Parts A and B look reasonable enough, but I have my doubts about C. Boy does Elias draw great thuggish faces though.
UPDATE: Nick Mamatas explains why this is actually a reasonable way to keep somebody quiet:
Reaper Man — Terry Pratchett
Reaper Man
Terry Pratchett
287 pages
published in 1991
Even before rereading the day after pTerry’s death, Reaper Man was mired in grieving for me. Because I reread it in 2012, the year after Sandra’s death, when I had fallen back on Pratchett’s Discworld series as comfort reading, something to lose yourself in and forget for a while. And then I hit Reaper Man, in which DEATH has been retired by the Auditors for having become too human, has to find a new living as BILL DOOR and a fragile, predoomed romance starts between him and Miss Flitworth, the never married widow he ends up working as a farmhand for. It’s a novel about death and life and humanity and the essence of it is captured by what DEATH argues at the climax of it:
LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?
Wrestling isn’t wrestling
In an alternate timeline, if WWF wrestling had had slightly more coverage in the Netherlands in the mid-eighties, rather than being banished to the post-midnight slot on Superchannel/Sky Channel, I would’ve become a wrestling nerd rather than a comix nerd. This video gives a great example of the appeal of wrestling when, as everybody knows, it isn’t real. Starring some people you may recognise.
Long Live the Queen — HA!
Kim Nguyen plays Long Live the Queen
Hanako Games’ Long Live the Queen is a princess story all about facets and demanding respect. You play as Princess Elodie, who must replace her late mother as queen by the end of the year. It’s a princess power fantasy where you learn all about Elodie’s world so that she may navigate politics both at home and abroad and survive attempts on her life. It’s a brutal game, as you learn how to progress by failing and/or dying repeatedly. It’s maddening for perfectionists.
Long Live the Queen is one of those deceptively simple spreadsheet simulator games where the appeal is that it is really, horribly, unfairly difficult. Basically the only decisions you can take is what classes to send Elodie to, how she spends her weekend to help change her mood to get bonuses in her classes and hope you can take the right decisions during the cut scenes, which is when all the action happens. Some of the crisis events are triggered, some are random, some unavoidable but all you can only prepare for either by accident or because you’ve played it before and died. (Unless you cheated and had the wiki open next to it.)
Not a game with much of a visual glamour going on, so if that’s your bag, this is not for you. At best you get scenes like this, with princess Elodie looking at you depressed, angry or happy depending on her exact mood. All the real interest is in beating the story, which has set you up for failure. Having played it for a couple of hours, I can say it’s really frustrating to be blindsided by something you have recovery of; it needs an entirely different mindset to play than the sort of game I normally play, where there’s always room to correct a mistake you make. Here, you die and have to restart.
So instead you have to find out the perfect combination of skill training and luck to make it through the crisises that hound you and hope the game has mercy on you. But it probably won’t.
Resident Evil redux
Unlike myself, Mr Moth has played and is a fan of the original Resident Evil games the movies are based on. Therefore he’s considerably more hacked off at them than I was, though I can certainly agree with much of his criticism:
3) Paul WS Anderson really believes the Umbrella Corporation is staggeringly incompetent.
Umbrella manage to wipe out nearly every human in existence but to what end? They’re a business and the undead are not a target market. By the fifth film it’s clear that the Red Queen is intent on destroying humanity. The problem is that humanity is well on its way to total extinction by the time of, well, Extinction. Las Vegas is a ruin, buried by the Nevada desert in just five years. There’s no coming back from that, but still Umbrella hold board meetings and employ receptionists (exactly how were they recruiting their staff? “Are you a zombie?” “No.” “Welcome to Umbrella.”). Their long-term plan made no sense, and it’s worth noting that in the games, humanity is in much better nick.
But that’s ok, because they were never going to benefit from it, anyway. Every single one of their developments got away from them in one way or another. The Red Queen goes rogue and kills everyone. The Nemesis turns goodie. The super-secret exit to their bioweapons lab is besieged by thousands of zombies, kept at bay by the thinnest of chainlink fences. The airtight lab they store their highly infectious weaponised virus in has aircon vents that link directly to the offices. If their underwater base loses power, all their soldiers go to sleep during the power cut. They leave hundreds of clones lying around of their most powerful enemy.
The Resident Evil movies really only make sense as spectacles, especially after the first one, which I still think was a rather good suspense horror movie even if there were plot holes there you could drive a zombie horde through. The overall story arc doesn’t make much sense and Umbrella has to be the most incompetent, pointlessly evil corporation in the world.
And yet, having watched all five movies over the last two months, these are still entertaining movies that have the redeeming feature of starring strong, female characters who aren’t undermined by their male costars, hold their own without becoming the usual bad girl cliche. It can be so much worse, as a look at the Underworld series, that other naughties action horror with female lead franchise, shows.