Maybe it’s just my recent Darkest Dungeon binging giving me a general mood of despair, but I can’t help but feel like this whole “post a day” affair has basically just produced what this video is satirizing:
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Everyone Is Jesus In Purgatory
Borderlands takes place in purgatory. Everyone is completely immortal thanks to the New-U stations, right up until they aren’t, which always comes at a dramatic moment. The only people who get to actually leave are the ones who’ve either atoned for their sins or proven irredeemable and been condemned to Hell.
Bully takes place in purgatory, which is why most of the cliques seem to be from the 80s, the greasers are clearly from the 50s, but the townies have a much more 90s vibe to them. Teenagers who were pretty rotten, but too young to be condemned to Hell for it, are sent to Bullworth until they have paid for their sins or succumbed to them. The game takes place sometime in the 90s, with the latest batch of lost souls being sent down midway through the game, which is why the town only opens up partway through and all students are supernaturally held within the school building until then. All adults in the town are either angels or demons sent to encourage the children to redemption, tempt them to damnation, or just to maintain the security of the purgatorial prison.
Baldur’s Gate takes place in purgatory, and it’s all a big metaphor for struggling with the evil inside, with Bhaal representing damnation and the one mentor guy being an angel sent to guide the character to redemption.
The Final Fantasy series takes place in purgatory. Sometimes characters are deposited into a “home village” with fabricated memories of having lived there their entire life, which is burnt down about thirty minutes after arrival to explain why the characters are adrift in the world. Sometimes characters can barely remember their own backstory, slowly “remembering” the past events of their life as their blanked minds are filled in by purgatory with false lives that set them up for the moral challenges they must overcome to escape to Heaven or else succumb to and be damned. Most of the monsters and NPCs, almost always including the primary villains, are manifestations of purgatory and not actual individuals being tested, but one exception is Cid, who is always reluctant to be involved in the plot and thus never escapes the cycle. Final Fantasy VII doesn’t count because shut up.
Portal takes place in purgatory, but the plot twist is that Chell is actually a demon who’s been sent to test and torment GLaDOS, which is clearly true because of contrived symbolism pulled from five different cultures, most of which are so small and obscure that there’s no reason to believe the developers were even aware of their existence, let alone the symbolism of their mythology.
Silent Hill is just a town that wants to kill people.
Batman Is In Purgatory
Sometimes, when watching shows or playing games with my younger brother (the guy what I did the Chrono Cross let’s play with), we’d come up with fan theories for various oddities in the show, almost exclusively bizarre and tonally inconsistent and sometimes contradicted by later developments in the show, which would lead to them becoming ever more elaborate conspiracy theories to paper over all the issues (some of the best parts of that let’s play were when we were doing this, although tragically a lot of our best work in the area happened in the recordings that were lost).
This leads me to one of my favorite dumb fan theories we came up with: Batman is in purgatory.
Concerning Galileo
So as a follow-up to the last Dark Ages post, I’ll note that in addition to people claiming the Dark Ages didn’t exist at all, there are (allegedly) also people who claim that the Dark Ages coincides pretty much exactly to the ascension of the first Christian emperor Constantine the Great in 306 AD ongoing until the Renaissance began sometime around the early 16th century. I don’t have any contact with these people, but I know they exist, because I see dumb charts like this one:
In order to get that chart onto this blog, I first had to download it onto my computer, and now my hard drive won’t speak to me.
The Dark Ages Were In Fact A Thing
Apparently this is something which is in contention? Like, I keep hearing people say that the Dark Ages definitely did exist, but I haven’t had any contact with the people who claim that they didn’t. I guess I’m not moving in the right insufferably stupid circles.
Anyway, the Dark Ages were indeed a thing, although the vague idea of the Dark Ages most people have in their head isn’t really an accurate picture of the time period. That’s neither surprising nor alarming. People generally speaking only have a vague overview of subjects not directly relevant to their work or whatever they studied in university, and it’s not like people can be reasonably expected to have in-depth knowledge of all fields.
