Something clever goes here.
An opinion piece on a specific topic
The V/H/S/ series has been very hit or miss for me. It’s an anthology series, so some segments will work, some won’t. Generally, I think I haven’t enjoyed the interstitial elements. At some point, it might be worth doing a rewatch and ranking them.
This one, I think I like it better than the previous SciFi one, but not as much as some of the earlier ones.
Back in April, a strange puzzlequest + visual novel Resident Evil Parody game came out on steam, the Third in the series, though the first two didn’t exist at the time. Recently, that’s changed, as Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 1 Re-Raptored has released. I had reached the end of the third game and enjoyed it, but there was still content I hadn’t unlocked. And with the re-raptored version of the first one available, I’m going back to clean it what I hadn’t seen yet.
The game uses “traits” to unlock the various paths, and there’s a few that I’m missing.
One minor issue, it’s occasionally hard to tell what some of the commands me. Like when it says it’ll remove all of one colour and I’m not sure which symbol matches that colour, due to my issues with recognizing colours.
It looks like I hadn’t given a random god the mystic hourglass that turns him into a boss, and then defeated him.
Having done that, I’m only missing 2 more achievements to say I’ve completed the game.
And there they are. I’m not 100% complete, but I have all the achievements.
Now on to the Re-Raptored one.
Weird sad man goes into a haunted house to face his fears and livestream it. Good amount of spooky, humour, gore, with a decent plot.
Overall, I’d say this is one to watch. The main character is annoying, yet endearing, something that’s hard to pull off.
The ending also fairly solid.
Another somewhat mindless social media movie, about livestreamers in a house were satanic murders happened in the past.
Decent if extremely unlikeable cast, found footage style.
Some clever bits where the livestream elements actually impact the movie. One dude loses his phone, and whoever took it uses the livestream to lure him towards the swamp. There’s also the fact that they ignore the danger because there’s a history of pranks between the channels. Also the usage of the phones to mislead the characters, just works.
The starter to this year’s Spooky Season of Reviews, was Spree, a movie about a guy who wanted to be famous, and decided to become a “spree” killer, driving a rideshare car around Los Angeles, livestreaming his killing spree.
I’ve watched it before, so it seemed like a good rewatch to start things off.
The ending really reminds me of the Santa Barabara killer from a few years back, that whole incel and social media obsession.
It’s got some good scenes, and a great “final girl”
The other day, I replayed a bit of Control, to test out the series S I’d picked up, before realizing that apparently Control hadn’t been optimized for the series S, only the series X. Still, it’s a good game, and I was enjoying it. So I loaded up my old save file on my PS4 Pro to play though the DLC. The DLC is not as good as the story in the base game. The way the mysteries unfold during the course of the game is just so good, it’s hard for anything else to really match it.
That inspired me to check where the X-Files was streaming these days; turns out, it’s over on Disney plus, since they own Fox now. I’m part way through the first season. The two strongest episode have been the ones involving the locked room murders: Squeeze and Ghost in the Machine.
In the latter, there are two scenes that were filmed at Metrotown, at the old Dolphin fountain, with the Skytrain in the background. It was weird to see that. It’ll be strange to see other things that I recognize from years back, some of which no longer exist.
I think someone once told me that the movie was inspired by Vin Diesel’s D&D character, which is partially why my previous post was about D&D. A quick google shows a whole article/video about that, but since I’m watching the movie right now, I don’t really have the time to actually do the research. Or maybe influenced by?
I’ve heard people say it’s a bad fillm. I’ve watched about 90 minutes of it now, and I’ve been enjoying it. Though some of the themes, especially the wiping out humanity to save the planet and a global plague, feel a little strange. If the bad guy was less cartoonishly evil, there might have been an “Are we the baddies moment?”, which might have made the whole thing more satisfying. Still, it was fun, more than I was expecting.
Having finished it now, I have to say it’s not quite as good as Constantine, but a solid entry in that category.
So, Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil, is one I saw recommended by netflix and on facebook. The original language was likely Italian, but I watched the rather terrible English dub. Crazy old man, keeps to himself in his fortress in the forest. Little girl is being bullied, her doll’s head gets tossed over his fence, she learns about the devil locked in a cage in his house, and gets entangled in his life. And then we learn that the dude from the Gov’t who’d come to town and tried to arrest the blacksmith, is also a devil. Politics gets in the way, and long story short, the blacksmith goes to hell with a giant gold bell, to rescue the little girl, and annoy the devils. Weird movie. I was hoping for something like “Witching and Bitching”, but this wasn’t quite as interesting.
