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What I'm Playing: Mitrasphere

Another of Crunchyroll's translated gachapon games. This one's: All PVE, mostly co-op but you can solo most things, casual/free-to-play friendly (no PVP rankings to keep up with!). The art's very cute anime paper-doll style (like Another Eden, or Crunchyroll's previous, DanMachi Memoria Freese), the music's lovely. You run a single character, the gacha is just for equipment. You use a lot of equipment.

Most of the gameplay loop is:

  • Go to the next quest zone, click on whoever has (!) over their head (mostly Matilda), go thru a series of Normal (easy) story & fight stages. You can pretty much faceroll or hit Auto on these if you even slightly try to keep up your gear. If you see someone with (?) over their head, you haven't unlocked their quest yet.
  • Go to Events, there's currently (until 07-11) Canary Eggs (basic mid-tier armor), Pehn (progressively harder werewolf boss fight), Job Coaching (you can switch jobs any time), Skill Training ("impossible" target dummies, for seeing how your build works). At any time there may also be Guerilla (1 hour, 3x a day, progress thru a short boss grind to get gear & upgrade gems), and a Weekly mission (same thing, different gear & upgrades). WHEW!
  • Menu brings up your char, check the "Panel Missions" which are long-term goals, "Missions" which are daily and progression completion rewards, and treasure chest.
  • Now look at your Equipment & Upgrades. Limit break duplicates, upgrade gear levels (uses seeds/gems you'll be spending the rest of your life grinding), slot anything that's better than current, auto-slot "support" gear (just adds stats, but your old levelled gear isn't useless!). The game will instruct you once, so pay attention. I'm constantly fiddling with new gear to add another few points to Power.
  • Repeat forever. And ever. Uh, Screen Time reports I've now played 28h55m, and it's only been out 3 days. Some of that's idle-grinding, but uh, yeah. This ate my free time, sleep, and probably cut into useful work time.

Once you've finished the main quest, which currently ends at a bit of a downer cliffhanger (beachcomber) on Edol Outskirts Night (huh, very much like Another Eden dumping you alone on a beach mid-game…), go back to the start and do Hard mode. This requires you to grind a lot and get your "Power" (total gear & stat scores) up, so I'm currently only about halfway thru Hard mode. Once you get thru Hard mode in a zone, you can do Expert… and currently these just demolish me even in a good co-op group. Another week and I should be capable of clearing Expert.

The boss fights are fun, all but expert are tough but doable with a smart group, or a clusterfuck with a bad group. For fuck's sake, when you're in Wave 1/2 of a boss fight, sitting at the "lobby" (10 HP monster that doesn't attack), WAIT FOR FIVE PLAYERS! Half the time, some jackass pokes the lobby as soon as they get in, and then me and them get murdered by the boss before anyone else can join. OH SWEET CTHULHU I've never been so angry at some people. But for every one of those, there's a group where everyone does their job, the healer heals, the tank holds aggro, the rest of us murder the boss, and there's that sense of "this is a really good game!" It's like every MMO wants to be in hours, but this does it in minutes. Even some of the almost-clusterfucks are fun, where there's 1 or 2 of us last-man-standing, the boss nearly dead, and we flick between heal, attack, and just barely squeak out a victory.

Side tasks:

  • Searching: See at the bottom of the screen if you have 0 to 5/5 sparklies you can collect, they're scattered in various overworld levels, they give you currency for the in-world shop (no gold here, they trade in pearls and souls!). There's not much more point to exploring the small levels, jumping and walking up the side pathways is pointless, but they're pretty.
  • Essence of Battle: Complete each of the jobs in Job Training and you unlock this, a leaderboard where you grind bosses to get trivial stat upgrades (they do add up to something, but not much). It's mostly meters you can move to 100%, which we all love to do!
  • Social: World chat's like any MMO public chat. Sometimes informative, sometimes nonsense memes. You can make private rooms, join pre-made groups for taking on hard bosses.
  • Fashion: You keep the appearance of every gear you've ever taken, and can use it as a cosmetic item over whatever you're actually wearing. There's only 2 genders (but you can switch if you don't like your first choice), the face & hair options aren't that much initially, but you can buy new options from the in-world merchant! By rank 10 or so everyone looks pretty distinct, instead of just random pickup gear.
  • Spreadsheets: I'm currently working on a big zone spreadsheet just so I can figure out where to go next, where to grind what I need. Will update this link as I finish Hard mode: Mitrasphere

