Unangbangkay

10 years on from Max Payne 3 and 19 years on from Max Payne 2, it's interesting to note that while 2 had good graphics, for 3 they decided to go with bad graphics. every project is different

Mister Scratch is a scary guy who wants to fuck my wife

I'm joining MicroBlogVember (thanks for the heads-up @iro), partly because i noticed myself quipping more again on Twitter and thinking "cohost is for effortposts" instead of "for all posts". That's the trick of twitter, i.e. things have been nominally calm for a week or so in your personal bubble, so you stop thinking you're literally on a wannabe 4channer's website putting your good stuff out there.

anyway, the treat is i finally killed the mosquito that's been haunting my legs all week. i'd post a picture but it would count as guro, so

That's what we're calling Mastodon, baybee.

(I kid.)

Recent events in media industry have really taken the shine off the idea of streaming and subscription services being the kind of archival, library-in-your-home concept that was part of the early pitch, and I'm already regretting some years-old decisions to delete old torrents after finding them on Netflix following its launch here.

Not even the insistence on physical media, as helpful as that is, will help that much, at least not with games, anyway, with more and more titles essentially becoming a download code in a box.

Hence, piracy. The old freedom to have "backups" that mutated into a way to get stuff without paying to the last tool left for economically accessible preservation of stuff you care to engage with again.

None of these, of course, are a solution to the problem of media preservation absent a genuine archival effort from first- and third-parties that is ideally backed on a societal level by the state or community, but on the level of "what can i do as an individual consumer", that's probably the thing you can manage that doesn't put you too much out of your way (and as we know, the least effective form of preservation is the one that's too much of a hassle to do regularly).

As an aside, I am ironically relieved and thankful for microsoft's unpleasant habit of syncing absolutely every picture and screenshot i take to onedrive. i ignored it for a long time but it came in handy when i needed to search through old photos i had uploaded to Viber for documentary proof for some legal things. It's a messy solution but it works in a pinch.

[This user Deliberately Did Not Research What "Jared, 19" Means before writing this part of the MicroBlog, and will only look up what it is after he's finished]

No idea who Jared is, but thanks to @TalenLee's excellent blog entry on Megatokyo, I thought about things I was doing and was into when I was 19, which would've been in 2004, exactly Half My Goddamn Life Ago.

[Webcomic aside: I was also reading the excellent Schlock Mercenary when I was 19. If you'd like an example of a webcomic that started in 2000 and, seemingly unlike MegaTokyo, only got better by posting daily for 20 years, read it.]

So I started poking through old drives to see what I had from that period, which would've been my sophomore year in college.

Photos were pretty much a wash, as I didn't keep any digital ones before 2007 or so. Attached is a screenshot of my Steam profile, which lists me has having signed up for Steam in August of '04.

Documents from that period were more productive, because I was in school and keeping copies of things.

Also attached are shots of my Communications BA thesis proposal, submitted in July 2004, which, of all things, was based on Ragnarok Online and Final Fantasy XI. I got the proposal approved, but ultimately the final thesis replaced FFXI with World of Warcraft because PlayOnline SUCKED here, plus my 19 year old brain was simply not up to the challenge of comprehending a PS2-era MMORPG.

[This User Has Now Researched What "Jared, 19" means]

Oh.

It's technically November 4th here, so I'll take this opportunity to get ahead of the prompts a little. I will not have this exercise suffer the same fate as my media thread (rip)

This is also a relevant prompt because much of my working-for-money time is currently spent on RPG Site, a game blog and news outlet that is, ostensibly, focused on RPG video games. And one odd background concern that hums behind our coverage decisions is how the lines have blurred these days. The nickname of the staff chat channel is "Everything is an RPG these days", a joke about the slow colonization of all of games by RPG-style progression mechanics. We semi-handwave concern-trolling about what is or isn't "RPG" enough for the site by saying that we're mainly for the audience of RPG players, and thus our coverage decisions are primarily driven by what they want to see - We regularly cite our decision to cover The Legend of Zelda and the occasional VN as part of that rationale.

And even in places where it doesn't always shore up (we passed on detailed coverage of both God of War Ragnarok and Armored Core VI even though those are both definitely in RPG players' wheelhouses), I think it works.

I also happened to notice today this article on GamesRadar quoting Todd Howard about how he see's bethesda's style of making RPGs as expressed in Starfield works. I haven't played enough Starfield to hold a coherent opinion on it, but if bethsoft games are made to emphasize 'defining and owning a literal role in the world", I'd say they've fallen flat in that respect since basically Morrowind. But that's a different discussion.

Anyway, this isn't exactly micro blog or even particularly together as a series of thoughts, but thinking about what makes an RPG again and how leveling is in absolutely everything now, makes me all the more convinced about how narrative and character and the ways in which those interact with player expression are gonna have to be the touchstones of what RPGs in video game form are gonna need to be, now that everyone and everything has coopted mechanically incentivized character progression as a central structuring pillar.

