Author: mdhughes

Portal Bandits RPG

I saw there was a one-page RPG jam, but hadn't thought of any theme or tricks to do with it. Then in the shower, I realized I could adapt the source of my PortalWorlds 7DRL videogame to one page really easily. I went with more of a Norse mythology theme, rather than the inspiration movie's "God" and "Satan" (whatever those are supposed to be, some crank carpenter cult thing).

In one page there isn't much room to expand on setting and discuss design, but two main principles: You are small and weak, and not even very clever; a Human adult is a scary monster. Magic items are the great leveller, in fact there's no advancement except getting Loot. Gold is really only a score, and it can bribe Humans and other monsters.

For a sample Realm, I just rolled Ancient Egypt, Zombies, Evil King. So now you might have to fight a bunch of undead, but more likely you'd sneak around vast temples and pyramids, let the zombies in, rob the Pharaoh without getting mummified, and run for the portal out. Next Realm is Modern America, with Assassins, and a Good King. So here you find a sympathetic President (mid-'90s?), being hunted by assassins. You still need to loot the White House for Kennedy's Gold Dildo or whatever, but you can't do that unless you stop the killers. Nobody thinks a bunch of little Dwarfs are any good at anything or a threat.

Written & layout in Pages, which works great for little things like this.

Only solo-tested a quick combat, but it works. Let me know if you get a chance to play, I will when I can.

What I'm Watching: The Long Kiss Goodnight

I had a rough night trying to find a thriller I hadn't seen. Started watching Clooney's The American, 3 minutes in it loses me by him killing an unarmed girl for no reason. Skipped to the end to get it out of my queue and there's another dead girl, so presumably he just does that a lot. If you kill a dog or an unarmed girl in a flick, I have zero sympathy.

Started watching the Barry series, which immediately pivots from low-rent killer premise to actors playing at learning to act for Hollywood, because actors are the most interesting people… no. They're fucking walking meatsticks, and best case they hit their marks and say their lines, and shut the fuck up otherwise.

So I gave up and watched something I've seen multiple times, but I know is not crap: The Long Kiss Goodnight, by Shane Black.

Now, the one real problem with this film. What I find implausible isn't the soap opera amnesia/MPD, it's that a homeless woman with no paperwork or cash comes out of the ocean and she's immediately able to get a teaching job, a house, raise a kid, have a square life.

Geena Davis & Sam Jackson are cute, of course, and Geena does a plausible turn as an assassin with mom-butt, but Craig Bierko as the antagonist really steals the show. He hasn't been in anything good since The Thirteenth Floor (1999), I mean literally nothing but soap opera, reality TV, and Scary Movie 4 garbage, just a dumpster fire of a career, but here he's just adorable, smirking and lounging around while still being obviously psychotic, he's got crazy eyes and perfect delivery.

Spoiler:










Oh. I'd forgotten this film, from 1996, basically lays out the plan for the CIA faking 9/11 to get their budget increased. Kill 4,000 people. "Oh, blame it on the Muslims, naturally." Yeah, I dunno IRL if they did it, maybe just gave the Saudis a little push?, but the CIA had motive, means, opportunity, and they're all soulless spooks, so this checks out.

There's a lot of points where the plot makes no sense, you'd just kill someone this annoying and get on with your mission. All the deathtraps, and leaving someone to be tortured (it is the CIA, and they love to torture), and kid hostage scenes, are just Shane Black shane-blacking it up. Standard tricks: 1) Teddy bear has a secret, 2) Running & shooting at a helicopter, 3) Exploded safely out of a house (not in a bathtub this time), 4) Tied up and water-tortured, 5) Kid is a hostage.

Unique tricks: 1) Escape from the freezer, I like the callback to the doll and the vigil candles, as I'm a sucker for inventory puzzles from text adventures. 2) The ice skating kills. 3) Way back at the beginning, One-Eye Jack freaking out at the TV.

Unfortunately some of it relies on the kid (Yvonne Zima, worst surname ever, who now plays soap opera & B-movie victims and hookers), and she has a formless, dumpy look and personality, and maybe they sedated her to get her to hold still, so it's utterly implausible that she grows a spine in one scene. Shouting "you can't be dead" at someone doesn't actually bring them back to life, that only works for Tinker Bell.