Almost all of this is perfect for me. I can stat-wonk and grind all day on slightly different gear, but I like having my own unique protagonist. I would like more NPCs for personal stories; this has about 6 NPCs who matter, and they have only a couple small side-quests or personal stories to tell. Another Eden was crazy with hundreds of characters you have to level, find the one spot in the world where their personal quests trigger, etc., I'm paralyzed by choice in it; DanMachi was much more playable where the story-mode only has about two dozen characters, but there's equally hundreds of in-game character variants you have to level, so that was annoying. A couple dozen NPCs with stories, please. No more.

There's a big content update coming on 07-05, so now is a good time to get started, then see the update as soon as you finish main quest.

What I'm Watching: Godzilla Singular Point

Netflix animation mashing up Godzilla, Jet Jaguar (!), Scooby Doo (Mei is such a Velma it's… whoo; and Barbell is Freddy, and if the other nerd isn't Shaggy I dunno who is). "Haunted" house, weird signals that sure sound a lot like the Mothra fairies, renegade electricians, giant flying monsters, and it gets more so every episode. I might do an episode analysis later, but if you like what I like, just watch it right now.

Rick & Morty S5

So, Nimbus. Goddamned Sub-Mariner wrecking homes and, uh, having his own solution to surface cops. So, are cops fish in this? Fish was a cop, so why not… Casual reference to "destroying mermaid puss" from the Ricklantis Mixup episode, which has never made sense since human-top mermaids don't have… anyway.

But what I want to point at is the two visual uses of The Fountain, and Jessica's journey there.

The Fountain is Aronofsky's only great-film-but-badly-edited. Pi and Requiem for a Dream are perfect as they are (tho I'll never watch Requiem again, fuck you, man). But all his other films are kinda trashy. The Fountain should be his best work, but jumping back and forth in time wrecks the message, halfway thru you know where it's all going, just have to wait it out.

If The Fountain was edited correctly, say 3/4 of each story in linear order, and then a coda for each in the same order, with the future part LAST, you might actually follow the character's enlightenment. As it is, I just get drunk and yell at the screen. And that's about how Jessica's enlightenment goes.

SPOILERS










Morty's enemy culture in this is a good development. Like every D&D party picks a fight with some stupid NPCs, and ends up razing their village and getting enemies for life (I know it's not just me, the Knights of the Dinner Table do it all the time… which is maybe a bad sign). The progression from a family of barbarian idiots who don't understand the consequences of a magic door, to medieval civilization built around hating Morty, to increasingly technical and apocalyptic focus on the one horrible thing that keeps happening to them. I want these to keep showing up, tho that's the kind of continuity they don't really do.

It's been a long damned time since S4.

★★★★★

Still Fixing Sublime

Minor notes on customization, all files are in Preferences > Browse Packages.

I fixed Dracula to be a little more pit of utter darkness:

UI: Customize Theme, file is User/Default Dark.sublime-theme:

// Documentation at https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/themes.html
{
    "variables": {
        "base_hue": "black",
        "base_tint": "#99ddff",
        "ui_bg": "#222222",
        "text_fg": "white",
        "sidebar_bg": "#111111",
        "sidebar_row_selected": "#666600",
    },
    "rules": [
    ]
}

UI: Customize Color Scheme, file is User/Dracula.sublime-color-scheme:

// Documentation at https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/color_schemes.html
{
    "variables": {
    },
    "globals": {
        "background": "black",
    },
    "rules": [
    ]
}

And some keys I use, file is User/Default (OSX).sublime-keymap: ^O as Open above is incredibly useful if you write "paren code enter paren open-above tab" over and over. Cmd-Y is lambda λ in a bunch of my editors and iTerm2; using the actual lambda symbol is awkward but cool, so of course I do it.

