New Twitter UI

Speaking of social fucking media. The new Twitter UI is ridiculous. It’s now impossible to have a bookmark to your “Latest Tweets” view or set a preference to only see that instead of “the algorithm” picking shit for you, have to manually click a star icon which has no mouseover text, title, or hints, I want you to see the source for this button (turn away if you’re squeamish):

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Latest Tweets</span>
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Are you fucking kidding me.

They removed the ability to set your own profile’s background color & image some time ago, back in the day everyone’s Twitter pages (if they knew what they were doing) looked unique and like a home page, but now it’s entirely gone. There’s a little swatch of image behind your profile photo, but nobody’ll ever see it.

Conversations are even harder to read, but the site’s been just broken for conversations for years. Kara Swisher’s interview/monstering of Jack proved that.

I’m sure there’s more to hate.

Come over to Fediverse, if you actually want a quieter place to have a few conversations, and a relentlessly non-algorithmic timeline; Mastodon’s more baseline what-Twitter-was-like for good and bad, Pleroma’s a better server and client but often smaller, isolated instances (porn and weirdos, yay!). Don’t be a gigantic flaming asshole there and it’ll be fine; well, and Gab is sorta federated except everyone blocks them, so even flaming assholes have a home.

What I’m Watching: The Boys

So, The Boys comic by Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson is my 3rd favorite comic of all time (right behind Transmetropolitan and The Invisibles ). It carries on in Garth’s inimitable tradition of showing how rotten everything is from The Pro.

A band of CIA-funded wankers based in the scenic Flatiron building, led by appropriately-named psychopath Billy Butcher, recruits conspiracy freak and recently bereaved Simon Pegg, er, “Wee Hughie”, an organized freak NCO Mother’s Milk, and two insane killers, The Frenchman and The Female. They power Hughie up like they are, and go fuck up superheroes who deserve it.

Wee Hughie knows nothing about superheroes or comics, so he goes on a Heart of Darkness style voyage of discovery into deep dark shit. The comics are heavily about the nature of comics and the superheroes they “report” on; they’re from an age when superhero movies were pretty crap and nobody cared. Stan Lee is The Legend, now a useless old man in a comics shop basement, but he knows shit. Vought-American is very clearly doing the same Nazi-science-for-America thing we did with rockets, but there’s supes all over the world, and everyone (well, anyone in “the industry”) knows how they’re made. And the supes are all insane with power, as they would be. The Seven live in a flying citadel full of awesome tech and everyone’s flunkies and whores, because of course they do.

The Boys comics cured me of superheroes as a serious genre, and they can cure you, too. I can enjoy one for a laugh now, like Deadpool and Guardians of the Galaxy, but any serious preaching and I wonder who they’re literally fucking to death. I know how they got that way.

But now we’re in a more vapid, useless age, full of shitty superhero movies worth literally billions of dollars, comics conventions bigger than religious revivals, fucking jocks pretending they’re superhero fans instead of nerds, bobbleheads, and social media. Especially social fucking media.

The Boys on Amazon Prime reflects this shittiest of all Human eras, the final death throes of the Anthropocene. It’s not even terrible, just all the mediocrity of this decade shat into streaming.

So here, the Boys are vigilantes on the run; this reduces the number of sets enormously to just a few shitty warehouses and abandoned diners, no need for on-the-street shots of New York City, they can use shitty parts of Toronto instead, and boy do they. The Seven get an even worse downgrade, being in a mid-size skyscraper in a CGI “matte painting” (nobody paints them anymore) background, with only the Seven’s conference room, one corridor, and a bathroom; we never see their lounges and bedrooms full of sluts, or the hangar for the plane Black Noir can’t fly. Doesn’t matter, you can’t see anything because the cameras are permanently tinted dark orange/dark cyan. For shots with chipper superheroine Starlight, they go back to bright colors, because that’s real subtle filmmaking.

