and getting off way too easy), and it becomes quite easy to see why both the beginning and the end leave a bad taste in my mouth.

My least favorite puzzle is a little bit of a harder question. I don’t tend to list puzzles that can be solved easily with a walkthrough on here because, well, they can be easily solved by a walkthrough.

The whole maze and glowstick sleuthing, however…wow I hate it so much. It’s horrible that the glowsticks burn out so quickly, having to solve the maze over and over again (or use the shortcut, which the game doesn’t give you even after having completed it once like normal Nancy Drew puzzles)…it’s enough to make me close my computer and go take a nice relaxing bath before I overrun the Her Interactive office with mail-order rats.

If we’re going with puzzles that can’t be cheated with a walkthrough, then Betty takes the cake — for a few different reasons.

The automaton, commissioned in 1775, is based off The Turk, a master chess player automaton which debuted in 1770 — and which was a fraud, being operated in secret by a handful of chess masters to give the appearance of a working automaton. Betty is supposed to be a genuine automaton capable of playing a complex game (cards rather than chess, which would have fit better in 30 years during the Regency, when card parties were commonplace), built 5 years after The Turk made its debut.

I realize that what HER was attempting to do was to show how smart the Penvellyns were, and to scratch the Robot Itch that they seem to get every couple of games…but to put something so incorrect in a game is galling, especially as the Nancy Drew games are still in full-on edutainment mode. Part of learning the history of the Penvellyns is to allow the player to watch the advancements in technology and innovation throughout the 600+ years of Penvellyn lore, and to have Betty as the 1775 puzzle (and also used by the next initiate, Brigitte) is a slap in the face to the real inventors and geniuses of the time.

Betty is also as out-of-place as Alan’s puzzles are; CUR relies of the feeling of Ancient Magics and Rituals to keep Blackmoor Manor feeling appropriately spooky, and both Betty and the “ghosts” puzzle yank the player out of the world. Not only is it bad history and bad science, it’s bad aesthetic, and it cuts through any suspension of disbelief that CUR has managed so far with a knife.

Don’t even get me started on his crest having the GIGO principle bungled into quasi-Latin.

The Fix:

So how would I fix Curse of Blackmoor Manor?

The largest fix I would attempt (remembering that I’m trying to keep the fixes as small as possible) is to move the Werewolf Bomb from the first minute of the game to much later. In the Nancy Drew World, ghosts really and truly exist — even if they aren’t the culprit in any mystery — but it’s quite a jump from ghosts to werewolves, and an even bigger jump from werewolves to a character possibly being a werewolf.

I realize that the shift from witchcraft to werewolves was an attempt to jump on the small but growing bandwagon of paranormal fiction/romance (Twilight, for example, would come out the next year) and to disassociate the game from allegations of witchcraft in children’s/juvenile fiction (HER already received flack for it in MHM, and Harry Potter was receiving similar allegations). However, it does fit much less nicely than witchcraft would have (as you could have simply said that the “beast” of Blackmoor was the noises from the scientific experiments, a la HAU) and should definitely be moved.

A good point to move it to is the 1/3 mark in the game, after Nancy’s “nightmare” — placing it there would give Nancy a good reason to have the nightmare matter to her, and would make it seem like the Beast of Blackmoor is actually a Scary Thing that they don’t want to reveal to an outsider/foreigner/what have you, rather than feeling like the legend of a mischievous family pet.

Fixing the ending and having Jane actually punished for what she does (and having is acknowledged more than Nancy half-jokingly calling her a “beast) would go a long way towards improving the game. It’d also be good to mention Linda getting professional help and her and Hugh working out a compromise so that she’s not always at home while he’s always away.

In the other big change I’d make, throwing out Nigel (who is functionally useless) or relegating him to a small, Ethel-sized role (even better, a phone contact) and replacing the fifth “suspect” with either Paliki Vadas or Hugh Penvellyn himself would create more mystery, disguise the real culprit, and give some much needed plot into the game.

For Paliki, the werewolf researcher, including her as a physical suspect would entail something like her visiting Blackmoor to research the Beast (given permission by Hugh, who wants the family name cleared) and asking/telling Linda all about it to get an “outsider’s perspective”. Nancy would be drawn in by the possibility that Paliki was using her Psychologist Know-How and the power of suggestion (with a dash of poison/hair growth serum) to make Linda really think that she was becoming a werewolf in order to study her or catch a big break in the publishing community by “revealing” her.

Having Nancy get the system of poisoning figured out while attributing it to the wrong suspect would make Nancy look much smarter than she comes across in this game, and would give Nancy something concrete to investigate rather than bouncing from puzzle to puzzle.

Paliki could easily switch between the library during the day and that one chair in Linda’s room during the evening, giving you a chance to snoop through each area without her being there and giving another place to find clues (as well as making Linda’s bedroom an actually usable and useful location).

If HER instead went with making Hugh the fifth physical suspect, it would be a great reveal to have him be a phone contact in the first half of the game (certainly no later than the halfway point) and then revealing that he’s actually been hiding in the manor the whole time (some of the nighttime spooks that Nancy sees are revealed to be him), having come home early — or even never left — to try to catch who was hurting his wife right in the act of it.

Nancy suspects him because he lied about where he was and because she thinks that Hugh might want the notoriety of a crazy wife — especially if he’s thinking about leaving his job and doesn’t know how to quit. He could be discovered in the greenhouse room, sitting amongst the plants, or even occupying the Great Hall after he’s discovered. His inclusion would be particularly good if Nancy starts out the case with Mrs. Petrov priming her to think that Hugh is poisoning his wife (like in The Bluebeard Room).

Those are just two options, but I think they show how easy it would have been to interject more than just a shadow of a plot into this game, and how much HER missed out on by simply not putting any effort into the writing.

CUR isn’t the worst game that HER has ever made, but it does stick out as a game filled with bells and whistles and no actual substance, and I think it’s a shame that it gets praised for its flashiness and ridiculous plot when better games are overlooked because of it.

[grump-the-deer]

stuff about HDM ep 8 + overall season thoughts

in other words.....

FINALE TIME BITCHES

this episode was INCREDIBLE. A+++, perfection.

this is what I expected from the get-go, and what I got a lot of the time.

we got some great exposition + bonding double time with Asriel, some excellent portrayal of Asriel and Marisa’s relationship, plenty of dæmons being cool and adorable respectively (Pan and Salcilia running around playing anyone???), some STUNNING visuals, an epic little fight scene with the fire-hurlers and the zeppelins, some great culmination for Iorek and Lyra’s relationship, good ol’ Thorold development, some more Lyra & Roger development (ESPECIALLY the tent and end scenes - Roger’s death KILLED ME OH MY GOD) - just the perfect fuckin meal.

this was exceptional. round of applause for HDM.

(except the Will being 15 thing. what? why is he so old? he could pass for a tall 13- or 14-year-old. that makes it a little weird. I hope Lyra is supposed to be like 13 now then, idk. that’s still a pretty big difference at that age.)