[
    { "keys": ["ctrl+o"], "command": "run_macro_file", "args": {"file": "res://Packages/Default/Add Line Before.sublime-macro"} },
    { "keys": ["shift+ctrl+o"], "command": "run_macro_file", "args": {"file": "res://Packages/Default/Add Line.sublime-macro"} },
    { "keys": ["super+y"], "command": "insert", "args": {"characters": "λ"} },
]

Obvious missing feature is piping thru shell. I'm going to tackle that fully later, but for now I just needed to number lines, so added a package Number, containing:

Number/Number.py:

import sublime
import sublime_plugin

def numberLines(s):
    out = []
    i = 0
    for line in s.splitlines():
        i += 1
        out.append("%d. %s" % (i, line))
    return "\n".join(out) + "\n"

class NumberCommand(sublime_plugin.TextCommand):
    def run(self, edit):
        for region in self.view.sel():
            if not region.empty():
                s = self.view.substr(region)
                out = numberLines(s)
                self.view.replace(edit, region, out)

and Number/Default (OSX).sublime-keymap:

[
    { "keys": ["shift+ctrl+n"], "command": "number" }
]

This makes a nice template for doing additional filters. Of course there's no damned examples for the current version, the old samples are missing arguments.

When developing a plugin, you can open the console with ^~ and type view.run_command("number") and see some print statement debugging, which helps.

It's very much more of a "developer's toolkit" than a real editor sometimes. It reminds me a lot of hacking on E/PM in REXX on OS/2, where the entire editor was just a big REXX script and it was trivial to make it circle all search results, or some such. But it's been better for doing my Scheme hacking than anything else so far.

What I'm Watching: Manifest

Just started, dunno how long. They did 3 seasons and cancelled, so now I know I can actually watch the whole thing without 'flix cancelling it on me.

Watched first two eps. Plane flight from Jamaica to NYC vanishes, lands 5.5 years later without time passing inside, nobody mentions Langoliers. They start having auditory hallucinations which lead to saving lives or solving crimes or standing outside at night to stare at a plane, some of them think it's God, others are relentlessly sane. Again nobody bothers to mention Stephen King. The government investigates them. Nobody mentions The Shop, from multiple Stephen King books about traumatized, time-lost psychics investigated by the government like say The Dead Zone or Firestarter.

The writing's nowhere near Stephen King level, but the family dramas are all tightly interconnected, the rather obvious bad guys are rather obvious, it's an enjoyable enough popcorn show ripoff of his books. I could do with less "God" from the stupid, life-disaster NYPD lady who's often the protagonist.

I'm tagging this "horror" but that's really not accurate. They don't have the balls to show anything dark and terrible, this aired on NBC for weak-spined old people who don't have streaming, so a young man in prison is just beaten up a little, not… The girls in a cage are… cared for off-screen, so you don't have to hear what happened. Fake sex is done with lingerie and taffeta sheets, not sweaty people boning just short of real porn. There's a murder… shown only as bloodspatter cut away from the victim.

The amazing world of the future of 2018 from 2013 doesn't seem to phaze anyone, just minor notes that their iPhones don't connect to obsolete 2G towers or long-cancelled phone accounts. Medical research girl's work has gone on without her. Nobody so far has noted that they went from a bright, hopeful America with President Barack Obama, to a war-torn hellhole dystopia under Traitor Tr@mp. If I found out I'd skipped over half of Barry's term and into that shit, I'd be pissed.

★★★½☆

What Are You Doing, iCloud?

I often use Pythonista for automation or just code goofing off on the iPad. And unfortunately, the only ways Apple has allowed to get files into it are:

  1. Download with some other app (Dropbox or Readdle Documents, mostly) and share, one-way into it and no way out like a roach motel, or
  2. Put the file in iCloud, and it "should" sync automatically.

This is 100% an Apple policy problem, #1 demonstrates other apps can use networking just fine.

So on Mac I open iCloud (only in Finder, it's a stupid long path in shell), Pythonista3, try dragging the now-annoying disappearing proxy icon… can't drag it. So up a folder and I can drag THAT into shell.

Now in my CodePy folder, ln -s LONGICLOUDPATH icloud and voila, convenient access. Move my working project in there.

Make changes to a file, look in Pythonista, and it's all good. Make a new file, wait… it never shows up. Finally I open Files app on iPad, see if it's there, and NOW it syncs.

Maybe Pythonista is getting old and missed a notification, I notice the keyboard row isn't coming up, but Apple's incompetent garbage service iCloud/MobileMe/iTools has been failing to sync files for 15 FUCKING YEARS NOW, and I'm goddamned sick and tired of it.

This is why I give Dropbox money every month, because their syncing always works.

Mornin'. Nice day for fishin', ain't it? Hu ha!

