On Saturday, sashagee and I went with thosesocks to see ᑐᑌᑎᑕ, Part II. Thoughts below:

( Lisan al-Gaib! )

On Juneteeth, worldbshiny invited me to watch Tilikum, which she had seen live two years ago and which (as the link indicates) was being broadcast again as a fundraiser for the Let Us Breathe Collective. All I knew going in was that it was about the killer whale at SeaWorld who was...well, let's borrow modern language and say that there were three orca-involved deaths, and I only knew that because I looked it up on Wikipedia. I described it as "powerful" later, and I'll stand by that. I was surprised how directly the metaphor applied when black actors played the killer whales--taken from their homelands and transported to a new world where they aren't free to move around, imprisoned in tiny cells, and forced to work without pay, with a white man (representing the white power structure) frequently talking about how Tilikum is his investment and will do what wants or else, and a white woman (representing the white savior narrative) arguing that Tilikum needs more space and light and air while also still training him in a specific trick that she wants to perform mostly for herself.

The other three orcas had no spoken dialogue, instead being performed by drummers, with specific sequences having specific meaning. Since the whales are all from separate pods, Tilikum can't understand them at the beginning, and part of the play is him learning to speak with the other orcas. It took about half the play for me to understand why these sequences were included , but afterwards worldbshiny pointed out that each of the other orcas had a slightly different set of instruments they were playing their songs on. There was a lot about communication in the play--about Tilikum learning to speak to the other orcas, after which their dialogue is displayed as supertitles during the drumming; about Dawn assuming she knows everything that Tilikum is saying without actually ever listening to him; and about the SeaWorld owner using communication as a weapon, constantly pushing boundaries and then pulling back with that "I'm only joking!" attitude, or the beginning and ending where he tries to tell an inquest how rare orca-involved deaths are as a means of avoiding any meaningful reform and continuing the current power structure indefinitely.

worldbshiny talked about Tilikum's sound design and how effective it was in person, where the drums were echoing off the walls and different orcas speaking came from different directions, or how the crowd noise didn't drown out some of the actors' lines, in a way that just can't be replicated when watching a single-camera video of the performance. Something that we'll have to get used to in the Plague Year, I think, since indoor performances seem like a bad idea for a while.

As the link indicates, it was one night only, otherwise I would recommend it. But if it does come back on streaming, definitely watch it.

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On Sunday, sashagee and I watched The Mandalorian after she was astonished that I, a fan of Star Wars, had never seen it. I had seen all the Baby Yoda memes, and "this is the way" and so on, but other than knowing it was a space Western about a guy who never takes off his helmet because of his religious convictions and that people had said it justified the existence of Disney+, I didn't know much else.

Turns out it's a lot like Cowboy Bebop, so.

sashagee described the best parts of Star Wars as being "bar fights on garbage planets," and it definitely has plenty of those. We were talking about how Star Wars is best when it's run-down and lived in, when the advanced technology is about to fall apart and seems like so much of a part of the world that when krill farmers on a backwater planet have droids helping them but also live in stick-and-mud huts, it seems natural. When most planets Mando visits are wastelands, with small towns or hermits living in the wilderness and civilization is far away, well, that's the best part of Star Wars. There was a lot going in with the prequels, but one of the things I personally disliked was that all the technology was shiny and new. A 50s diner instead of a dusty saloon. There's a quote about Firefly, about the two most important images being Mal eating instant noodles with chopsticks out of a tin cup and a bar fight where a patron gets thrown through a window, but the window is a hologram. For The Mandalorian, it's a barfight where the bartender is a droid.

I really appreciate when Star Wars takes a departure away from the Skywalker saga and tries to tell stories with other characters that aren't about Jedi, the Force, Darth Vader and his legacy, and so on. I saw Rogue One a while ago and the parts of it that I liked the least were the parts of it that tried to desperately forge connections between the original trilogy that weren't necessary and actually made the story worse ("This is a consular ship... we're on a diplomatic mission" when Vader literally followed them after they stole the Death Star plans ). The Mandalorian delves back into the jidaigeki to Western pipeline that inspired Star Wars, so there's an episode that's a version of The Seven Samurai and the basic plot is pretty similar to Lone Wolf and Cub. The New Republic is only mentioned and X-Wings don't show up for several episodes. It's all about space bounty hunting, which, much like Cowboy Bebop, just doesn't pay.

Also, Mando's acting is amazing considering he never once shows his face!

We got through "The Prisoner," so there's only two episodes left. I'm really looking forward to them!

While Elves of Stellaris hasn't updated for the new expansion yet, I've still been playing a bunch of Stellaris lately. I found some new mods, and one of them was a mod for extra species diversity by addding more possible traits. So I installed it, made a game, and this is W I L D.

Unlike when I'm playing space elves, in my current game my empire is accepting refugees, so I have my founders and a few other species. Here's the current list of species in my empire:

( Science fiction weirdness )

Most of that is just me directly extrapolating from the listed traits, with a little bit of RP thrown in to try to fit them all together. I did find a species that were simultaneously emotionless berzerker sadists, which is definitely , but fortunately there aren't any of them in my empire.

