Redwolf's Journal (continued)

It's definitely odd to see so many retail and office spaces closed downtown. Wrrf. Even businesses that are open are going to be suffering from all this. About the only places I can think of that aren't going to take a major downturn in revenue may be shipping and grocery stores - and that assumes they aren't directly  hit by infection issues. Steven Universe came to a full end this last week. Appropriately enough for a series that dealt heavily with relationships, identity, and helping people work through their problems, the final arc leaned heavily into Steven himself needing to find his way. It felt a little too simple for me, though. I feel like it may be unfair of me to say, considering this is a series in which many things span beyond the 15 (10?)-minute episode run time. Many issues have been resolved quicker than they probably "should" have been. I'm not sure if maybe it's just because it feels close to home, but shining a light on Steven's

Times change, and there may be a certain inevitability to things, but we cannot help long for brighter points of the past, neh? I'd say "now more than ever with all the social distancing, I get a lot of my socializing online," but truthfully it's been that way for a long while. I prefer it in a lot of ways. The company I keep needn't be local and I don't have to deal with the energy-sapping direct interactions that are common. Oh, face-to-face stuff is great sometimes, but I can only take so much. Socializing through online RP, though, has been tapering off more and more, it feels. When Kit shifted from the MUCK over to Discord pretty much exclusively, that was a big change for me. It works better for some people, but seems a bad fit personally. Several games and scenes have been run with a more play-when-you-can-anytime flow, and that has led me (as someone who practically has a window of a few hours a day to be 'present') to feel left out. After

So, after finishing an Assassin's Creed game fairly recently, a bit more open world adventuring seemed appealing, especially with shutdowns coming and increased time at home looming. So with some rifling around, I picked up Watch Dogs . I remembered how it made a big splash on reveal and was a bit of a let-down graphically when it released, but hey - open world stuff to do and a bit of a cyberpunk-ish bent with all the hacking. Weeeeelllll... It's okay. From the get-go, I found I didn't really like the revenge-driven protagonist, Aiden Pearce. The hacking involves a lot of jumping from camera to camera, taking control of things based on line-of-sight, and waving a phone at things to make them blow up or otherwise activate. There is a certain empowering element to that in gameplay, though it's functionally more tech-flavored magic than anything more grounded, not that there's anything inherently wrong with that. Along with that "hacking," the game has the

So there I was with my partner, behind enemy lines in some muddy battlefield zone that gave the feeling of WWI trench warfare. We had taken over some little cache area and I was putting on a heavy leather trench coat from one of the enemy, thinking it would be more protective than anything I had and it would offer a level of disguise. My partner had something too, such that the two of us shouldn't be attacked unless we drew attention. And at this point a girl joins us as a third member. I remember thinking "well, at least we can act like we're escorting her as a prisoner if guards question us," but it wasn't necessary. Somehow our disguise was good enough that as we passed down a lane with a few guards spaced out widely, they didn't question. On the other hand, my "character" had some particular hatred for the enemy, such that I started knifing each one that we passed. Chest stab. Throat slit. The last one on the row saw me before I reached him and

I recall dreaming this morning of a girl in some sort of "school" for training dungeon delvers and studying magic. I don't recall much in the way of specifics, but she had a male friend and there was a vague Hogwarts vibe to the establishment, though there was something unusual about the magic. And some SCA people from my past made a brief appearance. Hmm...

These are weird times. I've seen duck-and-cover earthquake/nuke drills. I've seen natural disasters like wildfires, hurricanes, and the like shut down areas. SARS, MERS, and the swine/bird-flus created fairly wide waves in the media, but that's about it. The COVID-19 pandemic is the first time I've seen something shutting things down in quite this fashion. Perhaps 9/11 was similar in some ways - it paused/revamped air travel and had emotional shockwaves, but I don't recall the same scale of shutting things down. Really weird. If it helps control the spread, then good, but still really weird. And the run on toilet paper, sanitizer, and face masks is... rather revealing of how there are people who are just dicks - hoarding and reselling at markups and such. All this reducing of hours and shutting down of placing is going to be particularly rough on hourly workers. If you don't get paid for not working, well, then not working isn't a good thing.

Still in sort of a cyberpunky headspace. I'm replaying Deus Ex: Human Revolution - though the "Director's Cut" this time. The main difference there seems to be a bit of building out around the boss fights to allow for use of some other skills to take them down. Originally (perhaps because the boss fights were outsources), they could seriously roadblock characters who focused on non-combat avenues. The redone ones have more options, though it is still rough for a stealth-hacker to deal with being dropped right in front of an enemy. I also rewatched some clips from Bugglegum Crisis , remembering that series. It focused more on the man-versus-machine aspects of the genre than the blending of the two or socio-economics (though each is in there to some extent). It was also a nice display of advanced power armor well before the Iron Man movies brought that to more "mainstream" scifi. Thinking of cyberpunk RPGs, I really only come back to two main ones. R. T

I've been listening to Magnum Bullets arguably too much the last couple days. But it definitely has my mind in a cyberpunk-ish space. One of the things that came to mind when I first listened to it is a central conceit of the genre that has always been a little... questionable. The genre sets up a society of haves and have nots. Those who are rich with corporate ties have reasonably safe lives where violence is fiction and the latest, greatest technology is within reach. Those without live in relative squalor, scraping by in fear of gang wars and body chop shops. I rather hope I don't live to see real life become that polarized, though it's a plausible dystopia - which makes it exactly why this type of science fiction has the value it does. But when looking at cyberpunk stories or games, there's a fairly large hurdle to overcome in explaining someone with millions of credits/eurobills/nuyen/etc. worth of hardware, weaponry, and skill is somehow existing in a world of

I'm not as into music as some people I know. I listen to the radio or something while driving, but that's maybe 20 minutes a day and can include news or commercials. I don't have theme music in my head for most characters I create and usually struggle when asked about it. I don't have explicitly favorite genres even if I have biases that tend to make some more appealing. There are a couple things that automatically earn points with me: - Music with a beat that makes me want to move - Understandable lyrics that evoke some emotion or story That in mind, I was a little blown away a while back when I came across the video for Starlight Brigade . The music's solid. The lyrics literally tell a story. The animated video ties it all together and weaves it into a Voltron-esque anime series condensed down to high points in a four-minutes music video. The Miyazaki/Ghibli-inspired art style is a plus, too. I give kudos to all involved, but I'm super-impressed by  Kni

So casting about for a game to play again, I went back and installed Assassins Creed: Unity - something that I picked up for free on Uplay (I think when the Notre Dame fire occurred). That came out before the AC series was really on my radar as "predictable, but still generally good games," so I missed it on release. And it is... predictable, but still generally good? I saw relatively few bugs (which were a big deal on release). The gameplay is pretty formulaic, which the free-running working a bit clunky now and then. I think that's improved in more recent iterations of the series. Similarly, I prefer the more modern hit box-based combat to the older auto-lock-on system on display in Unity. But it all works well enough. Revolution-era Paris is a fine backdrop, though I'm a little surprised certain big-name figures aren't given more involvement in the story. As for the story in specific... hmm... The bones are fine, but I wish it was fleshed out more. As with