Better Thursday
Feb. 25th, 2021 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickThe hormones have calmed down, and work wasn't quite as irritating as a result. Got a decent lunch break, got some more roster maintenance and phone calls done -- had to e-mail our credit card people again, but that's just freaking standard at this point. And I didn't have the same problems as I did yesterday getting out of the building, so yeah. Call that a win.
And I did pretty well with the evening checklist as well --
1. Get in a workout: Check! Feeling better today, so it was back on the bike and back to Jon’s Fallout 4 Survival Playthrough! I caught back up with Grills as he attended to his needs and his kit over at Longfellow’s – drinking a ton of water, storing a bunch of weapons and armor that he didn’t need, upgrading his new Powered Combat Armor Left Leg (can’t quite get it up to max, but second-best was nothing to sneeze at), and getting in a good night’s rest. He happily showed off his visually completely-unbalanced armor set the next day, running around to show just how slowly his Action Points go down and how fast they increase now that he’s upped his Endurance, taken a bunch of perks to increase refresh speed and whatnot, and gotten this Powered gear. It’s very nice and gives me ideas on where I’d take Victor’s build (if, you know, I could get into the damn game). There was also a moment while he was doing this where the game gave him a prompt to talk to Teddy Wright, even though Teddy was nowhere nearby, but – Bethesda. We know what they’re like.
Anyway, with that all sorted, Grills headed back to Far Harbor to check out the latest upgrade to the defenses (Mirelurk carapaces dotted about all the spikes and metal), then talk to the Mariner to receive her last quest – come with her on one last big adventure to hunt the Red Death, a mysterious monster that lures ships to their doom on some island out in a far corner of the map. Grills, who quite likes her, happily agreed to go with her, and after shooting down Captain Avery’s objections, sailed his boat to the island where the Red Death made its lair.
Its teeny, teeny lair, as the whole point of this quest is that the Red Death is a tiny Bloodrage Mirelurk who has extra-glowy eyes that basically serve as the opposite of a lighthouse – ships, puzzled by this red beam out of nowhere, go to investigate and sink. The Mariner was heartbroken by the revelation, while Grills could barely keep in his laughter. Aware that she was looking to be a hero to the Harbormen, though, he encouraged her to play up the fight and make the whole thing a legend – she wasn’t keen, but figured it better than some of the alternatives. Grills punched the tiny Level One Mirelurk to see if it would even fight back – it did, a BIT, and the Mariner shot it. Grills dumped it in the ocean so its still-glowing eyes wouldn’t be a bother, and they sailed back to Far Harbor to receive their hero’s welcome. The Mariner managed to awkwardly stumble her way through a few lies of omission regarding the monster, earning some cheers, then had a very heartfelt conversation with Grills about what to do with her final days – she was still thinking of setting off to sea quietly, before her time came. Grills encouraged her to leave a legacy, something to be remembered by, and they parted ways as good friends. I really like the Mariner – she’s another one of those characters I wish the game would let you hug. I suspect Jon wishes you could too.
Enough of that sappy shit, though – Jon’s got stuff to find if he hopes to complete his quests. After a quick off-camera stop back at Longfellow’s, Grills was on the move again, going to a certain hotel in the south to grab some nuclear launch codes which I suspect will be important in how he resolves the main conflicts on the Island. Main problem is that these codes were surrounded by many powerful Super Mutants, including a good number of Primuses. (Primi? Jon wasn’t sure either.) Jon managed to handle the ones outside okay, taking shots from afar, and blowing the head off a sniping Legendary – I left him and Grills inside the hotel, working their way to the codes so they could book it the hell out of there. XD Looking forward to seeing more!
2. Work some more on “Londerland Bloodlines”: Check! Good solid page – Alice has FINALLY learned that she’s a vampire, and has accepted help from Smilin’ Jack, because any good protagonist worth her salt should go through the tutorial. :p We’re right on the verge of part one – drinking from random strangers on the street. XD You do need to heal up that hole in your chest, kiddo. At least the Kiss being pleasurable should help with any guilt?
3. Keep up on YouTube Subscriptions: TECHNICALLY half a check because I only watched one out of the two – but I ALSO cleared out three videos in my Watch Later, so I’m going to count it as a full check. See below –
A) Started with Call Me Kevin and his community destroying Minecraft through mods! Basically there’s a mod for Minecraft that’s similar to the one he tried for Skyrim – chat can summon in stuff and apply effects to his character – and he ran it during a stream. The Twitch Chat promptly proceeded to MAKE HIS LIFE HELL IN EVERY WAY POSSIBLE. Seriously – in addition to the constant spawning in of horses, they were also constantly spawning in Ender Dragons, Withers, and Creepers. Kevin could barely MOVE at the beginning before dying! I don’t know HOW he managed to get the wool and wood necessary to make a bed, but he did, and then somehow managed to get a boat and sail away to new lands! Not that it helped him. . .even his attempts to make an underground base were constantly stifled by various spawns, and chat just straight-up killing him. The only reason he got ANYTHING done were a few friendly faces giving him diamond pickaxes and the like. Fortunately, one of the things he got done was find a load of diamonds in a secret lava cave – a self-imposed challenge he was probably a BIT too happy to complete. XD Poor Kevin. . .I kinda wanted to give him a hug after that.
