Author: mdhughes

What I'm Watching: Batman: The Long Halloween 1-2

A series of murders, mostly on mob people, on holidays drive Harvey Dent crazier and crazier, ultimately becoming Two-Face. The comic's a long, slow burn, but has some great moments, including my favorite Thanksgiving meal; Batman's a monomaniacal jerk, but has compassion for some of his antagonists. The mobs really just own Gotham, and hunting down The Roman won't change anything, but it's the thought that counts.

The cartoon movies are a mixed bag. The male characters pretty much all look alike, sometimes with different facial hair; the artist really only has two models, hulking brute like Batman, Dent, Gordon, Falcone, or weedy little dudes like Joker, or nerdy Alberto Falcone. The female characters, too, are all perfect flapper types from a single model, distinguished only by haircut. The scenes are dark even for a Batman cartoon, so it's often hard to make out more details than rough outline.

Jensen Ackles is not a good Batman, he's whiny. Troy Baker as Joker is lame, but I don't like anyone but Mark Hamill for the role; he's especially perfect for it in The Killing Joke, and is supposedly "retired", but really they should've paid or done anything for him to come back. The rest of the voice cast are adequate, Billy Burke's Gordon and Naya Rivera's Catwoman are even pretty good. Josh Duhamel is too growly to be professional lawyer Harvey Dent, and too clean to be cackling, half-mad Two-Face.

The movie does give hints about who Holiday is throughout, but it's not laid out as well as in the comic, there has to be a long, slowly-delivered monologue at the end.

Still, here's your Halloween Batman, which is the best seasonal Batman.

★★★½☆

Haunted Dungeon early beta

Hey, it's a new and slightly more usable build (still Mac only) of the Haunted Dungeon! You can now use all the weapons & armor, eat & drink food & potions, might even make it down to floor 2 or 3!

Up in the next few days:

  • Tossing out items. I need to write a new event mode for selecting it, so I didn't feel like it today.
  • Levelling up. Right now you're doomed because you can't heal except by food & potions; or improve, except by very rare (and a long ways down) stat potions.
  • Start getting the actual story into the game. But only the first hints will be in the upper levels, since you can't get far anyway.
  • Main release on Halloween!

Probably next month:

  • Backpack for storing more items. One of the premises of this game is every item's a singleton, there's no stacking. So every item must be useful by itself, and item slot management is hard.
  • Ranged weapons have range.
  • Magic spells.
  • Elemental effects. It's already true that hitting some monsters with sharp or blunt weapons is better, but there's many more interactions when magic gets involved.
  • Much more dungeon dressing, I'm using Vexed's Demonic Dungeon art for that late-'80s, hi-res but low color count effect.

I'd love to get some feedback if it actually works on everyone's machine, because I'm doing some weird tricks to make it launch. As noted on itch, if it doesn't launch, or crashes, try looking at ~/Documents/haunted-dungeon.log, email me with that file.

The game's written in Scheme, running on Chez Scheme, with SDL2 from Thunderchez. Then I have an excessively complex Scheme script that compiles it, and builds a .app structure for Mac, and should also make Linux & Windows builds on those platforms (or in a VM, which is how I do it); been a while since I tried those, but once this is solid I'll include those.

I normally discuss ongoing projects on fediverse, @mdhughes@appdot.net

'80s Neon Tuesday Music

Inspired by a fediverse conversation about how '80s the '80s were (more '80s than you can believe):

And then looking this up, I discovered Robert Palmer died in 2003, age 54. Nobody told me! guardian obituary

What I'm Watching: Post Mortem: No One Dies in Skarnes

Oh, Netflix. There was a long dry spell of Grim Scandinavian Crime Dramas after the last Bordertown, and Deadwind S2 was aimless without a main plot (tho still amusing mostly). But now they have Post Mortem: No One Dies in Skarnes (there's like 3 other Post Mortems in the last couple years). Also technically horror, but mostly comedy.

A young woman Live (pr. "Leeva", Kathrine Thorborg Johansen) is found dead in a field… mostly dead. Not all that dead. Her brother Odd (Elias Holmen Sørensen being a Norwegian Zach Galifianakis, just hilariously incompetent) and father run the small town's only mortuary. And then she starts to have problems with a need for blood.

Odd is soon in charge of the mortuary, and struggles desperately to keep it open. Live's murderous instincts should be a nice windfall… Instead she just gets wannabe cop/boyfriend Reinert (André Sørum) tangled up in it, and hapless Odd nearly bankrupted a couple times.