Officially, Law Abiding Citizen isn’t a horror film. But it starts out with something that would be at home in the rape-revenge horror category, a home invasion, murder of wife and daughter by creepy dudes. Then we get some courtroom bits, dealing with the system, and how people make deals. After that, we get the fun of the main dude beginning his revenge. Swapping the lethal injection chemicals for something messier, multi-limb amputation of the accomplice who made a deal to get off on lesser charges. And then we get into his revenge on the system. Bombs, killer robots, and more bombs. In the end, he gets tricked and hoisted by his own petard; or roasted by his own napalm, rather.
So, dude and random girl who dates his bully go into a closet as part of a Seven Minutes in Heaven that the bully orchestrated. Maybe he’s got a cuckold fetish, or thinks this will humiliate the dude? Not really sure. But they come out of the closet into a slightly different house, in a place where stuff is a little strange. He’s being accused of murdering someone with a pencil, and people seem a little aggressive, including his guidance counselor. After some strange twists, they learn that somehow they’ve ended up in some odd version of hell. And they have serious problems getting home. I’m not sure it’s really a horror film. I’m not sure what it is, really.
So, spoilers. Hiring a psychic to clean up the ghostly echos of all your murder victims, not a great idea, since the psychic might just learn that you are the killer, not the patsy you’d pinned it on. Not a bad movie, decent atmosphere. Not really sure why I didn’t enjoy this one, it had the elements for a decent film, but it just wasn’t all that entertaining.
Charlotte, was a weird anthology with a framework of an evil doll converting a babysitter into a doll. The first one, it seemed like a bargain basement Tales from the Crypt script. Jealous siblings wanting things that the other one wants, resulting in death. The second one, actually makes even less sense than the first one. Something about a woman, leaving her purse as bait to lure people into a trap. The third one, the babysitter tells a strange story about a troll, and then the troll shows up. And when the troll cuts off her feed, I grumble because using a sickle to make a vertical slash isn’t really possible. Then we have weird mind control girls scouts, and I don’t really remember the one after that. Then we have one with a little girl getting a doll, the doll being creepy, and the mom trying to kill the doll. Overall, pretty bad, pretty forgettable.
So, with Shux happening last weekend, and various other things going on, I haven’t been writing anything down lately. So, I watched a few movies, and I’ll try to put together a summary, though most of them haven’t really been worth writing about.
Triangle is an odd film.
And it’s hard to talk about without spoilers. So I’ll be somewhat vague, in case you haven’t seen it yet.
It’s a story with three sides. It ends where it begins, multiple ways. The short loop, of the wreck, the boarding, the murders and then the escape, are tucked into a longer loop of the whole day.
In some ways, you could argue this is related to Ground Hog Day. But the layering of the loops makes it far more sinister.
Though I suppose she makes less loops than he does. Though the seagull bodies on the dock hint perhaps not.
It’s worth seeing, to see the loops play out.
So Delirium, I wasn’t expecting much from it, dude gets out of a mental hospital and his parole is house arrest. His father’s dead, self-inflicted from a few days before, and his brother is stilling jail, his mother ran off when he was young, so he’s gone from being surrounded by people in a mental health facility to being on his own and isolated.
Naturally, he gets a bit weird. Especially when his parole officer decides to take his pills away.
Of course, we’re not really sure how much of the story is reality and how much of it is his head; normally that leads to an unsatisfying conclusion. This time however, they did a good job with the script, navigating us through the potential mess, and out the other side where things get darker and more interesting.
I can’t say much more without spoiling it, but it’s been my favourites of horror movies I’ve watched recently.
Mayhem, one of the first Shudder Originals that I watched, and possibly one of the reasons I signed up for Shudder in the first place. Well, that and it’s $5 to support horror movies. All things considered, this movie is pretty sharp and self aware. We’ve got a world where the rage virus exist, and the legal precedent has been set regarding murders committed while under the influence of the virus. Basically, you’ve got immunity to prosecution, if you’ve been infected.
