FH: Afeera - Jan 27

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us talk about something else. The latest FH character – the Afeera. No, I do not know what meaning this term/label/name has in RL – from what I have seen, this is a fully Ubisoft invention – and it shows.

How so? Let me be straightforward here: the Afeera is generic. And it shows.

Let us start again. Throughout the game’s existence, the PC characters of FH had flavors – knights, Vikings, samurai, and so on. Lately, however, this state of affairs began to change with the appearance of the ‘Outlanders’; until now, there were only two of them: the Pirate, (think 17^th-18^th century here than anything more modern), and the Medjai. The latter was clearly inspired by the characters in the Mummy franchise, the non-Tom-Cruise one, that is.

…For their part, the Medjai were based on the Western depictions of Ancient Egypt, and while that is neither here nor there, what matters is that while the Pirate was more modern, (proportionally), than the rest of FH heroes, the Medjai was more ancient instead, even moreso than the Gladiator and the Centurion were. This could be gleamed from the appearances of the two characters alone. The Afeera on the other hand, is different.

Officially, this character hails from ‘the kingdom of Arabia’, which is self-explanatory, but otherwise, there are few details that make them specific; even their weapon – a heavy mace – is generic, there’s nothing about it that is associated with an ‘Arabia’ of any kind.

A brief aside: as a weapon, (there are various meanings behind this word), a mace is a club, that has a big iron head with spines, or flanges, or so on, and a tough, stout handle, also made from iron, or from wood, with which to swing the head. Unlike a Morningstar or a flail, there are no chains to connect the two pieces; they are connected directly to each other.

Also, a mace is a weapon that a) inflicts mass damage – a direct or a glancing blow can easily rupture organs and break bones if there’s enough force behind the strike, even if you have armor on you. And b), a mace is not a precision weapon; while you certainly need to train with it, it is a different training from training to fight with a sword: to kill with a sword, you need to land a blow/strike at just the right place, (and if you don’t, your opponent just might survive…at least long enough to kill you), while with a mace or a club – not so much. It is proportionally easy to kill a person with a mace (club), than with a sword; as such, at least during WWI there were trench clubs as weapons… where were we?

Ah, yes, alongside the sword and the spear the mace is a standard RPG weapon these days, whether it is a LARP or a tabletop game – you can be certain that one of the less monstrous foes will use a mace or a club against you. Put otherwise, there is nothing special about a mace, and while, yes, one can argue that there is nothing special about the other weapons in the FH game, well… Somehow, the FH staff managed to make swords, axes and the other weapons unique and individual in the past, each PC had something unique and unusual, even the Pirate and the Medjai have… the Afeera doesn’t. Ah well, this is how the cookie crumbles, and also, you can always count on your family to make everything worse – but that is another story.

For now though, this is it. See you all soon!

Paleologic: Dunkleosteus - Jan 15

Let's talk about Dunkleosteus of all things. This fish, (also known as Dinichthys), was featured on the first two episodes of the ‘Walking with Sea Monsters’ trilogy, (made by Impossible Pictures in 2003), but little else, to my knowledge. What next?

It isn't easy to make an extinct fish sound exciting, but because Dunkleosteus wasn't just an extinct fish, but a giant extinct fish the size of a modern school bus, it has a good chance of being so. Where to begin?

Well… there's a tendency to have it compared to the Megalodon, but that isn’t quite right; the giant shark was still better than ‘the Dunk’ was; why?

Because, the baseline answer, is that the Megalodon was a more derived fish predator out of the two; it existed in the Miocene and the Pliocene, aka the Cenozoic, (about the same time that our direct ancestors descended from the trees and became our direct ancestors – they just didn’t know about that yet), whereas the Dunkleosteus lived during the Devonian, aka in the middle of Paleozoic instead. So what?

So, again, if you compare the two fishes the Megalodon just comes across as the better predator – mostly. It may be a cartilaginous fish, but it was still more modern than the bony Dunkleosteus was, (see their times of existence in the paragraph above). More precisely, Megalodon lived during tougher times and it had to be tougher (and smarter) than Dunkleosteus was. Another pause.

