I watched the episode of Legends of Tomorrow where Mick gets brain surgery by a physicist because Stein cannot handle talking him down, and the crew just lets them.
That's a different sort of messed up than the usual run around, you know?
Season 2 is rough on Mick being treated like a person.
Also he is having a bit of a same room different genre problem due to the Horrors.
And mostly the others haven't noticed.

The chip in Mick's brain seems like entire depths of Horrors that the story skimmed right past.
I do like that Stein apologised for forgetting about the Chronos thing but it isn't kind that they're forgetting about the Chronos thing.
Except for how it leaves them treating him like Mick, not the puppet bad guy.
... treating him like Mick doesn't involve a lot of respect though.

Going from Mick offering Ray partnership to exploding the gun and Ray being new besties with Nate is just
yowch
even though it is good story. Like that happens sometimes, people don't fit when they're trying and do click when they're not expecting it.

The thing with George Lucas being why two of them are heroes is... possibly more fun to film makers? Like culture matters but having it boil down to one film each is a little simplifying. But leaves them with plenty of fun references to do.

I think maybe I wasn't in a Legends headspace because the run around seemed too silly and the Horrors too real.



Also this week I am poking Ao3 for Constantine fic and... so so much fic, so many confusing canons, all in a soup. Not sure what I'm even looking for.

Well, I am looking for the episodes of the actual TV show, but I am getting them wrapped for xmas so until then I don't even know if I'll like those. The Horrors without the Legends will be a very different viewing experience, if that's what it's like.



I am not getting much done even with a chart to remind me to Actually Read Watch Listen Play A Thing.

December is not my favourite.

I get puzzled by people hating things in advance.
Especially reboots or sequels or sequels they insist are reboots.

I get it if there's some egregious detail known like 'but this time everyone is straight and white except the bad guys' or suchlike, but not when they're doing this from a standing start.

An existing story is being taken as inspiration for new story. Will they use the parts we thought were the good stuff? Don't know, do care, so it's potentially stressful. Will they use the bad stuff the makers didnt seem to evaluate properly the first time? Well that was always a problem, so the only way is up. ... actually no I can think of so many downs but you do at least have room for improvement. And, is The Thing that everyone was there for the first time, still a Thing we could stand to see in stories? Well generally yeah or we'd be bored of the basic idea by now.

Even if we get some horrible shambling husk of a came back wrong, it's not like it rewrites the original.

... blu ray and streaming upscaled releases do enough of that already...



It's especially puzzling when these are fanfic people. Someone with a budget is doing their fic grand scale. Hope they tag it well and move on, you know?



And one can always hope for good things, because we are as ever in a cultural moment that could really stand to get some actual feminism in it. Amongst so many other things.




Of course at my current rates of pop cultural consumption I might catch up to any new broadcast sometime around the point it is old enough to vote, but that is a separate problem.

I did eventually finish rereading Dresden Files Storm Front.
It did not change my opinion of the main character or the book.
Slimy.

Also I am just very bored with the style of story where they only ever find anything out when it tries to eat them. They lurch between murder attempts and figure out who dunnit because everyone else is dead. It is tedious.

I did get stuck for a while in the middle of yet another fight sequence
remembering a plot bunny for Legends of Tomorrow
visiting my home town.

It sort of doesn't have a punchline or payoff yet, but you get half a dozen characters exploring one place you know pretty well, you find half a dozen angles to see it from and at least half a dozen interwoven communities to have them connect with. You learn more about the characters and the place they're visiting. Do that whole 'a stranger comes to town' and stress test reactions.

... in Legends the reaction usually involves crime and bar fights so far. two seasons isn't long to have that come up this many times, and I haven't finished the second season...

If it is someone playing defence on their own territory the story has to keep on coming up with reasons to introduce a new bit when the point of view character knows it real well. Either you get their opinions straight up, which for Harry seems to mean him saying wizards aren't very smart but treating non wizards like they are deeply stupid, or they have to go around doing the sensory detail thing and describing things a lot. It makes them sound weird about clothes, or the people in them, to keep trying to convey data through physical elements, and really I'm not sure how much telling the fashions are going to manage. Sometimes the clothes are a symbol set adding to the story, but the connotations have to derive from somewhere first, and if it isn't shared *persistent* pop culture by the time you read it then either meaning gets lost or the book has to tell us what it's own symbols mean.

Duster and staff is a strong set of images but imagine Westerns as a genre fading out of pop culture, or coming back in with a different point of view, and suddenly the story hasn't adequately explained itself.

