Author: mdhughes

What I'm Watching: Super-Duper-Man 1: Man of Steel

So my plan is to watch the Snyder Trilogy. Man of Steel (2013), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), then Justice League (Snyder Cut, 2021). I am totally catching up on my film backlog.

Hobomax has redesigned their site, the stupid profile select now takes 10 seconds to be clickable, and I only have one profile so it's utterly pointless. And now the video player "full screen" maxes out at 1900x800, which is 2/3 of my monitor. WTF. I can't watch it on my TV, because Hobomax doesn't have a PS3 app, and I'm not buying another console for a while. Anyway, personal watching woes aside.

Why is Krypton all black and medieval? It's a gleaming forest of crystal spires in ALL the comic art and the Bottle City of Kandor. They're effete but civilized. Why is Jor-El riding a World of Warcraft Windrider™? Why are babies in pods? The "Codex" is a magic skull? I hate this design. It's like they watched Kenneth Brannagh's Thor (2011) and said "We don't want to be sleek and Kirby-esque like Asgard! Make it all shitty and ugly!" Really that's the theme for all the DCU movies.

Why is General Zod chasing Jor-El instead of securing their rebellion? Why are they frozen into little flying penises, instead of sent to the Phantom Zone? Much later they call the prison ship the PZ but it's very poor setting exposition.

Ridiculously bad cyan/orange tinting.

"People are afraid of what they don't understand", says Pa Kent to whiny baby Clark. People are afraid of a guy who can punch you into a fine red mist, laser-fry your brain, give you cancer with X-ray vision, demolish your truck with his bare hands. One second of drunkenness or anger or lust, and everyone dies. Clark's a damned nuclear weapon with a dick, and we all know it. And occasionally Snyder manages to show that.

Jor-El's program/ghost takes over a random abandoned scoutship, and gives Kal-El the suit. Which looks nothing like Earth or Kryptonian fashion. The comics made sense: Kryptonians wore skin-tight spandex and capes in bright colors. That's why Supergirl looks like she does, cheerleader outfit with giant boob window is demure Krypton fashion.

At least in flight the film quality gets better, but as soon as it's on the ground again it's back to even darker cyan/orange. I'm having a hard time looking at this. I want to pluck out the eyes of every film editor who does this.

The "Clark bums around like The Incredible Hulk TV show" parts would be a good movie by themselves, or a long TV series with the saddest ending music ever.

Lois (Amy Adams) is adequate. We don't see her do anything except Superman, so there's no great love story, no hyper-competent reporter thing. She does her own photos instead of having a Jimmy Olsen, which is weird; and her camera gets busted, but she doesn't retrieve the flash card which would give her actual evidence. She's certainly no Margot Kidder.

So, main plot finally starts.

Kal-El gets weak when he breathes Kryptonian air, not Kryptonite. Apparently he can fly in space without Earth air. The Kryptonians who haven't adapted are the reverse? It makes no sense. Yellow sunlight is what makes Superman and Supergirl so powerful, and people of Kandor when they come out of the bottle.

Fight scenes finally start at 90 minutes or so. And it's exactly like the Batman Arkham games, lotta fast swooshing between targets, hit them in ways that should break anything material, and it just flops a ragdoll around and they stand back up.

Forget all the little SimCity people running from the terraforming of Earth, think of the financial losses from bombing New York! If there's one thing I've learned from The Avengers and this movie, it's that aliens love giant robot tentacles coming from nowhere. Those are the greatest weapons ever. Fuck missiles, nukes, lasers, get some robot tentacles.

Also the message of these films is always that Humans can't solve their own problems, even disaster recovery, without a local demigod to save us. Perry White (Laurence Fishburne!) & intern Jenny have a moment, just waiting to die is all they can do.

Zod has a speech near the end which is actually kind of poignant, and if any of that was portrayed in the previous 2 hours, he'd be a good villain, instead of a mook. He's no Terence Stamp, of "KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!" fame. The cute alien chick (Antje Traue, last seen in Dark) claims they have no morality, which contradicts Zod.

Every fight they find more tissue-paper buildings to go thru, even ludicrously going up into space to smash thru a satellite. Just silly.

The ending's so weird. Kal-El's sent all his fellow Kryptonians to a fate worse than death, but killing one is just traumatic.