Come to think of it, everywhere I've lived, I've been upstairs neighbors seemingly by chance, so it's usually me that's going "the hell's going on down there" at the people living on the floor below.

Although I suppose the rat crawling around in my ceiling does count for the purposes of the prompt 😬

Remember 2-3 years ago when folks were mostly staying inside and learning hobbies? For us, that was turning our garden into a garden-garden. We live in an area with a lot of empty lots are are generally left to grow wild (bar a yearly trimming of the long grass for security), for a good year or so those lots became really useful little vegetable patches. Everyone was distributing and even selling small batches of homegrown produce.

Forgive the cliche, but for a good few months to a year, it really did feel like "the world is healing". Even the cows that grazed in a field nearby, which were slowly starving because the owner of the lot had been planning to develop it, came back looking stronger than ever thanks to a month or two of uninterrupted grazing. One day I went out for a walk and saw them eating the uncut vines off the fence of one of the lots.

We were no exception, and my father, with a new work schedule that kept him at home, found the time to tinker with a home hydroponics setup he bodged together based on YouTube videos.

Even now we're still using it to grow small batches of lettuce and tomatoes, though the heyday of produce productivity is behind us thanks to office real estate owners managing to twist the government's arm into effectively mandating a return to office for most people.

I think it is in front of computer

kind of like this prompt because it reminds me of what modern video games are best at: placing their players Somewhere Else. That somewhere else might be a different country, another world entirely, or someone else's body. They're really good at putting you elsewhere, augmenting the tired nerves in your imagination, those ones that can barely visualize their own room in a different color.

I don't subscribe to the idea of games as an empathy engine the way older proponents of gamification used to do (lol, lmao), but they do manage to get you thinking about other places in ways that are often separate from the tracks of narrative and plot, in a distinct fashion from books and cinema. I think Tom Chick captured that sense pretty well in his review of Assassin's Creed 3, where he praised the Americana of the game's incidental side quests and its homestead minigame.

This sense of place-ness and putting you in a real-feeling not-real situation is a particular forte of Ubisoft open-worlders, which is why I can't hate them in spite of gestures at everything else. Cyberpunk 2077 also does it fairly well in its image of Night City, and the sense of embodiment you derive from being inside V's shoes throughout the whole story and then some. Final Fantasy XIV does it with little tricks of perspective and scale that fall apart admirably when you get on a flying mount.

Even a gacha game like Genshin Impact, run through as it is with dailies and weeklies and monetization that undercuts everything about the world-build, manages some one-of-a-kind vistas, showcases of art and artistry that put very pretty clothes on its tainted gacha heart. If anything, my biggest disappointment with Honkai Star Rail, a better game by many measures, is that HSR hasn't managed those geographic feats nearly as well as its sister game.

I'm mostly citing big, triple-A titles here, but smaller games. Outer Wilds gives you space, but not "real" space, but the space of a tiny universe trapped in a death loop where wooden spaceships (complete with a houseplant for oxygen) plumb the stars.

Text adventures accomplish this, too. Choice of the Vampire and Choice of Romance are among my favorite Interactive Fiction works (IF being more "game-adjacent" admittedly, and the games' visions of a vampire-haunted civil war lousisana and a spain-like magical monarchy push the boundaries of what seems possible with mechanically-based narrative.

I'm the book club stalker. I've always liked the idea of a book club (i.e. a group that collectively decides to read a book and then gets together to discuss it), but I'm very bad at the follow-through, whether it's reading the book on time or participating in the ensuing discussion. Instead I've used books (or more often hobby clubs like game clubs, anime clubs, and even the recent Cohost Plamo Club) as a sort of informal curation service, putting recommendations on my backlog and getting to them on my own time.

Obviously this defeats the purpose of the "club", so it's not quite the same, but it's worked out for me. The need for discussion with others about stuff tends to be covered by my games media work. Not as much need to get together with folks to discuss a game when you're gonna do that as part of the reviews process or even the hot take cycle on socials.

Still, maybe one day I'll get into a club and stick with it, transition from being a book club stalker and just an ordinary member. Maybe.

The best to ever do it (trespass)

Least likely Sensei ever

I present to you a gem from circa 2018, my recreation of Altera from Fate/Extella's noble phantasm (as seen recreated by riyo for Learning FGO with Manga)

If I could get away with it, I wouldn't work at all, and not just in the "if you love your job it's not really work" sense (this is entirely untrue btw).

I simply would not work. I would vegetate like a potato if material circumstances permitted. They don't, and so I work, if begrudgingly. In other words, I do not dream of labor, both in the figurative sense, and also in the british political sense ("Labour").

