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AnotherEden Patch Update

We finally get an update notice, this is apparently not the one that'll remove Miyu, but if you want to get her, you should get in soon. And this will be the banner you'll want to do as many 10-pulls as you can on, because it's full of healers:

AnotherEden-update 20190212

I'm actually pretty good on healers now, but I'll pull once anyway in hopes of upgrading Pom.

They say "bug fixes", but this has been one of the most bug-free launches of anything I've seen; even for other games that had a year or two in JP before global launch, those are usually buggy as shit. There's a few weird clipping issues with the paper-doll design, but that's "works as intended".

Finally got out of the beach (I only need 3 more shells for another sword, but I'll get by; maybe do one walk up and back a day) and onto the Riftbreaker, and levelling up my RP-team (Aldo, Cyrus, Amy, Riica) in Another Dungeon on the side; I have 8 class books, only 1 of which is a character I have (and I don't need to level them yet).

What I'm Watching: Close

Dumb rich party girl Sophie Nelisse (of The Book Thief) with a new inheritance goes to Morocco with new bodyguard Noomi Rapace (from the good Dragon Tattoo movies), shit goes bad, and bodyguard has to keep her alive and try to figure out who's behind it. None of which is particularly new or interesting by itself, but the movie pulls out a few good moves.

The fights are good close-up struggles, a little jump-cut-heavy instead of the long tracking shots I prefer. The fortress kasbah is interesting, security system's not complete movie bullshit but visual enough to follow on screen.

I think they wanted to make another Man on Fire, but Creasy is a far more complex character than Sam, and there's more plot and bonding in that film; this isn't slow, but there's nowhere near enough plot, and it just kinda trails off at the ending.

★★★½☆ which is what Netflix originals seem to get for the most part.

What I'm Watching: Kingdom (2019)

The Joseon period (14th-19th C) of Korea's their formative period, but a big blind spot for most Westerners. I know a fair amount about the ancient Mediterranean thru fall of Rome, and the Dark Ages thru Charlemagne; some Japanese and Chinese history because of chanbara and kung fu movies and books like Outlaws of the Water Margin; some American history, but not so much the Texas School Board approved bullshit; only the most cursory details outside those time/space bubbles. Even tho it's right on the border, and like Japan was heavily influenced by China, Korea's isolation and outright weirdness keeps it in the dark. What I've managed to learn is: They tried very hard to be strict Confucians, they recorded everything (seems like half their upper class existed to spy on the other half), and they treated women and lower classes like animal property, worse than China or Japan which were hardly egalitarian.

What I'm learning from this show is: A) Their architecture's so Chinese the Chinese look like they're the bad copies, B) They have fantastic hats and rather nice machete swords, and C) Their aristocracy are shit at covering up zombie outbreaks.

The Crown Prince tries to find out if his sick father is alive or dead, in the hands of a wicked, pregnant stepmother half his age. Yeah, this is gonna end well. Happily, he has a fat but competent Sancho Panza sidekick and sets off on an epic quest.

Hanyang, where they start, is the equivalent of Seoul today; Dongnae's a southern port. The show explains none of this, be ready to read a lot of wiki pages to get at least some geography and fact-checking.

The peasantry might as well be Dennis the Shrubber from Monty Python & the Holy Grail, they're charmingly filthy and stinky.

The dead here are like Chinese jiangshi mixed with Return of the Living Dead zombies and a bit of 28 Days Later rage-infected. They're bestial, awkward, and stupid, but not slow or incapable of cunning.

And there's a lot of Evil Dead comedy in the fighting and zombie-eye camera in some scenes. The little zombie children are adoraterrible.

As in any good zombie story, the living are the worse threat.

This is a very gameable series. It's just like my old Dungeons & Zombies campaign, with wandering knights/fools with swords fighting undead or trying to find shelter every night.

★★★★★

On a Beach in AnotherEden

And I'll be here a while, killing crabs, bananas (third joke monster, after Plum Goblins and the spongmonkey-looking dudes at the Ogre sword fight), and blue "dragons" (barely even wyverns). The Last Island gear is 20 points better than anything else I've unlocked, it drops a ton of gold, and my gear situation was critical; the 4 pieces I've got so far are a game-changer, but I need 12! I'll probably just get 8 and I can move on, back row can suck it. The entire beach is a single short corridor with no turns, so I'm running back and forth forever. Oh kill me now.

Also, you wash up here with Aldo alone; so keep him sorta levelled up if you don't want to die a lot. I got off the beach with <100 HP and no MP, and had previously eaten my food.