I really have to wonder though - if they show they can do the above stuff perfectly, why didn’t they do it before???

the Bolvangar episode still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. this episode proves that they can make intercision horrific and emotional, and make it mean something with the dæmons interacting. Salcilia and Roger had good reactions - hell, Lyra reacting to remembering almost being separated from Pan was more emotional than the actual scene itself!! Roger’s death was HEARTBREAKING, thanks to his and his dæmon’s reactions!

they put the dæmons in enough, especially in speaking roles, that even when they weren’t around you didn’t really forget about them. I could always do with more background dæmons, but I can absolutely understand budget restraints - so long as you put them in enough. we need to feel they have an emotional impact on the characters. we need to feel like they ARE characters. not accessories.

Pan was a character in this episode. the things he says and do make an impact on the story. he was not a character in the Bolvangar episode, despite the fact that that was the MOST IMPORTANT episode for him to be around and active in.

they can do it right, but they didn’t. this series would be wonderful if they cut out that episode and reshot it and replaced it with a better take. hell, even just the intercision scene. it wouldn’t be perfect, but it would work.

so, overall:

HDM season 1 was a spectacular ride. the dæmons and bears look fantastic (when they’re actually in the shots), the voices are spot-on, the actors do a phenomenal job, and the writers actually added some interesting extra material and development.

some highlights for me are:

- Iorek and Lyra’s relationship. they got it absolutely perfect, if not better than the original. Iorek is perfectly stoic and bearlike and resolute, but Lyra earns his respect and even adoration, as best a bear can. it feels organic and has plenty of development scenes. just heartwarming.

- Lord Asriel all around. really awesome take on him, James MacAvoy loves him to pieces I can tell. he’s way better than the original, and that’s saying something. he’s got a lot more heart and I feel more connected to him despite him being a complete mad genius.

- Mrs. Coulter, for the most part. she’s got a bit of shaky characterization with Lyra towards the end - I’m not really certain of her motivations at the end - but generally she’s fascinating to watch on screen and absolutely horrible. I love her and I love Ruth Wilson as her. she’s positively uhinged. they did some really bold stuff with her character and her relationship with Lyra and I enjoyed every minute of it.

- Farder Coram ended up being great. he and Lyra are always a pleasure to watch interact. he really grew on me as soon as he started getting characterization, particularly with Serafina and the story of his son.

- the cinematography, lighting, set design, and graphics. I couldn’t ask for anything more. they went above and beyond and the framing and this world and its creatures look AMAZING. 10/10. hats off to the animation team in particular, of course.

- the acting. the acting is absolutely brilliant. particular standouts include Dafne Keen as Lyra, of course, James MacAvoy as Lord Asriel, Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Coulter, the voice of Iofur Raknison, and Farder Coram. honorable mention for Will, because he gets the character down so incredibly well.

- the respect for the source material. we’ve seen it blow up once with the Golden Compass movie, but this production obviously has every ounce of loyalty to the original. well, almost every ounce. the stuff they added ended up working very well and feeling organic to the original, and the stuff they kept, especially the verbatim lines, was delivered exceptionally. it’s clear they really care about the story they’re giving us.

- the opening credits are the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. a beautiful tribute to the magic of this series’ themes and world.

and some notably bad stuff, a couple that almost come close to ruining it for me:

- Lee Scoresby. an absolute mess. one moment he’s true to the original character and being sarcastic and selfish, and the next he’s stealing pocketwatches for funsies, yelling out his dangerous motivations in the middle of a town infested with armed Magisterium soldiers, and cooing over Lyra like she’s his flesh and blood and he got injected with Mother Hen Juice. he’s genuinely stupid. his characterization is all over the place. his “development” with Lyra is either nonexistent or rushed, and the only thing he actually does for the plot is fly the damn balloon for about 5 minutes tops. Hester is his only saving grace, and even she can’t do it all. I’m sorry Lin, I really love your work in Hamilton, but this was really disappointing. and I have to blame the writing mainly. they wouldn’t let Lin act a character, they had to shape the character around him. and the whole thing suffered for it.

- the intercision, and dæmon relationships. the Bolvangar episode wasn’t terrible overall, but it did not build up well to the intercision scene, and the episodes around it didn’t help either - especially the previous one. Billy’s death was not sad for me, because the middle of the show did not utilize dæmon relationships with their humans and dæmons as actual characters. we didn’t see them interacting enough with their people to matter consistently to us. the first couple of episodes did this bonding beautifully, even with budget restraints to how many dæmons could be in a shot, and how frequently they could come up. they showed us just enough for us to care about them and what they mean to their humans, particularly Pan and Lyra, and conveniently kept them out of frame when they weren’t necessary to the dialogue between humans.

they can do it properly, but they chose to let it fall by the wayside towards the middle, and it really shot the show in the foot. almost irreparably, I’d wager. Bolvangar, for all its masterful horror trope usage and suspense, was not nearly horrific enough nor emotional at all, thanks to the lack of buildup. we did not care about dæmons and their humans beyond knowing the humans are basically dead without them. there was no feeling behind the threat of Lyra and Pan getting split apart, other than Lyra becoming a shell. the focus was on Lyra and Mrs. Coulter’s relationship, which I don’t have a problem with - but not at the cost of Lyra and her dæmon. you know, the very FIRST line of the books? the main theme of the entire book? arguably the whole SERIES? dæmons as souls, as a person’s sense of free will and consciousness? kind of important to develop an emotional attachment to, don’t you think?

- the Gyptian leads (sans Farder Coram). Ma Costa was passable. she did a lot of crying and a lot of being desperate and pining for her son, and not a lot of kicking ass, proportionally. she didn’t come off as a strong boat mother at the center of her family with sway in her community. she came off as a wiry and lost soul who is somewhat capable but more interested in being depressed and worried. she did get to shine when she killed the Bolvangar doctor, but that wasn’t enough for me.

John Faa was boring. he was a hardass and only every so often came across as the original jovial, caring, but no-nonsense King of the Gyptians. most of the time he was just telling someone not to do something or insisting someone do something. no real personality other than being serious.

Billy Costa had no real character. a waste, considering we’re supposed to care about his death.

Tony Costa was alright. he was kind of a loser, which I guess is okay. I liked capable Tony and his gobbler-fightin’ gang from the books better though. he had a couple good moments with Lyra, and Benjamin was a good addition.