Proportionally, the Paleozoic was longer than the Cenozoic is, so far, but while that might be because of the human P.O.V., we do not have any other, (Nessie and Yeti do not want to share theirs right now), so we have to stick with this, and in this timeline P.O.V. the Devonian was more plentiful and less climatically tough than the Miocene and the Pliocene were; that climatic toughness was one of the main causes of the Megalodon’s extinction in the long run, actually.

Secondly, whereas Megalodon usually hunted marine mammals, (up to smallish prehistoric baleen whales), Dunkleosteus hunted smaller and weaker prey – fishes and invertebrates, (since nothing else existed on Earth in the Devonian anyhow), and so, its’ great size was almost overkill from an ecological P.O.V.

There was another animal discussed on the Paleologic that’d done a similar thing during its’ time – the giant snake Titanoboa, which became a giant because the climatic conditions favored it, and because it could, as a cold-blooded animal. While it was a giant, it was also a specialist, specializing in fishes, tortoises, and similar animals, as its skull and jaws show. Dunkleosteus too had a specialized jaws and skull, though its’ specialization was to enable it to eat as much as possible, as quickly as possible: it had no teeth, just giant bony plates, great for shearing, but little else; and it was so big, that it could swallow many of its’ smaller prey just whole, without any shearing or chewing at all.

…Sadly, great bulk also meant a great appetite, even by the standards of cold-blooded animals, and once the climate began to deteriorate, and Earth entered another mass extinction, Dunkleosteus just died out, just as the rest of the placoderms did. (Placoderms being the group of bony fish/vertebrate animals that Dunkleosteus belonged to, scientifically speaking). When the next time period of the Paleozoic – the Carboniferous – rolled-out, the placoderms appeared to have already vanished.

…Yet so had the Megalodon, and so did many other animals and animal dynasties of planet Earth. What is left of them are fossils, obviously, and various online features about the extinct fishes and other animals, which you can still buy, online and otherwise, so there's that.

That is all, folks! See you all soon!

PnP and 'Velma' - Jan 12

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, but for the moment it is tolerable, so let us talk about ‘Pride and Prejudice’ instead.

Ok, no, first a shout-out to the new cartoon show ‘Velma’, which is a latest reboot of Scooby-Doo, in which Velma is a lesbian or bisexual and in a relationship with Daphne, while Fred is an oblivious idiot, and Shaggy… is just himself, because he’s an Afro-American, just as Velma is, and to openly mock him as in case of Fred is… risky? Bad? Liable to give you a Will Smith treatment, if you’re lucky?” Well, one of those, anyhow.

Let us try again. The Internet, and especially YouTube, is full of people who talk how this or that reboot is bad, and how being ‘woke’ is bad, and so on. That is fair, and the other people’s annoyance at them/with them is fair, and the fact that professional reviewers/critics and lay members of audiences do not often agree is fair as well. But! “Velma’ manages to hit all the politically appropriate notes in all the politically appropriate ways, and the result is a trite, predictable mess, where male WASPs, (such as Fred), are mocked and belittled with impunity, and everyone else rises up at their expense. Pause.

Now, some have already been comparing ‘Velma’ to a different cartoon show – ‘Daria’, a show that was popular during the 1990s. It starred, well, Daria, a girl from a well-to-do, (semi-Jewish) family, who was smart, sarcastic, and hopelessly in love with an older ‘bad boy’ – well, a young adult, (early to mid-20s), Trent Lane, an elder brother of her best friend Jane, who was a latent lesbian herself, (albeit in denial). Sadly, because the show was made during the 1990s, this was never acknowledged, and instead, the showrunners tried to make Daria straight by introducing a character of Tom Sloane – and this backfired rather badly and after about 5 TV seasons and a couple of TV movies, ‘Daria’ ended, though it still got a fan base. Now, in 2023, we got ‘Velma’, where Velma and Daphne are like Daria and Jane out of the closet, Fred is a Tom-like figure, and Shaggy/not Shaggy… well, no one is sure what he is doing on ‘Velma’, especially since… there is no Scooby-Doo.