  • Epic NPC Man: Playlist of 182 (and more all the time) little skits from "The World of Sky-craft" aka "Aze-Rim". Some nail exactly what the MMO experience is like, frustrating and amusing at once, some are less so. But I watched most of these in the last 2 days, totally worth it. My brain has melted.
  • Baelin's Route: Movie of the silly fisherman with one line of dialogue, dragged off to adventure. The actor does a LOT with that one line and a fishing rod (that turns into a staff with a knob on the end during fights). If he earns a tiny bit of XP every time he fishes, and he's been fishing nonstop for 20 years since launch, he's probably the most powerful being in Azerim. I don't like the inevitable plot twist 2/3 thru, but fucking Witcher did it, why wouldn't these guys?
  • NPC Dungeons & Dragons: Playlist of the nerds playing D&D (5E, not at all my favorite edition and I dislike the kind of story-driven modules they're been funneled thru, but the play's the thing)

Makes heavy use of New Zealand's fantasy aesthetic and loudly plays celtic music like a certain set of movies set there. Their costumes, props, and film editing "magic" are simpler, but better than those movies. They do OK at getting diverse casting, it's not all honkies.

Sublime or Sub-prime?

Because I'm endlessly evading responsibility^W^W looking for more efficient ways to work at nothin' all day^A^K look, I play with new editors.

Ugly themes, right away, install Package Control, and then the theme Dracula, and it looks like something I can stand. Not as good as Hackerman for Atom.

It's still ludicrously using stacks of JSON files for settings; 700+ lines in the default, OS overrides that, then your user prefs override that. Read lines, figure out if the default is useful, copy & modify in your own.

It does have the advantage it works reasonably fast, and runs on multiple platforms. It has a Lisp syntax highlighter that doesn't completely suck on Scheme.

But it has this terrible minimap, and no setting for it! You have to disable it from the menu every time you make a new window. OR, you can hack on it. Prefs, Browse Packages, make a Python file User/minimap.py (found on StackOverflow, ugh):

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import sublime
import sublime_plugin

class MinimapSetting(sublime_plugin.EventListener):
    def on_activated(self, view):
        show_minimap = view.settings().get("show_minimap")
        view.window().set_minimap_visible(show_minimap)

Then add "show_minimap": false, to the prefs file, and the stupid minimap never shows back up.

Problem 2, I wanted to insert timestamps in my headers. No datetime function or snippet or whatever.

Make a folder Datetime next to User, file Datetime/Datetime.py:

import sublime
import sublime_plugin
import datetime

class DatetimeCommand(sublime_plugin.TextCommand):
    def run(self, edit):
        self.view.insert(edit, self.view.sel()[0].b, datetime.datetime.now().isoformat())

Note all the name cases matter. See that horrible self.view.sel()[0].b? That's how you get the current cursor position. WTF!

Next to it, make Default (OSX).sublime-keymap:

[
    { "keys": ["shift+ctrl+t"], "command": "datetime" }
]

And now Sh-^T will insert a chunky ISO8601 datetime. Good enough. (originally I did Sh-Cmd-D, but turns out that's duplicate line which I use sometimes)

So, I'm giving Sublime 4 a ★★☆☆☆ out of the box, the API is ugly as hell and they no longer have example code up so ★★★☆☆, but it's pretty hackable if you don't mind getting your hands covered in code guts, so maybe ★★★★☆

I'll give it another week and see if it's worth using longer term. BBEdit's infinitely better for giant text files, but I do have needs other than that.

Man, that Bachman & Turner concert… they're super old, and that was 2012. But Paul Schaeffer, minus the World's Most Dangerous Band, jamming out on the keyboard! The audience are too old to dance. But they still rock out pretty good for guys who are even older than me.

What I'm Watching: Jupiter's Legacy

Well, trying to watch it. It is supposedly based on a Mark Millar comic, so maybe there's something of value in here, but also they fired the showrunner partway thru and replaced him with a new guy, so clearly visions differ. Doing this live-action is stupid; it looks goofy at best, the CGI and greenscreens are hilariously ineffectual, the shitty color grading makes everything look like mud indoors or at "night" (all obviously shot day-for-night but then darkened digitally), it would be so much better as a cartoon. It makes CW superhero shows look competent.