- the themes of belonging. I don’t like how they changed the message about Lyra belonging in different groups. the point isn’t that she can “be anyone she wants to be” - that’s not how real life works, or should work. she can live with the gyptians and like them, but Ma Costa in the books asserts that she can’t be a gyptian, because she’s not part of their ethnic group. a similar message was overlooked with the bears - Iorek gave her the name Silvertongue because of his deep respect for her and what she had done for him, not because she was “one of us bears” now. she isn’t a bear, she’s a human.

the point is that she doesn’t have to be something to find an emotional home with the people themselves. it’s about what she builds, surpassing what she is - which is a product of two twisted, misguided people - taking what’s given to her and making it into something beautiful of her own volition. it’s a very nuanced theme and it’s basically thrown aside in this adaptation in favor of pseudo-colorblindness theory that origins don’t matter and you can stuff yourself anywhere you please. it’s not a deal-breaking point and most people probably won’t pay attention to it, but it’s worth mentioning anyway.

-

so overall, the show was really really spectacular. a ton of fun, beautifully crafted, with a few hiccups and one major major issue. the dæmon thing gouged out a good chunk of the enjoyment for me, and the integrity of the actual story too. a huge huge blunder on Jack Thorne’s part. I’d like to say they recovered from it, because they did do a pretty great job wrapping things up, but it still lingers in the back of my mind as a big blemish on an otherwise incredible work.

I have high hopes for the future seasons though, when dæmons aren’t around as frequently and less characters are on screen, so there will be more time and budget available to be devoted to them, particularly Pan as a character. they’ve shown they can handle this material skillfully, and I have a good amount of faith in them. I can’t wait to see what else they do with the concepts I’ve come to adore so much.

[nautiscarader]

Okay, so I’ve seen Crimes of Grindelwald (spoilers)

And boy, is this movie disappointing. 

Now, the first instance of Fantastic beasts was already hit-and-miss, but the plot to this movie was just freaking bizarre. And it pulled a few weird moves that even a hardcore Potterhead like myself consider out of place.

Let’s start with the positives: The movie does look amazing, and several scenes were really breath-taking, including the opening chase, and the final battle. Whether they made sense is a different thing, but they looked awesome.

I did like the ultimate reveal of Grindelwald’s plot. He wants wizards to take over muggles’ world because of a prophecy, or rather a vision of the future. Most notably, World War II. 

That scene in the Lestrange’s family vault, where Grindelwald breathed the... uh, skull fumes... which in turn showed the vision of London Blitz, concentration camps and a freaking nuclear bomb was absolutely chilling. And Jacob’s reaction to it was blood-freezing, given he was a veteran of WWI already.

so, that makes Grindelwald’s “greater good” plan actually competent and multi-dimensional. He’s evil, he wants to treat muggles as a cattle and workforce, but you can see the original skewed thinking of the young Gellert there. That, i think was executed really well.

This is something I wanted to see for a long, long time. We know from Pottermore (and first movie, I think) that wizards did participate in WWI, and I wanted to see how that will be integrated into the HP universe. We only got a glimpse of it, but it was a powerful one.

Queenie’s plot was, for the most part, very interesting. She seems on plan with subduing muggles into obedience, though of course, she draws a conclusion that it’s okay, even though she is doing it on a man who already is in love with her. But that shows how twisted her perspective is.

The beasts were kinda cool! Newt has a flat in London, which, again, is bigger on the inside than outside, and he’s still pulling off Matt Smith’s performance as The Doctor. And he keeps a freaking Kelpie in a pool in basement. Which may be a library 

Also he has a maid that is totally in love with him.

Zouwu, a.k.a. not manticore, a.k.a. big magical Chinese lion that could breathe fire and jump a hundred feet but when you jingle some bells he enters his big fluffy cat mode, was freaking amazing.  

Jude Law as Dumbledore is phenomenal. He really encapsulates all the charm, and wisdom, as well as ability to manipulate as his older incarnations.

And now onto the bad stuff.

So, here’s the thing. FB movies seems to be in-canon only with the HP movies. I think. I honestly don’t know. And the problem with that is as follow: Harry Potter movies sucked. Even the best ones had massive cuts, the plot had to be twisted or crammed. I have always wondered how does it feel to watch HP movie without reading HP book.

Well, now I know.

Every freaking second you think that this minute-long scene in the movie would be at least three pages long in the book, and all the magical shit that is pulled off would have been explained previously in tiniest details. EXCEPT THERE IS NO BOOK NOW.

And this is a genuine problem. There is a lot of magic pulled from nowhere. Like, for example, Newt and Jacob arrive in France looking for Queenie and Tina. And then Newt takes off some gold powder thing, scatters it around and ... it just shows the past?! Like, echoes of what happened, and it shows Tina walking, meeting with a black guy, etc. 

Now, we know seeing the past of *spells* is possible - Priori Incantatem can do that, but if we can just rewind the whole scene, then... why don’t Aurors do it all the time?! Where was that powder in Goblet of Fire when Ministry of Magic were investigating who conjured the Dark Mark?!

Secondly, future-seeing. In HP, it is quite heavily established that even wizards think that predicting the future is rubbish and only powerful seers can really do it. 

in CoG, we see two examples: Nicholas Flamel (admittedly, a powerful wizard) uses crystal ball to see what will happen at the graveyard, and Grindelwald himself uses... the skull-thingy. 

Okay, that needs explaining. So, Deppy-Depp here has the skull and it has some sort of pipe attached to it, and he smokes through it, and breathes out smog, and that smog shows the future.

I’d say you need to be high to invent this, but that is exactly what it looks like. 

There is a skull-bong in Harry Potter universe now.

And again, it seems to be working 100% time correctly. So yeah, ditch the seers, use this instead. Whatever it is. 

The movie shows Grindelwald and Dumbledore’s past, to an extent, and we also see some weird blood-pact-amulet thing. Again, very poorly explained. I guess it prevents them from hurting each other, hence they both use others (Dumbledore newt and Grindelwald Credence).

Also, Dumbledore is teaching Defense Against Dark Arts in Hogwarts. In the books, he was a transfiguration professor in his youth. Also, professor McGonnagal seems to be teaching in his years.

in 1927.

EIGHT YEARS BEFORE SHE WAS BORN.

OOPS.

And, honestly, she is only for a brief comedic moment. She could be substituted with a freaking Mickey Mouse, and it would have had no change on the plot whatsoever. 

Ah, well, that leads us to Credence. So, there is whole subplot about him apparently being a lost Lestrange. That coincides with the fact that both Theseus and Newt are in love with Credence’s supposed sister, Leta, so now we have two people looking for him. Oh, wait, we have a third one: a new French-African dude who is supposed to be a third Lestrange. This subplot honestly kinda goes nowhere. Turns out that the third lestrange was killed by Leta by accident, and Credence is...

Dumbledore’s brother.

yeah, this makes no fucking sense. 

I watched a review from a die-hard potter fan, and even she calls that move “like taken from worst fanfic”. And there is a reason for it.

See, when I finished watching FB1, I immediately joined the idea of Obscurus - a powerful, magical parasite that manifests in a particularly powerful wizard or witch, and can ultimately destroy them - with Ariana Dumbledore - Albus’ sister. This was a big, big, big deal in Deathly Hallows. So I was overjoyed when I learned that Dumbledore would be in the movie. Maybe the reason he takes interest in finding Credence was to see if there is a way to bring Ariana back, or whether she suffered in her death, or, hell, if he can help another child.

