Month: September 2020

What I Watched, Do Not Follow Me Into Hell: Suicide Squad

Just the worst. I knew going in this was bad, but it's jesus died for the sins of the filmmakers bad. Zero acting, zero script, mediocre CGI that could've been better done with a smoke sprayer and some cel art like Ghostbusters instead. There's shots of the infected building that look just like 1984's better movie.

I've never been more bored by Will Smith; Deadshot's an assassin with no remorse, but here he's daddy of the year. Boomerang keeps tucking a pink unicorn toy into his coat for no sane reason (actual Bronies just get tattoos and jerk it to pony porn, you know?), and barely does anything with his boomerangs or other gadgets. Croc's a gangsta stereotype, and just a normal-sized guy in latex, not a giant half-crocodile mutant who can literally bite a man's head off. Katana is a terrible one-note character in the comics, apparently, but here she's not even that. The rest of the squad are just boring. I like how they didn't even bother to give the disposable example villain any backstory or personality.

The "Hey Vern! It's Ernest!"-looking soldier boss is somehow allowed to sleep with an unstable metahuman whose heart they keep in a suitcase to stop from going on rampages. Amanda Waller is too cartoonishly evil to be in a cartoon, let alone this, you wouldn't trust someone like that with a squad of super-villains, you'd lock her up with them! You tell a room full of professional military that you're operating magic super-villains, but it's OK because the handler is porking her, and they won't thank you for your results. Everyone else normal and nameless dies, and there's zero empathy shown for them or the tens of thousands of people killed by the plot.

The fight scenes are trash. Mobs of black-faced unarmed "monsters" charge into gunfire, like the English murdering the Fuzzy-Wuzzy in Kipling's poem. If you're a reawakened ancient god, and you're building an army, I can see not realizing the value of firearms and modern tactics, but why aren't they armed with swords, spears, bows, slings? Nope, they're literally there to be targets. They rush up, grapple, die. At one point, some of the converted soldiers manage to shoot at the squad, with no cover, and they get annihilated by shitty CGI fire.

The boss fight scene is very directly ripped off from Ghostbusters, with Enchantress playing the part of Gozer, and then gets resolved by her being incredibly stupid, multiple times. You know, it's great that the villains can't hear the squad screaming instructions about "BOMB" across the room, or the surprise of the BOMB might not work. The magic sword that actually hurt you? Just leave it laying around, I'm sure that won't come back up.

This is a version where most of Jared Leto's scenes got cut out; I can't imagine spending more screen time with the loathesome creep who happens to play the Joker so badly. He slurs everything he says like he's got a mouthful of puddin'. He apparently really got into method-acting the Joker on set, which is not how you fucking behave if you're a human being. As I've long noted, the only good thing Jared Leto's ever done was get his head chopped off in American Psycho.

The one bright point to the entire film was Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, who does in fact kill it every chance she gets. "We're bad guys, it's what we do!" She's not just a stripper-with-a-bat, but the only one with any personality, or awareness of what being a super-villain means. Margot did most of her own stunts, and trained hard for it, and it shows. Except where she didn't get to do a stunt, and then it's very obvious, because the crew on this were absolutely incompetent.

OK, now I'm ready to watch Birds of Prey and see her in something good, right?

★½☆☆☆ — the ½ is for Margot.

What I'm Playing: Genshin Impact

Kind of a mashup of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Sword Art Online, Avatar: The Last Airbender (not the papyrus-font one), Guild Wars, etc. Not especially original, but well-implemented, very very pretty, and there's a lot of writing, all of it competent. I don't generally think 3D games make sense on the iPhone; AnotherEden was perfect because it worked in the limitations of the medium, but the 3D looks good; it does burn battery and heat the phone up considerably.

Account setup has two options, by email or username, but the email verification code never arrived, so I just did username; I'm "Kamimark" as usual, so if you're in and want a friend…

Starts with a gigantic 4GB download. This took a while.