I tend to play a lot of Stellaris games the same, in a "decadent precursor" kind of way, where I just build fleets and fortress stations and then hide in my borders and spend all my money building ringworlds or whatever, but it's still a lot of fun! Especially if you RP when you play. There was no in-game reason for me to expel the k'taknor or the qravadox, but I figured that a bunch of psychic plant people would refuse to allow them to stay. It's relatively easy to become unstoppable if you survive the early game, and at that point, RP makes the game fun.

I kind of want to play a space opera TTRPG and populate it with species from Stellaris's random generator now.

Just wrote this bit of Matrix fanfic on Facebook and wanted to share it here. It's just done in script form because I dashed it out and didn't feel like turning it into a narrative, but I don't know that a narrative would improve it.
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This is, of course, just the logical endpoint of the "The Matrix is Mage: the Ascension fanfic about a Virtual Adept's Awakening" insight I had in 1999 after walking out of the theater--you'd just need Morpheus to start explaining the Consensus and the Ascension War. When I got home from seeing the movie, I went to the White Wolf forums for the first time ever, intending to share my brilliant insight with the masses, but in a pattern of behavior that would come to define my behavior on the internet for literally the next twenty years, I first read the list of threads to see if anyone else had posted a similar thread.

When I saw ten threads with the same idea, I posted nothing and checked the Vampire subforum instead.

Previously, the only non-anime con I've been to is C2E2 2017, so I really wasn't sure what to expect from CONvergence. But a bunch of my friends told me they went and had a great time, and I was going with a bunch of people I knew, so I was sure that it would be at least pleasant.

It was more than pleasant. It was amazing.

( Tuesday )

( Wednesday )

( Thursday )

( Friday )

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

( Monday )

I had such a wonderful time! As I said, I've only ever been to anime cons before, so I wasn't sure what I was getting into. The answer was "The Enchanted Forest!" But also a smaller con that's not blown up into a gigantic mess like ACEN is past the edge of becoming. I never had to wait in a huge line, I got into everything I wanted (as long as it didn't conflict with something else), and I didn't go to anything that wasn't worthwhile. Next year is a bit up in the air, since the con moved hotels this year and so CONvergence 2020 is in August rather than July, but if everyone goes I'll gladly come with them.

It was also nice to not feel like an ancient relic. At anime conventions, I always feel like I'm one of the oldest people there at 36. Admittedly, that does fit with anime--lisekatevans and I were pretty scornful when Cowboy Bebop revealed that grizzled, world-weary ex-cop Jet Black is 36--but it's still disorienting sometimes. At CONvergence I was right in the middle of the age range, which is about where I should be.

I used to make a con circuit, from 2005 to 2008, going to multiple cons every year. Maybe it's time to get back into that again.

Here’s one last picture of all the Bubbles and Baubles staff in their costumes:

( Welcome to the Enchanted Forest! )

I first learned about Azure Striker Gunvolt not from any of his games, but rather from playing Blaster Master Zero. After the game came out, Inti Creates put out a bunch of DLC characters from other franchises they were connected to, and since all of them had a two-week period where they were available for free, I downloaded them all. Shantae, from the Metroidvania games that bear her name; Shovel Knight, from his own eponymous game; Ekoro, from some eroge rail shooter series called Gal*Gun; and Gunvolt. He's actually pretty well-realized for being in a complete different game. I beat the first level with him, back when I thought about playing through BMZ with the DLC characters (it's on the list... ), and I was intrigued by the way his weaponry worked. Tagging people with some kind of dart gun and then blasting them with lightning? Slowfalling when the lightning field is on? Who was this "Gunvolt"?

Not too much longer after Gunvolt came out as DLC, a game called Mighty Gunvolt Burst came out and I bought it immediately. And then I read that it was a sequel to Mighty Gunvolt, which was spun off from the original Azure Striker Gunvolt series. I tend to be pretty systematic about this sort of thing, so I waited until Azure Striker Gunvolt was on sale on Steam and now I've finally gotten around to playing it.

It's a good game, but it's not for me.


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Haven't had a great week and I'm not sure why. It might just be post-con blues, it might be something else. My therapist pointed out that seeking an immediately-proximate cause for something isn't always helpful, and she's right. It doesn't stop me from trying, though.

After watching the trailer for the Apocalypse expansion for Stellaris--it hit me right in the same place that the Earth Alliance president's speech Babylon 5's Battle of the Line does--I noticed that Stellaris was on sale and I immediately went out and bought it. I found a mod that allows space elves, so the Holy Ayleid Empire is currently expanding across the stars. I've only played for a couple hours so I don't have much of an opinion on it yet, but it seems fun. The people who told me to buy it were right.

