I received this in my work email inbox on Wednesday afternoon, and I’ve never wished anything harder than that I was the one responsible for it. Alas, I only dream of being able to come up with anything so radical as this.
I was inspired to draw this thing though.
Don’t ask me how I went from Bill & Ted to Sixteen Candles. My mind works in mysterious ways.
It’s that time again! That time when I just talk about what’s going on here behind the scenes.
The most important thing I want to note is that I’ve decided to make my upcoming works more visible. To that end, I’ve added the titles of four upcoming articles to the articles list. For one, you have some idea what’s coming up, and when you should be checking back (though every day is still a solid plan). Secondly, and more importantly, it’s a small way to push me to finish things that have been in the works for a while. I’ve had the New Surprise Bag Article about 90% done since February now, and it’s something I should really get around to.
The next thing I want to note is that I’ve filled in a few more of the blacked-out spots on the article list. I think we might finally be at the point where there are more articles that you can actually read than ones that are dummied out. And that’s a big milestone! It’s taken way too long to get even this far, and I’m hoping that I’ll have the entire archive up and readable by the end of the summer.
None of the articles I updated today are especially good, but you might want to check a couple of them out. Rocky Snow Ice Pops is actually really terrible. But the Mate1.com article is up here now, and to this day I still get e-mails from people who’ve read it and felt like they need to tell me how great it is and what a big scam Mate1 is. And I appreciate every one of those e-mails! But now people can just comment on the post itself so that’ll be sad. I like e-mails from strangers who think the things I write are funny.
Lastly, I just went through a few of the already-WordPress’d articles and made sure that the title banners were there. Some of them weren’t! Like the one for Steambot Chronicles. And I worked pretty hard on most of those things, so they deserve to live on.
I guess that’s about it then. Stay tuned for some more posts of nothing but embedded YouTube videos!
Seriously, I think I may be on the verge of considering Animal Crossing: New Leaf to be an actual obsession. There was a reason I got out all those years ago, and only now that I’ve been sucked in again do I remember why.
The thing about Animal Crossing, is that it’s not really interesting. At least, not looking at it from an outsider’s perspective. There isn’t a defined goal, and there isn’t really much in the way of actual gameplay to speak of. But damned if I don’t spend most of my time away from my town of Farron thinking about what I’m going to do next time I’m there.
True story: New Leaf has led me to kill my 3DS’ battery every day since I bought the damn thing. My other video games are getting very jealous.
Most of my time is spent fishing. Why? For money, mostly. But also to fill out my fishopedia. And also so that I can fill out the museum’s fish exhibit. Also because it’s pretty relaxing, and far more rewarding than real fishing. Sure, I could switch to chasing butterflies around all day for all the same reasons, but I prefer fishing.
There’s also the element of the animal neighbours. What little imagination I have tends to puff up these characters into much more than the game programming allows them to be, and I’ve developed very complicated relationships with most of them. Realistically, I just talk to them until they give me a job or offer to sell me their old furniture, but what goes on in my head is far more complex than that.
It’s a little worrying, but maybe not as bad as when I used to play Unreal Tournament with bots and give them all personalities and backstories and pretend the ones on my team were my friends.
What’s even worse is that now, Animal Crossing has online multiplayer. And also I belong to an online community that provides me with a huge list of people to play with. Maybe it’s not the most interactive game out there, but I’ve been having a great time simply taking the train to other towns and exploring. Meeting new animals, seeing what kinds of landmarks people are building, that kind of stuff.
There is also an island that allows you to play multiplayer mini-games, which is pretty good fun, but I find that they’re more fun to play with people in the same room. Online multiplayer seems like a better outlet for fishing together while chatting about what kinds of shoes you’d like to have.
That’s about all the thoughts I can wrangle for now. I just had a fountain built, and I’m pretty excited to start up another public works project. Maybe a campsite next? Or perhaps a humble bench? I don’t know! Back to Animal Crossing!
It’s Father’s Day, and what better way for me to show appreciation for my own father than with an article about a video game? Don’t worry, it’s relevant and quite excellent.
And so I have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the world of Animal Crossing: New Leaf. This will be the first time I’ve played an Animal Crossing game since the first; I burned out on it so hard that I had absolutely no desire to partake in the DS or Wii sequels. So a lot of the changes that fans have gotten accustomed to over the years are kind of a system shock to me.
The most important thing you need to take away from this, though, is that I’ve begun the first draft of the sequel to The Hunt for the Banded Dragonfly. At first I was all like “That’s something I want to do, but I can’t get good screenshots on the 3DS” and then one of my animal neighbours told me about the in-game screenshot-taking feature. So I guess I really don’t have a choice. We’ll just have to see if I can come up with a halfway decent story to tell.
I’ve been neglecting my web-duties, and am way behind on these! And other bloggety stuff. And other YouTube stuff! What can I say? I’ve “got a lot going on” right now. And by that, I guess I mean Resident Evil 6? Anyway, here are some Pop-Tarts reviews. We hope you enjoy them.
Told ya there’d be another one.
My only regret is that I really borked up the music. Not only did it record poorly, but also it’s hard to hear too often. Oh well. Lesson learned!