Side note: It was phrased that a loophole got the case dismissed, which I think would actually mean that precedent wasn’t actually set, since a case has to be heard and decided to set precedent. At least that’s my understanding with regard to certain human rights cases I followed. They were dismissed on other merits, so the case law was never established.
The main character has just lost his job, a nice corner office gig. He’d been used as a scapegoat to cover up someone else’s error. Then the virus exposure hits, he tries to get back upstairs, gets taken to the basement for a beating instead. And then we have his long bloody climb from the basement to the penthouse, removing people along the way.
And of course, he’s accompanied by the person he couldn’t help earlier in the film, a woman whose mortgage had been bought up and foreclosed on by the company. He’d given her advice, but been unable to help her. And since she’d been a problem for security, she was also waiting in the basement for the cops when the virus quarantined the building.
It’s a fun tale of revenge, corporate power structures and toxic people. Plenty of violence, plenty of gore. Horror, though, less direct horror, and more just horrible people doing horrible things, before and after the rage virus.
So, the Collector, is a tense movie about a dude who does horrible things to a family, inside a house, and another fellow, who breaks into the house to rob it while these horrible things are happening. And it’s a damn creepy movie, with a good variety of disturbing traps. Most of the traps make some amount of mechanical sense.
And then we have the Collection, the sequel, where he goes from a horror movie bad guy to super villain levels of evil. We get news reports that he’s terrorizing the city, we get him committing mass murder at a nightclub, using a threshing machine to clear the dance floor, some sort of hydraulic press elevator to crush the people in the lobby, and some random blade traps. Cool traps, but a bit nonsensical compared to his previous set.
He kidnaps a girl, and in the process, on of his previous victims gets away. In the first one, we knew he brought his previous victims along to the new houses, though it wasn’t really clear why. In this one, he’s trying to complete his collection. Since in this film, he’s got a base. An abandoned hotel, the Argento, a nod to the famous horror director, I suppose. And the hotel is rigged with booby traps and filled with people he’s turned feral with drugs.
We get some scenes very reminiscent of a zombie movie, where the rescue team are shooting zombies. We get some traps, which make even less sense than the previous ones. And of course, we get to see his collection, various taxidermied folks, preserved in some liquid, that for whatever isn’t flammable. Which is important, since smashing these tanks provides liquid that puts out the fire that he’s started to destroy the evidence.
And of course, he gets away, and then our main victim tracks him down later, stuffs him in a box. Which isn’t really a horror movie ending, unless becoming the monster is the horror of it.
Really, I’d have a hard time imagining how the two films could be more different. The main characters are the same, but the motives, methods and abilities aren’t. Well, I suppose the burglar fellow uses his lock picking skills again in the second film.
I watched this one at a friend’s place. She is one of the few people I know with a Shudder account, and this Ruin Me, is another Shudder Exclusive.
It had some clever bits, some decent twists, and you spend a good portion of the movie wondering what’s real and what isn’t.
It starts as a roleplay weekend getaway, “Slasher Sleepover”. A handful of people meeting up at a creepy gas station to get black bagged, taken into the woods and then scared while they live out being in a horror movie.
In the end, I guess it’s worth watching. But it kinda falls flat when the motives come out.
It’s got some fun scenes though, and the characters aside from the main pair are entertaining.
So, I’ve seen this one on netflix as a suggestion a few times, but didn’t think it would be worth the watch. Well, The Ritual definitely has some amazing moments. Especially the first death, that sets the stage for the whole trip into the woods. It’s incredibly mundane and ordinary, but also rather gory. There’s just something heavy about that scene, and you really feel for the protagonist who seems to have a mix of PTSD and survivor’s guilt over how his friend died. And of course it doesn’t help that some of his other friends blame him for it. After all it was his idea of walk into that store, and while one of them died, he walked out without a scratch. It gets creepier once they get off the beaten trail, and at times I wondered how much his PTSD was screwing with him, vs something actually being wrong with their circumstances.
Overall, I’d say give it a watch, it definitely has atmosphere and some creepy moments.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This morning, I finished reading the novel Odd Thomas. I’d previously seen the movie, and like Horns, John Dies at the End, and pretty much every other movie that comes from a book, I’ve heard the book was better. Since I’d bought myself a kobo the other day, I’d loaded Odd Thomas onto it, and read it over the last few days. This is my thoughts, on both the book and the movie.