You'd think the Canadians would have somebody guarding a major border crossing, especially if there's an overturned tanker and a bunch of US pigs on the other side, even if it's just to offer donuts and say "So I see ya got an overturned tanker, eh?" But no Canadians could be arsed to show up.

I don't buy the Charly personality going back in the box as "Samantha" again. She might compromise to raise the dumpy kid, but there's no way she's back on the PTA and marrying the boring white dude.

Didn't quite earn the ½ for rising above cliché, but it's a perfectly fine shoot-em-up.

★★★★☆

What I'm Watching: Lovecraft Country

Based on a fixup "novel" of short stories by Matt Ruff about racism and the supernatural in the lives of a black family in 1950s New England. And then adapted by Jordan "Get Out! I'm Gonna Make Another Good Movie or Show Someday I Swear!" Peele.

Humn, an unpleasant observation. I've read Matt "Chubby White Dude" Ruff before, and wasn't pleased. His Sewer, Gas & Electric trilogy uses tropes of cyberpunk without understanding the ethos of "the street finds its own uses for things (mil/industrial tech)", he just puts power in the hands of a bureaucracy and megacorporations. And it's grossly, excessively racist while trying to… make fun of racism? I don't know what his point was, as I threw the book out halfway thru. In it all black people die of a plague so androids are made with black skin and racist caricature behaviors, to be slaves forever, because white people missed them so. Yes, I'm serious. When you're looking for a guy to translate around H.P. Lovecraft's product-of-his-time racism into more modern terms, Matt Ruff's not the guy I'd pick.

HoboMax is doing the annoying "just like old-timey television" shit of only releasing one ep a week, which I haven't had to deal with since killing cable and buying DVD boxes around 2000. So this just covers S1E1.

On with the show.

A black Korean war veteran Atticus (Jonathan Majors) who loves pulp literature, his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) who edits the Green Book, down-on-her-luck friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett), go on a little road trip into "Lovecraft Country", weird New England from Salem up to Maine, looking for Tic's missing father. Who's an asshole, apparently.

They do need the Green Book, early on we see incredibly hostile racist places. I'm very far in time and culture from these, so maybe I'm off, but I've read period histories and a lot of crime & pulps… and they're exaggerating to an extreme level. I don't buy fat New Englanders racing out of nowhere in car chases with fire engines and gunfire, just because black people sat in a restaurant, without first escalating from threats and bats, to threat of lynching, and then going Mad Max. Inbred pyschotic states like Kentucky, Alabama, Arkansas, or Texas, sure, but not Pennsylvania. The Green Book used to recommend that black people always carry bail money if they went to Missouri, not "Don't go they'll KILL YOU!"

Matt Ruff. Jordan Peele.

The period is often confused, between Tic's dreams which waver all over time and space from WWII to aliens & saucers from '60s-70s UFO nuts, Cthulhu illustrations popularized in the '80s-'00s, and sets, cars, and costumes which are almost but not quite period '50s, a lot of it looks '60s. I'm not sure how much of that is intentionally making a timeless hostile place, some of it the difficulty of actually making period sets. The music is intentionally anachronistic, which has modern rap mixed in with period blues and jazz; I find that jarring and incompetent, regardless of what their intent was.

So after meeting all the Human monsters, we get 10 minutes with the "real" monsters. Who do great at killing no-name mooks, but are apparently utterly helpless against named characters. For a scene that's supposed to be a horrific chase… it was just goofy. Letitia's running scene, in particular, looked like one of those endless runner videogames, or Telltale Games' "story on rails with quick-time events" games, where you dodge a little left or right, jump now, hammer X to grab the thing. The pacing, the comically bad CGI cartoon look of the monsters, and the stoic/detached/whacked out on 'ludes attitude the actors all have, destroy any "horror" from these things.

I like Tic, he's a good adventurer hero, and his love of pulp SF which often has unpleasant attitudes with a "people are complicated" philosophy. Letitia's a little strident but bland. Uncle George is awfully naïve and passive for a civil rights organizer.

The plot so far has been very episodic and unconnected, a toddler's "and then this happened, then this, then this", and the cliffhanger of them knocking on a front door, wearing bloody rags, and not being shot for their hubris is out of nowhere.

I'm willing to put up with a lot if they actually get to some real horror, but so far it's very comical.