The cutscene is bizarre, but then you choose your character's gender, you get no choice in appearance or abilities (you are a wind swordsman).

OK, once in the world, you get a fat cherub sidekick (who vanishes and rarely bugs you, but does provide some useful information…)


They soon give you a second character, Amber the stripper fire archer/knight. "Wish" is the gachapon system, you get enough tokens and a reduced cost on your first 10-pull. I got 8 weapons, only two of which were useful to me, and 2 characters, Noelle (light) and Razor (dark), who I haven't really used yet.

Movement is open-world, with a virtual joystick and dragging on the main screen; I find I often hit the attack buttons, which do not fold away when you're in a peaceful area just looking around, so I freak out and attack the air or through harmless NPCs sometimes, but they're unharmed by it.

You can climb almost any surface, with a rapidly-shrinking stamina bar, and soon after reaching the city you get glider wings so you can coast down from any tower. I'm just having fun now exploring rooftops. For instance, the Knights of Favonius guildhall? The roof has several goodies and a teleporter!

The wilderness map is huge, and even the town is fairly large. Spend some time there, because once you start the main quest, everyone hides and you can't shop or chat for a while.

There's a fairly extensive cooking, weapon crafting, and alchemy system, based on finding all the little sparkly nodes in the wild, and then playing a minigame to practice the recipe. Food hasn't actually been that useful to me yet, I don't get hurt much, but later I expect to be constantly hitting inventory and stuffing my face, like Skyrim.

Combat as the main character's pretty good, but it doesn't have an actual gap-closer, so you have to dash forward to the enemy, try to line up, then mash attack and spells; there's a cheap elemental attack, and a big AOE ultimate/limit break. I've been smashing up goblin camps and taking their chests. I'll usually open with Amber sniping all their explosive barrels and killing a few, then when they get close I switch back to Kamimark and murder everyone. Since you can only have one character up at a time, the others aren't follower NPCs, it's really pointless to level more than one or two except for specific elemental tasks.

The first dungeon is small but has a few nice tricks, requires switching between your main character and Amber.

I've since just been running around the first part of the world. By reaching the statue of the gods pins, you reveal a new map section.

There's a ton (40+) of lore books in the knights guild hall library, and I've read a couple of them and there's obviously been a lot of work put into these; so lore and backstory matters here.

Of course this is a "first hit is free" gachapon game, because that's what works on the shitty app stores. That said, the daily reward tier looks OK, like a $5/month sub, so I may do that if I'm still playing by next weekend:

This really is more of a desktop MMO, but the UI is very mobile-focused like the Sword Art Online games. I wish they'd bothered to make a Mac client, even as just a raw iOS port. I've never bothered to replace my PS3 with a PS4, and I'm waiting for PS5 price to drop and/or killer game I need, so I can't play on console, which might also be better.

Computer Archaeology: Public Caves Discovered!

Exploring the archives of the People's Computer Company (a public timesharing computer center in the early '70s, yes before home computers), and many of the programs we're familiar with from David H. Ahl's Creative Computing come from here. 15 different variations on guess the number and guess a coordinate, sure, but also some really important things, many of them long forgotten.

Then I find this artifact:

pcaves

What the. This is basically a MUD†, from 1973!

Source code (uses a very long TREES library on previous pages).

Everyone knows WUMPUS, which is based on CAVES, but this is the rock star of these! How does everyone not have a copy of PCAVES? This is like finding a working Airwolf helicopter in a cave with ochre handprints on the walls. HOW THE FUCK did cavemen do that? Why don't we all have an Airwolf, if it existed 47 years ago?!

So anyway some barely-modernized version of this will be added to the MysticDungeon soon, you'll all be able to graffiti up a cave!

† more like a MUSH ("Multi-User Shared Hallucination") with one user at a time, specifically.