I would be the test case for Star Trek-like fully automated luxury socialism, the kind of Federation citizen who wouldn't necessarily strive to "better myself" like the brave starfleet crews pushing the frontiers etc, but some sack of meat on Earth permitted by technological and social progress to spend the rest of his days in idle hedonism on the holodeck. I would make Reginald Barclay on his worst holoaddiction day look as admirable as Jean-Luc Picard.

The key factor here I guess is the interpretation of "labor" as "something you do to make ends meet," a.k.a. a job. This of course is notwithstanding all the other forms of labor that exist outside the context of employment, like being the only person with enough time to keep track of an ongoing family project, etc., which is me, since the layoffs in March. As it turned out, my unwillingly going part-time was timed just right for the emergence of a bunch of family business that needed minding by someone who could afford to stay home most days.

As things stand, even if I was still working full time, I would have good reason to go part time to take care of this stuff, which, of course, would prompt all manner of worries about not being able to make ends meet. And according to Theory, that is part of the problem: i.e. that this kind of work (not to mention work like child care, elderly care outside the nursing context, "family administration" usually taken up either by house-spouses or, in earlier ages, the first- or second-born) isn't really recognized as valid "labor" by the people who compile statistics for policymakers.

I'm lucky enough that my own circumstances and my personal skillset let me even afford this on top of doing things I'd be doing anyway as a hobby for the trickle of money it brings in, so I'm glad for that privilege, at least. But it leads me to think that we'd all be better off if things were such that we didn't have to dream about labor at all.

The website hosting this post 🫵😳

I honestly don't, although in poetry's defense, my ignorance is entirely for lack of trying: I have never made any deliberate attempt to engage with poetry as an art form, encountering it only incidentally in other media.

Maybe this is sort of a weird thing to admit as a communications major, idk, but my brain starts to shrivel into a small raisin-sized lump when people mention poetry rules. Which, incidentally, means that the poetry-themed event that recently took place in Genshin Impact passed right over my head, nullifying its impact. Sorry, Mr. Mihoyo.

Of course, my mention of "poetry rules" here is the giveaway that I'm partly doing a bit, speaking through the voice in my head that acts like poetry is something only fancy people do when in fact it's nothing more or less than art via words, and that any kind of writing or use of language can be poetic and enjoyed as such. Even fridge magnet scrabble and the genre of shitposting where you blank out words in someone else's post to change the message. In other words, you don't need to know what iambic pentameter means to enjoy a poem or poetics.

One of my favorite gambits to help someone understand poetry in this fundamental way was deployed by my film studies elective professor back in college: Tell them to try watching a big fantasy movie with an epic script in a language they don't understand. Absent the context of Knowing What The Words Are Saying, you'll be able to pay attention to cadences, rhyming, and the artifice of speech that turns jabbering and mouth noises into Spoken Art, augmented by context from the film.

His particular example was a minute-long scene from Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002) where the King of Qin (Chen Daoming) laments the diversity of language in the land, and his idea to address it:

The cinematography and acting does work here, particularly showing Jet Li's growing horror at realizing the scope of the king's ambition bookended by the scenes of horror that illustrate the king's chosen means of fulfilling that ambition, but even without subtitles or context, purely as an audio exercise, the courtly poetry of period language and, bombastic, regal spoken Mandarin is clear, even to foreigners like me.

At the moment the family is on vigil for one of our elders (passing at the ripe old age of 102), so last night's dinner was a somewhat hurried delivery from McDonald's, but it did get us thinking about previous dinners, and the unlikely places you'll find surprisingly good non-local food. Like when we found some really good Chinese food high in Morocco's Rif Mountains.

On our 3nd day in the country, we drove with our guide to Chefchaouen, the famed "Blue City" of Morocco, and eventually checked into our hotel. Built for tourists, we expected that the included dinner would be fairly typical hotel buffet fare: Local bread, tajine, and some easy-to-prepare buffet food. We were informed that since we were the the only guests in the building that night, they'd just bring the plates to our table rather than setting up the buffet line. And lo, rather than what we expected, we got a spread of some of the best Chinese we'd had in a while.

It's not that we didn't expect to find Chinese food - it's popular everywhere, and Chefchaouen isn't exactly an obscure backwater - but rather that we found really good Chinese food here. Turns out that the chef, who is Chinese, thought we were Chinese and rolled out the spread they use for groups of Chinese tourists, which he had grown to miss over the last few years due to the pandemic-borne tourism downturn.

After some conversation, we learned that the hotel itself was Chinese-owned, and the proprietor had established it thanks in part to a state-backed loan: Young entrepreneurs from the Chinese countryside are invited to apply for and receive no-strings-attached loans from the government, then go into foreign countries and make investments, start businesses (particularly hotels that can cater to chinese travelers), and essentially, put down roots that can be used as an "in" to make local contacts for other opportunities. An interesting and forward-looking scheme to semi-organically expand business networks and open connections for future Chinese investment.