★★★☆☆ — lost a star for the fucking awful color, half a star for how dull and fighty the end is, after the first half was OK. Nothing fun, just a slugfest.

Cyberpunk Manga

Most all of these are out of print, or so obscure that apparently I'm the only person I know who's ever read them.

  • Blame!: Nihei Tsutomu, Blame! anime previously reviewed.
  • Blame! Academy And So On: Nihei Tsutomu's art book, weird school side-story to Blame!
  • Noise: Nihei Tsutomu, prequel to Blame!
  • Digimortal: Nihei Tsutomu. Bleak and awesome.
  • AD Police: The serious part of Bubblegum Crisis. The anime is OK but not as good as BGC, the manga are the other way around.
  • Black Magic: Shirow Masamune's original epic of an Athena/Typhon bioroid sorceress fighting to free Venusians from an evil AI god Zeus 66 million years ago. The anime takes one minor element, the M-66 combat robots, and turns that into a well-drawn but vapid present-day (1990s) Terminator ripoff.
  • Appleseed: Shirow Masamune. "The Promethean X" are the four volumes of a girl and her cyborg boyfriend from a post-WWIII wasteland trying to "adapt" to a city created by and for bioroids, where Human people go crazy. Is civilization even possible for Humans?
  • Dominion Tank Police: Shirow Masamune. Bleaker than the very silly anime, but both are kinda light-hearted with absolute doom for humanity.
  • Orion: Shirow Masamune. Very weird Buddhist-fantasy-tech. Like steampunk but with mandalas and priests instead of Victorian aristocrats fucking you over. Main character is very much Typhon 2.0.
  • Ghost in the Shell 1.5 Human Error Processor: Shirow Masamune, the volume you certainly missed between GitS 1 & 2, which you can find new copies so I won't link to. Here Motoko/Puppetmaster hybrid learns to redesign user interfaces and jump between bodies (mostly taut young female cyborgs, because Shirow's a perv, and who isn't?)
  • Lazarus Churchyard: Warren Ellis, an immortal plastic-spiky-boy in a ruined England (post Brexit, ha!) trying to die and failing. Generally possible to get in print?

In all cases, I suggest grabbing the torrent and then just keeping all the cbz, read with your comic reader of choice.

What I'm Watching: The Head

An English-language (mostly), Spanish-made mini-series on hobomax. Remarkably good actors, cinematography, for the most part… though indoors scenes are heavily tinted cyan/orange. The disease of monochromism is spreading. I assume everything outdoors was shot in Norway, because it only shows Antarctic panoramas from stock footage, anything with characters is in a generic white void.

Science team goes to Antarctica. We see them goofing off, last day before winter. They watch John Carpenter's "The Thing", firmly lampshading what kind of show this is: Creepy drama, but with a few laughs. Team leader Johan (Alexandre Willaume) gets to go home for a break, his wife Aniika (Laura Bach) stays behind to work with pompous scientist Arthur Wilde (John Lynch, the poor man's John Lithgow).

Contact with the base is cut off. When they get back, almost everyone is dead. A survivor starts telling a story, and then more and more facts don't match up, and contrary stories are told.

So, the science in this: Arthur claims he's invented a bacteria that's 153x better than photosynthesis at scrubbing CO2 from the air, so he's solved global warming. If they'd said "10%", or even "100%", OK, maybe; 153x is so far past what's physically possible it's pure fantasy. Plants use sunlight to get energy to crack CO2 for carbon and oxygen; what's this bacteria using, nuclear fission? And even if you had it, you couldn't release it, it'd run away and convert the entire atmosphere to oxygen, deadly to most current life.

Each episode, Maggie remembers more of her story, tells Johan, he runs around looking for evidence, mostly doesn't find any.

★★★½☆ - watch, don't expect miracles

SPOILER












The problem is, the "mystery" doesn't hold up, it's out of character for at least 2 people directly involved, and 2 covering it up. The original crime is petty, and doesn't need a giant base-destroying coverup. The murders in the new base are just deranged and over the top, completely out of anyone's league who's accused of them.

