A Blog of Thrones (Chapter 56) Tyrion VII: Don Lannister

Previously on A Blog of Thrones, I decided to hypnotize some chickens in lieu of discussing Robb's battle tactics. In today's post, I include a picture of James Bond to spare myself having to discuss the Lannister battle tactics either.

The Thanksgiving Rant: A re-post

My original Thanksgiving Rant is here. This is the same thing, just with the politics toned down.

BLIZZCON 2014

The valiant underdog came from behind and left the world stunned. I could drag out the election metaphor a bit or I could just congratulate Life on a series of balls-out amazing plays.

While I do think he was a bit overeager with his proxy hatches - they never paid off and he had to spend most of the rest of those games on the back foot before landing a few incredibly lucky engagements - I do think he was hands-down the best tactician on the field.  I think it was his RO8 game on Overwatch where, with a massive enemy army marching north against him, he just swung completely around, decided not to take an engagement against an enemy on the high ground, and went straight for his opponent's base.

You know, kinda what Longstreet told Lee he should have done at Gettysburg.

Does this mean that zerg is imba? Hardly.  There was one zerg in the final eight. And zerg requires more mechanical skill than the other races do. No, shut up, it's true.  Your APM will go up when you play zerg because you have to do more stuff.  Note that after his proxy hatch plays, Life should have been much further ahead than he wound up being. One of those games lingered on for an entire hour.  This isn't a cheese-fail situation where your play screws up and you have nothing behind it; Life did economic damage, but because terrans have MULEs and protoss is just OP - no, shut up, it is - it didn't give him a significant advantage.

Elsewhere, there was Hearthstone and WOW stuff, neither of which you'll read much about ever on this blog.  Heroes had a few showmatches, yay. Diablo panels talked about how they changed up the game because their initial roll-out was so ill-conceived. (Seriously, it's like the guys who were originally in charge didn't know what "fun" is.)

The Starcraft tournament kept having technical issues. Dear Blizzard: blah blah your MMO and your virtual card game, Starcraft is eSports, and those issues were just embarrassing. As was your non-apology at the closing ceremony. Of course, shortly after that non-apology you obliterated us with a thorough application of Metallica, so I suppose all is forgiven.

Legacy of the Void was announced and there are a lot of cool new things to look at and abuse, half of which probably won't make it into the final game, alas. Just from watching one showmatch it was obvious that the ability to drop Siege Tanks already in siege mode is never going to be balanced. (Unless you bring back the siege tech upgrade.)

It seems like the entire mindset now is "faster games with more micro." I get that this means seriously overhauling terran - the master turtle - but, crikey, the other changes aren't great. The Immortals got nerfed - this is unforgivable - and the one new zerg unit (Lurkers don't count) won't ever be able to accomplish anything.

My suggestion is that you don't switch to terran in anticipation of the next expansion (or whatever it is), because it's going to get nerfed.

I voted. And no, I don't want a sticker.

If I served in the US military, I'd get an appropriate bumper sticker. Maybe even a tattoo. When I get admitted to the bar, I'll crow about that.

But voting? Crikey. I took 10 minutes out of my day to drive down to the polling place (a union hall with a big "STOP THE WAR ON WORKERS" sign right outside the voting room) and filled in a few circles.

Medal, now.

This isn't Afghanistan post-9/11, where they got their first real election in quite a while (can't be bothered to research) courtesy of Uncle Sam, and they still didn't have the entire country pacified, so going around with a dab of purple paint on your finger was actually a risk.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service, that weird film where James Bond actually goes through a proper character arc (meaning he's not really James Bond at the beginning), there's a full-on "falling in love" montage, the best scene has the Bond Girl recite poetry, and it ends on an inevitable-yet-upsetting note without any closure whatsoever.

Crikey, this series can be excellent when it forgets what it's "supposed" to be.

This week's Skyrim roleplay

1) strip your character buck-ass nekkid. Meaning, empty your entire inventory.
2) fast-travel to the opposite side of the map from your home.
3) get back home. No fast-traveling.

Easy, you say, right? After all, you start the game with nothing in your inventory.

Wrong. And while we're talking, call your mother. She worries.

You're handed your first weapon and armor on a silver platter in the game. Yeah, yeah you have your spells and your shouts and your werewolf/vampire lord transformation, but you don't have your enchanted gear. How many fireballs can you really cast? If you're a werewolf, when do you take that once-per-day transformation? If you're a vampire lord, congratulations, it's easier going... until the sun comes up.

You have no money, potions, or soul gems. You start out with no armor, and you'll probably have to start by making do with the crap that the common bandits wear. You don't get to keep your pickaxe or wood-chopper, so good luck making your own stuff.

Have fun!

The curse of the zombie franchise

Appropriate topic for a Halloween-ish post, n'est-ce pas? (Pronounced "nez pah," but why you'd expect rational spelling from the country whose tanks have three "reverse" gears, to butcher an old joke, is entirely beyond me.)

Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen, The Terminator is getting another reheating.

What's The Terminator, you ask? Well, back in the early 1980s, a man named James Cameron had a nightmare about a metal skeleton walking out of a fire. This was turned into The Sleeper Hit Of 1984. In a sane world, that was the end of the story.

We were also spared this.

This world, as you should know by now, is not sane.

A question I would like to answer at some point

Did the later Harry Potter films benefit from having one director do the last four films? And if so, should that model be re-applied to the James Bond franchise in spite of the eventual disasters that produced back in the Cubby Broccoli days?

By "disasters" I mean that both Guy Hamilton (4 Bonds) and John Glen (5 Bonds) have steaming piles of crap on their hands.

Moonraker, the novel

is the third James Bond novel. It's the first one where Bond confronts a full-on supervillain. The previous two baddies were a tad small-time: a moneyman and a druglord. The villain of Moonraker wants to nuke London, and Bond has a (minor) freak-out when he realizes it.

Given that Daniel Craig's Bond hasn't run into full-on supervillainy yet, I kinda hope that he has a similar scene when he finally does.

And now, a word about the sexualization of female videogame characters

Videogame characters are not real.
I knew that when I was 5.

Five Years Ago, I was an idiot

Five years ago, I had some different opinions than I do now. Mostly these pertain to films, since my musical and political tastes were set.

I've revisited some of the films I know I had opinions on five years ago.