…I, for one, care little about Scooby-Doo – the dog was annoying at best and intolerable at worst… but that doesn’t change the fact that he is the franchise, and without Scooby-Doo around, (so far, at least), ‘Velma’ isn’t a variant of ‘Scooby-Doo’; she is a variant of ‘Daria’ at best, and that just isn’t the same. In addition, Scooby-Doo isn’t a WASP; he is a Great Dane, so how will the writers of ‘Velma’ explain his absence, especially his prolonged absence? This will be entertaining, albeit in a sad way, but we became carried away.

So, ‘Pride and Prejudice’. It is a classic of English literature, well renowned for its’ wicked wit and successful conclusion. What of it?

For a start, it has a bit of Shakespeare in its’ literary DNA. I don’t know if Ms. Austen ever read Shakespeare, but given that Shakespeare is THE man in England, and especially in its’ literature, she probably did, however, briefly and ‘diagonally’, to put it frankly. This resulted in ‘Pride’ having a bit of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ in its’ literary DNA – pause.

Shakespeare might be THE man in England, and especially in its’ English literature, but his plays just are not equal. On one end we were, say, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, which is a classic; on the other – ‘Much Ado about Nothing’, which is EXACTLY what it says on the tin; at the third there’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’.

No one is exactly sure what ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ is about. It can be about a man crashing his wife’s spirit for the sake of money to a point where she turns on her fellow women, (who’re shown as manipulative and sneaky harpies by the Bard), in a haranguing monologue at the play’s end, or it can be about finding true love, or it can be about anything else, (especially since most adaptations tend to dismiss some details from the original piece). Without going too far, let us just recognize that ‘The Taming’ is a conflict-driven play, and the conflict is generated by Catherine and Petruccio’s interactions – and now we got ‘Pride and Prejudice’, where the roles of Cat and Peter are taken over by Lizzie and Darcy, while Wickham makes an appropriate Shakespearean villain.

…No, wait. Yes, Wickham is the villain of the piece, but while many fan works tend to make him into this great mastermind, in the canon, it is the other way around. Wickham might be wicked, (cough), but otherwise? He is a wastrel, a gambler, and a drunk; he does not plot, he does not think things through, he just acts and reacts. He wants a rich wife to carry him comfortably on… so he gets Lydia Bennett, the middle daughter, who doesn’t have much in terms of a dowry, and who just wants to get married. That is it. In some spin-offs, such as the ‘Lizzie Bennett diaries’, Lydia is given a character and a personality of her own, but that is modern apocrypha; in Ms. Austen’s canon, neither George nor Lydia have much in terms of personality or intelligence or Christian values…

Oh, yes, there are plenty of those in Ms. Austen’s novels; in case of ‘Pride and Prejudice’, we got Charles Bingley and Jane Bennett, who wait, who do their best to do the right thing, and who get their karmic rewards. Their primary differences from Lizzie and Darcy are the fact that Lizzie and Darcy are more (pro)-active, while Charles and Jane are more passive instead; they are more naïve and trusting, while Lizzie and Darcy are more cynical…but in a modern, positive meaning of the word. What else?

Uh, people tend to hate Caroline Bingley; why? Because she is petty and selfish as opposed to Lizzie’s greater goodness and generosity, plus Ms. Austen created her to be a foil to Lizzie, just as Charles Bingley’s other sister, Mrs. Hurst, is a foil to Jane. Still, a debt is only as good as its’ payment; these days, Mrs. Hurst is barely remembered in most official modern adaptations, while Caroline is going strong, and Lydia is… being redeemed, in some manner of way, just look at the ‘Diaries’ and the like. The original novel… not so much; I think that the last modern adaptation of ‘Pride’ was back in 2005 or so; since then, ‘Pride’ kind of gotten shoved out of the spotlight.

Cannot say that I am regretting this state of affairs, though. ‘Pride’ might have Shakespeare in its’ literary DNA, as well as Christian values, but it is also an ancestor of the modern Hallmark pieces as well. See, unlike Catholic and Orthodox Christians, the Protestant Christians, including the British, hate organized church and try to promote Christian values via secular manners, such as an enlightening novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’, where the righteous get rewarded, the wicked get punished, and there’s no mention of religion, (organized or otherwise), or of God and Devil. Clever, hah?

