The Odyssey

 Well, I finally all-but-exhausted that Regal Cinemas gift card by catching a matinee showing of The Odyssey.  It's a well-managed edit of the original thousands-of-years-old story, and I enjoyed it overall, especially the core concept of the Law of Zeus - I assumed I had read the base material before at some point, but it must have been select readings for a class at best, to let that sort of story thread slip by me.  At any rate, I enjoyed myself, and I think it's worth your time, should you want to experience the whole audio-visual spectacle on the big screen.

That said, it's not a movie without its issues... and lest anybody get the wrong idea, no, I'm not bothered by the multi-racial cast like the world's richest Nazi and his ilk are.  The easiest one is that Matt Damon delivers some lines a bit flat, but that might be just a personal taste issue.

No, the biggest issue likely ties back to the source material.  See, Odysseus is painted as the strongest man in Ithaca, and the smartest warrior among the Greek forces.  I get it, he's supposed to be like the ancient Greek Superman, and you can't have a war story without warriors.  Given the time period, strong warriors are better warriors, sure.  But the thing that sets him apart, particularly starting with the Trojan Horse (side note, well done on making that sequence work without making the Trojans look like complete idiots) and continuing on through his travels, is him using his cleverness to make the best of bad situations.  Then, he finally makes it back home (I know, spoilers) and, without explicit coordination with his family, sets up first a test of strength, then a wholesale slaughter of the suitors for his wife's hand.  I get it to an extent, Homer's setting up the contrast between the "true warrior" Odysseus and the only-clever suitors.  But it also paints being clever as a sin in and of itself, as even Odysseus comes to believe his clever trick with the Trojans becomes the trigger for the downfall of civilization in years to come.  It's a common-enough view in early warrior cultures, sure, but as a more-clever-than-brawny sort myself, I don't much care for it, especially in times like these.

Steam Machine has come, plus a happy obituary

Just to get the politically-charged bit out of the way first... there's a quote I've always resonated with, something to the tune of "I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."  That's certainly held true with the news I saw today about Lindsey Graham's death.  Not because he was "on the wrong team", exactly... rather, I always enjoy when somebody doesn't get to live to enjoy the fruits of their labor in making the world worse for their personal gain.  Petty, sure, but that's truly how I feel.

Now, in gaming news, Steam Machine has launched, and this time, thanks to Valve implementing a lottery to minimize the impact of scalpers, I actually managed to get my hands on one!  It just so happened to hit as my interest in Forza Horizon 6 and Warframe waned, so that's why you'll only see Labyrinth of Galleria over on my "games that have my attention" list now.

My verdict?  Paired with the new Steam Controller, it's pretty much exactly what I expected and hoped for.  Heck, it's basically what I was really wanting back when I got my Stead Deck three and a half years back, used in tandem with a dock and the old-model Steam Controller.  The biggest changes, from my perspective, are the increased power of the device (pretty much a given), well-behaved WiFi, HDR support, and waking the Machine with the Controller actually working solidly (I used the feature with the old Controller/Deck combo, but it was always a little flaky).  I'd broadly recommend the cheapest Machine/Controller combo to many people, but it still has the basic issue of not being a Windows machine, so things like competitive shooters with kernel-based anti-cheat won't work, along with a small selection of games that have their own issues.  Luckily, Steam has updated their compatibility ratings for the new Machine (and for SteamOS in general, on the off chance you want to build your own machine for cheaper), so you can see if there's any deal-breakers in store for you ahead of time.

But me, I expect to be using this Steam Machine largely as a backlog sampler, and there's one area where it really shines.  It'll run older titles like 7 Grand Steps and Rogue Legacy without a hitch, as I've verified, and both titles will stay on my Machine for the foreseeable future - not games I'd say have my attention per se, but certainly worth pecking at for short play sessions as the mood hits me.  Similarly, I've also got Pixel Puzzles Ultimate and No Man's Sky loaded - not short-session games by any stretch of the imagination, but each filling a niche to satisfyingly scratch particular itches.  That's it for now, although I did see a couple of games I had previously marked as "doesn't work on any system I own" that supposedly play nicely with Steam Machine, so I might have to give those a try later.

That's the gaming landscape, but it also means that I now have a good, quiet PC hooked up to my TV.  I may be able to do something in the way of a Jellyfin setup to back up some of my DVDs and such to a local server of some sort and increase my video-watching options as well - it's not like I'm lacking content, but I find the desire to physically find a disc and insert it into my XBox routinely falls to my desire to stay planted on the couch.  It's a terribly first-world problem, but that doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing, if the setup process isn't super-annoying and can be handled as a one-and-done thing.

Steam Controller in hand, I stare down my backlog

 Sure, Epsteinapalooza and the Iran mess are still in play, for all they've quieted down a bit, but it's not all doom and gloom out there.  Ukraine is taking the fight to Russia, literally, better than ever before, even with our lukewarm support.

 Closer to home, I finally got my hands on a Steam Controller.  A little over a month's wait isn't too bad, especially considering I gather new reservations at this point won't get to people until 2027!  It's everything I hoped for, especially once SteamOS 3.8 dropped and I was able to use it to wake up my Steam Deck from the couch.  The grip to use it is a bit different, but it's not bad in any way, just takes some time to get used to.