B) Then, because the other thing in my Subs was the latest Wyrd Sisters Podcast, just dropped and just over an hour long (and will require a proper well-thought-out comment from me instead of a mini-shitpost), I decided to wait on that one and instead clear a few OXBox and OXtra videos out of my Watch Later! Had a few lists, after all, including:
I. “7 Failed Videogames That Were Too Ahead of Their Time” – video games that had at least the germ of a good idea, but were limited by the technology constraints when they came out. For example, Resident Evil: Outbreak, a four-player co-op game about escaping a zombie-infested city that came out five years before Left 4 Dead – and five years before good internet. Or Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, a horror game full of scares, sanity effects (before Amnesia: The Dark Descent), and playing as historical figures (before Assassin’s Creed – and doing it better too) that unfortunately sold poorly. Or APB, an open-world co-op crime shooter that could have been GTA Online if it hadn’t been kinda shit despite being super expensive to make. What I’m saying is, there’s a lot of genuinely good remake possibilities here, people.
II. “7 Superheroes Betrayed By Their Own Crappy Game” – yes, superheroes who deserved better than the games they got! . . .and Halle Berry’s take on Catwoman, who absolutely deserved the game she got. XD But yes, while a lot of these were terrible movie tie-ins (the Thor and Daredevil tie-ins being especially bad – Chris Hemsworth was EXTREMELY wooden in the former’s voice-acting), there were a couple of original terrible games, like Spawn having a tank control horror, or the Fantastic Four suffering from a very poor side-scrolling beat-em-up. Not to mention poor Aquaman, whose video game didn’t even get properly animated cutscenes. . . Basically, if you want superheroes in good games, you could probably do worse than sticking with the various LEGO adaptations.
III. “7 Ludicrous Death Traps You Escaped Easily” – video game death traps that weren’t as deadly as one might think. Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines got a shout with the Fu Syndicate “dungeon,” where your fledgling is subjected to a number of tests to determine how best to kill a vampire. As Jane puts it, the Mandarin mainly learns “don’t let your vampire bring their gun into the course.” XD There was also a raised-floor spike trap from The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion that is only deadly if you’re an NPC with one hit point; an acid trap from Monkey Island 2 that can’t kill protagonist Guybrush because, well, he’s telling the story to his love interest after the fact; and Wheatley’s “death option” from Portal 2 where he tries to convince you to just let yourself be dragged into a crusher via a conveyor belt because you’re getting close to his lair and he figured he’d give you a choice. (Though, really, the best one is at the beginning, where he tries to talk you into a pit, and you get an achievement for letting him. XD) Not deadly, but very funny.
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: . . .Check? There actually wasn’t any asks or threads or anything on my Valice Multiverse tumblr – the only one that needed an update – so I just found some fandom stuff to reblog. Counts, right?
Not too shabby -- now to answer my DW comment and head to bed. Got one more day to get through before the weekend! ...and then a Saturday full of chores and taxes. And a Sims 4 patch (which seems to have been them getting some custom content creators to add some of their stuff to the game, and the revelation that "Kit Packs" are going to be a thing, because they're now testing the waters to see how small they can make a pack before we'll stop paying for it?). Hopefully it's not the kind that shatters Sims CC. . .we'll see. Night all!
And I did pretty well with the evening checklist as well --
1. Get in a workout: Check! Feeling better today, so it was back on the bike and back to Jon’s Fallout 4 Survival Playthrough! I caught back up with Grills as he attended to his needs and his kit over at Longfellow’s – drinking a ton of water, storing a bunch of weapons and armor that he didn’t need, upgrading his new Powered Combat Armor Left Leg (can’t quite get it up to max, but second-best was nothing to sneeze at), and getting in a good night’s rest. He happily showed off his visually completely-unbalanced armor set the next day, running around to show just how slowly his Action Points go down and how fast they increase now that he’s upped his Endurance, taken a bunch of perks to increase refresh speed and whatnot, and gotten this Powered gear. It’s very nice and gives me ideas on where I’d take Victor’s build (if, you know, I could get into the damn game). There was also a moment while he was doing this where the game gave him a prompt to talk to Teddy Wright, even though Teddy was nowhere nearby, but – Bethesda. We know what they’re like.