★★★☆☆

Apocalypse Tuesday Music

I play a lot of "old" music because it reminds me of the time.

'80s pop, because I really thought things could only get better, if we lived thru the Cold War (which I put at 5-10% odds depending on what shit Reagan had done that day).

'90s industrial, metal, and punk (old and post- whatever) because kicking out the bastards seemed possible, and we needed to be angry for it.

… And the only music I've liked of the last 20 years is repeats of those. That giant dump of vaporwave I got is great anodyne nothingness that sounds exactly like '80s pop played over muzak speakers at a mall (remember malls?! I lust for a food court lunch, full shopping bag, and checking out bored housewives & sorority chicks). I love it because it's soulless and derivative. There's a few old artists (as in, my age) still making stuff I like, Trent Reznor's Ghosts V & VI were bleak horrorshows which is just what I ordered, and occasional Corrosion of Conformity, Front Line Assembly, Gary Numan, etc. to keep me in the mood.

So anyway. Happy Tuesday. Most of us made it one more day, which is about the best we can ask for.

DO NOT TAUNT 2020. It can always get worse.

Epic Rap Battles of History: Apple vs Everyone

Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field certainly made the Mac/NeXT/iMac/iPhone/iPad much cooler than just "it's a knockoff Star/UNIX, in a fishtank/as a black magnesium box/in fruit-colored plastic/in your pants/as a book".

But their hardware & software mostly works, unlike everyone else. I haven't liked Mac design since Tiger (and Big Sur is their ugliest desktop yet), or iOS since iOS 6, but it's still the best, most reliable UNIX workstation money can buy. The more I look into setting up a FreeBSD workstation, the less happy I am with how much effort I'd be spending to get back to here (albeit with a much lighter load).

Non-Mac people with their giant junkpile of non-working or sometimes exploding hardware & software with shitty licenses, grifters like "Epic" stealing your kids data & money for virtual hats while running their own exclusive game store, constant whining about the existential threat that someone else may be cooler, is really getting tiresome.

Spend your time making your own junkpile less awful. Stop whining about Apple stealing your precious bodily fluids.

(see also epic rap battles )

What I'm Watching: October Faction

Adapted from an IDW comic. The comic is by spooky Steve Niles (30 Days of Night), with Damien Worms' art, which ranges from blatantly ripping off Charles Addams' "Addams Family" cartoons, to blatantly ripping off Ben Templesmith who formerly worked with Niles; and Ben's entire career is ripping off Bill Sienkiewicz. I've read one of it, wasn't at a time when I cared enough to keep following it, but it seemed fun. At some point I may get all the collected volumes, maybe for Halloween.

The show doesn't really match up. The comic's dark gothic look, skulls and shadows everywhere, lots of backlit outlines, is replaced with perky yuppies in suits, and their annoyingly precocious children. The house could be creepy and gloomy, it has weird locked rooms and summoning circles… but it's always brightly lit, and almost never the set. Instead they're out in the woods like a B-movie, or at a police station, or anywhere but home.

The premise suffers from translation, from a retired monster hunter protecting his family, to a pair of scheming, active agents getting a year of sabbatical which turns very active again.

The monster-killing agency, The Shop Presidio, is just as genocidal and shitty as the comic, but what works in comics, with aged heroes or rookie hillbilly cops holding off masses of armored soldiers and monsters, here turns into almost comedy as this square middle-aged couple—ooh, they're so hip they smoke an old joint found in their '72 Charger!—murder people with bad facial appliances (literally four toothpicks sticking out of some latex around the mouth for the "vampires", and glowing red eyes added with CGI, except they miss sometimes). The goon soldiers all have full armor, modern weapons, and always get killed by unarmored, often untrained good guys. The monsters are worse, many times stronger than Humans, magic powers, maybe centuries of practice killing Humans, and they always get beaten or killed by half-assed Human fighters. At one point, spoiler but meh, Deloris is cornered by five angry vampire bikers. Next scene she comes home with some cosmetic bruises and scratches.

I mock the excesses, but the adult story is OK. Fred (JC McKenzie, who's played boring lawyers or doctors for the last 30 years), Deloris (Tamara Taylor, previously in Altered Carbon), Gina (Nicola Correia-Damude, who's in a ton of fun B-movies & series), Alice (Maxim Roy, French-Canadian femme fatale, mostly in shitty Canadian dramas), and Moshe (Dayo Ade, haven't previously seen him) are all competent, the main story of the family finding out who they are and just how evil The Shop Presidio is, warlocks and vampires seeking revenge, and a father's incredibly stupid desperate attempt to save a son, is interesting.