Wee Hughie instead becomes a 6′ tall Billy Joel-listening douchebag “l33t haxxor”/mom-and-pop electronics store guy (most implausible background of anyone: There are no mom-and-pop electronics stores anymore), who’s madly into superheroes, especially A-Train. I think the vapid video producers thought this would provide “pathos”, but it’s just stupid. Lives at home with his Dad (actual Simon Pegg), not in the shittiest transient hotel in New York like Wee Hughie does. Does not rescue a gerbil. I suppose Richard Gere is tired of that story, but I never will be.

Billy Butcher is just a confused loser here. And short. No dog. Doesn’t fuck. A couple references to Guinness and tea from other people, but he never brings it up. He’s useless. I didn’t like Karl Urban as Judge Dredd, either, he was more like Judge Mediocre Honky Cop on a Talking Dirt Bike in Generic Skyscraper “The Raid” Rip-Off, but that title was too long for them; in any case here he shows the same lack of menace, talent, or ability to enunciate; he mostly stands around while actors read their lines. Decent beard and trenchcoat; he’s the only one who gets a trenchcoat in the show.

Mother’s Milk gets some of the NCO personality, but he doesn’t have his namesake’s background, no powers, and still has a wife and a tiny daughter, not a junkie ex-wife and a teenage skank daughter; the point in the comic was he has all his shit together for everyone else, but his life’s a disaster. No, here he’s just good and professional. Whitewashed.

The Frenchman is… he’s fine. Not quite enough insanity about France, but he’s a violent, passionate lunatic anyway, and close enough that I won’t complain.

The Female looks and works great, and the actress does a good job with the “behave like a mad dog” role, but in the comics she’s independent, she’s perfectly capable of taking jobs on her own and will if they don’t have a supe for her to kill.

The supes are a mixed bag. Homelander came out OK; he has more of a plan this time, he’s less overtly rapey, but on a scale of 1 to Genocidal Superman, he’s pretty far up there.

Black Noir is more useful and less creepy silent stalker than the original; I doubt his backstory’s been left intact. But he does nothing; I actually forgot he was there when I started writing this, “wait that’s six, where’s… OH!”

Starlight’s great, she’s as perky and stupid as possible, and seems like a decent girl-next-door in her sorta romantic scenes.

A-Train’s great, an A-grade asshole murderer with no conscience; but he has a “reason” for being that out of control, which somewhat dampens it.

The Deep is changed from a probably-crazy black man in a diving helmet who can fly, to a white hormonally-bitchy rapist low-rent low-IQ Aquaman who can actually talk to fish (uh, including dolphins and lobsters… so he has general telepathy, he’s just insane and only uses it with aquatic creatures?). He’s useless and offensive to rapists, and they half write him off the team by the end. Every scene with him in it could be deleted and this would be a marginally less shit show.

Jack from Jupiter is replaced with “Translucent” the naked invisible man with diamond skin; it’s such a stupid name that even the show tells him how stupid a name partially-transparent is for invisibility. I loathed Jack, so this is a good change, but then they just use it to have characters talk to empty air and an occasionally CGI shot of him fading in and out.

Queen Maeve gets hosed. From being the queen bitch of the Seven’s station, with a harem of naked men, who literally cares about nothing except her next drink or fuck but can kill anything short of Homelander, to a mopey bi woman doing Xena cosplay, in therapy and AA, who’s just kinda strong and tough. Just appalling writing, losing the whole point: What does absolute power do to someone that damaged?

James Stillwell (“The Man from Vought American”) is replaced with Madelyn Stillwell (played by Elisabeth Shue, “Replacement Jennifer” from Back to the Future II-III; she’s never the original). James is a cold, stoic, perfectly rational machine for optimizing profits and killing anything that gets in the way, the one mere Human the Homelander is wary of. Madelyn is a mommy-figure for sad broken little Homelander (and by extension all the Millennials who made incest porn so popular), and a doormat for Starlight (though if she wasn’t a doormat, Starlight would have to act like she could plan and be sneaky… which she can’t). Her arc is terrible, she’s stupid and fallible, the writers are idiots. She’s a goddamned catastrophe.