Anyway, with that all sorted, Grills headed back to Far Harbor to check out the latest upgrade to the defenses (Mirelurk carapaces dotted about all the spikes and metal), then talk to the Mariner to receive her last quest – come with her on one last big adventure to hunt the Red Death, a mysterious monster that lures ships to their doom on some island out in a far corner of the map. Grills, who quite likes her, happily agreed to go with her, and after shooting down Captain Avery’s objections, sailed his boat to the island where the Red Death made its lair.
Its teeny, teeny lair, as the whole point of this quest is that the Red Death is a tiny Bloodrage Mirelurk who has extra-glowy eyes that basically serve as the opposite of a lighthouse – ships, puzzled by this red beam out of nowhere, go to investigate and sink. The Mariner was heartbroken by the revelation, while Grills could barely keep in his laughter. Aware that she was looking to be a hero to the Harbormen, though, he encouraged her to play up the fight and make the whole thing a legend – she wasn’t keen, but figured it better than some of the alternatives. Grills punched the tiny Level One Mirelurk to see if it would even fight back – it did, a BIT, and the Mariner shot it. Grills dumped it in the ocean so its still-glowing eyes wouldn’t be a bother, and they sailed back to Far Harbor to receive their hero’s welcome. The Mariner managed to awkwardly stumble her way through a few lies of omission regarding the monster, earning some cheers, then had a very heartfelt conversation with Grills about what to do with her final days – she was still thinking of setting off to sea quietly, before her time came. Grills encouraged her to leave a legacy, something to be remembered by, and they parted ways as good friends. I really like the Mariner – she’s another one of those characters I wish the game would let you hug. I suspect Jon wishes you could too.
Enough of that sappy shit, though – Jon’s got stuff to find if he hopes to complete his quests. After a quick off-camera stop back at Longfellow’s, Grills was on the move again, going to a certain hotel in the south to grab some nuclear launch codes which I suspect will be important in how he resolves the main conflicts on the Island. Main problem is that these codes were surrounded by many powerful Super Mutants, including a good number of Primuses. (Primi? Jon wasn’t sure either.) Jon managed to handle the ones outside okay, taking shots from afar, and blowing the head off a sniping Legendary – I left him and Grills inside the hotel, working their way to the codes so they could book it the hell out of there. XD Looking forward to seeing more!
2. Work some more on “Londerland Bloodlines”: Check! Good solid page – Alice has FINALLY learned that she’s a vampire, and has accepted help from Smilin’ Jack, because any good protagonist worth her salt should go through the tutorial. :p We’re right on the verge of part one – drinking from random strangers on the street. XD You do need to heal up that hole in your chest, kiddo. At least the Kiss being pleasurable should help with any guilt?
3. Keep up on YouTube Subscriptions: TECHNICALLY half a check because I only watched one out of the two – but I ALSO cleared out three videos in my Watch Later, so I’m going to count it as a full check. See below –
A) Started with Call Me Kevin and his community destroying Minecraft through mods! Basically there’s a mod for Minecraft that’s similar to the one he tried for Skyrim – chat can summon in stuff and apply effects to his character – and he ran it during a stream. The Twitch Chat promptly proceeded to MAKE HIS LIFE HELL IN EVERY WAY POSSIBLE. Seriously – in addition to the constant spawning in of horses, they were also constantly spawning in Ender Dragons, Withers, and Creepers. Kevin could barely MOVE at the beginning before dying! I don’t know HOW he managed to get the wool and wood necessary to make a bed, but he did, and then somehow managed to get a boat and sail away to new lands! Not that it helped him. . .even his attempts to make an underground base were constantly stifled by various spawns, and chat just straight-up killing him. The only reason he got ANYTHING done were a few friendly faces giving him diamond pickaxes and the like. Fortunately, one of the things he got done was find a load of diamonds in a secret lava cave – a self-imposed challenge he was probably a BIT too happy to complete. XD Poor Kevin. . .I kinda wanted to give him a hug after that.
B) Then, because the other thing in my Subs was the latest Wyrd Sisters Podcast, just dropped and just over an hour long (and will require a proper well-thought-out comment from me instead of a mini-shitpost), I decided to wait on that one and instead clear a few OXBox and OXtra videos out of my Watch Later! Had a few lists, after all, including:
I. “7 Failed Videogames That Were Too Ahead of Their Time” – video games that had at least the germ of a good idea, but were limited by the technology constraints when they came out. For example, Resident Evil: Outbreak, a four-player co-op game about escaping a zombie-infested city that came out five years before Left 4 Dead – and five years before good internet. Or Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, a horror game full of scares, sanity effects (before Amnesia: The Dark Descent), and playing as historical figures (before Assassin’s Creed – and doing it better too) that unfortunately sold poorly. Or APB, an open-world co-op crime shooter that could have been GTA Online if it hadn’t been kinda shit despite being super expensive to make. What I’m saying is, there’s a lot of genuinely good remake possibilities here, people.