And, I guess it can still happen. But... where the bloody hell does that brother thing come from?! Now, it’s not confirmed, I think, and it is only told to credence by Grindelwald, but he also reveals that the bird Credence was taking care of is in fact, a phoenix, a bird that is tied to Dumbledore’s family. 

So... is he a Dumbledore? Really? How... How does that work?

And there are a lot of weirder problems in this movie. Like, at some point, Tina and Newt go to French Ministry of Magic to pull Leta’s family tree, and it is stored in the least practical fucking room with revolving pillars or something. 

Also, they go the evil mean librarian, and Tina simply says “I’m Lestrange”, and she is like “okay”.

No wand-checking?! No protective spells?! What?!

And, mind you, they are on the chase; Newt drinks polyjuice potion to look like Theseus, and it only works for maybe five minutes, as opposed to an hour, and there are posters of Newt all over French MoM. So, how the bloody hell didn’t the mean librarian notice him and raise an alarm. Or better - WHY DOESN’T SHE FUCKING STUN HIM?!

Eventually she does bring back her army of CGI multiplying cats, but that happens after Tina and Newt kinda find what they were looking for.

Edit: Oh, yeah, and one wizard can WALK THROUGH FUCKING WALLS.

Like, he has a noclip cheat turned on. WAHT.

Eh, I’m not gonna lie, this film was bad on several different levels. It had lots of good elements in it, but the bad ones do overweight them for me. And with “Cursed Child” and all of that, I really feel bummed to see one of my favourite franchises gets kinda destroyed and distorted.

I guess this is how Star Wars fan felt when the prequels came out...? Except we have three more.

[woohooligancomics]

Six Tips to Kickstarter Success!

How do you build a career as a creative person? I mean a real career, one that pays your bills, not a side-gig that's obviously important to you but that you have to supplement by sacking people's fidget spinners at your local Walmart. Learning how to do that is a difficult thing and I certainly don't have it all figured out, but I've learned a lot over the years and I'd like to share some of what I've learned with you, to help you reach your creative career goals.

A couple weeks ago I found this Kickstarter campaign for a comic series called the Millennials. It was a few days before the end of the campaign and with only one backer it was obvious this campaign wouldn't fund. But I also saw something else; I saw myself in the creator, Jay Wallace. I saw many of the mistakes I personally made when I was much younger. That's why I'm writing this. I know some of these lessons are hard to hear, and often hard to learn, heck I forgot a couple of the most basic rules of marketing when I overhauled my Patreon page recently. So I think a post-mortem analysis of a failed campaign like this can be very helpful to us as we move forward wether it's with this project or a new one.

First, if you're like a lot of us and you've internalized this idea that marketing is bad, like the sleazy car salesman who just wants to sell you a lemon and take his bonus home, you need to get that picture out of your head. Sales and marketing aren't bad, in fact you're already marketing and selling, you just don't know it. Do you have a job? Then you've sold something: yourself. When you write a resume or take a job interview, you're selling to the interviewer an idea of you as a good person for that job. You have to convince them not only that you can perform the task, but that you won't create any extra headaches for them either. The interviewer can only hire so many people, so they're going to choose the candidates who will make their job the easiest. Except in those cases when they hire their drunk cousin or friend from grade-school, despite all the vomit in the backseat of their car, because history and nepotism. Besides, they want to stay on uncle Don's good side if they don't want their tires slashed. ;P

The point I'm making here is that you have to sell things all the time, and there are lots of better ways. That sleazy car dearler is a sales person, but he's just one guy, and he's a very bad sales person. I'll bet you didn't use any of those sleazy car-sales tactics to get the job you have now. You didn't lie and tell the interviewer at Walmart that you managed distribution for the midwest division of Oscar Mayer and drove their weinermobile. No, you told them the truth, that you're willing to work any hours, on any day including holidays, for minimum wage, that you have your own transortation, and that you like their "I hate mondays" neck-tie. Okay, that last one was a lie, but how else are you going to make an impression on the interviewer and stand out in that crowd of Walmart applicants?

Seriously though, the best car salesman and the one who's better off in the long-run is the one who helps you find the car you want even if it's at someone else's dealership where he won't get the bonus for selling it. That guy who helps you find what you're looking for at a competitor's dealership builds a reputation for himself as an honest, helpful guy, and that's worth a lot more than the bonus on a single sale.

So now that we have that out of the way, how would the helpful salesperson approach this Kickstarter that failed? What would he recommend to Jay to help the Millennials Kickstarter fund?

Before I do that, I want to recommend this podcast I found recently called ComixLaunch. If you're planning even one KickStarter project, you should probably check out this podcast first, there's a lot of really useful info in here. Several of the mistakes Jay made, (mistakes I used to make when I was younger), could have been avoided with information from just the first couple episodes of ComixLaunch.

EDIT (Dec 22, 2017): I also just came across this great article with very specific Kickstarter advice from Russell Nohelty.

Now let's see what Jay did well. He did several of the basic things that we all know you need to do with a KickStarter. He's got a video and it's brief at only a minute and seventeen seconds. He introduced himself, he seems like a nice kid, and he explains the emotional connection he has to this project, why it's important to him (having a lot to do with high-school, bullying, biraciality, the immigrant experience and racial profiling). So if you identify with those feelings and experiences, there's a good chance you'll want to help him. When you get down below the video, you see he included the first six pages of the comic's first(?) issue, and the art is high quality, so that's a plus.

So how do we evaluate these positives? What do we compare them to? Where's our yardstick? In the marketing world, when you're telling people about something they might want to buy, there are six points to hit. There are actually a lot more than six, but there are six main points that professional marketers focus on. Those six points are:

Authority: people are more likely to support those who show authority on a given subject. You get a rash checked by a doctor, not by boxcar willie who's playing banjo on the street for tips. This works in any industry, though, it's not just for doctors and lawyers. Even your weed dealer is going to sell more weed if he has a reputation for knowing good product and selling the better stuff.

Commitment & Consistency: This works both ways. The more someone has committed to supporting you in the past (your comics, your music albums, whatever), the more likely they are to continue to support you. You also need to be consistent. You can evolve gradually, however, your personality and your products need to be fairly consistent in their tone. The world is full of examples of bands, movie and video game franchises, that lost a huge chunk of their fanbase by introducing dramatic changes between two releases. The Highlander, Tracy Chapman, etc, etc.

I know, some of you are thinking, "no, you don't have to be consistent, look at Lady Gaga or Monty Python!" In reality though, their work is consistent for what their fans expect. Would you buy The Best of Show-Tunes from Lady Gaga? Would you buy a gut-wrenching docudrama about the Syrian civil war from Monty Python? Even if you show the giant foot stomping on Bashar al-Assad, that's probably not winning over a lot of Monty Python fans.