When I escape this beach, I can spend more time in the industrial and spacey areas I just finished for story, and do more hard dungeons, and then back to the main story. So there's nice cool darkness at the end of this too-bright grind tunnel I'm in now.

The best part about AnotherEden as a mobage is it isn't Stamina-limited. The worst part is the battery life basically restricts you to 2 hours of game and then it's back on a charger, so you may as well have had Stamina.

There's several sidequests now where I've greatly disagreed with the linear plot, I desperately miss Elder Scrolls Online's branching quests with consequences. Just have to sit back and let the idiots fuck things up, then collect mats, then finish the quest. "How could I have known this would fuck things up?!" Creepy farmer man is creepy and I'd kill him and use his body as fertilizer in a tabletop RPG. I've commented before that morality enforced by a scoring mechanism is not ethical: This is exactly that case in point, I have to help this guy because the system says I'm rewarded for doing so and there's no choices, even though ethically it's utterly wrong.

You get better hard/very hard dungeon rewards from high light or dark ratings. But there's no way to draw plot characters from the Dream, so you can't increase their light/dark ratings the usual way. Instead, JP site says grinding these dungeons with a plot char in party sometimes adds (slight spoilers):

  • Aldo: Miglance Castle
  • Riica: Xeno Domain
  • Amy: Industrial Ruins
  • Cyrus: Man-Eating Marsh
  • Feinne: Beast Kings Castle
  • Helena: Riftbreaker

I did a fourth 10-pull, and completely filled my C-team with ★★★★ Lingli and Denny, both excellent hitters, and a ★★★☆ Ciel which is disappointing since there's a ★★★★ and will be upgraded to ★★★★★ this year, if global follows JP release order; that's too much book grinding to upgrade. And a couple dumb ★★★ robots, which are kinda cool; I'd like to build an all-robot party, even if everyone but Riica sucks. I have another 1000 Chronos but I'm saving them now for special event banners.

Learn2JS Updates

Added to my Learn2JS project, and it's fairly usable now for rapid development, I can move over the application logic of little tools and they just show up in the catalog and work. Still no live editor, you have to drop a script in lib or a user dir, but it's getting closer to instant-on coding!

Try it out, then look at the scripts, alien is just block sprites but it's a decently hard shooter (there's some oddness about hit detection, and it needs upgrade drops to be a real game). maze is the usual maze generator; drawing text right now because I haven't hooked up the sprite graphics. Both are about as close to minimal code needed for the task as you can get.

Arianespace Flight VA247

Interesting differences from a SpaceX or NASA launch video.

NASA does a terrible job of broadcasting their launches, they do good in-space video on NASA-TV, but the launches will usually show a burn and then some infographics and then cut off. NASA's public relations is the bare minimum, lowest-bidder attempt required by Federal disclosure laws, and it shows.

SpaceX is halfway to being a media company, just because they instrument and record everything, so they have great photography of the launch, flight, then on-rocket cameras showing second state separation, and landings, and cool synthwave music before and after. Even when they're not launching a car into deep space, they always put on a cool show.

Arianespace is like NASA-TV, only showing a burn and then CGI renders of what they think is happening, and slightly better live tracking info than NASA-TV. But half their audio & text is in French, German, or Spanish, they haven't standardized on English and some Russian-pidgin like NASA or SpaceX. They spend an inordinate amount of time explaining their political/economic structure, because it's a horrible bureaucratic compromise between countries that barely tolerate each other; they have to launch from French Guiana, one of their last conquered colonial holdings/penal colonies (remember the movie Papillon? That's French Guiana; they really made prisoners catch rare butterflies for the warden's profit); Charles De Gaulle demanded a spaceport be built there in the '60s, which is a bit of a boondoggle but it's still their best spaceport.

Hey, let's interrupt the flight to show an ad promoting Seville for some political thing.

There's a moral question hanging over this like the Sword of Damocles: Should you be launching satellites for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with its known-murder-conspirator "prince"? Well, the next two in-flight ads don't even argue that, they just say it's great that the Saudis have paid Arianespace for these launches, and thank the murderer prince by name. I suppose it's rude to say "he should be hung by the neck until dead" to your paycheck's medieval aristocracy.

Another ad for Lockheed/Martin, who made one of the satellites being launched, and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization), who made the other.

One final bit of actual launch news, explaining their telemetry gaps, but repeating "perfectly normal" sounds apologetic, rather than factual. I trust nothing the bureaucrat says by now.

Finally bureaucrats give each other handshakes and blowjobs all around. No sign of the engineers or scientists who do the actual work.

Maybe 10, 15 minutes of actual launch content in 85 minutes of airtime.