I also finished another coding project! It's not super special, but I'm happy because I started breaking all the Javascript out into its own functions rather than trying to stuff everything into a single on-load function, which made it a lot easier to see what was going on. I also used a name-based track and CSS classes to dynamically change the backgrounds based on weather type and time of day with six lines of code and a bunch of CSS classes, rather than a giant switch statement or a massive if/else chain. Next time I'm going to see if I can do the whole thing without any JQuery at all. I should at least know how to write an XMLHttpRequest.

I just finished reading Locke & Key #1, after already reading Nutmeg #1 and Monstress #2 this month. I think the thing that always scared me away from Western comics is that 1) I'm neutral on superheroes as a concept and 2) I don't know where to start. With manga it's easy--start at the beginning. If I wanted to read about the X-men, where is the beginning? How much backstory am I missing? Listening to Jay & Miles X-plain the X-men especially makes me think that there are dozens of issues of backstory I'd need to appreciate what was going on, and that impression is always why I stayed away. But there are plenty of non-manga comics that follow a similar format, just like a lot of Western TV now has the same format as an anime series with a limited, self-contained run instead of just continuing until the money runs out or the creators get bored. I slept on Western comics for a long time, but I was just looking in the wrong places.

Tonight is another episode of Starlight Radio Dreams, so I'm going there later and getting fish and chips while I watch an episode of olde timey radio theatre. Other than that, I have no plans this weekend except maybe going to see Prometheus Bound on Sunday. Probably just stay in, play games, and study Japanese/coding. Maybe beat Shadowrun: Hong Kong and write about it. We'll see what else comes up.

Metroid II is the only Game Boy game I've played for longer than a few minutes. One of my sister's friends had a Game Boy, and for some reason that is still opaque to this day, her mother asked me to babysit for them. That mainly consisted of the friend watching TV while I played Metroid II, confusing myself with the changes between that and Metroid. Having to hunt metroids? Jumping morph ball? Trying to play a metroid game on a 160 x 144 pixel screen? I played for about half an hour, got nowhere, and then never played it again.

When I heard about Another Metroid 2 Remake, I figured it would end up vaporware like the various 3D Link's Awakening remakes or shut down before being released like Chrono Resurrection. To my utter astonishment, however, it was finished, released, and was out for almost a month before Nintendo DMCAed it. That was more than enough time for the internet to seize hold of it, and it's easy to find if you spend any time looking.


Threat detected
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I don't usually go to see a movie for a variety of reasons, but as a Christmas present--they can call it for the holidays all they want, but everyone who doesn't celebrate Christmas knows what it really is--the vice president of our unit gave everyone two free tickets to an AMC movie, and when schoolpsychnerd mentioned wanting to go see Rogue One, so I told her I would go see it. And today, we did.

Further comments in the spoiler below:

( Spoilers )

It's a pretty good movie with some flaws that annoyed me, but not enough to ruin my experience.

So I had a ridiculous idea and I need to share it.

In Shards of the Exalted Dream, the book for Exalted 2e about alternate settings for the game, there’s a chapter entitled “Heaven’s Reach,” which is a space opera setting. Humanity reaches the limits of technological innovation in the purely physical realm until they discover Essence and use it as a source of power to create enhanced humans with a variety of seemingly supernatural abilities. Cue Exalted in space.

Of course, since I’m playing Mass Effect, I ended up thinking of this:

In the year 2148, explorers on Mars discovered the remains of an ancient spacefaring civilization. In the decades that followed, these mysterious artifacts revealed startling new technologies, enabling powers previously deemed to be mythological. The basis for this incredible enhancement was a force that controlled the very fabric of space and time. They called it the greatest discovery in human history.

The civilizations of the galaxy call them...

THE EXALTED.

The basic structure of the world would remain the same, with the relays and so on, except instead of biotics and Element Zero allowing for mass manipulation, it’d be Exalts and Essence manipulation allowing for FTL. Ships can enter into hyperspace, a chaotic dimension of possibility where only a strong anima field can prevent the ship from dissolving into the surrounding madness, and jump from relay to relay. Jumping without using a relay is possible, but is much slower and ships have to periodically leave near a star in order to prevent hyperspace from eating away at their reality. That way, I get to keep the Wyld and use hyperspace as hell.

The Council races would have the most territory and Exalted. I’m a little tempted to add some of Exalted’s Primordial races, or at least use their appearance, for some of the minor one-note groups. Like, change the Volus to the ereta’een (the species that Autochthon ate whole and thus discovered soulsteel), the Hanar to the pelagials, or the Batarians to the hruggha. Asari, Turians, and Salarians could stay as is. Draw a bit on the Mountain Folk for the Quarians, and say that they’re on the run now because they experimented with beings drawn from hyperspace as a work force until those beings banded together in sufficient numbers and started showing signs of self-awareness, which lead to war, which lead to the migrant fleet. These “raksha” are a persistant danger to travelers in the Terminus Systems.

The Protheans are, of course, the Dragon Kings.

Reapers would draw on Abyssal iconography and motivations. Life is chaotic and messy and full of sorrow. We will grant you the peace of death, in which there is an end to suffering and fear. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it. And husks are already space zombies, so...

I think this has potential.