All the secondary stuff falls down bad. Popclaw goes from an active party girl (girl, maybe 18-20) to a middle-aged sad has-been kicked out of a team. She does have one of the more spectacular kills, but her story is garbage. A fat Doogie Hauser wanker not from the comics is introduced to provide exposition that shouldn’t be provided. Tek-Knight is mentioned but never seen. The mad scientist just has a cinderblock room, probably filmed in Jeff Bezos’ basement sex dungeon, not a silo and a nuke.

No other teams are seen or really mentioned; that ecosystem of D-grade teams feeding C-grade teams feeding B-grade teams feeding The Seven isn’t touched on at all, when that’s the pyramid scam behind the entire setting. In the show there’s just a few villains planning everything, not an entire industry of scumbags using superpowers.

The Jesus freak event is sad, a tent show which cost them nothing to make and it shows. I can’t imagine these cheap Amazon assholes making Herogasm, the annual party for supes, look good.

The politics show up and then vanish. In the comics, there’s a pro-supes VP “Vic the Veep”, like Ahnold Shwazzanagga crossed with Rain Main crossed with George W. Bush, with less IQ than any of them, and he’s involved. Here, there’s a governor and a senator seen at various times, we’re told but not shown anything about a vote on military supes. Cheap and lazy and bad writing.

★½☆☆☆

I’m beyond disappointed. I had a real hard-on for this, but now I’m utterly flaccid. Occasional moments of characters doing something interesting interrupt an endless orange/cyan fog of nothing.

Shows have improved between seasons, superheroes especially. Sony’s Powers (another good “superheroes are dicks” comic) adaptation on Playstation+ was unbelievably terrible in S1, decent in S2; Sharlto Copley as Diamond was ludicrous, but they wrote a good plot for him. Amazon’s The Tick in S1 was the most depressed, mopey, unheroic, unfunny thing I have ever seen; S2 was less bad, though still inferior to the comics, the cartoon, or the first live-action series.

But for now, please go read the comics instead. They’re fantastic.

Isolation Friday Music

  • Isolation playlist by Apple Music: One of the better incarnations of this downbeat playlist. Like they say in the description, it updates often so save any songs you want to hear again.

“I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you
That I almost believe that they’re real
I’ve been living so long with my pictures of you
That I almost believe that the pictures are
All I can feel”
—The Cure, “Pictures of You”

Rick Roll Thursday Music

What always amuses me about the Rick Roll is I grew up with Rick Astley’s music, he’s a really good R&B-pop singer. “Never Gonna Give You Up” isn’t my favorite of his songs, but he also sang way too much about love and romance and sometimes “god” (whatever that nonsense is), not my favorite subjects. Anyway, haven’t heard his new album, post 50.

Minecraft 2011

Was searching for another file, and found my Minecraft screenshots from my first real world. I bought it 2010-09-29, just before the Halloween update, but didn’t really play much until the next spring; Alpha was buggy as hell, you can’t imagine. Beta 1.3_01 was much more stable, and I settled down. I’m 90% sure WORLD 1’s file is lost, but some images remain:

The “castle” was built up around a little gravel-floored valley, which I then walled up and paved over except the pond at the center. So the walls were a weird natural shape. I dunno if I thought cobblestone looked better than smooth stone, or just didn’t have enough coal to make it; stone bricks weren’t added until Beta 1.8.

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Minecraft-20110228-002

There’s no overview or underview showing everything, but these glass walkways and stone balconies were a sort of maze, a complex loop going up to the tower exit and around. The cave area below I just kept tunnelling down, not very methodically. I built a bunch of redstone wiring down there, not just the noisemaker/”stereo” up by my bed.

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Minecraft-20110301-002-glass-castle

Minecraft-20110301-003-glass-castle

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Sadly not visible in any of these, the farm area where I took a natural “river” (a single source block up in the hillside), let it flow through a bunch of channels I dug to irrigate my crops, with a fence and door (no fence gates) all the way to the beach. I definitely didn’t know how to make new water sources, water remained a frustration until some versions later.