II. “7 Superheroes Betrayed By Their Own Crappy Game” – yes, superheroes who deserved better than the games they got! . . .and Halle Berry’s take on Catwoman, who absolutely deserved the game she got. XD But yes, while a lot of these were terrible movie tie-ins (the Thor and Daredevil tie-ins being especially bad – Chris Hemsworth was EXTREMELY wooden in the former’s voice-acting), there were a couple of original terrible games, like Spawn having a tank control horror, or the Fantastic Four suffering from a very poor side-scrolling beat-em-up. Not to mention poor Aquaman, whose video game didn’t even get properly animated cutscenes. . . Basically, if you want superheroes in good games, you could probably do worse than sticking with the various LEGO adaptations.
III. “7 Ludicrous Death Traps You Escaped Easily” – video game death traps that weren’t as deadly as one might think. Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines got a shout with the Fu Syndicate “dungeon,” where your fledgling is subjected to a number of tests to determine how best to kill a vampire. As Jane puts it, the Mandarin mainly learns “don’t let your vampire bring their gun into the course.” XD There was also a raised-floor spike trap from The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion that is only deadly if you’re an NPC with one hit point; an acid trap from Monkey Island 2 that can’t kill protagonist Guybrush because, well, he’s telling the story to his love interest after the fact; and Wheatley’s “death option” from Portal 2 where he tries to convince you to just let yourself be dragged into a crusher via a conveyor belt because you’re getting close to his lair and he figured he’d give you a choice. (Though, really, the best one is at the beginning, where he tries to talk you into a pit, and you get an achievement for letting him. XD) Not deadly, but very funny.
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: . . .Check? There actually wasn’t any asks or threads or anything on my Valice Multiverse tumblr – the only one that needed an update – so I just found some fandom stuff to reblog. Counts, right?
Not too shabby -- now to answer my DW comment and head to bed. Got one more day to get through before the weekend! ...and then a Saturday full of chores and taxes. And a Sims 4 patch (which seems to have been them getting some custom content creators to add some of their stuff to the game, and the revelation that "Kit Packs" are going to be a thing, because they're now testing the waters to see how small they can make a pack before we'll stop paying for it?). Hopefully it's not the kind that shatters Sims CC. . .we'll see. Night all!
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Date: 2021-02-26 08:55 am (UTC)But that's the kind of stuff my brain does.
Also, I would have wanted to make a pet out of the glowing mirelurk. Whatever the heck a mirelurk is.
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Date: 2021-02-27 04:13 am (UTC)Mirelurks are generally giant mutated crabs from the Fallout universe that try to snip people in half and whatnot. The Red Death is a unique tiny variant with bright glowing red eyes. You can see a picture of it here.
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Date: 2021-02-27 04:34 am (UTC)https://darkcrystal.fandom.com/wiki/Garthim
... O.O
Holy crap, is there a playthrough vid link you can recommend that shows how tall these things are? Because Dark Crystal has no references I can use to determine anything's height since all of it is on another planet with no human charas or anything that could be used to determine scale and I'd kind of given up on ever finding a useable reference that wasn't just going off the heights of the puppets, but if mirelurks=garthim I could use that...
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Date: 2021-02-27 05:16 am (UTC)And -- honestly, I'm not sure. Jon's playthroughs are fun, but done mostly from first person mode, which might not be great for determining height, and I haven't been watching many others. . . Okay, this weird video might be useful - it's about a mod for the game that lets you BECOME a standard Mirelurk (in a couple of different variants), and they go by the human companions, so. . .maybe that'll help? They look pretty big. . .
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Date: 2021-02-27 06:51 pm (UTC)Heh, they even skitter the same, sound effect and all. I know poor skekSil was definitely sunk deep in the 'mad' part of 'mad scientist' after the peeper beetle thing, but just how did he manage to misplace some of these in the wrong timeline? (Had to have gone that way, as Fallout seems to presume Mirelurks are "just more mutant things" while Dark Crystal specifies that Garthim were created in a lab by skekSil. I should not be tempted to file this as a plotbunny) He must have lost experimental ones capable of breeding, because the ones in Dark Crystal don't seem able to but the Mirelurks do... And Fallout definitely has some time-space holes in it since you can find Nirnroot from Elder Scrolls as an "experimental plant" in one game, sound effects and all.