No, not really – these days, even modern Hallmark novels, films, etc. have mostly lost their steam; if ‘Pride and Prejudice’ stood at the beginning of the period and the process where the WASPs such as Darcy and Lizzie, were beginning to rise to power, then ‘Daria’ stood in the middle and ‘Velma’, where Fred the male WASP is a comic idiot, and Daphne his female counterpart is in a relationship with Velma, a female POC, is the end – but the discussion of this process is another story.

End

Sun bear vs. moon bear - Jan 9

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and family can always be counted on to make you feel worse. I hate them. So, let us talk about something else: bears. Yes, the wild mammals that inspired Winnie the Pooh and Paddington Bear, among other characters.

There are currently eight species of bears found in the world, so, in the spirit of 2023, let us have a face-off between just two bear species: the sun, or the Malaysian bear, and the moon, or the Asiatic black bear.

Where, and how, to begin? The sun bear is one of the smallest modern bears, right there alongside the giant panda. It is about 120-150 cm long, (the tail, less than 10 cm long, does not count), and weighs about 35-80 kg. Those are dimensions of a large dog breed, put otherwise.

The moon bear is somewhat larger out of the two: it is about 120-180 cm long, (plus an equally short tail), and weighs about 65-150 kg; the American black bear may not be much bigger, but it is certainly quite a bit heavier than its’ Asiatic counterpart, up to 400 kg heavy – but we’re talking about the sun bear instead.

Physically, the two bear species differ in that the sun bear has a yellow patch on its face and chest, while the moon bear has more of a white napkin on its’ chest. In addition, despite the similar-sounding names, the moon bear is more reminiscent of the sloth bear instead – but we are digressing.

Habitat-wise, the two bear species are similar: the sun bear lives in the tropics of Southeast Asia, whereas the moon bear lives further up north, in South and East Asia instead, where the climate is more temperate instead. Regardless, the two bear species behave more like each other, than like the sloth, the American black, or the giant panda bears: both are tree-dwelling animals, which feed upon… what?

The tropical sun bear is more of a specialist, (though not as much as the giant panda): it eats fruit, honey, termites, ants, beetles, bees, and their larvae. The temperate moon bear is more of a generalist, as it eats vegetation, fruits, nuts, insects… and big, hooved mammals, including domestic livestock. There’s a reason as to why it is considered more closely related to the American black, the brown, and the polar bears than to any other modern bear species, you know?

Lifestyle. The sun bear is one of the more arboreal of bear species: it finds most of its’ food (see above) in trees, and it finds escape from its’ own predators in trees, in particular humans and tigers. It actually got a big attitude for its’ small size and can usually hold its’ ground against such smaller carnivores as big snakes and leopards.

The moon bear spends more time on the ground than the sun bear does, but moreso than the brown or the American black bears do, for comparison. It even hibernates in trees sometimes, for it lives in a seasonal climate, especially in the northern half of its’ habitat. It is less aggressive than the sun bear is, but proportionally it is the more stronger and powerful bear species out of the two.

Weaponry… Both bears are armed with teeth and claws, but the moon bear has more powerful teeth and jaws, out of the two, as it eats more red meat in its’ food rations. By contrast, the sun bear eats more of softer, squishier foods, such as honey and fruits, where less chewing is required. Hence, it does not have such impressive teeth and jaws, and actually looks a bit like an anteater, with its’ extra-long tongue. It also has an extra-large jaw gap, but while it looks cool to us humans, the other animals are not as impressed by it.

The moon bear, on the other hand, has teeth and jaws typical of a bear: it is a relatively large and powerful omnivore, and so its’ teeth and jaws are designed to handle tougher stuff than just fruits, insects and honey.

The paws and claws, on the other hand, (pardon the pun), are more similar between the two bear species, as both are, well, tree-climbing bears and their limbs have evolved along similar lines: strong, powerful, with claws that are reminiscent of grappling hooks.

Combat style? Also reminiscent of most, if not all the bears: stand upright and pummel each other with the forepaws and claws. Teeth and biting are more secondary, (though still important, obviously) – and so, which bear would win?

