Author: Chamomile Has A Blog

The Immortal Cure: Immortality Cured

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Chapter 24

Alright. Final stretch. I missed a day, but once I get out of this book I think I’ll be good.  I’ll admit that part of my problem here is that I have spent a lot of time playing a perfectly legal non-pirate MMORPG, which is making everything seem less engaging than usual, but also part of the problem is that this is not a very interesting book.

Anyway, Alister has realized he loved Charlotte, because apparently he’s real slow on the uptake with regards to his own emotions, and is trying to help her assassinate Harthum? Or is just trying to track her down so he can tell her that he’s in love with her? It’s really not clear what his actual goal is here, and this mainly just feels like the scene from a romcom where the guy tries to reach the girl and profess his love, except the stakes are so much fucking higher that it all comes across like farce. Like, dude, she’s trying to assassinate an evil overlord. How much do you love her really, that getting her to tick a box in your “do you like me?” note is more important than the fact that she is very probably about to die?

Like, look at this:

As he ran back to the airfield, Alister counted the hours on his hands. Four hours to Callan at full speed plus finding a way into the Eternal’s palace. I’m not going to make it, Alister thought and he picked up speed. A small box tucked away in his jacket pocket bumped against his leg with every stride. Inside was Alister’s mother’s necklace. I have to try, he thought to himself. I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t.

Maybe the idea here is that Alister wants to help her save the world, because it never explicitly contradicts that, but the emphasis on the love present he nearly gave her until he found her letter to Jonathon suggests that no, he just wants to propose. Can’t that wait until after the assassination attempt?

Continue reading “The Immortal Cure: Immortality Cured” →

The Failure of Game of Thrones

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Let’s be topical for once and talk about why Game of Thrones is bad. Now, Game of Thrones has been bad for like four seasons now, and people have been uneasy about it for years. Almost nobody ever wanted to be the one to stand up and say that this show is going off the rails until right near the end, when it dawned on everyone that there wasn’t enough time left to turn this thing around, but people could’ve seen this coming years away, and many of them did. The showrunners didn’t just roll out of bed and decide to phone in the final few episodes. They’ve demonstrated an obsession with the cliffhanger and the twist to the detriment of character motivation since at least Jon’s death (in fairness, GRRM wrote that scene exactly as poorly, trying to have Jon’s death be sudden and shocking instead of letting the tension build properly). They’ve demonstrated a failure to pay attention to details in troop movement and logistics since at least when Dany showed up in Westeros. In terms of writing, once they ran out of material to adapt they always had exactly one thing going for them: They were good at baiting their audience into thinking this was all going somewhere. Like the writers of Lost, their only merit was their ability to make convincing promises. When the story was wrapping up, they had no ability to deliver.

You can even see what they were going for if you look closely. Drogon avenges Danaerys by destroying the Iron Throne, the obsession with which would’ve killed Dany in any scenario, rather than killing Jon, the guy who happened to do the deed in the specific course of events that actually happened. Drogon (somehow) recognizes that it is feudalism that killed Dany, that she succumbed to it when she tried to claim the Iron Throne, a goal that stands in direct contradiction to her nominal desire to “break the wheel,” and Jon was merely a tool in the hands of the system. If it wasn’t him, it would’ve been someone else. It’s a good metaphor, a really well shot scene, and would’ve been a fantastic ending if only the showrunners had bothered with writing the beginning and middle of that story. Tyrion’s explanations of Dany’s motivations after the fact make sense and could’ve been the basis of a season 8 that was actually good.

The problem is that all of this was kept completely hidden from us until after the scene for which it was vital context. In order to make Dany’s torching of King’s Landing maximally shocking, the writers shut us out of Dany’s head until after it was too late – both too late for the audience to predict what would happen next, and too late to make the scene work. And that former one didn’t even work out well, because once a show becomes sufficiently popular, the internet’s theorycrafters will have any team of writers so thoroughly outnumbered that your only options are either to favor one faction of theorists over another or else to provide an ending that’s so bad that people never entertained the notion, because fans of ongoing art generally agree that the ending is going to be good. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be fans.

Ophiuchus 1: The Masked Man

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One thing I’d considered using to fill in my Sunday slot was bits of my draft of the ongoing novel I’m working on. The problem with this is that I don’t want first draft material from the novel making it in, when it could see heavy revision or even be cut completely by the time it actually appears in the story. Plus, while first drafting, it’s important to just get to the story’s end even if some of the chapters aren’t very good, because you can clean up the bad stuff in editing just so long as you actually finish a story and reach the editing stage. Dumping bad bits of the first draft that need to be cleaned up before publication will only serve to convince people that they’ve already given the story a chance and didn’t like it when that isn’t necessarily true.