And it looks like the Lurky-Garthim there is exactly the height of the Supermutant he stops next to. Fallout wiki says Strong and other Fallout 4 supermutants are a different strain from the rest of the games and are shorter "standing 7 feet (2.13 m) tall" (not counting Behemoths). Garthim only got made in the last ep of the series, so scale comparisons kind of limited to the film, but Jen fell in a pit of them and they are almost exactly twice his height. So that puts Jen (and probably the average Gelfling, presuming Jen is average) at 1.075 meters or 3 1/2 ft tall. Yay! And since Augra is in both movie and prequel series I can compare her height to Jen's and then to pretty much everyone else she interacts with... major breakthrough for my taxonomic and chara data info. Thank you! ^__^
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Date: 2021-02-28 04:22 am (UTC)Was he missing some lobsters too? Because there's actually a few different kinds of Mirelurks, based off of different sea creatures. Hunters are lobster-like, Kings are -- I guess kind of salamander-ish? And Queens. . .well, looking at the picture, they're basically "crab but FUCKING BIG." This is the general entry on the species on the Fallout Wiki, if you're at all interested -- they've been in both Bethesda games and New Vegas, it looks like, though designs changed a lot for FO4. AKA your friend skekSil there could have only lost those particular ones in the Commonwealth, as DC has a more bipedal variant. And I'm not surprised about space-time holes, in one of the first two isometric games (I forget which one), apparently you can find the TARDIS as a random encounter. XD (Plus, with Nirnroot specifically, Bethesda putting in a wink-and-a-nod to the other series they're known for.)
Ah, nice! I'm glad I was able to find that video! I was thinking the usual "fighting them" stuff wouldn't work well for actually figuring out their size. . . So yay, that's awesome! You're welcome! :)
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Date: 2021-02-28 06:35 am (UTC)https://darkcrystal.fandom.com/wiki/Gruenak
https://darkcrystal.fandom.com/wiki/Spitter
And I did a real stupid, skekTek is the scientist's name, which I damned well should have known (it's kind of obvious). skekSil is that annoying chamberlain... now I'm worried why he was on the brain, especially given some of his actions towards skekTek that resulted in, well, a whole list of things. skekSil was like a sneakier and more manipulative Starscream. Everyone knows Starscream is a backstabber, everyone (in universe anyway, where they don't get to see what he's up to) thinks skekSil is just a smarmy, wheedling little idiot. (And when I make a goof like that it usually DOES mean my subconscious is attempting to grow a plotbunny, and in this case might be hinting that that smarmy bastard had something to do with it). (Of course, the Skeksis are all kind of bastards, though they didn't start that way. They're basically the unrestrained ambitious and hedonistic halves of the creatures they were split from. Not evil in itself but can certainly be a fast route to it. skekTek himself would be a near irredeemable amoral mess if it weren't for I think one scene where he shows regret and another where he is shown to be emotionally attached to his pet 'bird' Sidetik. I use bird loosely because it's wingless, has a beak, green feathers, and eyestalks.)
And I went on such a long ramble on the different mirelurks and biology that I decided maybe I'd better put it in my own posts and not clutter up your journal with notes and speculation. So that's over there.
I am absolutely thrilled. I really wanted excuse to toss the Dark Crystal timelines in the timesoup for Mosaic, but the best I had to go with was a very weak 'Podlings kind of resemble the Ettins from Creatures if you squint a lot, maybe that's where the Shee picked the genes for them up from'. This is a much clearer 'these universes brushing up at some point seems a lot more likely than sheer coincidence' connect. I should probably make note to compare other Dark Crystal creatures to ones from Fallout... and ones from Fallout to Resident Evil for that matter (and Ludo from Labyrinth looks a LOT like a Mounder, come to think of it) (and Elder Scrolls for obvious reasons - yes, I know Bethesda is behind both, my primary connection to Fallout for Mosaic is the presence of that Nirnroot and that Bethesda has admitted that the Elder Scrolls setting was their in-office D&D setting, which is good enough for me to call it a D&D spinoff.)
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Date: 2021-03-01 04:14 am (UTC)Heh -- well, since I sure as heck didn't know any better, you don't need to worry about in my case. Though, ooh, yeah, having a character that's essentially "Starscream but he's kind of better at it and definitely more under the radar" is probably a worrying thing to have in the plotbunny area. I wouldn't be surprised if he did have something to do with the whole mess. . . (And curiouser and curiouser -- so basically they're in it for themselves at all times. Yeah, that doesn't sound like a mindset that would lead itself to good morals. Hmmm.)
And LOL, I saw -- yeah, it probably makes sense that the "basic" Mirelurks are the transfers (however it happened), and a lot of the other kinds -- Kings and such -- are native to the Fallout-verse and just ended up evolving to some sort of symbiosis with the Garthim. I mean, Fallout is already a weird verse that has lots of weird shit in it, so. . .