I was thinking about it because magic items on Pathfinder's Golarion can be ten thousand years old and still work, albeit with a possibility of quirks. Thassilonian stuff turns up in several of the adventure paths I've read but it also does some fun weird things by now. But the art from the books and computer games has to pick a visual style to go with the magic objects, and with the change in visual assets since Kingmaker, you get at least two visually distinct styles of common magic items in cultures that pretty much share a border. Individual makers have distinct styles even. And then they color code the bonuses. Half the time I use the Prestidigipainter just to make the look in the vague ballpark of unified.

Adventurer gear gets very visually busy.

I've thought about Adventurer's Aposematism where the flashy warns off the less well equipped, but consider, you can't really afford to throw a magic item away just because it is, for instance, Ancient Osirian, when you are not even modern Osirian. You could end up with clashing visual statements covering longer than Earth human history.

Your magic items would contain stitching older than Earth humans had writing.



And then you need to just pull off that visual ensemble with some kind of panache
while at the same time being aware that even your shirt and cloak are Adventurer practical enough
they count as Going Equipped
for some fairly large tasks
even at the scale calibrated by a hundred years of war.

... there's a bit in Dance of Masks where these tiny little first level NPCs get aggressive and go red for enemy
and then just drop dead.

It actually took me a while to figure out that's because there's two items the party were wearing that do damage to all in range enemies.

They were only wearing them to add some elemental damage to end regenerating enemies.

But that tiny smidge of damage by the standards of adventurers that can afford those clothes is
all the hit points and then some
for a first level NPC.

Which is wild.

The plot relevant characters have different maths on Just Not Dying.

Adventures sure do make some Choices.

ANYway.

In a story you wear a specific visual statement meant to elicit a reaction from the expected audience.

In an adventure you wear whatever makes number go up when the number in question is your chance of survival.

It sort of speaks less but screams more.



I still do not recall why I have a shelf of these particular wizard books.


They are giving me that I Can Sneeze Better Book Than This feeling.



... if and only if I actually write it down of course...

Today I did Cleaner Day tasks, including laundry.
... the color catcher once again did important work. I think because I had new clothes in the darks wash today. very darks by the time they were done.
I bought some pyjamas and only noticed they said Do Not Tumble Dry when I had washed them already. They're cotton, what are they doing, no tumble dry? I decided I do not like them well enough to fuss about them so they can go get donated in Washed Not Worn condition. Hopefully that'll work okays.

Inevitable Excess on Hard is indeed hard. I stopped for the day when I realised I wasn't having fun with gnarly problem sets any more, just getting frustrated at an ongoing inability to survive the first combat round in that location. The basic problem is on Hard they have a great many of the same buffs we do but it is possible to have built the team not so great. Which I am getting the feeling has happened. Or I picked the wrong team and will have to go back to the hard save before this level. Or there were buffs Woljif was really needed for, but I have scrolls and though I'd got that covered? Boo. It was working up until now though so probably I just need another go or... several.

Still a pretty good day.

Today I couldn't think of much to do so I played more Inevitable Excess while I waited for a parcel.
Two new nightdresses and two sets of pyjamas arrived, without actually ringing the door because that would be helpful and convenient, but they did sort of knock.
Inevitable Excess remains *really tedious* because of the stupid way of moving they introduced and how fiddly it is about targets, and also I can never remember how much of each thing I need to do so if I get the right ending is pretty largely Luck based. But I have been steadily achieving it.
I realised I hadn't been using the highest level buffs and that explained a lot about how many diamonds I needed. Also any buff you leave out is the one that causes all the problems. Also also I am trying to do this section without Woljif when I left many buffs to him so far so we are short Stoneskin unless I specifically add him to the group for just long enough to cast it and then go back to the more effective set. ... and I just remembered he's still wearing some of the best gear. so. reasons for getting pasted abound.
But I have been doing okay. Even though I turned the difficulty level up to Hard and that so far seems to mean they know all the same tricks and have a great many of the same buffs we do. It's much less easy when they also can cast Legendary Proportions, Wind of Vengeance, and Dispel Magic.
Arue's ridiculous extra buffs from the shadow arena continue to mean that the only problem there is she only gets a go once a round.
Given how much of this seems new to me I probably only did the Inevitable Darkness fight on core before though, so I shall have better shiny things waiting for me if I finish it this way.

I don't know how people manage Unfair difficulty. The achievement for winning the main campaign on Unfair is iirc called The Test of the Starstone, and that seems reasonable.


... I think I have been bored all day but bored with clicky buttons and a walkthrough that is only slightly wrong sometimes and did have a location I had missed. So that's a less boring variety of bored. Mostly.