The point is that by being consistent, you're building trust with your fans.

Likability: How likeable are you as an individual? We would all like to think of ourselves as being likeable, and I think that's fairly true for most of us. There's probably nobody who can't do something to make themselves a little more likeable. As an autistic person, studying this is kind of my life -- I could rant and rave about how it shouldn't matter (I've seen lots of autistic people do this), but that wouldn't make me very likeable would it? ;) It doesn't actually take a lot to be more likeable. Remember to smile more (but don't tell women to, seriously, that's pretty douchey), tell a joke once in a while (my personal favorite), have a sense of humor about yourself and let people know that you know you're not perfect.

Reciprocity: Even with strangers, if you've done something nice for someone, they tend to want to return that gesture. You see this any time you go out -- even as a guy, when I hold the door for another guy (and obviously we're both perfectly capable of opening a door), the other guy will usually open the next door for me on the other side of the mandatory airlock that all stores have now. It's a good thing though, if it weren't for that airlock, we'd all be blown back out of the store and we'd never be able to buy our milk. (We don't have any local milk people anymore!) ;P

Social Proof: This is one of the tougher points to hit when you're a fresh new face like Jay. People want to do things together. People want to know that their friends, neighbors and/or family are involved in a particular thing. You'll get the occasional extreme hipster, "oh, you've never heard of the band Cross-Stich Circumcision... oh you have? Well they suck then." But that notwithstanding, people don't want to do things alone, they want to know they're part of a team or a tribe or a book-club. They want to know that they're part of something their peers are interested in, like Game of Thrones.

Even in microcosm you can see this all the time. Look at any auction and you'll notice that there's a notable pause at the beginning of each item, before anyone's bid on it. Everyone at the auction is waiting to see if anyone else will bid and if so, where that person will set the bar for bidding. They want someone else to prove to them that this item is worth bidding on, and to give them an idea how much it's worth. So if you're genuinely interested in an item at auction, definitely bid first, and bid at or near the minimum. If you bid high, you might overestimate the interest and miss out on getting the item for less. Also, once that first bid is out there, generally, the bidding flows much more rapidly. It's possible you could bid high enough to shock everyone in the room away from bidding and be the only bidder, but unless you're more interested in the shock than the item, you're better off setting people's expectations with the initial bid.

To be fair though, bidding on a dead ostritch might be shocking enough. What does one do with a dead ostritch? They spend most of their life half-buried to begin with. They met you half-way, the least you could do is give them a proper burial.

Scarcity: To be honest, I'm a little conflicted about this point. I understand that scarcity can really help drive sales, but there's still a small part of my soul that dies every time I use it. I just can't seem to dissociate it in my mind from that sleazy car-salesman I talked about before.

In my first Kickstarter campaign, I only set the goal at $300 because I was producing ebooks and I just wanted to purchase a batch of ISBNs (which I later learned I shouldn't have even used on eBooks, d'oh!) That being the case I actually set a limit on every pledge level, even the $1 level, because at that level I was offering a credit in the back of one of the books. I was pretty sure there wouldn't be hundreds or thousands of backers I would have to credit (making the books unfeasibly large), but I decided to limit even the $1 pledges just to be on the safe side. I just can't help but think of that car salesman saying "hey, and you know what, they don't make 'em like this anymore!" (And you don't want to buy a car like that anyway, because there's usually a reason they don't make 'em like that anymore, and it's murder to get parts or repairs!)

I realize also that my discomfort with scarcity isn't always warranted. When your Kickstarter project is approaching its deadline, even if you don't have any limited pledge levels, there's still a sense of scarcity for the people who pledge in the last few days. Many of those people have been holding out to pledge on your campaign, to see if they need your support. They want to support you, if you need it, but they have a lot of their own expenses, so they're hoping your project will fund without them and they can use that money on bills, or groceries, or a dead ostrich. It's in those last couple days, if it looks like your project is close and it might not fund, they'll make that sacrifice to help you out, because they're afraid of the scarcity, the idea that your project may not exist at all if it doesn't fund. And in that sense, I understand scarcity can also be a positive, because it shows how we band together. :D Although even then, it's not strictly necessary to use scarcity, since crowdfunding on IndieGogo with no deadline eliminates that, but that's also part of the reason why fewer IndieGogo projects meet their goals.

The more of these points you hit, the more people will support your project. So how many of these did Jay hit?

Authority? Certainly some people must know Jay, but this is the first I've heard of him. He's only created this one Kickstarter campaign, so I can't look at previous campaigns for information. And I don't see any social media presence or other internet presence -- he didn't enter Twitter or Facebook on his Kickstarter profile, and a google search for "Jay Wallace Millennials" produces only this Kickstarter, a subsequent IndieGogo campaign, and a Twitter account for a Fox News executive with the same name. Also, "the Millennials" as a title is generic enough to produce a lot of false-positives on a Google search. That's not a make-or-break issue, but it will make it harder for people to find your project. There's no website for the Millennials that I can tell, there's no evidence on the internet that he or this project exist at all outside of this crowdfunding campaign.

It's hard to create a sense of "authority" when nobody knows who you are. A degree of some kind might help, like graduating from SCAD or the Kubert School. Ironically, just wearing a white lab-coat and carrying a clipboard does wonders to generate a sense of authority, but that's back into car salesman territory, so we won't go there. One thing you can do to generate more authority even as an unknown noob, is to show your homework. I use the word "homework" here deliberately -- none of us enjoy doing homework, but it has to get done if we want to graduate. The same is true for crowdfunding campaigns, there are a lot of logistical details that are boring, but necessary. The Kickstarter campaign should show exactly where all the money is going -- tell us how many books you're printing, which printer you chose and how much they quoted for your job, what you need for shipping, for the Kickstarter fees, and for any other rewards offered. (Personally, I would even tell us how much you need to pay your artist.) This is all basic information that you need to know to complete your project, and I don't see any of it mentioned in the Millennials Kickstarter. This is like coming in to class and saying, "I had this really great report written, and then my dog ate it. But I pinky-swear, it was A+ work!"

Commitment and Consistency? Like I said about authority, it's hard to create a sense of consistency if nobody knows who you are. Without a website, without any social media presence, strangers online don't have any way to evaluate just how consistent you are in your attitudes, your communication or your work.

Jay does mention in the video and the text of the Kickstarter that he's worked on this project for three years and that he's written over 600 issues (which is about ten "trade paperbacks" or "graphic novels" as we used to call them). That does indicate commitment, however, with no online presence, we're all stuck taking him at his word about the time he's put into this project. And if I'm going to take someone at their word, it would be a lot easier for me actually if the project were a lot smaller. You have to remember that trust is built incrementally, and that's what commitment and consistency are all about, building trust. To put this in perspective, imagine if a stranger came to you on the bus, and they're dressed in a nice suit and they seem nice and they say, "hey, I have this plan to cure cancer, I just need a few thousand people to donate $20 each". Most people are going to respond to that with "fuck cancer," before they suck down an entire pack of cigarettes... laced with asbestos. If that same person had just said, "I'm kind of hard up and wondered if I could get some change or a dollar to buy some weed," they'd probably have better luck, wouldn't they?