If you haven’t seen the movie, I’d probably suggest that you see it. If you’ve got the patience for it, I think you might want to read the book first.
It’s hard to write about this story without spoiling it, but I’ll give it a shot. The book is quite self aware, just a little bit more so than the movie. The main character has an Odd name, an odd life, and this is something of his origin story. Given that there’s 7 other books in the series, I think that’s a good thing. The character, while perhaps not overly easy to relate to, comes across as a good person. Flawed, as we all are, but with good intentions.
The plot, the twists his life takes, the place where it takes place, have a similar quality. You can’t quite relate to it, but you can appreciate it. Where he lives, and how it feels is actually tied into the plot, which is something I appreciated.
This is the end of the spoiler free section. I’d not bother reading below this line, until you’ve either read the book or seen the movie.
Yes. I know there’s nothing here. I don’t trust you. Go read the damn book first. Or watch it on Netflix at least.
As I mentioned the other day, I picked up an ereader, with the intention of reading more. I’ve had it for a weekend and a bit, and in that time I’ve read two and a half books. I read the Dresden novel skin games, the first novel in a different urban fantasy series, the Iron Druid, and about half of the Odd Thomas book, which I’ll probably finish today.
So far, Odd Thomas is very much like the movie, and I’d enjoyed the movie. I’m looking forward to the other books in the series.
The Iron Druid book has a similar flavour to Dresden, and I’d recommend it to fans of that series. It has some genuinely funny bits and a pretty interesting magic system.
Skin Games, I’m surprised I hadn’t read earlier, when it first came out. Simply out, it really reminded me of why I enjoyed the Dresden novels, and was perhaps my favourite since Dead Beat.
I’ll probably toss up another quick article like this in a week or two.
Well, that was a fun night. I wrote a decent piece. It’s up over here, at Erotic Vancouver. And now I’m tired. Tomorrow, I’m going to wander Victoria for a bit. Maybe do some ingressing.
Well, I’m about to make another attempt to channel the spirit of Spider Jerusalem once again, and put together a live blog. A stream of my thoughts, coherent enough to be understood and interesting enough to be worth reading. If you’re curious what I’m up to tonight, it’ll be going up over on EroticVancouver.com.
I’m on the bus on the way back into the office. I’ve had an interesting weekend. Created more content than I’ve created in a long time. It can be found over on EroticVancouver. That’s the majority of the writing I did this weekend, though there’s another 50% again as many words that have been written and will be released on EV over the next couple weeks.
While I was at Taboo for most of the weekend, I did manage to get some work done. Delivered three modems that should go live sometime today. And sat in the dungeon programming an ATA during the show, so that the ported number would work properly.
After I finished playing Locker Tetris with the gear from the dungeon, I delivered the ATA, tweaked the router and tested it out. Then I headed over to the post Taboo defrag. It was nice. Managed to get the last piece of the live blog finished while sipping on homemade gin.
This is my attempt at a review of iCandy, a party that is thrown on Friday nights at Club 8×6, by ScottyHotty half of the [adjective not found] Plur Duo, with his partner, Markus|edge. The Plur parties have been some of the better events that I’ve attended. I’ve also enjoyed the energy on the dance floor at Noir when Markus has been up on the decks.
The events they throw have had a good energy, a good vibe, a good [word for a spiritual thing that is hard to put into words without sounding like a hippy] or something like that. I’m not sure how best to explain it, but I can recommend the event for someone who wants to explore their sexuality and boundaries more, in a low pressure and low judgement environment.
I’ve been to three or four parties at Club 8×6 at this point. The Mad Hatter party and both of the iCandy parties. I think there was one other, but I don’t recall.
For the most part, I’ve ended up in a comfortable corner, with the Neon Wand kit plugged in, doing electrical play demos and socializing with people. For who haven’t been educated on the various strange and wonderful toys out there, [here’s a crash course on the Violet Wands]. TL;DR, it’s a zappy fun electrical play toy.