I'd been wondering since the survivor story started if they'd do a Keyser Soze flip at the end, and sure enough the girl is who I thought she was, and even does a "this physical disorder is all an act" scene. But I don't find her "true" story plausible either, especially Nils' death is just impossible, and there's no way for her collaborator to not realize what's happening.

Are you classified as Human? Negative, I am a Meat Popsicle.

Twitter said Thursday it aims to have 315 million monetizable daily active users (mDAUs)
by the end of 2023 and to at least double its annual revenue in that year.
The announcement was made in an SEC filing.
Twitter’s stock was up more than 5% on Thursday afternoon.

So now you're not even a "Human Resource", "User", "Eyeball", or "Meat Popsicle", but an "mDAU". And by completely dehumanizing you like that, they were rewarded by the stock market.

What I'm Watching: Last Suspicions, The Investigation

  • Suspicions of Mr Whicher: Ties That Bind: (zon) A divorce case (in Victorian England, nasty business) turns into a missing person case, then murder. Paddy really seems to have grown into the role here (tho again by now the historical Mr Whicher is utterly different from this character), but this is the last one. Unlike #3, the video quality is back to normal, even fairly good views of pastoral English countryside, horses galloping around. Everyone in this crappy little village and the nearby manor house has secrets, nobody is innocent of anything. The mystery almost works; but they have to cheat by telling Whicher something the audience doesn't get to hear, which resolves everything. Still, a good enough episode to go out on. ★★★½☆

  • The Investigation: (hobomax) Danish 5-episode miniseries about the death of a Swedish journalist in a submarine ("ripped from the headlines!"). Stoic, brooding cop (Søren Malling) largely ignores his family while slowly moving between scenes. Very heavily tell-don't-show. We don't even get to see the first interviews with the submarine guy, just told about them. Ep 2 mostly follows officer Maibritt (Laura Christensen) investigating the journalist's private life. Somewhat less brooding, but still closed-off, moody. Ep 3 they finally get some physical evidence, but again spends very long stretches waiting, in silence. That's where I am so far. Another case of maybe 45-90 minutes of content stretched out to 225 minutes of show. I'll probably finish this tomorrow, I'm interested in the case, but I'm bored out of my skull by the pacing. ★★★☆☆

Nintendo Direct

Not a great Direct to start the year. bold for things I'm interested in.

  • Xenoblade? No, it's just Smash. My interest in Smash is zero.
  • Famicom Detective Club: Very interesting, I'll be picking these up if they're not unreasonably priced. Pre-order is nonsense in a digital store.
  • Monster Hunter is offensive, trophy hunting innocent animals not for meat, but because you've encroached on their land.
  • Mario Golf: No interest, even tho I enjoy some golf games, largely because it's Joycon based and I have a Switch Lite.
  • No More Heroes III: "Save the world!" It's yet another NMH game, you do stupid chores in an "open world" with nothing in it, then fight in an arena, and literally jerk off with your blade to charge it back up. Plot means nothing here. Another Joycon game. Hard pass.
  • DC Super Hero Girls: FFS STOP MAKING THAT NOISE! The shrieking pitch of the characters aside, this is not for me.
  • Miitopia: Miitopia should be Nintendo's social network, shared world thing, if they had any ability to operate anything social. Instead it's now a bad JRPG. Pass, and despair.
  • Animal Crossing: New Horizons: Super Mario Items: OH YES GIMME! Especially the warp pipes, my house is up on a high cliff, separated from "town" by the river, so no villagers can reach it. But it also takes me forever to get home. So now I'll put one warp at my house, one on the far side of city center.
  • Project Triangle Strategy: The game is named for its genre, a rock-paper-scissors triangle, strategy game. With some of the most cliché dialogue I've ever heard in a game. Where it does show gameplay, it's kind of similar to Jeanne d'Arc without the cute character design, clever story, or deep tactical combat. If it turns out good despite first impressions, I'll reconsider.
  • Star Wars Hunters: Zero gameplay trailer. Buy it because you're such a Star Wars nerd despite the last 40 years of mostly bad Star Wars, or don't. Pass.
  • Hyrule Warriors: Ha ha no. Really dumb "action fighting" game with inappropriate Zelda skins. Almost any other game is better than this trash.
  • Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword HD: Interesting enough, and they seem to have adapted the Wiimote/Joycon controls to the Lite OK. I played on Wii and it was passable but not great; if you didn't, it's worth trying.
  • Splatoon 3: Zero gameplay trailer. A little bit of character customization in a shoot-em-up where that won't matter a bit.
  • Capcom Arcade Stadium: Free-to-start in-app-purchase arcade. I'm downloading it now. [later] So, some of the games at least are free, but you have to "buy" each one separately in the Nintendo eShop™. Ghouls & Ghosts has maybe the worst controls I've ever seen, I get tangled on diagonal jumps and die. It is sadness.
  • Bravely Default II: Looks fine, probably worth playing if you like this kind of thing. Pre-order, so can't tell now.
  • Knockout City: It's like Smash, but team-based. But it's not even Smash. Total pass.
  • Outer Wilds: You have 22 minutes… Stop. No. I hated Majora's Mask, will not put up with this bullshit in sppaaaaace. I want to lazily coast around looking at and doing things at my own pace, and the Sun exploding puts a crimp in my game style.
  • Plants vs Zombies: Adequate early iPhone tower defense game, long outlived its sell-by date, more of a touch interface game. Do not pay anything for this.
  • Samurai Warriors 5: I love samurai sword-fighting, and sort of like fighting games, but there's not much there, and the ridiculous superpowers ruin the historical fighting concept.

  • Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection: You are the legendary ninja Ryu Hayabusa… You fight giant crabs, because that's what ninja do, right? These are all fun games, "ninja" in name only, very stupid, but fun.

  • Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without a Pulse: Slightly funny joke is carried on way too long.

  • World's End Club: Very cartoony/Flash-animation endless runner with cutscenes. Not much game to the game.
  • Neon White: Very weird "flying cards shoot angels" game, with at least 3 art styles mashed together incoherently. Pass.
  • Legend of Mana Remastered: It's a great game, one of the prettiest action RPGs of the old times. I have it on iPhone, old graphics upscaled. I don't think I like the new graphics, the original pixel art was perfect.
  • SaGa Frontier Remastered: Great game, art update. Unlike Mana, I think the art could use an update; I'm not sure I like this, but it may be better.

Raspbian from the Keyboard

Doing some maintenance and setup on my RasPi4, I struggled to find keyboard shortcuts. Where I did find them online, they were slightly obsolete or just not correct for my keyboard.

Some of these are specific to my Rii keyboard/trackpad combo, which has a Fn key and F-keys are "under" the media keys and arrows. A normal keyboard doesn't need to type Fn.

Key Effect
Ctrl-Alt-Fn-Del Shutdown menu
Ctrl-Esc System menu
Alt-Space Window menu
Alt-Fn-F2 Run Program dialog
Alt-Fn-F11 Fullscreen window
Alt-Tab Cycle windows
Ctrl-Q Quit most programs
Alt-Fn-F4 Kill any program
Ctrl-Alt-Arrow Left/Right packs window to side, Up fullscreen, Down not-fullscreen.
Ctrl-Alt-Fn-F1-6 Virtual Console 1-6
Ctrl-Alt-Fn-F7 GUI

I love Ctrl-Alt-Arrow keys now that I know them. It's not quite Ratpoison or other anti-mouse window managers, but it's so handy on a small screen.

If you use virtual consoles, I cannot recommend highly enough learning to use screen, so you only need to remember that one of them is open, and can restore that session in any terminal later.

I still don't know what the Chromium program menu key is, it won't tell me and the docs are useless. I loathe that every Linux program chooses a different place to put menus. It shouldn't be allowed.

Useful Shell Commands

  • lxterminal: Standard Terminal
  • omxplayer: Audio/Video player
  • scrot: Screenshot, dumps into ~ in format Y-M-D-HMS_REZ_scrot.png (which is terrible, but whatever, man). I can't generate its printscreen keycode, supposedly I can edit openbox config to add a keycode for it. Later. I can always run scrot from the Run Program dialog, or sleep 10; scrot from lxterminal and switch windows.
  • gpicview: Image viewer
  • mousepad: Simple GUI text editor. Has line numbers, paren matching, and different themes, so if you don't want to use GVim or Geany, or nano or vim from Terminal, this is nice and starts nigh-instantly.
  • leafpad: Shitty Gtk text editor. You should hit Ctrl-Esc, Preferences, Main Menu Editor, Accessories, Text Editor, Properties. If it says leafpad, change that to mousepad.