So for Jay, I don't think he should give up on his passion-project, however, I think he'd be better off not even mentioning the 600 issues and simply focusing on the first issue. Telling people you're trying to get six-hundred of them made (and it's not clear in his text if this Kickstarter is meant for one issue or for all six-hundred), is pretty off-putting. But there are lots of people who are quite successful on Kickstarter just promoting a first issue. Some of them may have a huge number of issues written and waiting, but you don't want to hit a stranger with that the first time they meet you. Start small, let people see what you can do with one, and that will build your credibility.

For the record, when I was young, I used to make this mistake all the time.

Likeability? Okay, I know this one is always hard to hear. We all want to think we're super-likeable, and I'm not saying Jay's not likeable, all I'm saying is I think we all underrate our ability to improve ourselves in this area. Jay is clean and presentable on the video and he ends it with a polite "thank you" and that's kind of the bare minimum on making yourself likeable. I don't notice him smile at any point in the video, and he reads off the script in a bit of a monotone, and those things are kind of a shot in the foot. When you make your video, you should open and close with a smile and you should talk about your project with a little energy. I know that's going to require a bit of practice, it may take several takes to get it the way you want it, but if you've already put three years into this project, the day or week or however long you take to get the video just right should be nothing. You don't get all your gear ready to climb Mount Everest and then cancel the trip because your airline flight is delayed.

This may not sound like "likeability", but the cinematography of this video is a bit off as well. The camera angle is from below Jay, so what you see behind him is the ceiling and in particular, his head is directly in front of a light. The camera's light adjustement and the viewers brain compensate a little for that light source, but with all the compensation in the world, it still casts his face in a shadow and that's never good. Maybe he was trying for a "dramtic" look, like the scene in an action movie where the hero bursts into the darkened warehouse through a shaft of bright light. That works great when it's followed by a climactic battle, not so much when it's followed by a project pitch.

Reciprocity? Nope. I've had a Kickstarter account for at least four years now and over that time I've pledged to 29 other Kickstarter campaigns. I'm not sure how many I had pledged to before my first Kickstarter, but I know there were a bunch of them. People on Kickstarter don't want you to be there just to get your cash and run -- they want to know that you're a part of the community and that you'll give back to other creators as well. Jay's not pledged to any other Kickstarter campaigns, so that's a strike against him. Given that you've paid $70 per page to have the first six pages illustrated and colored, that's $420 you've already sunk into this project. Sink a few more dollars into helping some other creators build their social proof so they can get their projects funded. Not only will you generate some goodwill for your projects, if you talk to those creators (I haven't done a good job of this), there's a good chance you'll even make a few friends. :)

Social Proof? Nope. I take that back, there's a little -- the first pledge. And yes, that's important, if you're going to run a Kickstarter campaign, you should at least make sure you know where your first pledge is coming from, so you can get it on the first day. Usually it's your mom. Thanks mom! :D Beyond that, again, it's hard to build social proof when nobody knows you. The idea that people like your work really has to come from other people, not from you. If someone else says they enjoy your work, their friends will believe it. But you can't say it yourself, because then you just sound like Trump, "I make the best comics, everybody says so." Thankfully, Jay didn't go there, but he did something else that shot himself in the foot for social proof.

If you read the text of Jay's Kickstarter, at the top he says:

I'm raising money to pay my penciller and colorist to finish the following issue pages. I recently submitted The Millennials to Image Comcis. But I also will use the money to get a table at the Cincinnati Comic Expo in September that will host over 20,000 people. The money will fund the trip and merchandise.

The fourth sentence in that passage is redundant, but the second sentence is the real problem. The fact that he recently pitched this series to Image isn't relevant to the Kickstarter. Including that sentence here is at best confusing without any explanation of why he's bringing it up. Then further down, below the six pages he's already produced, he makes it a little worse when he brings it up again in the "Risks and Challenges" section.

The risk to my project is Image not wanting to pick up my story. I would over come this by self-publishing and handling distribution personally.

Blam! Your toe's gone. Either you're saying that Image has already rejected your project, or you're saying that you're still waiting for a response from Image. If you haven't heard back from Image yet, then you have no business being on Kickstarter. You can pitch your project to publishing companies, or you can pitch it to us for crowdfunding, but you can't do both of those things at the same time. If you're saying Image already rejected you, then telling us you've been rejected already runs against your social proof. We all know rejection, we've all experienced it, but don't tell us that if you're looking for project funding. If you're looking for sympathy it's a different story. Here it's like, "Hey, Becky, would you like to go to the prom? Amy turned me down... I'm asking all the girls alphabetically." (True story, I once made that mistake when asking a girl out in my teens. Awkward!)

Scarcity? This is the one point that bothers me for personal reasons, but my own hangups aside, how did Jay do? Mostly scarcity in a Kickstarter project is created with higher pledge levels where backers can get limited edition items that they might not be able to get if they don't pledge. Jay defined five pledge levels, ranging from $20 to $300. First, there should have been some lower pledge levels -- give people credit in the back of the book or something, it's not hard to do, and it makes the higher pledge levels more valuable. Or give them a copy of the first volume as an ebook or send them a postcard.

At the lowest pledge level of $20 he offered some fankly peculiar rewards. The first book is normal, but a pair of branded sunglasses? With a standard 22-page comic issue? And there's no homework showing where he's getting these sunglasses made or how much they cost, and at $3,500 I wonder if he's done the math to cover that expense. For another $5 I can get a backpack? Are people really wanting sunglasses and backpacks? Even branded with the project name, I just don't think people are looking to get these things with a comic. They're common items, most people have them already, etc.

The t-shirt or the hoodie at $40 is maybe okay, if you know how to get those made and you've done the math and know you can afford them, but do the homework and let us know you can cover the cost. All these things sound really expensive on the budget you're describing. And show us the image you're planning to put on the shirt -- is it just the logo or will there be character art? Honestly, the t-shirt market is pretty darn saturated, which makes them already hard to sell. So a t-shirt with this project logo, even with character art, would probably require a great deal of social proof before it becomes a reason for someone to pledge. (I say this as someone who has satirical t-shirts I printed still sitting in my closet.)

The highest pledge level, the $300, I think I would have offered people their likeness in the comics in some way, as a bystander or someone who dies. I did that in my first Kickstarter and people seemed to enjoy the comics they were injected into. In Jay's project it's just all the lower pledge levels. So if at the $40 level, I already got a shirt or a hoodie, and I'm just getting an extra two shirts and/or hoodies, the math doesn't add up. That first hoodie was a jump of $15 (and I'm surprised it's three times as much as the backpack). The jump from one t-shirt or hoodie to three of them is an increase of $260. That means those two extra shirts, instead of being $15 each are now $130 each. That's an expensive shirt! I think I'm only paying $130 for a shirt if it comes with Amy Schumer still wearing it! Or better yet, Samantha Bee! I'd pay $130 for that shirt, she gives good satire.