Fan fiction for MMORPGs that went offline seven years ago doesn’t have this problem. I can dump first drafts directly into the blog and if people don’t like it, that’s because they actually don’t like my fan fiction. This stuff can’t be sold, is written purely for fun, and as such receives only as-I-write editing. The only outline is that I am loosely following the plot structure of City of Heroes except and until I think of something better. If I decide to write more of these at all, I may jump multiple “issues” into the future whenever I feel like shaking up the status quo but don’t feel like explaining how we got here, and the interim issues may or may not ever get written.

I have no idea whether or not this is going to be a regular thing (I made a category for it just in case, but a lot of categories are speculative, don’t pan out, and end up with like four total posts in them). Maybe this will be my Sunday slot going forward. Maybe this will just be something I do for this specific Sunday and I figure something else out later. We’ll see. The “#1” designation is less a promise that this will be a series and more meant to invoke comic books in general. I’d have started us at, like, #7 or something, but this is too clearly an origin story.

Continue reading “Ophiuchus 1: The Masked Man” →

The Immortal Cure: Cyborg Rebel Commander

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Chapter 21

The party arrives at the town where they’re supposed to meet their mysterious benefactor. The whole town is staring at them, and at one point comes at them with a torches and pitchforks, before a guy in a bowler hat shows up and talks the crowd down. It’s not really clear why the crowd was so angry in the first place, but bowler hat guy takes them to see Captain Hancock, who is a cyborg working for the Rebellion, hands Alister his giant sack of money, and Alister takes it and leaves. Charlotte asks Annie to go with him in order to keep him safe.

And again I’m wondering: Is this supposed to be our act two down beat? The moment when all seems lost? That Alister and Charlotte might not get together after all? Are the Rebellion going to turn out evil and Charlotte will be forced to deal with that entirely by herself until Alister comes back for…some reason? That feels like the only way this can go.

Chapter 22

Charlotte gets all gussied up in a nice white dress and meets with Captain Hancock, who has a black dress that somehow blends well with her cyborg bits, which I find hard to believe, considering that her cyborg bits include large portions of her face. I can see a dress making a cyborg arm look regal, but I don’t see how it could do anything for your face, considering the dress presumably ends at the neck at the highest. In any case, the book takes a paragraph to clumsily pretend it’s a movie:

Charlotte took her drink and walked to the fireplace as well. The flames emphasized the contrast between Charlotte’s white dress and Hancock’s black one.

This feels less like painting an image with words and more like a camera direction from a scriptwriter who doesn’t trust the director.

Charlotte explains what she knows about her mysterious super stone:

Charlotte looked down at her feet, “My theory is that we must touch the stone to Harthum. I believe that it will unravel his immortality.”

“And why is that?” Hancock asked.

Charlotte fumbled for an explanation but in the end decided on the truth. “I do not know. Unfortunately, I have yet to find any information that explains the existence of the stone and its ability to be active outside of a designated flask.”

“But you believe that contact between the stone and Harthum,” she said his name as if it were poison, “would result in a reversal of his immortality?”

“I think that it is the most plausible outcome.”

Captain Hancock nodded and took one last drink of her wine before setting it down. She turned to Charlotte and held out her good hand. “Very well, you will hand the stone over to me. My men and I will infiltrate Callan in three days. We will attempt to destroy Harthum with this stone.”

So note that this conversation basically goes:

Charlotte: “I think touching the stone to Harthum will make him mortal.”

Hancock: “What makes you think that will work?”

Charlotte: “I dunno.”

Hancock: “Good enough for me, brb staking my life on your totally unsupported guess.”

Continue reading “The Immortal Cure: Cyborg Rebel Commander” →

The Problem With MMO Roleplay

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Most MMORPGs will have a dedicated roleplay server. The idea of using an MMO as a backdrop for roleplaying appeals to me, but it has a serious problem that I don’t know how to easily solve: Who plays the NPCs? Like, obviously the computer runs the NPCs in the sense of having them attack players and stuff, but it’s pretty hard to have a roleplay conversation if you can’t talk to NPCs. It’s never long before you can feel the constraints of not being able to talk to plot-vital characters are felt.