[Right, sorry, digression. Back to praising Plur. They put together an interesting event. I have not experienced any of the other events at Club 8×6, so it’s a bit hard for me to distinguish the aspects of the event that are unique to the event from those that are part of the venue. ]
The best way to review iCandy is to give you the spiel I’d give to a friend who was curious about attending.
iCandy takes place in a great venue, just off Denman, right behind True Confections, that great little dessert place. Being downtown, parking absolutely sucks. Anyways, you go into this little room, pay your fee through the glass window, they give you a padlock with a key and buzz the door open. Down a set of stairs, you enter into a locker room. Find a locker without a padlock on it, change into what you find comfy and sexy, or whatever you’re ready to wear, lock up your phone and valuables, and go exploring.
The venue isn’t brightly lit, so it might take your eyes a bit to adjust. They’v set up a social area and a dance floor, and then across the ways, through a bit of a doorway, they’ve got a dungeon and a curtained off area. I’ve yet to explore past the curtained area, so I can’t talk about that. The dungeon area has plenty of equipment set up, with appropriate supervision. If it’s your first time, it might be a bit much for you. Then again, some people just want to leap in with both feet. One thing you’ll probably notice is that there are plenty of safety supplies around.
Back in the social area, you’ll find a pile of Pink and Green cards on the table, with some markers nearby. These are for writing out a brief introduction about yourself. What handle or name you go by, your orientation, and some of your interests. Then you attach that card to your outfit, and you’ve got an instant icebreaker. I’ve been told that the Pink cards are for if you’re mostly looking to observe and the Green cards are for if you’re looking to actively get involved in play.
You’ll find that the people are dressed in a variety of outfits and have a variety of body shapes and sizes. And the surprising part, nobody seems to have a problem with the body types they aren’t personally interested in. It’s a very body positive and sex positive night.
Those are the basics. Beyond that, I think you might need to experience it for yourself to understand it.
Background : (Why I got the game, skip if you don’t care about context)
A while back, I heard great things about Xia from a couple of different people. A guy at the local Trumpeteer Gaming club was drooling over the copy he’d gotten from the Kickstarter campaign, and it was mentioned by a couple of podcasts I’d listen to. I’ve gotten a bit burnt out on Kickstarter, after the Zombicide and Miskatonic School for Girls failed to live up to the hype. I’ve still got the bonus minis for Zombicide, which are apparently selling for a ton each, though not locally, and I’m trying to decide how best to sell them off. With that in mind, I wasn’t sure how much of the game’s hype was the post-Kickstarter rationalization process and how much was legitimate appreciation. Anyways, the other night, I accidentally sold off some Warhammer stuff that I’d had kicking around the basement and managed to get a copy of Xia : Legends of a Drift System in trade for the balance.
The game is 3-5 players, and we happened to have 3 players over at my house last night. That gave us a choice between Xia and Dead of Winter, which I still haven’t played. Given that we’d spent a bit of time talking about Star Citizen that day, Xia was the obvious choice.
Components and Setup :
We opened the box and were impressed with the quality of the components. The materials feel great. Solid cardstock and a nice variety of pre-painted ships. And plenty of plastic storage bags for sorting out the components. It took us a bit of time to understand all the pieces and where they should go.
We watched the Tutorial video on FarOffGames site, it helped quite a bit, though it didn’t go into the mechanics much. We read the rules, played the into game, the one with the 5 point goal. It went quickly, with Dimestore almost wining the game in his first turn, through a nice bit of luck in the draws. The other player, Kilo, managed to blind jump into a star, killing himself instantly. With that under our belt, we reset the game and started up again.
First Real Game:
This time, we set the point counter at 10 and put together our ships. I made an attempt to travel into the the nebula to harvest plasma to sell on a nearby planet. I managed to get one cube worth of energy from the nebula before my ship’s power supply had been drained to the point where I was worried I wouldn’t make it back to the dock to recharge. Dimestore decided to try scanning for new systems, wary of blind jumping into danger. Kilo decided to pick up a couple of missions and managed to perform “Science!” on a local planet. Basically, the game was living up to the promise of being a sandbox. Dimestore blind jumped through the shields of one of the planets, getting himself a bounty in the process. We attempted to find the rules for getting rid of a bounty, but apparently you can’t buy them off, not that he really had the credits for it anyways. One of the discovered planets was willing to sell plasma so I was able to set up a nice trade route, running plasma from one planet to another. Kilo continued to perform missions while Dimestore explored, looking for a planet to deliver his mission to. He managed to find an amazingly powerful trade route, one that could be achieved twice during a single turn. These two trade routes turned into a race to see who could upgrade their ship the fastest, and we hit the 10 point marker before getting to play with the tier 3 ships. I think next time we’ll play a longer game.