In the interests of making this blog post long enough to actually maybe be interesting, though, let’s actually talk about the Dark Ages.
Breadsword on Treasure Planet
When I can, I like to link to other people’s content in place of producing my own, because that’s easier and I’m seriously regretting my decision to try and update this blog daily for a full year. Today, though, I’m linking to someone else’s content because it genuinely blew me away. Breadsword, a YouTuber with exactly two uploads, made this video on Treasure Planet and why it didn’t do well. Treasure Planet is a fantastically well-animated movie with tons of engaging characters based on a vivid reimagining of a classic children’s story, but despite having run myself dry on positive adjectives to describe it, it barely brought in half its production value and was fourth in the box office the week of its release. This video seeks to answer the question: Why did a great movie do so poorly?
Outside Is About Humans Now
I’m going to take a break from complaining about games that people haven’t played in 5+ years and instead start complaining about a game so popular that basically everyone is still playing it: Outside. In keeping with the usual spirit of my blog, though, I’m going to talk about by referencing lots of old content that most people don’t even know exists. For example: You damn kids don’t even know that non-human play is a thing that exists. Get off my lawn.
Vindicators Was The Worst Episode Of Rick And Morty
Rick and Morty season 3 is now over, and work on the next season won’t even start until Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland run out of cocaine money, so you probably won’t be having another blog post from me on the subject for a very long while. Probably never, actually, since once I finish my initial commitment to this whole “blog post every day for a year” thing I am very unlikely to renew it, since it mainly just resulted in lots of filler content like this.
Today, though, I’m still five months out from the finish line and my contempt for certain sections of the Rick and Morty fanbase has not waned, so let’s have another filler post shitting on them.
Continue reading “Vindicators Was The Worst Episode Of Rick And Morty”
Minecraft Survival Mode Is Still Creeper Mode
A full six years ago, Shamus Young argued that survival mode was basically just “creeper mode,” because the threat of the other monsters was so overshadowed by creepers that they were basically a non-issue. After half a decade and then some, this is still a problem. Zombies and spiders remain almost completely a non-threat (past the very early stages of the game, when brand new players might find themselves getting sucker punched by them at the first nightfall, totally unaware of how to build an effective shelter before then), and skeletons remain dangerous only in large groups or possibly when picking a player off as they flee creepers in a panic. New monsters have been added, but none of them come close to overshadowing the creeper.
I blame memes for this. Once the creeper became a meme, messing with it in any significant way became a bad idea. Once it became a meme, people wanted Survival Mode to be Creeper Mode, or said they did anyway, and never mind how much better the game would be if the creeper were one component of an arsenal the monsters had to throw at players (it doesn’t help that the game’s fanbase are twelve-year olds, who love memes more and understand less how much better a game is with depth as compared to older demographics).
Zombies are relatively tough, but not very quick and can only attack in melee. Skeletons have ranged attacks, so there could be a balance between the two where zombies are easy to avoid but hit hard and keep the player occupied, smack the zombie to bounce him out of melee range, wait for him to run back into range, smack him again before he can deal damage. A fairly simple timing trick on his own, but in large numbers it’s harder to keep them all timed, and if there’s a skeleton peppering the player with arrow fire all the while, that means the player either needs to tank through those arrows while cutting up the zombie before closing on the skeleton, or else they can try to outmaneuver the zombie to get to the skeleton without killing the zombie first.
This resembles the current interaction the two have with one another, but there’s several key deficiencies that prevent them from really synergizing with one another. For starters, zombie attacks don’t hit very hard. A leather chestplate, something a player can assemble day one if they’re reasonably lucky with cow spawns and drop rates, can absorb a zombie attack altogether, so it’s not very threatening to run past the zombie and smack the skeleton. The zombie’s two armor points do basically nothing against even a stone sword, a weapon trivially easy to acquire in the early game, and it has no more health than the skeleton. This is both because skeletons are too tough to serve as a glass cannon and because zombies are too fragile to serve as an effective tank. Skeletons, rather than being a complicating factor in a fight with a zombie (or spider), are basically just a flat upgrade to a zombie, almost identical but with the ability to fight at range.