Okay, so how many of those six points did Jay's Kickstarter hit?

Authority: 0 points

Commitment & Consistency: 1/2 point for sticking with this project for three years, but it's hampered by appearing to bite off way more than you should on your first appearance, without building any reputation.

Likability: 1/2 point for the bare minimum of coming across as a nice kid - Jay doesn't seem like a car salesman or an egomaniac, but that's like advertising your car on craigslist as "it still runs". (And before you think I'm being real hard on Jay here, remember that this is something I personally work at and struggle with every day because of my autism.)

Reciprocity: 0 points

Social Proof: 0 points - it would have been a half-point for having the first pledge, but it's taken away by the mention of an either prior or simultaneous pitch to Image.

Scarcity: 1/2 point - I can see that an attempt was made, but the offerings don't really add up

So, I've given him 1.5 out of a possible 6. If we think of that like a class assignment, he'd need 70% to get a C. This places Jay's Kickstarter at 25%, so it wouldn't be a passing grade. To have even a passing grade on this scale, you need at least 4.5 points. Ideally obviously you want to hit all six of them. The good news is this doesn't have to be the end for the Millennials or for Jay.

The reason why we do post-mortems like this after a project fails is to learn from our mistakes. As long as we can keep learning, we can get a little further down that path toward our goals. It may be a little harder for Jay to get his next Kickstarter funded now that this one failed, but he shouldn't let that discourage him, he just needs to study more. A Kickstarter needs a lot of people to believe in it, and you can't make that work by cramming at the final, no matter how much Monster Energy you drink. I hope this article helps a lot of you fresh young comic artists, looking forward to your first few Kickstarters or other crowdfunding campaigns. If you can learn from a few of these mistakes before your first campaign, you'll be in much better shape. And I really hope that Jay also sticks with it and eventually gets the whole Millennials story published. :D

Stay awesome, Hooligans!

Sam

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FOUR EPISODES into the new Star Trek series, Discovery, the crew receives a distress call from Corvan II, a resource-rich planet. A colony of humans is under attack from the Klingons. The victims, dilithium miners, flicker on screen, as miserable as anything we’d read about in Émile Zola’s descriptions of coal mining in Germinal. As dirty and distressed as the faces in a Dorothea Lange photo. Crying babies are so compelling! The Discovery, the closest ship in the fleet, is 90-odd light years away. They’ll never make it in time. But it turns out that the ship is equipped with a brand-new mode of transportation, a spore-based energy system that could, in theory, complete the trip in a few seconds. So, against the advice of his chief scientist, and even though the system may not be ready, the captain gives the order: go! Next, in a stunning display of visual effects, rings surrounding the ship’s saucer begin to rotate as the ship “spore jumps” just in time to drop a few torpedoes on the Klingon Birds-of-Prey. And before we can blink, the Discovery “spore jumps” back to its starting point.

The casual viewer might not make anything particular of this techno-aesthetic scene.

But as everyone knows, Trekkies are anything but casual. On their podcasts, forums, and blogs, they obsessively parse every word, every detail, making cross-references to the other series and movies of the Trek universe. They expect consistency across the whole franchise. Every Trekkie knows that in the original series (which begins 10 years after Discovery) ships are propelled, faster than the speed of light, by “warp drives,” a feat achieved thanks to dilithium crystals that moderate matter-antimatter (fusion) reactions. [1]

Needless to say, the appearance of these spores, as an organic method of propulsion, immediately raised Trekkie eyebrows. As one podcaster explained, “We know, assuming the timeline isn’t screwed up … we know it’s not going to work. We’ve already seen the twenty-fourth century and we know that they don’t have organic warp drives.” (STDP006 podcast: 10/10/2017; Golden Spiral Media.) At this point we don’t know how this apparent contradiction will be resolved. Maybe the spore drives only worked this once and consequently fall into oblivion. In episode five, the “Ripper,” a monster beamed aboard Discovery from a destroyed ship, is released into space. The monster had functioned like a living super computer, communicating spatial coordinates to the spores by some sort of symbiotic means. Michael Burnham, the show’s protagonist, figures out that Ripper is a giant (nuked?) version of an actually existing tiny Earth organism, the tardigrade, which can survive without nourishment for years and exhibits other notable characteristics of resilience. Maybe the best scientific minds will be unable to bio-engineer a new creature capable of withstanding the rigors of spore navigation so the whole enterprise will fall into oblivion. Maybe it will turn out that this tech was developed in an alternative timeline. Maybe the Borg are responsible for upsetting the natural course of things. Maybe it was all a dream. Or, god forbid, perhaps the producers of Discovery don’t care about the kind of consistency demanded by fanboys. Not likely. We’ll just have to wait.

Now I’ve watched my fair share of Star Trek episodes and movies, but I certainly wouldn’t qualify as a Trekkie. I’ve never put on Spock ears or attended a convention and I can’t identify the plots of TOS — the original series — from the titles. I’m someone who is interested in climate change, and recently, in decoupling fuel from energy to help think about forms of radical engagement to achieve rapid decarbonization. I couldn’t resist including an entry for “dilithium” in my book Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), but according to my own criteria, it really shouldn’t be there. “Nuclear,” for instance, is a system of energy, so it doesn’t get its own entry, whereas “uranium” and “plutonium” do. Technically, as I mentioned, warp speed (speed faster than light) is achieved in Federation starships via a matter/antimatter (fusion) reaction. Dilithium crystals serve as a medium to help achieve this, but the actual substance that fuels the reaction is, to be precise, antimatter. I made an exception because the mining of dilithium is such an important and evocative theme throughout various quadrants of the Star Trek universe.

In a way, dilithium is like “hydrogen.” We talk about cars pulling up to filling stations and pumping in hydrogen instead of gasoline, but unlike oil, once removed from the ground and refined, hydrogen doesn’t exist as such, ready to be inserted into a vehicle. It has to be subjected to a process of catalysis before it can create energy to power the engine to turn the wheels. And for now, at least, that process is more likely than not powered by fossil fuels. The same kind of murkiness applies to “electric vehicles.” We can embrace them precisely because we only engage directly with one small element, the compact garage charger. We don’t have to see or think about the vast fossil infrastructure — out of sight, underground, or, “over there,” beyond our immediate perceptual horizon — that still persists at all levels of life while we drive along feeling pleased. The phenomenon of “carbon lock-in” — the idea that our globe is so deeply entangled with oil and coal that no good will gesture on the part of well-meaning individuals will have any significant effect — is hard to swallow. Distinctions between “fuel” and “energy” matter if we’re going to move beyond the kind of green optimistic haze that swirls around “future fuels” in the public sphere. It’s too easy to keep going these days with a vague sense of hope: if we only scale up some new technologies we can keep all the structures and systems we currently enjoy, replacing fossil-based fuels with renewable fuels. Like when you bring up the vast scale of climate change at the dinner table and your relatives say, “But I hear solar and wind prices are coming down and there’s nothing Trump and company can do about that. Coal mining isn’t coming back. So relax and have another glass of wine.”