We sorted out the components and cleaned up the game, and it’s definitely on our list to play again in the future. After that, I updated my game list over on Boardgamegeek, putting in ratings for a bunch of things we hadn’t bothered to rate.
Summary :
I like it, and I’ll play it again. It has a nice mix of space theme, cool mechanics and options for gaining Victory points. It is very much a sandbox game, which is something I’ve always been fond of in video games, but hadn’t really seen much of in the way of board games.
The models are all really neat and fairly distinctive. The ships each have their own special powers and the outfit system, which is basically an inventory-tetris mini-game for the various components and the cargo, works really well. I can imagine an expansion that includes missions with specific cargo requirements that would be really interesting.
It does require a decent amount of table space, and we probably need to come up with some better solutions for storing the outfits. While piling them up in stacks on the table sort of works, they tend to get messy once you start upgrading ships and moving them to make more space on the table.
I think one video game comparison would be FTL, though I’ve seen others compare it to Freelancer. Television wise, it’s clearly Firefly or maybe Red Dwarf. Or I suppose Cowboy Bebop.
I’m not sure how common the game is at this point, but it’s certainly not impossible to get currently, unlike a few other games I could mention. If someone in your local gaming circle has it, give it a try. If not, it might be worth getting, as the component are a good value for the cost and the game is quite a bit of fun.
The other night I noticed that Oculus had shown up on Netflix. I’d been wanting to see if ever since FlayOtters a.k.a Charlie from Austin had talked about it on Horror Show Hot Dog. I hadn’t gotten around to seeing it in the theatre, though that’s no surprise. I almost never see anything in theatres these days.
Last night, I decided to watch it before bed. It probably would have been better to watch it with someone, but opportunities for that are rare lately. It has a nice tense atmosphere and for a change, I didn’t get bored and start playing games on my cell phone.
It’s a smart film, with the horror kept mostly subtle. At this point, I’d say if you intend to watch it, stop reading. What I’m going to discuss after this point will probably spoil some if not most of the fun of watching it.
The film revolves around a mirror, which contains something evil. It extends a sphere of influence in which it can screw with reality. It drains the life from plants and small animals, using that energy to create hallucinations and to corrupt people. It’s a smart premise, a nice clear set of boundaries.
There are two main characters, a brother and a sister, who first encountered the mirror as children. The “present” is a decade later, when the brother has been released from the psyche ward, and is trying to get on with his life. The sister has managed to recover the mirror and intends to destroy it. She has done her research and is fully prepared to fight it. The brother is in denial about it, his therapists having convinced him that the events were tragic but mundane. So, we’ve got the nice pairing of believer and skeptic.
For a change, the believer is playing it smart. She’s rigged up a series of systems designed based on what she’s been able to research about the mirror. She has a few cameras set up to observe it, some fancy sensors, some analog clocks to remind her to change the tapes and to eat, and something akin to the sword of Damocles; a boat anchor positioned to smash into the mirror and destroy it. This dead man’s switch is her protection against the influence of the mirror, the idea being that if she’s dead, she won’t reset timer and so the mirror will be destroyed. And since the mirror seems to be intelligent, it’ll know that. However, she wants to prove that the mirror is evil and responsible for the death of her parents. So, she needs to give it some time to screw with them before destroying it.
On some levels, this premise really fits. You’ve got a reason for them to be there, a reason for them to be interacting with it rather than just actively destroying it, but you’ve also got a fairly high probability that something will go wrong. It works, and there are times when you initially wonder if the issue is just in her head.
The problem is that all of her precautions rely on humanity. A few are electric, but she expects those to fail. The anchor is on a kitchen timer and thus in theory out of reach of this thing. Except it screws with people, and there are two people in the house who could effect the timer.
In some ways, this movie reminds me of 1408. It isn’t someone being screwed with by something they have no idea about, it’s someone trying to face down something they are prepared for.