Shortly after this, I got on the Shaftlands and Yogscast servers, and did a lot there, so my single-player world languished a bit.

I still do a little Minecraft many mornings when drinking my coffee, currently building a little mountain village (haven’t converted villagers yet):

Minecraft-2019-07-09_00.06.01-mountain_village

A Little More Magia Record

The JP site has little weekly update comics, which have mostly been translated by fans:

Mostly just gags about bad pulls and events after they’re over (in JP timeline; the EN timeline should be following the same pattern eventually), but a few honestly great jokes about Madoka like the one above. (in case you didn’t know, read right to left)

Two pulls got me a better tree AOE DPS ★★☆☆ (Hinano is a monster in combat, everything dies in explosions), a fire DPS ★★☆☆, a light support ★★☆☆ (totally useless because main is light support), and… dark vampire DPS ★★★★! Hooray! Not the one I want, but an acceptable start.

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Figured out where the equipment is, you get “Memoria” cards which give boosts and skills, assign them on the team screen, and eventually you can unlock up to 4 slots for these. I got a few ★★★★ cards from a free support pull (forgot to screenshot it) and they make a huge difference in killing shit above my level. Before, I near TPKd once, had a few HP left on one girl when I finished a fight, everyone else was dead (well, KO; you can’t kill magical girls without SPOILER). Now nobody goes below half HP even fighting twice my level.

Tactically it’s getting pretty interesting. I wish I had more combat layouts. The T-shaped one is more powerful, but gets me hammered by any AOE mobs. The X-shaped default only buffs one girl, and the main needs DEF UP to survive, but ATK UP is wasted on her. But I’m not willing to pay real money for the one I see in the shop, so it’s grind grind time.

They really got the witch art style from the series into the game:

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The one complaint I have is there’s not a lot of Energy. So it’s back to playing for half an hour, putting it down for 12 hours. Which is good discipline but normally mobage give you a huge burst of Energy at the start of the game to draw you in, before hitting you with the hard reality of the money-or-time economy. I’m not buying Energy potions or whatever they’re called. I miss DanMachi’s near-endless supply of “potato snacks” to restore Energy, from just doing dailies. You could run out, but it took grinding all day to do that.

What I’m Playing: Magia Record

A Puella Magi Madoka Magica mobage!

It’s very cutesy, aimed at teenage Japanese girls and horny otaku boys, so I’m not likely to play very long, but I really did enjoy the anime series. If you haven’t seen it yet, go watch that at the very least up to episode 4. Then it flips from “magical girls” to cute Lovecraftian horror and you’ll be hooked to get to the end.

You don’t play as the main characters from the anime, but entirely new characters. The main is very Madoka-like, except she took her contract, and the Homura-like Yachiyo antagonist/rival is great, a menacing rational magical girl. Kyubey is not yet a terrible existential threat.

There’s the usual very long tutorial where you hit the buttons they tell you to. Eventually it lets you use the menu and go home and play around with the app. I don’t even mind doing a campaign, but I want the ability to jump to home and change things, which tutorials prevent.

It’s gachapon, and I haven’t got enough for a 10-pull yet, so I dunno what the other characters are like. My free pull was a ★★★ tree-element flower girl, who’s fine as long as she’s not facing fire, which is like 50% of the fights where she’s useless. I could reroll, but I never do that, I just grind a bit more.

Combat is turn-based, with 5 elements: Fire beats Tree beats Water beats Fire, and Light beats Shadow beats Light. There’s a random selection of maneuvers that affect parts of an enemy formation or give bonus magia or damage, plus skills, plus limit breaks Magia Specials.

There’s no equipment? But you can power up your magical girls with various gems, which seems much the same. It’s a rich character development system, for sure. There’s a bit of cheesecake in the costumes, which verges on lolicon already.

It’s free to play, just don’t buy anything from the store if you’re not into blowing money on this kind of thing; you can apparently grind out most of the content free.