I think probably the most fruitful direction for this kind of thing would be to ignore completely the role that the main plot casts you in. Most MMOs treat every player as though they are the chosen one. Obviously, you need to junk that in favor of the chosen four or eight or however many people are in your RP group, but I think that obvious step isn’t going far enough. If you’re going to not actually interact with any NPCs pretty much ever, then you need to be someone who wouldn’t be expected to. Let’s take Lord of the Rings Online as an example, although it makes you less chosen than most MMOs on account of Frodo and Aragorn are already a thing. In LotRO, your character is allegedly instrumental in fighting off all kinds of major servants of the Enemy all across Middle-Earth. You meet with Aragorn, Galadriel, Elrond, and a dozen other major names. Not only that, those people rely on you to accomplish vital tasks so they can do all their canon world saving shenanigans. But there’s nobody around to play the part of Aragorn or Elrond in RP conversations when you’re sitting around Rivendell.

Instead of being the tenth most important person in all of Middle-Earth right after the Fellowship, imagine you roleplay as just, like, regular hunters out of Bree or dwarven guards from the Blue Mountains or what-have-you. A fellowship of basically ordinary people who don’t interact directly with Aragorn or Elrond. You fight in the battles of the free people not because you are their savior but because you’re one of them. An army of dwarves showed up, and your dwarf buddy is one of them, and the non-dwarves are with him, and at no stage do any of the big names from the Hobbit personally thank you for your valor or anything. This reduces the party from protagonists to extras, but it also means that you can talk about the game as it really is: Pulling you along events that you cannot really control, rather than pretending that you’re on a first-name basis with Eomer and should be able to include him in the conversation whenever it would be prudent to do so. And with the group no longer at the heart of the plot, it liberates everyone to instead care mainly about the interpersonal relationships within the group, and how those relationships grow or wither over time as a result of the things that happen to the fellowship.

The Immortal Cure: Love Letter 2: Love Harder

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Admin note, a few hours after it was supposed to go live, I noticed I’d put the wrong time in for the last Immortal Cure post. I tried to switch it to the right time, and instead overshot so it was six hours early. Even if it’s worked, it still would’ve posted without notifying anyone, ’cause it was backdated. Probably should’ve just let it go up six hours later than normal, it’s not like anyone’s hitting refresh on my website waiting for the hour to tick over so they can get a new post.

Chapter 19

I haven’t been so eager to see the end of a book since Dungeon Born – at least things like Succubus were spectacularly bad and not just relentlessly mediocre – but unfortunately the Immortal Cure does have an actual plot where scenes build on what came before so I can’t just compress a fifth of the story into a two-line summary and exclude nothing important. For that matter, it’s worth noting here that the Immortal Cure is often aiming in the right direction, it’s just constantly crippled by a character-driven plot driven by characters with no charm or chemistry. If the secrets of alchemy are meant to be a plot-driven big twist, then that’s also a problem, because I don’t care about that, either. Like, really, what do I care about the umpteenth Brandon Sandersen rip-off magic system? Mistborn was published in 2006, we’re reaching the stage where complaining about Sandersen knock-offs is itself becoming old hat, actual Sandersen knock-offs set sail years ago. And the setting is functional but uninspired, good enough to serve as the foundation for other elements without detracting from them but not a selling point on its own. Much like the plot, it’s somewhat formulaic but competently executed enough not to get in the way of the book’s strengths, if only the book had any strengths.

Anyway, Charlotte ruminates on how she’s in love with a pirate and also on how this is the stupidest thing to be preoccupying her thoughts while she’s preparing to murder a tyrant, something that would be compelling if love and romance had not been at the forefront of her mind almost incessantly from chapter one.

Eventually, she joins Alister and Giovanni, and they start trying to puzzle out why Geoffrey went rogue. This is the part of the narrative that tries to make Charlotte look smart by making Alister and Giovanni into dipshits.

Charlotte turned to Alister. “I have thought about this a lot. I think Geoffrey saved you because he liked you, Alister. I believe that something more powerful than his conditioning leaked through, causing him to act according to his own desires. And that desire was to protect you. It’s soul, or Ether according to Flamel’s journal, wanted to protect you despite what it had been trained to do.”

Alister nodded slowly. “I guess that makes sense. But why? Why try to protect me? It’s not like I did anything different with it.”

“I am not sure about that,” Charlotte said, looking down at her cracker. “You see, you did something no other previous master had done.”

“What’s that?”

“You gave him a name.”

The book has explicitly called this out as unusual, not just in narrative but in dialogue, so Alister should be aware that this is weird. Genius inventor that he is, he should also be smart enough to realize that the weird thing he did is the prime candidate for being responsible for the golem’s weird behavior towards him. Also, anthropomorphizing non-living creatures is plenty common. People name their cars, their computers, any machine they interact with regularly. Not most people, but enough of them that golems getting named and subsequently going rogue should be a common enough occurrence for the redcoats to know about it. Plus, if it’s literally just giving some kind of unique identification, then anyone who regularly interacts with more than one golem will at the very least number them. Naming them would be more advisable, since it’s easier to keep track of Alice, Bob, and Charlie than it is to keep track of golem one, golem two, and golem three.

