Category: Uncategorized

I’m not producing much for my dedicated projects because this Awaken Online thing kind of caught me off guard so I’ve written up like eight posts of that. On the one hand, I feel like I should probably have more discipline and focus on finishing up the old projects, seeing as that’s my current goal. On the other hand, my Awaken Online blind read and review is way more popular than my other content, and while I do want to have a corpus of completed content to point at and say “look, guys, I finish things,” it also has to be acknowledged that the audience for those things I’m finishing is very small and it’s much more sensible to invest time and energy into something that is not only easier, but also has broader appeal (if only just).

But all those Awaken Online posts were scheduled under the assumption that I’d still be making regular Vestitas content, and I don’t want to futz around with the scheduling on all those posts now, so instead I’ll throw something out about the anatomy of a plot hook, because this is something that RPG books get wrong surprisingly often.

A plot hook has two vital components: The plot and the hook. For the past like ten or twenty years, RPG books have been weirdly unable to grasp this concept and instead deliver only one of the two. In the drow book for 3e, there’s a “plothook” that’s just one of the PCs growing four extra limbs because they’ve been chosen by Lolth for an unspecified mission. That’s the hook, but what’s the plot? Like, I don’t need a fully written encounter or anything, just say “chosen by Lolth to retrieve her kidnapped high priestess” or “chosen by Lolth to slay a champion of the high elves” or something, rather than having them chosen by Lolth for a completely unspecified mission.

In one of the nWoD books, and this isn’t surprising because nWoD is awful, but it happens elsewhere, too, a bunch of different hitchhikers have all disappeared in multiple different states because someone is tracking their movements through the internet and abducting travelers. It’s fine that the reason for abducting travelers is unspecified (again, you don’t have to write the whole adventure or anything), but where exactly is the hook in this plot hook? How do the players get involved? How do they even know it’s happening, when it’s spread out across multiple states?

A plot hook needs to have both a plot and a hook, and it’s not hard to have both of those elements in a one or two sentence entry on a bullet pointed list. One or the other doesn’t cut it.

Every post I draft or publish on WordPress has a number attached to it. For example, this one is number 5992. Now, I’ve only actually posted about 360 posts to this blog so far. So you might wonder if I’ve got five and a half thousand drafts gathering dust, half-finished or rejected for being below standards or something. And the answer is obviously not, because I have consistently been overwhelmed by the workload of updating daily, to the point where anything coherent and even moderately interesting gets posted, in some cases even if it’s only one or two paragraphs long and does nothing but ruminate about failed projects, or if it’s literally just pointing you to other people’s content, or whatever. I’m glad that I’ve been able to keep up a post a day for just about a full year (and by now I’ve got enough content in my buffer that just about nothing short of getting hit by a bus will stop me from meeting that goal), but it’s definitely the case that only a tiny handful of posts, maybe two or three dozen across the entire year, ever got deleted, because my only standard for quality has been “is this literally worse than nothing?” I.e. if someone were given a choice between reading my blog post or staring at a wall for an equivalent amount of time, is the blog post interesting enough to win?

Even counting every trashed post, I’ve got maybe 400 total. So why is this one labeled 5992? The number does seem to increment upwards over time, but clearly it doesn’t just increment up by one every time I start a new draft, or it’d be way lower right now.

I’m gonna do that thing again where I post a YouTube video from someone way more popular than my blog, like way more popular, in order to piggyback a blog post on someone else’s effort with the fig leaf justification that I’m curating content.

Continue reading “The Turnabout Encounter” →

I am somewhat accidentally still subscribed to the Humble Monthly Bundle. I really shouldn’t be, since I need that money for other things, but I am, because I forgot to unsubscribe and the automatic annual payment went through. I’ve fixed that now (I think), but in the meantime I’m still subscribed for a while. Now, the reason I want to be unsubscribed is not because the Humble Monthly is a bad deal, just that the money spent on that is better put towards paying people on Fiverr to fill in skills I lack for creative projects and, y’know, food. The Humble Monthly is usually a really good deal. Last month’s big ticket item was Civilization VI, which is pretty good, but it also came with this Humble Bundle exclusive game called Fortune 499 about a fortune-telling witch who works at a soul-sucking corporate job whose main office is being invaded by monsters.

Continue reading “Fortune 499” →

At this point, this blog’s original mission is clearly a failure, to the point where what few readers it has don’t even know what that mission was supposed to be. To the extent that it has survived, it has survived as my personal blog. As such, rather than paying to renew my original domain name, I’m instead paying for the (slightly cheaper, although it’s not super expensive either way) domain chamomilehasa.blog, which is consistent with my usernames across the internet (which also helps distinguish me from the not-insignificant number of people who use the same name online). I don’t think much of my audience uses the URL to access this blog anyway, and even if they do, I don’t have many readers to lose to begin with, but if anyone does get here by typing in the address, that address is going defunct in a couple of weeks, so probably best to get used to typing in chamomilehasa.blog instead.