At the start, there's preachy old-school Justice League ripoffs, with a "Code" of no killing, no leading, no going into politics. Which we know is nonsense, it doesn't work, because that much power in Human(-ish) hands corrupts absolutely. They claim the "new supervillains" are "going crazy" by killing, instead of just harmless bank robbery, but we see mundane bank robbers gunning people down at the start, so there's nothing new or supervillainy about it. Utopian, asshole Superman father, chastises his son Paragon for killing a supervillain who had just killed two heroes, and however many more in his inevitable escape from prison. Completely stiff, uncompromising, Christian supremacist. But I do not believe for a second that someone can be like that for 100 years without loosening up or becoming completely corrupt, so the whole premise is a fail so far.

The mother's also a superhero, but fairly ineffectual, she's like Edith Bunker with even less of a spine to stand up to her asshole husband (who, admittedly, could pull her spine out if she did more than talk back). The son's a whipped dog who does what daddy says. There's a mostly-absent daughter who doesn't pretend to fight "crime"; she's chased off when she does show up. The telepath uncle is maybe the only likeable character in the first few episodes.

Long sections are set in the 1920s, at the start of the Depression, and the father's origin as an asshole; but they seem so far to be completely irrelevant, a few throwaway lines would've told us as much.

The power sets are ridiculously cartoony. Most can fly just by wishing at the sky, Utopian has laser beam eyes of course, a few others have weak pew-pew-pew energy powers. They all seem to be made of steel, but the fighting sets don't reflect that, a couple bits of fake marble break but the bad CGI grass doesn't even dent when a superhero is smashed into it at mach speed. Zero effort on detail and realism.

Invincible, despite being a cartoon with intentionally cartoony physics including throwing baseballs around the planet at something like 1% light speed and then fighting aliens coming thru portals, is both physically and psychologically more realistic.

Now I'm down to fast-forwarding over anything with the family, unless Uncle Walt's involved.

Oh, finally end of E2/start of E3 we get to see some origin story, where the rich (or ex-rich, as Depression starts) get superpowers, the poor don't even get a pension. George in the 1920s story, and his son Hutch and his little gang of petty near-supers in the present, greatly improve the show. Like, this is an entirely different and better show when they're on screen, than the whiny, horrible Utopian family.

★★☆☆☆ with the Utopians on screen, ★★★½☆ with Hutch. Maybe the show will average out to ★★★☆☆.

What I'm Watching: Army of the Dead

This is a zombie flick, the most worn-out of genres, by Zack Snyder, the most worn-out edgelord filmmaker of the millennium. And it's vastly, vastly better than I would expect.

The title credits show the rise and fall of Las Vegas zombies with Elvis singing, you think "oh that character's totally surviving"… no mercy. Over the top but not quite into comedy range, tho I did laugh at some of the machine gun scenes.

So now years later, Vegas is walled off, the few surviving heroes are in dead-end jobs, or refugee camps. A fixer (Hiroyuki Sanada) hires ex-hero/fry cook Dave Bautista to gather a heist team to extract wealth from Vegas before the inevitable military solution.

The team's full of fun character actors, from Garrett Dillahunt (Francis from Deadwood, Ty from Justified) as the Carter Burke company man type, to Ella Purnell, one of the girls from Miss Peregrine's. And a lot of the crew are stunt performers. Samantha Win does a great job channelling Vasquez from Aliens, right down to the red bandana, tho there's no Lieutenant Gorman analogue in this.

The gunfights, knife fights, and brawls are quick and bloody, nice honest squibs it looks like in most shots, with a few cartoony but generally blurred-out CGI shots for machine-gun fire melting armies of the dead.

The crawler zombies are slow, dumb, and follow Night of the Living Dead tradition of just being extras in makeup, not too much effort. The ghouls, or "alpha zombies" as they call them, are heavily made up and sometimes CGI'd, especially their bright yellow eyes. There's some interesting zombie ecology/culture built up here, especially Valentine, and the showgirl, and Zeus.

I make a lot of comparisons to Aliens, because this is clearly like 50% Aliens + 25% original Dawn of the Dead + 25% Zack's Dawn of the Dead. Which is fine, Snyder needs a better template than just "dark superheroes brood and kill people", and here he's got one. This is shockingly superior to anything Zack's done since… Sucker Punch?

There's a spinoff TV series already in production, it seems, covering the zombie war, I'm definitely watching that.

★★★★★