Giovanni impulsively tries to smash the super stone from the ruin open, but it’s basically impervious. Charlotte still suspects that touching the stone to Harthum might kill him, although it’s still not clear why she thinks that. During this chapter, she also comes across a more reasonable, though still speculative, theory: Maybe this stone will crumble if removed from its chamber just like all the others, but it just has a really big chamber. So, maybe we Journey to the Moon this shit by firing the stone out of a giant cannon until it leaves the planet?

Continue reading “The Immortal Cure: Love Letter 2: Love Harder” →

The Immortal Cure: History Lesson

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Chapter 16

Everyone is safe in the ruined city where Annie the living doll resides. And also they have passed the mysterious test of character they didn’t even know they were taking.

“Thank you, Prince Alister,” Annie said, giving him a curtsy.

She giggled which, to Alister, was very creepy. He rolled his eyes, obviously not caring for his new title.

“Charlotte,” Annie said, addressing the room. “Prince Alister. Mr. Giovanni.” She looked at each of them as she spoke. “I have decided that you are people who love and care for each other.”

“Um… thank you, Annie,” Charlotte said, confused. “My father,” she continued, “told me that I was to wait for people to come who love and care for each other and me. He said that they would not be afraid or angry with me but would be nice and kind. You have all become my friends and made me oh, so happy.”

See, turns out Annie knew where her father’s secret alchemy lab was all along, she was just waiting ’till she was certain that these strangers qualified by her father’s criteria. There’s nothing wrong with the basic premise of a father entrusting his golemized daughter with the secrets of his life’s work before he expires, and setting some guidelines that 1) a child could understand and 2) will hopefully keep the lab out of the wrong hands. And generally speaking, this moment where the heroes get something they could not have gotten had they not grown and changed along the journey is good. The problem is, who all has been growing and changing, exactly? Charlotte and Alister aren’t more caring and compassionate people than when they started, they’ve just warmed up to one another, specifically, through constant exposure.

On the other hand, we’re only 60% of the way through the book, and you’d expect the moment when the hero’s growth over the course of the journey gives them the strength to complete it to come more like 80% of the way through. So it’d hardly be unusual for this bit here to not actually be emblematic of any particular growth.

In the secret lab, Charlotte finds the lost diary of Annie’s father, who helped create the machines that annihilated all life in Labati. Turns out he helped Harthum and the one other immortal in the world to suck the life out of a nation in order to become gods.

Father

The journal refers to the two siblings immortaled by the process as “Hassams,” so presumably Harthum is a corruption of that.

Also, the secret to getting a philosopher’s stone (an alchemic power source created by siphoning the soul out of someone) that can leave its container without crumbling to dust is extracting a complete soul all at once. The book had a potential explanation why no one had ever tried this, but then ignores it completely to instead…mock itself for having a dumb reveal?

Up until now, Alchemists could store within a stone a set amount of energy drained from human and animals alike. Through this processs, that stone would become what we lovingly refer to as a philosophers stone. But no one had been able to produce a philosophers stone capable of powering indefinitely. That is, not until Dr. Hassam. I still remember the day he revealed his secret. I remember feeling underwhelmed at the revelation. Looking back on it, my insides twist at my apathetic manner.

The secret was surprisingly simple. Dr. Hassam had built a potent Ens Primum Machina powerful enough to sift an entire human soul into a stone, killing the person. He assured us that the ones used to make the stones were highly dangerous criminals, but that hardly concerned me. I marveled more over the simplicity of the method. If a fraction of a soul could power machines for a time, then what could the entirety of a soul do? How had none till now discovered this simple truth?

The obvious limiter here seems to be that an ens primum machina isn’t usually powerful enough to suck an entire soul out at once. Making a sufficiently powerful people juicer was the breakthrough necessary to get this working. But apparently that’s not the limitation, and instead people just hadn’t bothered to make a sufficiently powerful people juicer to check what happens when you juice all of someone at once? ‘Cause Dr. Flamel here thinks it’s weird that no one’s ever figured this out before. And it is indeed weird. Almost every society has people it’s willing to sacrifice for the sake of power, and fairly often has people it’s willing to sacrifice just for the Hell of it.