It's shot like a horror story or drama, but everyone is so foolish and slapstick it never manages to not be comedy (very morbid, hope you don't mind blood & dead bodies). Some of the eps drag or cycle over the same ground a bit; hopefully if they get more seasons they tighten the plot up more. But just a charming little show.

★★★★½

M1 MacBooks Pro

I love beepy music made from Apple system noises. This is not the first!

I could not care any less about HomePod (I have cheap but acceptable stereo BT speakers in every room) or AirPods (BT lag into my ears makes me dizzy). So do with these as you will. I'll be using cheap wired earbuds or expensive wired cans forever.

M1 names combine the ugly internal product number with marketing "Pro". "Max" implies you can't get better. Who'd need more than 64GB RAM? Should be one or the other, like "Apple Chip Pro", or "M1P-10-16-32" (cores-gpus-ram).

MacBook stats are given in mm & lb. PICK ONE SYSTEM!

"The physical keys replace the Touch Bar." Almost like it was a gigantic mistake everyone hated. And MagSafe is back! Multiple ports and SD card reader! It's 2013 again!

What would you do if you had a million bucks? LCD, 3 XDRs, & a 4K monitor at once! (actual cost of the shown system is ~$25K).

How's the notch gonna work with fullscreen programs like Notch's game Minecraft? Just a blank spot. Might obscure the compass in Elder Scrolls games, too. Maybe it just blacks out the entire upper area in fullscreen, wasting real estate but not being stupid. I dislike the notch thing in every device, desktop more than others.

Battery life & GPU performance are awesome, no kidding. Faster than anything Apple shipped in a desktop even, my iMac 5K has a low-end AMD Radeon.

The 16" with M1 Max, 64GB RAM, 4TB SSD, is $4899, still less than a single XDR monitor. 14" with M1 Pro, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD (get a cheap thunderbolt drive for storage) is $2899, almost reasonable.

I'm not, I think, actually getting this; the iPad Air satisfies my portable needs at present. I want the M1 Max in a Mini format, so I can wire up any monitor (not a $6000 XDR).

But if I took a new dayjob, I'd do it in a minute.

Animal Crossing Direct 2021

I haven't been playing as much, typically I'll get in on Fri-Sun if there's an event, or check for birthdays. I've had to time-travel cheat a couple times now, just a few days off, to catch something, and I hate doing it, but it's better than waiting a year? There's just nothing new each day to bring me in. I am trying to stockpile candy for Halloween, but I can get enough candy on the day to not need to do this, it's just easier.

But now there's reasons to come back more often! As of Nov 5:

  • Brewster's café in the museum looks charming, and I have a few Amiibo cards which can be used there. They didn't say if KK Slider would move his shows there? In Wild World (which I mainly played) you had to know KK was playing there to find him; the courtyard is a much more obvious place, but not as comfy.
  • Kapp'n! Boat tours to really non-standard islands. I rarely bother with the Nook Miles islands because I have everything I need at home.
  • Aerobics is back from GameCube. Not at an impossibly early scheduled time now, but just whenever you want?
  • A bunch of Town Hall stuff. And you can expand your storage more! I'm constantly fighting my storage, and have an assistant/mule character who just holds extra junk.
  • Gyroids will grow in the ground again! Fun fact, they're actually ancient Japanese funerary statues Haniwa.
  • More construction content with Harv, who I find creepy but the scene studio's amusing.
  • But also Lottie, who I hate, largely because the Pocket Camp furnishing minigame was absolutely terrible, with no choices or creativity, just a prompt to pay real money for gacha. Maybe it won't be as bad in New Horizons. Maybe. But I want all the construction tools for my own home, not another "Happy Home Designer" minigame. Apparently this is only available if you pay for Online Plus?

Also announced is the Online Plus subscription, mo' money, for Lottie's thing, and:

  • N64 & SEGA Genesis emulators. This is like Coke+ giving you Pepsi as well. That there's a Nintendo-branded Genesis controller is so weird and cursed I don't even know. I think the controller won't work on my Switch Lite, so I'm not too tempted.

Fuck Firefox

I'd been using Firefox as my media browser; I can't reasonably set Safari to show on all desktops, or risk it crashing from stupid movies & music, so I need a secondary browser.

Mozilla's constant disruptive updates are annoying, but they just added a new "trick" to Firefox:

Yes, they've added ads & spyware, and enabled it by default. If they're willing to do this kind of shit, the next one won't have a checkbox, it'll just secretly sell everything you do to ad companies.

So fuck this, Mozilla is dead to me. The one thing I ask first and most importantly from any app or service is DO NOT SPY ON ME.

I've uninstalled Firefox, gone to Chromium for now, we'll see if there's a better option later.