Awww, I'm glad! Yeah, always better to have a clearer connection than not when you're trying for a crossover, especially the type you're going for! No harm in figuring out if there were other shared designs (especially if one of the creature creators DID see the movie ages back and then forgot). And I can seen overlap between Fallout and RE too. . . (And heh, okay, I see -- I wasn't sure! Though I hadn't heard that the Elder Scrolls was their D&D world -- neat!)
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Date: 2021-03-01 05:10 am (UTC)There's a lot of interesting fan debate and speculation and chatter on the division as it isn't a pure good/evil thing no matter how much it seems on the surface. It's more like a yin/yang thing, with the Mystics being generally passive and the Skeksis getting most of the willpower and initiative. Mystics being introverted, Skeksis extroverted, and so on. It's fascinating just from a psychological point even if the story wasn't good enough to make me absolutely forget these are puppets every time I watch it. (Which is actually slightly annoying in some ways as I like picking apart how movie scenes were made and I keep forgetting every time to watch for technical details of the puppetry. I have to rely on making-of vids and articles. XD)
The crab-based ones are really the only ones that actually look like Garthim, and there's enough in-world evidence that the others are different species that just share a similar habitat and common name. It's like the average person saying 'those little wild daisies', and some of them are daisies, some are fleabane, and some are chamomile. And, honestly, those look more like each other than the Mirelurks. XD
Very much so. I think this moves the multiverse set I had Dark Crystal in a few levels closer to core, as well, which is always good to keep things nice and tight. (I should probably be putting those notes in a calc file too, now that I'm learning to do spreadsheets.) And, yes, Tamriel began as a tabletop D&D setting. I was happy to find that out, given there's a lot of content in a lot of Bethesda stuff I'd like to play with.
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Date: 2021-03-02 04:34 am (UTC)Ahhh, I see -- so yeah, it's a relatively even split, but it's not necessarily a good/evil split. Because none of those traits are necessarily weighted one way or the other. I'm sure it is very psychologically intriguing. :p (And LOL -- whoops. Well, I suppose that's just a compliment on the talents of the creators.)
*nods* I can believe that -- I mean, I don't know why they're even called "Mirelurks" to begin with. I suppose they can lurk in the sand or whatnot, but. . . *shrug* Not for me to question the naming conventions of the post-apocalypse, I suppose.
Nice! :D That's good to hear. (And yes, spreadsheets are a good thing, especially for a project like this.) And heh, cool. :D Hooray for having reasonable excuses to drag in new universes. XD
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Date: 2021-03-02 08:02 am (UTC)Even the music is amazing. I have the soundtracks and listen to them a lot. The prequel was highly interesting because, along with basically adding to the backstory behind the events of the movie, it basically showed the point at which the Skeksis went from being a bunch of hedonistic overlords who con-gamed the planet's population into treating them as lords (which ain't great to start with) and tumbled over the Morality Event Horizon into genocidal monsters literally feeding on the life force of others. And implies this has been a slippery slope they've been sliding down since division.
Yeah. it's even proven not to be a simple black-and-white thing in the prequel series by skekGra the Heretic. Though, in addition to being a good guy camping out in the desert with his counterpart, he's also stoned out of his buzzardy gourd on hallucinogenic berries. so...
Oh, a lot of the original designs were also worked on by Brian Froud, btw. Same guy who did designs for Labyrinth. So a lot more intricate detail than the average muppet.
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Date: 2021-03-03 04:08 am (UTC)Niice -- if nothing else, maybe I can sample some of the music for later. And oooh, interesting indeed. . . Seems like there's a heck of a lot going on here, especially with the Skeksis! Creeps. . .
*nods* Gotta have at least one holdout from the hedonism. . .well, sort of. XD I guess being a stoner is the least of the sins of this race, so. . .
Oooo, I see. Sounds like they definitely brought out the big guns for this film, and the series afterward!
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Date: 2021-03-03 06:26 am (UTC)The music I can definitely help with! Let's see if this works...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX6_LhslFWEiA6ot_-oPyy3iyPKfwYiMZ
I'd far rather have interestingly written and fleshed out villians, even if it means occasional rare sympathetic moments (mostly involving skekTek, but then he's kind of my favorite) than one that just seems to be doing it 'for the evulz'.
Yep, and his narcotic of choice can also cause precognitive visions, so when he's found he's all like "I've been waiting so long for you to show up! I have a surprise! No, you can't skip it! I've been working for SO LONG on this!" Yes, all those exclamation points are needed.
Yep. Fascinating levels of worldbuilding, too. I spot new things every time.
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Date: 2021-03-04 04:22 am (UTC)Ooooh, very suitably dramatic! I like. :) I'll have to remember this one, see about listening to more of it later. :)
*nods* Yeah -- I can get amusement out of a "for the evulz" villain, but the more fleshed out ones tend to make for better villains overall, and for more interesting stories.