But the B-plots suck. The Shop Presidio internal politics are far over the top, instant assassinations and Mengele-style tortures instead of, you know, anything subtle or intelligent. There's an entire ep of flashback to when Alice was happy, and for 30+ minutes nothing happens and then it's war porn and a big "I told you so". The final resolution of the main plot involves kids and old people beating up soldiers who have years of experience committing monster genocide, and silly people stepping out of cover to monologue each other to death. If only it were that easy.

Casting diversity is definitely an improvement, there's a range of ethnicities and a token bigot in the first ep to point it out. IDW and Netflix made a big deal on launch about the comic being gay-friendly. Well, I guess. The annoying son is gay (but the actor Gabriel Darku, one of the filth from the terrible ReBoot reboot, is straight, because gay actors don't get to play gay characters), and his teen romance shit, regardless of orientation, goes on forever, but so does the annoying daughter with her catty, dumpy friend, and the girl clique straight out of Heathers or 90210 who are oppressing them. The children are entitled, pompous, loathesome, whiny, and useless. Which means when it comes time for them to be endangered or have to make choices, I DO NOT CARE. The awful kids drove this down from a passable show sympathetic to the monsters, to "UGH, the kids are on screen again, skip skip skip".

I'm glad Netflix killed this after a season, instead of dragging it out.

I kinda wanted to watch Fred possess the monster/robot/whatever in the basement, which seems to be what the ending shot was.

★★☆☆☆

What I'm Watching: Harley Quinn

HoboMax delivers a mostly-adult-oriented cartoon about recently-separted-from-Mistah-J Harlequinn/Harley Quinn.

Voice-actor is Kaley Cuoco (the annoying chick from the more annoying Big Bang Laugh Track Show), who is better than I expected, but doesn't really hit the shrill Joisey girl accent I expect; Poison Ivy, her slightly but not too overtly lesbian (well, you'd think, but they do throw in lines about Kite Man) roommate is the surprisingly competent Lake Bell (who has been acting for 20 years but her IMDB page is just a list of trash roles; did you see Surface? Be glad if you didn't.); Alan Tudyk does the Joker, which he's not really fit for, I miss Mark Hammill as the Joker, but he also does Clayface, which really fits his over-the-top thespian tone just like Mr Nobody in Doom Patrol.

"You helped me. I can be around people now. You know, I mean, I hate it, but I can do it without vomiting."

Some of it's well-written, there's a lot of snarky lines, and the plots and tone are similar to the '90s Tick cartoons. But I do find it odd and annoying that A) There's 3 main writers, all of them dudes, B) The art is very male-gazey/Striperella, which hey, I like cartoon porn as much as anyone but it's not a good way to build Harley up as a self-respecting villain. In fact, of the 30 names listed for writing on all 15 episodes, 7 are women, all with 4 eps or less to their names. And it shows over and over again. When they try to "talk about women", it's slightly better than the Rick & Morty Bechdel Test gag, but only very slightly.

"This guy's such a douche."
"I'm sorry, but none of the charming supervillains with great personalities were holding seminars today."

Occasionally manages some social commentary, but at the same time exactly reinforces the stereotypes it's gossiping about.

"I had to make my own [crew] by believing in stupid little things like Mark. No offense, Mark."

SIGH. The curse of the generic name.

Well, I'm rarely bored by it, and I do laugh.

★★★½☆

MysticDungeon.club Random Thursday Update

Redesigned the front as a software gallery, got Portal Worlds working with my common input system, adapted Amazing (the dumb maze game).

I might get Heist adapted this weekend. Cityscape needs either a custom character set, or I add sprite graphics to the retro screen, which is a better plan. I have a bunch more JS games and demos, most can be adapted pretty quick. Porting the Mystic Dungeon RPG from Python is harder, but on the list.

Still thinking about the forum idea, I haven't seen a lot of interest yet, but a place for smack-talking would be nice.

It's really quite nice just having an easy way to focus on the game design or UI mechanics, and not have to make infrastructure from scratch every time.

Everything should be usable without an account, but you can't post scores unless you do!