Continue reading “The Immortal Cure: History Lesson” →

Jon Enge’s YouTube Channel Seems Pretty Okay

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Most of the time, by the time I’ve seen a YouTube channel, its audience has already grown orders of magnitude larger than mine. Mostly this is because even the most generous estimates of the size of my audience put me at under 100 readers, so most YouTube channels worth watching are already considerably more popular than me, and the exceptions are almost by definition things I’m much less likely to know about.

Today, though, I got a live one. Jon Enge’s YouTube GM advice videos are good. I particularly like his video on the value of money. His mannerisms are kind of cringey, but much like Shadiversity and his awful, awful voice, the content is worth muscling through it.

The Immortal Cure: Desert Snakes

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Chapter 12

This chapter opens up with the protagonists getting over all that petty bickering they were engaged in last chapter. They apologize and then Alister launches into more of his backstory. Characters are still sleepwalking through the beats of a tired old arc, but on the bright side at least this came in chapter 12 and not in, like, chapter 23 or whatever the chapter right before last is. In fact, since this is book one of a duology, this petty bickering could’ve dragged itself out past the end of the book. Turns out Alister’s father designed his ship, and the Abaric pirate king stole it and some others and killed his father and then pressganged him into the crew. Alister was way more interesting when his background was just having the personal enmity of a single ship full of pirates, rather than having been personally wronged by the leader of some globe-spanning pirate confederation.

Also, Alister’s fault in all this is supposed to be that he’s more interested in getting his bounty cleared than in Charlotte as a person, but Charlotte still has no right to Alister’s affection, so what the Hell? The book phrases it as Alister “treating [Charlotte] like a piece of cargo,” but it’s not like he shoved her in the hold and told her to stay there and keep quiet until they arrived at their destination. The actual “fault” here is apparently keeping a professional relationship instead of obeying the plot and falling in love with the female lead.

Also, they visit some sandy ruined village and get attacked by a giant monster.

Chapter 13

In which the giant monster attack continues. Our monster here is a giant serpentine monster with no eyes or nose, just a giant maw and a bunch of human arms out front that feel around. It’s basically a dune worm that hunts by feeling vibrations on the sand, but unfortunately it doesn’t care how rhythmic your vibrations are so you can’t escape it by grooving to the colors. You can escape it by standing on a rock, though, because it can’t swim through solid stone and dislikes emerging from the sand intensely enough that it won’t pop out and eat something sitting on top of it, plus I don’t know if it can feel vibrations through rock the way it can through sand. Charlotte ends up separated from the group and attacked by a slightly different snake-y worm-y sort of golem, before being saved by some doll golem that can talk. It’s all…okay? There’s nothing wrong with the chapter itself, it’s just suffering from how much I don’t care about these characters or their journey.

Chapter 14

The chapters aren’t getting shorter. I just have less and less to say about them. Quality is actually climbing a bit overall, as we get more weird and interesting ideas and fewer references to Charlotte’s tits, but we’re 55% of the way in. It’s pretty late in the game to try and win my attention just by mostly shedding some early flaws.

The doll golem is named Annie and leads Charlotte to her home in a ruined city. Annie used to be a human but then got golem’d. Also, Alister and Giovanni are stuck on a rock because the one snake chimera is constantly circling it waiting for them to step off so it can murder them. And that’s basically it.

Continue reading “The Immortal Cure: Desert Snakes” →

Assassin’s Creed Unity Still Has Bugs

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I don’t really know what I’m doing with Sundays now that I’m shelving the whole podcast theater thing for taking too long to edit for the quality of the content it produced, so here’s something random while I figure out what to stick there: After the Notre Dame fire, Ubisoft gave Assassin’s Creed Unity away for free. I’d already bought the game on sale ages ago, but I decided to play it in order to take advantage of the fresh crop of players for multiplayer content. Unity is no longer the horrific bugfest that it was at release (and they also removed all the connections to their freemium mobile game, with all the quests and chests formerly locked behind progress in that game now auto-unlocked), but it does have noticeably more bugs than other Assassin’s Creed games (which I always wait at least a year before playing, partly so that prices can come down, partly to give Ubisoft time to fix all the bugs). The parkour system in particular is janky as Hell, with Arno doing things like perching on the top of stairs as though it were a ledge and refusing to move while he’s shot to death by enemies or getting locked into his limb-flailing falling animation while attached to a wall, rendering him completely unable to move. It doesn’t help that the revised parkour system has made it the hardest to control Assassin’s Creed game yet made, which is a real shame since they finally stopped putting a gazillion snipers on the rooftops so you can actually parkour your way across the city without being attacked.

Y’know back in 2008 blog posts of this length were perfectly typical? If I could reload my life from an earlier save I would take advantage of so many fleeting internet fads that I’d naively assumed would last forever.