I enjoyed it, and I think it’s worth watching. And I’ve decided not to spoil the ending.
This is just a stream of thoughts and impressions that I’ll use to write up a review later for Erotic Vancouver.
Markus had advertised the event as being more pub like than club like, but I think I misunderstood what he meant by that. Its got similar lighting as the last time I was here. I was expecting a little brighter and a bit more mellow. Attempting to play board games here will be tricky. Certain games might work, but the random ones I brought with me probably require a brighter and quieter space to work. King of Tokyo, I could see working.
Some people sat down and picked up my copy of cards against humanity, that I had sitting at the table in front of me, without asking. I could care, but as that copy has been through hell, I’m not overly concerned. I’m wondering how long it’ll be before they think to ask, or they touch something else on the pile.
The pile currently consists of One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Arctic Scavengers and my neon wand. Funny that they picked the item I care least about.
A friend came up and started chatting. I mentioned the games, and the people didn’t seem to realise they were being rude. And now others have come over and asked about it and the male of the pair is explaining the game as if it was his own copy. I find this a mix of amusement and irritation. I’m pondering why someone would feel that touching another person’s toys is acceptable, even if the toys are board games. In the geek world, the general awareness of the value of a collection acts as a deterrent to most people touching without permission. It is possible that the lack of awareness of the value is a factor. It is likely that they have assumed that the games were provided by the venue. Not a terrible idea, but a bit of an assumption. It fits with the behaviour that was commented on previously with regards to patrons and the magic wands.
Offhand, I can’t think of how our hosts might deal with this assumption. I think such assumptions should be rare in a place focused on consent culture, as the default permission should be assumed to be the negative.
They haven’t managed to start a game of CaH, or clean up the game that they started. They’ve gotten engaged in some conversation with the couple that had approached them and used the game as an ice breaker. Its mildly amusing that it served that purpose. And mildly annoying that it was used in such a way without being respected.
Then again, I’m at a fetish event and I’m wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I don’t exactly fit in. Perhaps its made me invisible.
Except of course to those who know me, most of whom seem to be wearing volunteer badges tonight, at least so far.
The music works, its nice mellow jazz, but its a bit drowned out by all the people. I suspect its just the acoustics of the place. I wonder if some baffles would help create the impression of greater intimacy by shaping the conversations into tighter spaces.
I was expecting to be able to find some electrical sockets where I had found them last time, but unfortunately they don’t seem to be accessible this time. Removes option of the neon wand in the lounge area, something that was great fun at the Mad Hatter party.
—
Markus and VanJoe managed to find me an electrical cord, so now I have the neon wand going.
—
Spent about an hour demonstrating electricity via direct and indirect methods. People would randomly come up to me and ask to give it a try. It was nice to educate people.
Overall, the neon wand was a hit again.
At some point, they killed the music and brought out a comedian. The acoustics worked against him, and the crosschatter drowned out most of his act, if you weren’t over by where he was standing.
In theory, linking his mic to some of the other speakers could fix this problem, but I’m not sure that would help, as part of a comedian’s performance is visual. Alternatively, shaping the acoustics to isolate the areas better could create more of a feeling of different spaces.
At this point, I’d probably attend this event again, through I’m not sure I quite understand what the intended demographic is. The mix of kinksters, swingers, and explorers creates an interesting environment, but I feel it lacks something in terms of community consciousness, coherence and shared expectations. However, I’m sure things could be done to foster that.
Interesting. Someone stepped over me to talk to people, kicking my knee in the process. He apologised, but it was an afterthought. It seems to be an intoxication issue.
Am I so mellow that people lack concern for offending me? Or is the vibe such a peaceful one that the sort of hostility that such inconsiderate behaviour would evoke is inconceivable? Nah. Drunken fools are as they always are.
—
Nice to have a conversation about serious matters to remind me that I’m old and bitter and take matters far too seriously.
And then ten minutes later, run into another friend and have a random happy conversation that reminds me that the community contains plenty of people who have a passion who are looking for ways to express it. Be it Spaz and his music, or Nathan and his paintings. Or Mikhail and the things he does in the dark dark places.
And interesting mixture of individuals and their motives. Steps taken to foster understanding between the different cliques seem like the obvious direction. Given that Markus is already running a 420 munch, I think he has the right skill set for that challenge.