MurderHobo.Club

Category: Reviews

An opinion piece on a specific topic

  • Bedeviled

    So, Bedeviled, despite being a mashup of creepy phone app and spooky ghost, this one actually had some clever bits and scary scenes.

    Ensemble cast of high schoolers get an app invite after a friend’s death, and it’s a personal assistant with some neat tricks that turn nasty fairly quickly.

    The app acting as a bridge to the spirit realm, technology giving us awareness of them and them a way to reach us; sure it’s been done before, but they did it without it feeling rote.

    Oh, and there was the clever callback where the one dude’s custom firmware was an issue.

  • Another 3 down

    Selfie From Hell

    Well, you start with some internet buzz words, like selfie, darknet, black rooms, etc, and add some mysticism, like the number 13, and a catatonic person with psychic powers. And somehow, it’s still not all that interesting. Sure, there’s a lesson about not being a dumbass online, especially not on the dark web, but beyond that? I can’t recommend it.

    Meet the Blacks

    Purge Parody, with a black family named the Blacks, moving into a primarily white neighbourhood. Tons of racism, probably a bit hard to unpack. Some funny moments, some stupid ones. Watch it during a Purge Marathon, it’ll fit right in. 

    Bad Match

    Tinder meetup results in sex then ghosting, followed by a suicide attempt and criminal charges. Overall, actually better than I was expecting. I’d actually recommend watching this one, though I’m not sure I’d qualify it as a horror movie, except maybe that dating these days is a horror itself. 

  • Ghost House

    So, I finished Ghost House, after not being up for it before. It had something of a swerve in the middle, where they are about to pass on the curse but decide not to. And of course a stinger at the end, where we can see that the cycle will continue. I’d give it a solid meh, it was alright, but nothing special. 

  • The Purge: Election Year

    Today’s Movie: The Purge: Election Year

    Well, that was better than I expected. But I don’t think it was a horror movie. I think it was a thriller, or a action movie maybe. Maybe I should rewatch previous Purges. There is definitely some genre drift. If I recall correctly, the first one with the house invasion, that one was more of a horror movie. I’d have to pull up wiki summaries for the other ones, as I can’t specifically recall.

    The purge as a concept is still horribly flawed, but as the series has gone on, they’ve plugged up some of the more obvious holes, and focused on the people who want something other than the chaos that the purge creates. And they added some nice touches with the economic reality of the Purge. One of the main characters this time around is just trying to protect his Deli, his livelihood, after the insurance company jacks up his premiums by thousands on the day before the purge.

  • Funhouse Massacre

    Only one film tonight. Another haunted house film. This one, The Funhouse Massacre, was about a cult leader who was being held in the mental health equivalent of Guantanamo Bay.

    No rights, no trials, no sentences, just lock up the monsters and leave them to rot. And this place had a nice collection of monsters. A dentist, a taxidermist, a clown themed wrestler, a cannibal chef, a nice ensemble cast. So cult leader dude, and his serial killer daughter orchestrate a fun house themed after all the various crimes, the perfect place for these guys to throw down after their escape.

    Then you throw in a quirky collection of folks from the local dinner, a tough cop, a clueless cop, and some radio DJs, and you’ve got this gory funny halloween mess.

    Of the stuff I’ve watched recently, this is the first one I’d recommend to people. 

  • Hellhouses

    HellHouse LLC and HellHouse LLC II : Abbadon House. 

    So, these were a pair of found footage films about a haunted house, where dark rituals had been performed and a tragedy occurred. The news segments were pretty well done and felt like local news. The in-house stuff relied too much on the darkness and the cameras not being able to capture much.  The supernatural elements also interfered with radios and cameras, meaning the cameras would start to fail when things got spooky. Sometimes this can work, sometimes this comes across as annoying; in this case, it comes across as both at different times. 

    I also attempted to watch Ghost House, a film about an american couple on vacation in Thailand, the american woman disturbs a “ghost house”, which wikipedia lists under the heading “spirit houses“. Disrupt the shrine, bad things happen, pretty plotline when foreigners adversely interact with folklore. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get into it. Maybe I’ll give it another shot another time.