So, better controls mean more gaming to be done in Steam's ecosystem... when I can pull myself away from Warframe and Forza Horizon 6 on the XBox at least.  What's the game I start with?  Well, I was going to put some time into The Thaumaturge -  what's not to like about wielding the supernatural while palling around with Rasputin in 1905 Russia?  Unfortunately, some graphical glitching I didn't see when testing it on my Ubuntu machine had me set that aside.  Plenty of time to get back to it after the Steam Machine launches, I'm thinking.

I decided instead to give some proper attention to Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society.  Mechanically, it's a first-person turn-, party-, and grid based dungeon crawler, the sort of thing that dates all the way back to the dungeons in early Ultima games... but much prettier, of course, given its developer, NIS.  Story-wise, well...

I'm sure I've vented here before about how tired I am of the standard "team of heroes sallies forth to save the world" shtick. Labyrinth of Galleria is distinctly not that.  The titular labyrinth is a space beneath Galleria Manor, someplace off the beaten path, that a former owner collected various objects, then sealed them away with magic such that there is only one way in or out.  That access point, a magical wardrobe, has one major issue, though... it will allow entry without issue, but any living thing trying to exit by that route gets minced into meat.

Naturally, there's a Count that wants some of the objects that are hiding down there, and he's not exactly a nice sort.  He buys the manor, and hires a witch to work out how to find and fetch the items he wants.  Her solution?  Get around the "living thing" limitation using soldier puppets - actual puppets with souls bound to them.  Problem being, she doesn't have a good way to make them do what she wants while out of her sight.

The answer lies in getting a spirit to follow them in and act as a commander, but the witch isn't capable/willing to handle that herself.  Instead, she advertises in a far-off country town and ends up bringing in an energetic, naive, and frankly not-very-bright young noble lady with a knack for finding things to act as a medium for the spirit.  In this game, "you" are the spirit, and you follow the story of what happens outside of the labyrinth from the young lady's standpoint.

Now, could this story eventually evolve/devolve into the same old "save the world" trope?  Sure, there's no knowing where the story could end up at this point, otherwise there's not much point in following the story.  I'm definitely willing to see where it leads from here, though! 

One last goodbye, Destiny

 December 2023 is when I gave up on Destiny 2, a decision I haven't regretted.  Did it help usher in the change I was hoping for?  Not really, no... Sony didn't take the nuclear option and flush the Bungie board (doubtless thinking of the lawsuits that would be sure to follow), but rather allowed the then-head of the board to cash out, without replacing him.  In the meantime, Sony basically absorbed everything from Bungie except their Destiny and Marathon teams, then watched as Destiny staggered about without sufficient support or focus, pinning their hopes on Marathon instead.  As of this writing, that looks to be a poor decision, with Sony having to write down some of the value of their Bungie acquisition after Marathon finally launched to a tepid market response.

At any rate, the game looks to be up for Destiny.  The current game has been announced to be getting its last update next month, after which it will be in maintenance mode, just like the last game.  It's always possible that Bungie could be thinking in terms of prepping a Destiny 3, but current leaks make that look unlikely at best.  Rather, there's likely to be layoffs after that last patch comes out, with maybe some lucky survivors getting yeeted over to the Marathon team.

I feel for the Destiny team members, truly.  There's never a good time to be laid off, but these days are amazingly bad.  Still, Marathon doesn't strike me as my sort of fare, and, even if it were, there's still at least one lingering board member there from before Sony's takeover, so I'm still not getting involved in anything Bungie for the time being.  At this point, it's almost with clinical detachment that I'm keeping an eye on Bungie's future.  Will they somehow parlay Marathon into something that will reverse the company's fortunes, or will Sony eventually absorb the remnants, and squirrel away its IP?  I know which path I'm seeing as likely.

Tidbits from gaming land

 Yeah, I'm going to give the real world's continuing slide from SNAFU to TARFU a rest this time.  Let's stick with smaller-stakes stupidity from the world of games.

First up has to be Valve's launch of the new version of the Steam Controller.  I get why they might have thought the demand wasn't going to be as high as it was, because they tried this game once before, in 2015.  I got one back then (and still use it to this day), even though it was apparent that it was a compromised device in some respects - notably, lacking a physical d-pad or right analog stick, and expecting the clickable track-pads to be a suitable replacement.  At least they learned from that when they made the Steam Deck, which helped it become as dominant as it is in its gaming niche.

So now, May 4th, in a world seeded by the prominence of Steam Deck, they launch orders for their new Steam Controller, this time without those pesky compromises, and they decide to do so as a worldwide launch at 10am Pacific.  I tried to get my hands on one, but, to nobody's surprise, the scalpers and their bots won the day, overwhelming Steam's payment processing systems, with eBay listings for two or three times the price cropping up shortly thereafter.