We all know how Spec Ops: The Line works by now, because I’m like half a decade late to this conversation. Part of the reason I’m writing about it now is because MrBTongue recently released a video about it in which he presumed that a significant chunk of his audience would be unfamiliar with its plot, which seems weird to me even from the perspective of someone who just woke up from having been napping since November of 2016.

Spec Ops is clearly a criticism of genre conventions revolving around the portrayal of US military action in FPS games. It’s often described as additionally being a criticism of the player for continuing to do terrible things just because they can’t progress in the game otherwise. That first one is fair enough. Deconstructing genre conventions is usually interesting on its own (especially for genres whose conventions were established by mindlessly aping the style of one particularly successful work while most or all of its substance is lost in a game of telephone), and often makes the genre stronger by pushing later creators to respond with reconstructions that remove the weak spots exploited by the deconstruction in the first place.

The second one has always bugged the Hell out of me, because it only works when it happens to land in front of someone to whom its criticisms apply. Undertale is a judgmental game to the point where there is a specific hall of judgment where one of the characters judges your actions, but it bases that judgment on the player’s choices. It’s not always fully accurate, but it comes across as characters in the world making mostly fair judgments to the best of the information available to them, and uses a fourth wall breaking narrative so that it can judge a Doylist entity – the player – by their Watsonian actions, by making them part of the Watsonian narrative.

Continue reading “Spec Ops: The Line Can’t Keep Doylist And Watsonian Actions Straight” →

Crimzon Clover: World Ignition is a bullet Hell game I usually play while listening to podcasts. I can’t really get any work done while listening to podcasts, but CGP Grey’s Hello Internet and especially Cortex have been really helpful in sorting out my workflow and actually getting things done, so I listen to those as they release even when I’m otherwise really busy. This means that I only play the game for a couple of hours once every week or two, but I do still play it regularly. Now, Crimzon Clover is a very well designed bullet Hell game whose difficulty reaches up to extreme levels, so when I say that I’ve gotten pretty good at the game, bear in mind that what that means is that I can almost beat the game without continues on the lower (of two) difficulty. I’ve actually made it a rule not to play with continues on any difficulty setting, because the game is actually quite trivial if you do. You can just hold the attack button down and you will eventually overcome everything, because there is no limit to the number of continues. You’d be limited by quarters if you went to Japan and found this game in an arcade, but I got it on Steam as part of a Humble Bundle so I can, technically, beat the game on any difficulty by taping down the z-key and going out to lunch. That’s not sporting, though, so single continue playthrough it is.

Now, the game is a respectably difficult bullet Hell by the time you reach level two out of five. Even someone who’s reasonably good at bullet Hell games in general is probably not making it past level three or four on their first playthrough, or even their first couple playthroughs. There are lots of different enemy types with lots of different attack patterns and learning them takes time (although none of them are cheap insta-gibs and it is theoretically possible to beat the game on a blind playthrough, and I wouldn’t even be surprised if super hardcore bullet Hell players have managed it on the lower difficulty). What this means is that even after what Steam tells me is 38 hours play, I still hadn’t beaten the game.

So when I showed up to the start of the final level with five extra lives (that’s extras, so a total of six deaths before it’s game over), I thought I was in a pretty good place. I had gotten the final boss halfway dead with just one extra life before. If I could get to the final confrontation with two, I’d have a real chance of making this my victory run.

Continue reading “Crimzon Clover” →

Monster Hunter World released lately, and I’m doing that thing I often do where I commiserate about not being able to afford the new thing by instead playing the old thing, specifically, Monster Hunter Tri. Monster Hunter, for those unaware, is a series where you hunt dinosaurs in order to wear their hides as a hit that will give you bonuses to hunting other monsters. Every game has the same plot: Go and hunt some monsters. Like, Tri does have some stuff about how there’s been some earthquakes near an island lately, and that’s caused some flooding, and also driven this giant leviathan up near the surface, and it’s pretty heavily implied that it’s left its deeper hunting grounds because something even bigger chased it out. Probably other Monster Hunter games have some kind of similar paper-thin plot, but they’re about as important as the framing story for a Mario game.

The aptonoth is a vaguely iguanadon-esque beasty that you encounter very early in the game. Here’s a gameplay shot so you can get a size comparison:

And here’s a more zoomed out shot so you can get a look at that thing’s tail:

Continue reading “Aptonoths: Weirdly Non-Threatening” →

It’s Imbolc. Celebrate the coming of spring by cleaning up the house and setting something on fire. Candles are traditional, but your neighbor’s car will also work.

Continue reading “Imbolc Update: Approaching the End of the Endless” →

So I still play about 30 minutes of Ace Combat Zero on a daily basis, maybe an hour if I’m towards the end of the campaign and completing two missions takes longer than normal (or sometimes I finish more than two because I’m towards the end and want to wrap it up). At this point I’m going back to get S-ranks on every mission, and I have discovered two things.

Continue reading “Ace Combat Zero: Lasers Solve Everything” →