  • Halloween, 2018

    A few years back, I tried to keep a log of my 31 days of horror movies. As I recall, it didn’t go overly well. I logged a dozen or so movies over a few days, then got distracted by something. 

    In an effort to bring this place back from the dead, now that I’ve made the effort to move it to a new host, I’ll attempt something similar. I’ve just resubscribed to Shudder, between that, Netflix, and Amazon Prime, I should have a decent catalog to work with. 

  • Firewatch : probably worth playing

    So, the Campo Santo game Firewatch was released the other day and I finished it in a pair of sittings. Overall, I enjoyed it, and I’m going to discuss it. Warning, there will be spoilers.

    (more…)

  • Ashes : Rise of the Pheonixborn – It’s exciting.

    There is a game being published by Plaid Hat Games, that I’m really excited about. It’s a card game, where you’re playing a mage, that uses dice for the spell power pool.

    It comes with a half-dozen heroes, with a premade deck for each, but also with rules for building your own decks and for playing it as a draft.

    The game has elements of several popular games, but has a unique feel to it. Breaking down those mechanics, here they are.

    It has a card pool, provided completely in the core set, with expansions that will be provided quarterly, and not as a blind buy. I’d use the term LCG, but someone owns that term, so I can’t use it.

    When you’re starting the game, you pick 5 cards for your opening hand, a mechanic similar to the Posse in Doomtown : Reloaded.

    Then you roll dice, like Quarriors, or Marvel Dice, or Roll for the Galaxy. Those dice form your mana pool. The higher level dice can be used for any of the lower levels and there are ways to reroll them.

    Some spells like to summon tokens, similar to Magic : The Gathering, but unlike the MtG tokens, these all have card text. Some with special powers, some without. Like Magic and various other games, there are spells that you can attach to your creatures to make them stronger or more durable. There is also an exhaustion mechanic, that while similar to magic’s tapping mechanic, or the kneeling mechanic, has a few differences. You can throw multiple on a card, but only one are removed per turn.

    There is a mechanic I can’t recall seeing elsewhere, which allows you to play down extra copies of an individual card to reinforce it’s powers. These are called Focus, and they trigger at various levels. You’ve also got the ability to toss a card aside to flip the dice around; this is called meditating.

    Basically, it’s a game with a pretty interesting magic system, using dice rolls and dice manipulation mechanics, creating a nice mix of randomness and strategy.

    The biggest thing that makes this game stand out is how fast the turns feel, when compared to Magic or some other games. Each round, you can perform a major action and if you want, a minor action. Then the other play takes their turn, and it goes back and forth for a bit. After you’ve run out of dice and options, then you end the round, pull of the exhaust tokens, heal the cards that can heal, re-roll the dice, and refresh the hand, and start it over again.

    The deck design is 30 cards, with no more than 3 of each card. So you’ve got a 1/10 chance of drawing a card. Given that you can discard and draw 5 cards in a turn, plus whatever you use for meditating, you can burn through your deck pretty quickly. When you hit the bottom of the deck, you start taking damage, similar to hearthstone.

    For comparison, Hearthstone, 30 cards, of which there’s a max of 2 of each per deck. Magic, it’s 60 cards, 4 of each. Netrunner, it’s 45ish, 3 of each card. Doomtown, it’s 52, but you’ve got poker mechanics and 4 of any given card type. I’m not enough of a math guy to actually make much out of these numbers, but I’m sure some of you are finding this fascinating.

    Each of the heroes has at a few cards that are exclusive to them, a limit to the amount of spell cards they can have active in front of them, a limit to the number of allies they can have protecting them, and of course specific amount of health. They’ve also got a power that they can trigger, which is exclusive to them.

    When building a deck, you’ll decide which spells to include and how many dice of each type to include. The dice have 3 different faces, the common face, which is shared by all dice, the path face, which has the basic power for that type of magic, and the empowered face, which you need for the higher powers of that path. I’m not sure on the specific terms, but the ideas are there. The player who rolls the most common dice, they’re first player for the round.