Throughout April, The Wife and I watched a show called The Killing on Netflix. It is an excellent crime drama with a fun twist: the entire two-season run focuses on a single case. My initial thought was that stretching one investigation over 20-something episodes would make the show too slow and repetitive, but I was so wrong. There were no filler episodes; each one offered something pertinent to either the case or character development. It wasn’t perfect but god damn if that thing did not have me absolutely hooked by the end. And the ending! Oh, that ending. Powerful, powerful stuff.
So after that, I was thirsting for something similar. I have never been big on the television crime drama, but The Killing left a very good taste in my mouth. So when Netflix started advertising for their upcoming exclusive series called Hemlock Grove, my interest was piqued. Here, take a look at the description pilfered directly from Netflix:
When the mangled corpse of a local teenager is discovered, rumor and suspicion spread like a plague through Hemlock Grove. As dark secrets bubble to the surface, everyone becomes a suspect in the hunt for a monster that may be hiding in plain sight.
Hey! That sounds exactly like what I’m looking for! Seriously, if you replace ‘Hemlock Grove’ with ‘Seatlle’ that could (very) loosely describe The Killing as well. If only I could go back to a couple weeks ago and tell my past self that no, oh sweet crepes no, it is not what you’re looking for.
The Netflix poster/cover thing for Hemlock Grove is a hand protruding from the mouth of a wolf. I figured that it was more symbolic than anything, especially since the O in Hemlock is stylized as a snake eating it’s own tail, as in the Ouroboros symbol. So, “okay,” I thought, “this seems fairly deep and rooted in some sort of mythology so I am so in.”
Yeah, it didn’t turn out that way. I won’t spoil too much, but Hemlock Grove is kinda like what would happen if Twilight took off the kid gloves. So it’s an awful, stupid, confusing mess, but at least it’s an awful, stupid, confusing mess that shows boobs pretty often.
Basically what goes down is that this chick gets killed -disemboweled “snatch-first”- and two teenage loners decide that they want to investigate the murder. One (Roman) is a rich pretty boy who’s got a blood fetish and can do the Jedi mind trick. The other (Peter) is a Gypsy that just moved into town and people just assume that he’s a werewolf for no real reason. Apparently there is some sort of vague enmity between their families (this is only barely touched upon in the final episode) but they bond pretty quickly. Which becomes somewhat problematic for the viewer.
The chemistry between these two is one of the more aggravating parts of the show. Roman has his way with all the ladies and Peter develops a pretty serious relationship with a girl throughout the series, but they are so impossibly gay for each other it hurts. I don’t know if maybe it was written that way on purpose or the actors just don’t understand body language, but they are constantly giving each other the look and spouting off gay innuendo but nothing ever comes of it. There is so much more unresolved crap in this show, but the sexual tension between these two is thick enough to bludgeon someone to death and if the two of them had just admitted their true feelings and gotten their queer on, I’d have been satisfied enough to not demand my thirteen hours back.
The very, very worst part is that the best, most sympathetic character, Roman’s sister Shelley, ends up just being a deus ex machina. It is infuriating and whyyyyyy do we not spend more time getting to know Shelley? All she is over the course of the series is the sheltered girl who’s pretty much Frankenstein’s monster less the neck bolts and sometimes she glows blue for no well-defined reason. I don’t really know about that last one, I fell asleep during the episode where I’m guessing that maybe they explained her backstory. But rather than have her slow growth towards independence mean anything, it just turns her into a big ol’ plot device out of nowhere. It is infuriating.
As for the other unresolved crap.. well, I guess the show answers the main questions, those being “who is eating all these vaginas?” and “why is someone eating all these vaginas?” but not a single one of the character arcs comes to a satisfying conclusion. Every member of Peter’s family has some sort of supernatural quirk about them, but not a one of them gets any real explanation. His mom sort of gets some backstory at the end, but even that isn’t enough to explain really anything at all outside of why she’s so damn frigid. It really confuses more than it enlightens. I guess the best way to explain it is that the show tries to frantically wrap up a handful of loose ends in the last episode rather than let the resolutions work themselves out naturally over the course of the series. It would make a much better payoff to have some sort of revelation during or at the end of each episode, rather than just adding a bunch more questions onto the pile. You know, like LOST. LOST was pretty great.
Side note: There is also a cubic buttload of fantasy terminology that is used but never even given context, nevermind outright explained. So if the words Upir and Vargulf and Ouroboros don’t mean anything to you (and they probably don’t unless you’re some kinda goth douche), you might want to keep your smartphone next to you while watching. You know, so you can Google some of the wacky fantasy garbage. Actually, Ouroboros is friggin everywhere in the show, but isn’t really all that meaningful in the context of the show. It sort of represents one character’s major development (at the very end), and is also the name for a big science project that we never learn a damn thing about. HEMLOCK GROOOOVE!! *fist shaking*
I suppose the “silver lining” here is that Hemlock Grove is based on a book, which is the first in a trilogy. So maybe some day its insanity will all work itself out, but really, that’s not the point. The point is that this first season of the Hemlock Grove TV show is deeply disappointing outside of some pretty gnarly gore effects. I guess two or three of the characters could have been pretty likeable too if they had gotten anything resembling real character development but oh well. Mostly every character who isn’t Roman or Peter or Shelley is a straight-up douchebag or a babbling idiot (sometimes both!), so why should I even care?
TLDR: Don’t waste your time on Hemlock Grove. Read a plot synopsis or something if you’ve got a burning desire to know what it’s about. Hopefully the writer will add some supplemental information, because that’s the only way any of this garbage is going to make sense.