I don't have Dropbox on it, and that'd be awkward anyway, so I'm still pondering how to easily get files off it. sftp or scp works, but I'd rather have a general-purpose, auto-syncing share folder.

What I'm Watching: More Suspicions of Mr Whicher

  • Murder In Angel Lane: Mr Whicher is now a "private inquiry agent", dicks not yet having been invented, and searches for a missing girl in a story about uncertain paternity and jerks with knives. Obvious villain is obvious, but the multiple visits to the insane asylum are nice; for a Victorian bedlam it's pretty cushy.

★★★☆☆

Note that the historical Mr Whicher was still a police officer at this time, and moving up in authority in London.

  • Beyond the Pale: The English are, it should be noted, monsters. The conquest, rape, and robbery of India over centuries is one of the greatest war crimes of history, every English is blood-stained clear through. The Sepoy Mutiny was the first try of the Indians to seize back their country, which took nearly a century. And that's what this oh-so-happy episode is about.

"Out there in the hills, we lived like kings. No one to censure us, no one to disapprove."

The fantastical element of this episode is that any English cares. That Mr Whicher will stand up even a little bit for the Indians seeking vengeance for a truly heinous crime. And the resolution requires even more empathy and compassion that I don't buy from them. The premise could've gone really dark and given something like closure, but instead it whimpers out.

Also, the lighting/color grading in this one is terrible, it's just black and yellow, sometimes black and cyan for variety. Everyone looks jaundiced, and you can't see any of the action. Even the outdoors scenes are so fake-overcast (but not actually overcast) they look like day-for-night shots. Impossible to guess at the hour.

★★☆☆☆

Just one more of the series to go, hopefully it goes out on a higher note.

Nanorogue2 in BASIC

I've completed my BASIC 10-Liner contest entry, download on itch.io or find the latest version here:

Just shove the disk (.atr) in Atari800MacX or any other compatible Atari 800XL emulator, disable BASIC and hit reset, it should boot up into the launcher:

Where you can read docs or source:

And play the game!

So, the source for my first pass was manually-packed down, and I couldn't really fit everything I wanted in there, or switch to text-graphics mode. With some rethinking, and a better source editing tool, I could… So I wrote a filter program "Basic2List.py" that removes comments & blank lines, joins up everything after a numbered line with colons, lets me insert binary codes with \xFF escapes. It still looks a little dense, because I have to manually use abbreviated statement names or remove spaces, I'd like to make it smart enough about BASIC source to do that itself.

But it lets me turn source like:

5   POKE731,1       // noclick
    GR.1            // 20x20 wide chars, 40x4 regular
    SE.1,13,15      // palette 1 to gold
    W=20            // world size
    DIME$(27),M(W,W)    // E$() encounter table, M() map
    //RRRZZZD$$..........#######>
    E$="\xF2\xF2\xF2\xFA\xFA\xFA\xE4\x04\x04\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE#######\x3E"
    H=10        // Hit Points
    L=1     // Level
    // G=0      // Gold, default value
    ?"NANOROGUE BY MDHUGHES"

into:

5 POKE731,1:GR.1:SE.1,13,15:W=20:DIME$(27),M(W,W):E$="RRRZZZD$$..........#######>":H=10:L=1:?"NANOROGUE BY MDHUGHES"

(except the RRR... are inverse & graphics chars)

See the Atari BASIC Quick Reference Guide to learn the abbreviations and some of Atari's peculiarities. And it's running in Turbo Basic XL which really helped the program size, so I was able to squeeze in stairs!

Last time I was using the compiler, and that worked but it distorted my sounds, and I couldn't make LAUNCHER.CTB run NANOROG2.CTB! So if I just left them all uncompiled (but tokenized) .BAS files it works fine.

The only down side is it's stuck in easy mode. I'd love to have a difficulty which increases the GP to Level Up, and makes monsters hit harder (but not reward more), but that didn't quite make the cut.

Generally I'm pretty pleased by this!

The ZX Spectrum (non-Next) port is turning out to be hard, it lacks a few things and doesn't have ELSE, either, so I don't know if it can be done.