And by the way, Star Trek apparently takes place in a post–climate change, post–fossil fuel world. “We” must have figured out a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere in order to avoid catastrophe, while also transitioning to “future fuels,” just as we will have overcome poverty, racism, and various other social problems. Note to Star Trek writers: I’m available if you want to hire me to introduce the shift to a post-carbon economy as a future theme about Earth’s past.

In Discovery, mining of dilithium goes on. (Incidentally, given the importance of the besieged outpost, Corvan II, as a source of 40 percent of the Federation’s dilithium supplies, why are there no Federation ships guarding the colony?) And if the whole matter/antimatter warp-drive system will someday be replaced by something greener and more powerful, we are still not there in the future. It’s hard not to hear echoes of our current energy transitions in the plot line.

Trekkies tend to revel in optimism, so they have generally been disturbed by the call by Discovery’s uncharacteristically dark captain, Lorca, to weaponize the spores to help in the war against the Klingons. Poor Lieutenant Stamets, the on-board astro-mycologist (named for an actually existing scholar of fungal remediation). He’s not only lost his colleague/rival on the Glenn, but now he’s reminded, rather bluntly, that his work is the intellectual property of Star Fleet. But aside from the analogy with academia, we might see another one, to the field of nuclear science. Fuels like uranium and plutonium do not harm on their own. “Peaceful atoms,” they could be used for peaceful purposes (energy). But they could also be enriched or inserted into a system that transmutes them for use on warheads. Things could go either way. Spores are, dare I say, rather queer. Stamets and the ship’s doctor are, by the way, the first openly gay couple on Star Trek. They are seen, in episode five, brushing their teeth side-by-side in their quarters, a fairly banal homo-normative scene following Stamets’s reckless and unsanctioned attempt to take over from the tardigrade in the first (and perhaps the last?) intergalactic human-mycelia displacement network.

On a more mundane note, the spores might make us think of the development of biofuels in our current “energy transition,” but without all of the negatives. The Trek spores have no need for other fuels to grow or distill them. They float around in space (the so-called “panspermia” theory) and grow in a magical forest in a gigantic on-board terrarium. There is no need to displace food crops, since food is replicated on board the ship. The spores don’t emit any byproducts, harmful or otherwise. And unlike other forms of fuels, the spores are not used up in combustion. It’s a nice immersive fantasy, not a bad set of images to take us away from all kinds of unbearable realities today.

I wonder: Could the writers of Discovery have read anthropologist Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015)? In the face of massive climate upheaval and other disasters, Tsing embraces the potentially redemptive qualities of fungi, as they continually adapt. Fungi are complex life forms that metabolize plants and coexist in different kinds of ecosystems, performing what she calls symbiopoiesis. They are, like the sparking special effects on the ship, beautiful. Like the World Wide Web, fungi offer infinite possibilities of recombination and new relations in the future. Stamets tells his lover he experienced a whole universe of possibilities when he was hooked up to the drive. Spores flying around the atmosphere (maybe even in outer space?) could configure forms of cosmopolitanism, the happy side of invasive species.

By the time you are reading this piece we’ll all probably know more about the spores on Discovery. Fans of the new series love to speculate. They consume and analyze it week by week, as it is doled out, in close to real time, so it seems appropriate to me to do so here. In comparison, TOS, shown on network television in the late ’60s, had self-enclosed and self-resolving episodes. Serialization is crucial, of course, to 19th-century literature. It’s how kids read the imaginary voyages of Jules Verne. Week by week in the newspaper. And Verne is, for me, the most important writer for thinking and dreaming about possible relations to fuels. So let’s see what happens, but meanwhile, back here on early 21st-century Earth, time to mitigate is slipping away, tipping points are fast approaching. Catastrophic events made much more likely by rising sea levels and warming global average temperatures are pulling apart life as we know it. So it is all the more imperative to ask what is meant by “the future” when one talks of change. Is the future something we project for ourselves on screens? Star Trek offers us a mirror of our better selves. In the future humans are still flawed, and so are those other species that we coexist with in complex relations that bear traces of our own past forms of colonialism, benevolence, communitarianism, exploitation. Overall, though, contact with extraterrestrial beings and places has led to the social and cultural evolution of the human race. The future is bright.

Ultimately we should be wary of thinking about those spore drives as part of a narrative of progress, one that could simply allow us to defer now, in the present, any radical shifts in how we produce and consume energy. This narrative presents a tyranny of common sense that defers new fuels to a future that is just around the corner, but not yet. It governs statements like:

Human history is a record of endless human innovation, most of which has improved the human condition. Who knows what energy sources and technologies of the future may trump the energy benefits of fossil fuels?

This comes from the pen of one Kathleen Hartnett White, in a policy brief titled, “Fossil Fuels: The Moral Case” (2014). White, a former regulator in the Texas oil industry, has just been named by Trump to chair the Council on Environmental Quality. She illustrates her case study for the benefits of fossils with images of poor Americans, including what may be Dorothea Lange’s most iconic image, “Migrant Mother.” How does this image of a desperate mother with her children, displaced dustbowlers in California migrant camp in 1936 help White battle what she calls the false hysteria over climate change? [2] Without fossils, White asserts, we would never have developed beyond subsistence farming. Do we want to go back to this? Of course not — we all agree, right? So for now, let’s enjoy the benefits of carbon-based energy and wait for history to take its course.

It’s with this kind of reasoning in mind that I will wait to see what happens with the new spores on Discovery. I’ll forget the present, for an hour, but I will still be up at night with periodic panic attacks about our future on this warming planet. At least I’ll have the Star Trek podcasts keep me company.

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Karen Pinkus teaches at Cornell University where is currently a Social Science, Humanities, Arts Fellow in Residence at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. She is the author of Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

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[1] There are several book-length studies of the science of the Star Trek franchise. Lawrence Krauss, The Physics of Star Trek (New York: Basic Books, revised edition 2007) goes into the function and plausibility of warp drive and dilithium in great detail.

[2] The photograph, in the public domain and so available for use in any context, actually has a complex history. Many years later, the subject, Florence Owens Thompson, asserted that she had never spoken to Lange, who apparently embellished her story of the interaction. I doubt that White has thought through the bigger question of the relation of the Dust Bowl to soil depletion, wheat farming, New York bankers, and so on. She’s only reading Lange’s photo with a single signifier: poverty. And that is, for her, so morally bankrupt that it alone should squelch any discussion of moving beyond fossils, beyond business as usual.

The post “Star Trek: Discovery” and the Dream of Future Fuels appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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