  • Note: You can play a version from the Narrascope conference 2019: PublicCavesNarrascope
  • Renga in Blue typed it in for the above event, and briefly reviews it as an adventure game. Which it's not, this is a social environment, literally a MUSH.

What I'm Watching: Code 8

Code 8 (2019): Inexplicably, 4% of people have "powers": Brawn, Pyro, Cryo, Electric, Telekinetic, Telepath, Healer. You can make a pretty balanced City of Heroes party. But there's no costumed superheroes or supervillains, instead they do construction work, or are just petty criminals. So now the muggles have outlawed powers, and use "Guardians" (shitty human-sized robot Sentinels). I don't buy the premise, but it's no dumber than any other superpowered show, and is far less preachy about it than most.

Unfortunately, it's just a formulaic drug crime drama, Training Day for super-powered gangsters. There's a couple of good powered fights, one really amusing Electric kill, otherwise it barely needs the powers, just drugs. It feels like a failed TV pilot; they actually made a 10-minute short demo movie, that after 3 years of production work got them to this, but it still doesn't go anywhere.

As with most modern films, entirely too much is shot with cyan/orange filters so there's no other colors in deeply dark rooms.

Baby Henry Rollins (Robbie Amell) (character has a name but I don't care) is a stay-at-home good boy who tries to get normal jobs, not use his probably high-level Electric powers like his dead hoodlum father, his mother's sick and losing control of her Cryo powers.

So after a little humiliation day in and out being treated like an illegal immigrant worker, he takes up a life of crime, just to sock it away in his sock drawer, we never get to see Baby Henry Rollins go on a bender, he never has fun, he's just focused on his mom. I really don't like him, he's a sterile plastic homunculus like a Ken doll.

Imitation Walter Goggins (Stephen Amell, cousin to Baby Henry Rollins) is more fun, he's a good ol' boy gangbanger, takes care of his crew. But again we don't see much of his life or anything about him. The other two crew, one mute and one a snickering girl pyro assassin, are even more cyphers.

Their crime boss Imitation Riff Raff (Greg Bryk) is obviously evil and treacherous, keeps a girl Nia around for her power… and for once, she calls out Baby Henry Rollins "You just want me for my power", instead of treating him like a good guy for helping/using her.

Half-Bacon/Korean Cop (Sung Kang) does OK, and there's like 2 minutes of him getting any personality before he resumes reading the cop lines. There's no resolution to either his personal problems or his assertion he's going to bring in Baby Henry Rollins.

I don't like the message. Nothing really changes, the world just gets shittier and shittier, corrupt government, corporations, and mobsters get what they want, and you should just accept death and misery.

Fuck that. These people should rise up and slaughter the muggles in power, and anyone else who gets in the way, make them know fear, and pain, and then die. That'd be a good ending. That's basically the videogame Infamous, which had a lot more character development and personality than this film.

★★★☆☆

Maybe We Ain't That Young Anymore Monday Music

Darling, you know just what I'm here for
So you're scared and you're thinking
That maybe we ain't that young anymore
Show a little faith, there's magic in the night
You ain't a beauty, but, hey, you're alright
Oh, and that's alright with me
—Bruce Springsteen, "Thunder Road", so romantic.

Largely inspired by McSweeney's Bruce Springsteen or Stephen King?, which I got all the classic SK, and many of the Boss's. #30 just made me laugh out loud.

What I'm Watching: Invisible Man (2020)

So, a woman (Elisabeth Moss) who's apparently been given everything she wants, sabotages security systems and flees her husband's home in the night, releases his dog, dings his car. Then she acts like a prisoner in a "safe house" of a single black cop and his daughter, but never explains why. The husband (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, generic English prettyboy but has the stupid Millennial mullet, which means he's coded as villain) is so distraught he commits suicide, and the disrespectful wench can't even sit through his prepared statement at the will reading, only wants money money money.

To say I'm not sympathetic to the viewpoint character is a massive understatement. You need to show, not tell, to get any kind of sympathy.