*snork* I see. He sounds like quite the character. XD
w000, awesome. Sounds like it's packed full of -- well, just about everything.
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Date: 2021-03-05 07:52 am (UTC)Yeah. Almost no one gets out of bed and thinks "How can I be evil today". I've also heard it as "everyone thinks they're the hero in their own story". I like it when characters have motivations that probably make perfect sense from their own perspectives... even if said motivations and resulting actions make me want to reach into the screen and throttle them (and/or reveal that they'd have to have some kind of underlying mental issue to think the way they do).
He is. The Heretic is definitely someone who has spent way too much time, er... well, in his introduction he says he is "Alone, so very alone. And yet, I am also with myself!" just before introducing urGoh. He and urGoh are both strange.
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Date: 2021-03-06 04:30 am (UTC)Indeed -- I mean, it may feel like some people roll out of bed and go "EVIL!" but it's rarely exactly like that. People have complex inner worlds and all that. Though, yes, said complex inner worlds may be shitholes. Nothing stopping someone from having understandable motivations and still being a dickweed!
Heh, well, he at least seems like the fun kind of strange, instead of the worrying kind.
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Date: 2021-03-08 04:09 am (UTC)Yeah. I can't swear it's true, as I've never watched the film (I think it's a film, not even sure on that) for comparison, but I've heard he and his other half were based off a couple charas from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
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Date: 2021-03-08 04:35 am (UTC)Heh -- I believe it was a book turned into a film. Hunter S. Thompson I want to say? At the very least there should be drug references in it. . .
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Date: 2021-03-10 05:08 am (UTC)Yeah, and those two at least act like one's on uppers and the other's on downers. Though I think they also mess with each other a little with it. Like when urGoh is introducing himself he does so extremely slowly while skekGra is getting frustrated with how slow he's being and at one point - and I didn't catch it the first time - urGoh actually just repeats the 'der' syllable in 'Wanderer' (and I think looks over at skekGra just before he does) and skekGra just completely loses it and starts screeching "Wanderer! Your name is urGoh the Wanderer! Just say it!"
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Date: 2021-03-11 04:12 am (UTC)LOL -- so they're the kind of friends who are occasionally pains in the ass to each other. I can dig it. XD
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Date: 2021-03-12 12:52 am (UTC)Yeah, those two are hillarious
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Date: 2021-03-12 04:39 am (UTC)They sound it XD
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Date: 2021-03-12 09:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-13 04:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-27 07:08 pm (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy8ERa_ioEA
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Date: 2021-02-28 04:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-27 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-28 04:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-28 06:41 am (UTC)That said, later on in Mosaic when that timeline is properly blended in, I have a feeling there would be at least some call in the pet trade for those. Heck, a pet that can double as a flashlight/nightlight! And pet stores could sell special little sunglasses for them to screen the light out when it's not needed. It'd be even better than D&D's giant fire beetles (which are going to end up shrunk for unhealthy violation of inverse square law anyway)
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Date: 2021-03-01 04:29 am (UTC)*snrrrk* It is a useful thing to have! I wouldn't mind having a pet that could serve as a nightlight when I'm feeling stressed. Maybe not a crab-like creature, but. . . Still, yes, better than large fire beetles!
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Date: 2021-03-01 05:24 am (UTC)Definitely better. The mini-Garthim would almost certainly have a longer lifespan, and the feeding requirements would actually be easier. The Mirelurks seem happy with fish or pretty much any meat (and I could see a mini one eating canned seafood-flavor cat food in a pinch), but fire beetles mostly eat termite larvae. Granted, some pet stores have freeze-dried or even fresh grubs too, but that might not help if they prefer to prey only on specific species. (I remember mealworms that had to be kept in the fridge from the short time I had pet hermit crabs as a kid - one didn't survive a molt - I think maybe it wasn't damp enough - and the other shortly after went in its shell and never came out again. The pet store did NOT give me sufficient care info.)
*sent googling by curiosity* Oh yeah, the stuff you can feed pet crabs has definitely improved since I was a kid. Bitta and Pincher would have loved this stuff.
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Date: 2021-03-02 04:37 am (UTC)Yeah -- they're obviously feared for chowing down on humans, but I'm sure they're not picky. And LOL, I like the mental image of feeding a Mirelurk "Fancy Feast" or something similar. XD *nods* I see -- yeah, that would definitely make taking care of a fire beetle pretty tricky. Better to have a pet with less stringent food requirements. (And aww, too bad -- Fallout has Hermit Crabs too, courtesy of the Far Harbor DLC! Only now they're huge and can wear old vans as shells.)
Heh, well, good. A shame for your pets, but a boon for the future.