Spiders likewise are just downgraded zombies, with less health and less damage. In theory, a spider’s thing is that they can climb walls, but the game is Minecraft, so generally speaking a player’s fortifications will be fully enclosed rather than just being a wall. The basic idea of having a mob who is weaker but has the ability to circumvent fortifications would be good, the problem is that the spider does not actually have the ability to circumvent the most common fortifications of the game.
The monster that actually has this ability is actually the enderman, who can teleport. Now, the enderman is also a lategame enemy who only spawns very rarely in the starter Overworld, but a weaker monster with the same trick would be a valuable addition to the game. Not strong enough to rip a player in iron armor to shreds, but enough of a threat that there’d be periodic “dammit, another one got in my house” moments during the night.
Side note: if the enderman wasn’t such a late entry to the game, I imagine it would’ve been the monstrous mascot rather than the creeper, as it’s far more memorable and encounters with them tend to be much more dramatic. They’re relentless, hard to escape, hit hard, have tons of health, and their visual cue is far more terrifying than the creeper’s on its own merits (I freaked the fuck out the first time I heard it). The only reason the creeper’s hiss is more panic-inducing is because of how aggravating the associated creeper damage is. Unlike the creeper, which ambushes the player and either kills them or not in about two seconds flat, the enderman will have a deadly and proper-length fight. That fight will only last about 10-20 seconds, but that’s enough time to smack the baddy around a little, realize it’s ripping up your health, attempt to make a retreat, and get caught on the way out. There’s an arc there, not just hisssss-BOOM and you’re dead after a single moment of panic.
Then there’s the creeper. Creepers could be siege breakers whose main role is to blow holes in defenses to let the other monsters in. As it is, they’re too beefy and deal too much damage. Their high health means it’s difficult to respond to the hissing by just flat out murdering them, and the damage they deal means that until the endgame, getting caught in a creeper blast is lethal all by itself. Even in the endgame, the response to being caught by a creeper blast is not “oh, no, now a bunch of other monsters are coming through the hole in my defenses” but rather “oh, no, I just lost 80% of my health just now.” No other monster who can do that spawns with anything near the frequency of the creeper. Every other monster is a schlub who barely merits consideration, and creeper fights aren’t even interesting.
All that and they can survive in daylight, too.
Gilmore Girls: Generational Conflict
Gilmore Girls kind of sets itself up as a class conflict thing, with Lorelei Gilmore integrating herself into a poorer small town community and Emily Gilmore representing obscene wealth and connections. I think it works even better as an interesting look at generational conflict, though. The stereotypes of the millennial generation were really underdeveloped in the year 2000, since even the oldest of them were barely entering high school, but through dumb luck or prescience, Gilmore Girls pretty much nailed it.
Rory Gilmore is born in approximately 1984 and is a millennial. She is friendly and polite, fixated on university as a road to success, and much more conformist and minimalist than her mother.
Speaking of, Lorelei Gilmore is born in approximately 1968 and is in Generation X. She is fiercely independent, snarky, impulsive, and relentlessly rebellious.
Emily Gilmore’s birthdate is born in approximately 1948 and is a Baby Boomer. She is selfish, passive-aggressive, wears a thin veneer of politeness over narcissistic contempt for everyone around her, demonstrates sincere compassion exclusively for close family members and then very rarely, and the closest thing she gets to redeeming qualities is when she uses generosity to try and make people dependent upon her and thus force them to tolerate her personality defects in lieu of self-improvement.
I said the show depicted generational conflict, I never said it didn’t take sides.
Chamomile Has A Blog 