Lifetime Movie Aside: There's a movie I saw, Enough (2002, Jennifer Lopez), a ripoff of Sleeping with the Enemy (1991, Julia Roberts) where it spends half the film showing her life with an abusive husband who makes her clean perfectly, turn can labels forward in a cupboard, behave perfectly, every petty thing, or he'll beat her; then she escapes, learns "krav maga" (but what it shows is just kickboxing/tai chi), and kicks his ass. It was as preposterous as any other Lifetime movie, but I didn't mind it because it shows, not tells.

Anyway, then she goes paranoid, starts seeing moving shadows, and footprints in sheets in an utterly dark room we can't see anything in either, finds things she lost, and starts committing crimes and claiming her dead, invisible husband did it.

She tries to get a new job, and stays at the safe house, despite having all the money money money from her dead husband's estate. None of her behavior makes sense for someone newly rich. Did the writer (Leigh Whannell, dude best known for the horrendous Saw movies) just forget they'd done that? If he wrote this as little snippets while drinking, it would explain a lot of the "plot". In fact, several of the "I won't hurt you, I'll hurt them!" bits are straight out of Saw.

Security Aside: This shouldn't be news to anyone in 2020, but lock your damned computer. On the Mac, you can do System Preferences, Desktop, Screen Saver, Start after 5 minutes (or whatever), then Security, General, Require Password 5 Seconds after screen saver. The  menu also has ^⌘Q Lock Screen now (formerly in Keychain Access); I don't know/care how Windows and Linux do it, but you can figure it out. Now nobody can get to your desktop and send emails pretending to be you. This is the most basic security procedure. She h4xx0r3d her husband's security at the start, and lip-polishes over the webcam (which on good computers can't be accessed without the green light), so clearly learning security matters… Then she doesn't do the most basic thing. And while I'm at hit, the dead husband had terrible choices for passwords and PINs, do not use important dates in your life! Memorize random number & word sequences!

If this was going to be a psychological study of PTSD, then pretending that the "bad guy" is actually doing it ruins that. If it's going to be an Invisible Man horror story, then never showing the invisible man doing anything until nearly the end ruins that. Either way, it's just 90 minutes of Elisabeth Moss whining. Egregiously so when she whines "You can have any girl! I'm just a suburban girl!"; Mz Moss is dressed down in hoodies and bad makeup here, and nearing 40 not as young as Peggy on Mad Men, but she's still cute, fit, in the top 1% of pretty girls. Can you imagine what kind of psychological damage this is inflicting on girls who aren't her? "Nobody will ever love you if you don't look better than Mz Moss" is the writer's message. FUCK THIS GUY.

Suit Applications Aside: Suppose the invisible super-suit did exist (which it does not, it's her delusion). Every military, espionage, and assassination organization in the world would want it. Who cares about one possibly crazy ex-wife, if you get the ultimate weapon? And what happens when you scale that up to tanks, planes, missiles? You think a cop is gonna let someone walk off with one?

When the brother-in-law offers to make charges go away, to protect his brother's kid, he's just doing his filial duty, it's not a trap. And poor Zeus the dog, he just wants both his people back, but they keep fighting.

The entire last third of the film is a delusional, hallucinating, psychotic widow killing family, friends, and anyone else getting in her way. It's tragic, but there's no invisible man.

★★☆☆☆

(Disclaimer: Movie tropes about insanity are not reality; I'm not characterizing actual mental illness this way.)

Haunted House

You are a bold and courageous person,
afraid of nothing.
High on the hilltop near your home
there stands a dilapidated old mansion.
Some say the place is haunted,
but you don't believe in such myths.
One dark and stormy night, a light appears
in the topmost window in the tower of the old house.
You decide to investigate.
And you never return.

Ah, the classics.

[Update a few minutes later: Wow, "The Chinese Water Torture" is incredibly racist. Also it's called "waterboarding" and it's not a single drop of water, but wow.]