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Date: 2021-03-02 08:22 am (UTC)Apparently most crabs are scavengers/detritus eaters. You can pretty much feed them anything that isn't processed or straight-up poisonous. I did some reading up last night and want to go back in time and punch a pet shop employee for not telling me a tenth of the things I learned. It feels like the only thing I managed to do right by the poor things was get two of them. (They normally travel on beaches in swarms of up to a hundred. That 'hermit' in the name is damned misleading.)
And when I say anything in regards to food, I mean apparently they love unsalted popcorn for a treat, can be given a nibble of your scrambled egg from breakfast, and like the white stringy bits inside citrus fruit after it's been left to dry out for a few days. Bananas, bugs, bits of carrot, bits of rotted wood... Definitely easier to feed than the fire beetles.
I've added a possible "Virtual Crabitat" game to things I want to try to make with Unreal Editor for practice. I don't want to try real ones again, but sim crabbies could be fun.
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Date: 2021-03-03 04:12 am (UTC)*whistles* Wow. . .nature's little vacuum cleaners, it sounds like. XD And I didn't know that hermit crabs lived in groups! The name IS misleading. I mean, I know it refers to the whole "finding shells to live in" thing, but "hermit" is a word that carries a lot of connotations, and "swarms up to a hundred" is not one of them. Yeah, your younger self needed this information!
Awww, cute. :) Sim crabbies could be fun!
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Date: 2021-02-28 07:15 am (UTC)https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/15563?tab=description
Odds are of I ever play these games I'll probably eventually want to try my own hand at making mods. But, so many things, so little time...
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Date: 2021-03-01 04:32 am (UTC)Yeah, I know. Just be careful if you do end up going down that route -- I'm sure you know something about how buggy Bethesda code is!
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Date: 2021-03-01 05:47 am (UTC)Also... they did the same stupid lighthouse thing with that quest, didn't they. Bit of a pet peeve of mine since it happens SO often where there are plots where "the light seems to be in the wrong place so ships wreck". Except... that's the exact OPPOSITE of how Lighthouses work. Lighthouses aren't placed where it is safe for ships. They are placed where it is dangerous for ships to go and a ship is supposed to AVOID the lighthouse in order to avoid the undersea rocks near it. All a 'false' lighthouse would do would be make ships maybe avoid a place they didn't need to. (Ok, it could theoretically make ships hit rocks on, say, the other side of a narrow passage if they moved away from the light to avoid rocks they thought were there but weren't and hit the rocks that WERE there, but in that case the REAL rocks should have had a lighthouse!) It wouldn't make them wreck on nearby rocks where they could then be looted by pirates (as in a D&D module that did the same thing), because if there were rocks there for a ship to wreck on then that is where you WANT A LIGHTHOUSE. Gah.
That said, if I force myself to ignore it, and if the town in Fallout has a lighthouse (in the place where they don't NEED one >.< )... or needs one in a sensible place to prevent ships running aground, then it would have been far better to catch the little living false light, tame him, and get the lighthouse keeper to take him in for a pet. Light moved to appropriate location=problem solved, and I'm pretty sure feeding the mini crab would be cheaper than lighthouse fuel. Just let him skitter around the glassed-in top floor at night, and be sure to keep the little guy misted when he molts!
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Date: 2021-03-02 04:45 am (UTC)All I can say is, you're talking about civilizations of post-apocalyptic people who have left debris and such from the bombs dropping lying around for over two centuries. This is canonical due to the Sole Survivor of FO4 being pre-War -- their vault, 111, was a cryonic freezing experiment, and they're the only one who makes it out after their infant son is kidnapped and their spouse killed (you can choose whether you're the mother or the father) -- and it still doesn't look that far off the bombs dropping when they emerge 210 years later. I'm pretty sure Far Harbor doesn't have a lighthouse, or at least not one that works. . .which makes no sense, as a) they're explicitly a fishing community -- the death of the Red death is greeted with cheers along the lines of "now we can go out and fish again!" and b) FOG IS A HUGE PROBLEM ON THE ISLAND IT'S KIND OF A PLOT POINT IN FACT. *facepalm* Kidnapping the Red Death and using it as a living lighthouse WOULD be the smartest way to end that quest! But then again, the writing is not one of the things people praise Bethesda for. . .
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Date: 2021-03-02 08:35 am (UTC)True. Interesting concepts but weak writing in various points is one of the reasons I wanted to throw those continuities in the Timesoup for fixing. That and my usual impulses to save any decent characters from their crapsack setting.
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Date: 2021-03-03 04:19 am (UTC)Mmmmm, yes, I well know. And I'm sure plenty of people would want to be saved from the post-nuclear-apocalypse. :p
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Date: 2021-03-03 06:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-04 04:14 am (UTC)