Normally, that's where the story would end, but Steam is a different sort of company in many respects.  They took much of the week thereafter to look at what happened, and think about countermeasures.  So now, as of May 8th, they decided to implement a reservation queue, similar to what they did when they launched Steam Deck, limited to accounts "in good standing" to effectively shut down scalper shenanigans.  My reservation is in, so now we wait.

Of course, I could start up another game now, and the temptation is there, especially when I see things like publisher sales on quirky "AA" games.  But lately, there's been a disturbing up-tick in games getting launched even as (or after!) the studios that worked on them are shut down, effectively eliminating any chance that their worst bugs will ever get fixed.  So, shout out to Bellular for this video about Nacon, detailing some of their business moves and their relation to the state of the games they've been releasing of late.  Long story short, they've just jumped up to the same level as Ubisoft for "do not buy"-ness for me, if only for engineering the shutdown of a subsidiary union studio while they staff up an internal non-union studio for the same game genre the old studio served.

Well, things should improve in this space with time, maybe after the AI bubble pops and further constrains the credit markets.  For now, I'm getting by fine on Warframe, and Forza Horizon 6 is on the horizon, courtesy of a more-palatable Game Pass subscription price.  Let's see what comes next!

Seriously, the fuckin' POPE?

 Just gotta keep reminding myself, every day that passes is another day closer to us being, maybe, with any luck, done with Trump and his cronies.

I mean, sure, the guy's gotten us into a pissing match with Iran, he's throwing his under-performers under the bus, and Epsteinapalooza constantly burbles in the background.  Those are just a sample of the things he's been doing over the past year, but pretty much all things that I'd say fall within what I'd expect him to try and pull.  I honestly never thought I'd see the day where he'd try to take on the Pope.

So, I'm not going to link to the source materials this time, because it's all social media, so ew.  But basically, the pope, like many before him in modern times, came out and said something to the tune of "war bad, don't try and justify it with religion."  Trump apparently took that as a rebuke (duh!), and put up his own rant about how the Pope is weak on crime(?) and terrible on foreign policy... then followed up with an AI-generated picture of Trump as fuckin' JESUS CHRIST.  Saner heads prevailed and got that pic taken down (with Trump making the lame excuse that he thought it was made to look like him as a doctor, not, you know, a major and readily-recognizable religious figure).  Since then, there's been a little bit of back-and-forth, but, unsurprisingly, the Pope is being the bigger man and refusing to let things escalate.

But the kicker is that it's not just Trump.  His VP and the Speaker of the House, both supposed men of faith, have, in effect, told the Pope to stay in his lane... and apparently, there's significant support for that stance among various Trump voters.  Honestly, it would no longer surprise me if the people dredging up bad ideas from the past didn't have "once we've got the brown people under our thumb again, we're going after the Catholics next" on their agenda.

Seriously, the midterm elections can't get here soon enough.  I need another read on my fellow Americans, to see how many are in the camp of "no, really, this is what I voted for", handily sorted by region so I know where never to go in the future. 

Project Hail Mary, and another dose of the Regal experience

 This past week, I went and saw Project Hail Mary.  For those not in the know, it's basically the story of a man who wakes up, after an induced coma and with severe memory loss, on a ship at a distant star as the last survivor of his crew.  After working out/remembering why he's there (saving Earth, natch), he encounters an alien ship, crewed by the last survivor of their group, similarly looking to save their world.  Hijinks ensue, hurdles are overcome, and everybody makes it through.

I liked the film overall.  Sure, it's got its holes in the science here and there, but all in service of telling a better story, so I'm not going to nit-pick too hard.  There were even a couple of "oh, you decided to go there" moments that elevated the film a bit in my eyes.  Of course, it probably helped that I was in a better mood from a somewhat-improved theater experience from last time.

 I'm still working on that gift card I got for Christmas, so I chose a different Regal theater this time.  The main positive takeaway here is that you want to check the tag-spam of your theater/show choices for the "Recliner Seating" option - I'm sure it's more expensive (although I don't know for certain, since I did a matinee this time around, so it's not a simple apples-to-apples comparison), but actual adult-scale furniture with padding and the ability to put your feet up makes a world of difference, especially when it's time to get back up.

Beyond that, the compare-and-contrast with my last Regal experience was pretty spot-on.  Same dodgy app experience (and a note on the ticket booth to buy tickets at the concession stand instead of touch-screens), same commercial overload.  I did get to experience the concessions this time around, and what an experience that was - it's never been cheap, but I'm amazed at what it's become.  Candy is no longer hoarded behind the counter, but scattered through a serpentine approach to the stand.  The signage above the stand shows large photos of the products on sale, in their various combo packs, while the prices are relegated to a small bar at the bottom, barely legible while standing at the counter - not certain what percentage of "intentional customer behavior shaping" and "shame at the prices we're charging" is involved, but the first part's gotta be higher.  End result, for a small popcorn (similar size to the 3/$1 microwave bags you get at the grocer) and a medium soda (which translates roughly to Big Gulp sized) approaches $20, pre-tax.

Well, now I know what Regal brings to the table for the movie-going experience, and I remain unimpressed.  I figure I'll get one more movie out of that gift card, then I'm going to have to pay for a movie or two at other local theaters to see how deep the industry rot has spread.