    So far, I’ve only seen it played as a two player game, but I can see it as being pretty cool as a multiplayer game.

    Anyways, that’s why I’m excited for my copy. You’ve got a few hours left to pre-order your copy if you want to get it as part of the Pre-GenCon shipment. After that, I’m not sure when the next shipment is going out.

    http://www.plaidhatgames.com/games/ashes

  • Security Implementation

    Yubikey and LastPass, are a pair of services that I use for storing my passwords and personal data. The Yubikey functions as an authentication token for the LastPass login, and is used to decrypt the password vault.

    In theory, I should consider a service where the passwords aren’t stored on their cloud, even in an encrypted format. However, I like LastPass, and I like their software. I like that their password validator seems to actually give accurate ratings to the various passwords in the vault during their security check function. Some sites will fail simple passwords that actually are very hard to crack, simply because they don’t fit a scheme. The fact that the tool also monitors for duplicate passwords and sites whose passwords have been compromised; and then request that you change those, also really handy.

    The Yubikey is a little plastic dongle that plugs into your USB drive and acts as USB keyboard, typing out a One Time Password (OTP) as if you’d typed it into the keyboard directly. The chip on the Yubikey is set up to do a few fancy things to ensure that the password is hard to spoof.

    There are some potential problems with any password scheme, especially the sort where there is a single point of failure. Using the Yubikey to generate the OTP for the LastPass in theory, makes it much more secure, since in order to access your Password Vault, they require both the digital key and the physical key. So, that’s what I had been using for my personal passwords for the last year, but I hadn’t been able to convince too many other people to switch over, until recently.

    When I first got my Chromebook, I was slightly annoyed that there wasn’t a way to use the Yubikey to log into it. Then, by accident, the other day, I found out how to manage that. The Yubikey configuration tool has the ability to set up what is stored in the two slots on the Yubikey. In the main slot, is the OTP, for doing the main login. In the second slot, a variety of different configurations could be set up. The only option that made sense for my purposes is the Static Keystring.

    By storing a preset keystring of up to 38 characters that will be typed in whenever I activate the second slot on the key, I have a password that I can use to log into offline devices. The activation of the secondary slot is simply holding down the button on the yubikey, rather than tapping it.  I can use this preset key to log into a secondary gmail account, which logs me into the chromebook. Once inside that gmail account, I can log into the lastpass browser plugin, verifying with slot 1 on the yubikey, and open up my gmail account. This whole sequence can be done fairly quickly, especially if the lastpass browser plugin has been told to save the master password, so the login sequence becomes essentially boot computer, long press on the key, wait for the screen for the Yubikey OTP, short press, and you’re logged in. That system, as long as you aren’t worried about losing the key, is actually pretty secure. It does have a few obvious flaws.

    Though, with a few minor alterations, can be made considerably more secure.

    The first main flaw, is that with the key and the knowledge, anyone can get in. Convenience has compromised the security. The single press a button bypasses the first login, and the second login is saved, the third login is just another button press.

    So, what’s the easy way to fix that? Pad the static keystring. Have a few characters that need to be typed in manually, before you press the button. That means even with the key, they’ll still need to guess that initial password, before it’ll let them in.

    This actually also helps with the second flaw, which is that since the static keystring is static and emitted whenever the button is pressed to activate that slot, it’s easy to steal. That’s why I’m not using it on my main gmail, but on a secondary gmail that really only exists so that it grabs a copy of the LastPass browser plugin from the chrome store when I log on.

    Beyond that, I’m sure there are plenty of other flaws, but these are the ones I’ve discovered so far. And since my google account has other forms of verification on it, specifically the whole two-factor authentication whenever you log in from a new device, I’m not currently concerned.

    I know someone could compromise my security, if they had reason to, but for the moment, I doubt there are any with the skills, malicious intent, and motivation. I am sure there are some with two of the three, but I can’t think of anyone with all three; most would only have but one.