I am still going with the Asiatic black/moon bear. While the two bears are mostly equally matched, the Asiatic black bear shows an edge, however slight, over its’ sun bear cousin. The sun bear may have a better fighting attitude, but among the animals, size and physical strength often matter more, and the moon bear would just be better able to absorb the physical punishment of its’ tropical cousin than vice versa. Still, opinions may differ, and I’m open to listen to them.

That is all for now, see you all soon!

PJ Masks 1 - Jan 5

 So about them PJ Masks?

I admit that this is not my usual topic, but – real life sucks more than it regularly does, (obligatory disclaimer), so let us talk about something else. PJ Masks will do.

What to say about it? PJ Masks is one weird cartoon; it talks about three children – Amaya/Owlette, Connor/Cat Boy and Greg/Gecko – who are kindergarteners by day and superheroes by night, ‘fighting fiendish villains’ without any regard to sleep or other body functions, (such as eating or – the other end). Fair enough, you do not expect a children’s show to be realistic, but still…

What is the crunch of the show? Either both the PJ Masks and their archrivals – Romeo, Night Ninja and Luna Girl among others - are all real and all of their mutual brouhaha is just a typical playground roughhousing, disguised as superhero/villain face-off and nothing more, or the only ones real are the PJ Masks, who have invented everything and everyone, because no one else wants to play with them, and so they invented some frenemies to play with. Namely, the bookish Amaya has invented Romeo, who is smart like her, but ruthless and mean unlike her, the shy Greg has invented the over confident Luna Girl, while Connor has invented the Night Ninja, who is a dark reflection of Cat Boy, a bad leader, period. What is left?

The fact that while the titular heroes are on the first-name basis with their enemies/frenemies, their classmates have no names; the only one who interacts with them, is a boy named Cameron, and his interactions with the trio are more ambiguous than friendly, so there’s that. For a while, it was even a possibility that he is one of the nighttime villains, but as a Halloween special episode showed, he is not – he is just a civilian.

Even the authority figures do not make much impact in the PJ Masks’ world – their classroom teacher is ‘just a teacher’ and the rest are not even episodic characters – they just walk on and off screen with minimal impact, not even a proper exposition dump. That may not be necessarily bad, but it is empty… and the PJ Masks’ parents are flat-out absent. You would think that they had at least some presence on screen, but no, not even shadows on the floors/walls.

A typical PJ Masks’ episode goes as follows: the PJ Masks are playing during the daytime; they find something unusual, (for them), and there’s immediately a montage of them being in their bedrooms, changing into their superhero personas, going to their HQ – a totem pole in the middle of a park – in three flashes of color, and then they get up to speed in their HQ, and off they go. Ok.

The thing is that a typical PJ Masks episode is slightly over 10 minutes long, and this montage takes a good amount of time of the episode. Put otherwise, a typical PJ Masks’ episode does not know itself how long it will take and how to make itself last; often, the scriptwriters just take a single scenario and re-design it time after time, trying to make it more complex and sophisticated than the last time.

Take the scenario where Romeo teamed-up with Luna Girl and Night Ninja, and the PJ Masks’ had to team-up with the twins Carly and Cartyka to save the day/night. It actually takes them 20+ minutes to do that, and this sounds impressive…until you realize that something like this has happened in an earlier episode, where a character named Armadylan had to save the PJ Masks in question, and it took him a single episode – 11+ minutes total. So why haven’t the PJ Masks asked Armadylan to rescue them this time? Because they already got 5 seasons under their belts, and got to look good to justify their upcoming 6th season by now. Next?

Ah yes, consistency. One episode, Luna Girl is a diehard enemy of the PJ Masks; the next, she cooperates with them easily enough; either the show has sneaked-in a multiverse, where two different Luna Girls have two different interactions with two different PJ Mask teams, or else the consistency is all over the floor. Often, the show introduces new characters, and does not exactly know what to do with them, as it had with Newton Star.

The latter is something of an exception, as he seems to exist during the daytime, alongside the main characters. Only… he is a loner – his mother is an astronaut far out in space, his father is never mentioned, and his friends aside from the Masks’ are some asteroids, aka space rocks. That is… somewhat sad, really. Newton Star is an outsider slash outcast in the ‘regular’ world, and so are the PJ Masks, it looks like: they have no social life outside of their heroics!..

And their villains have no families, it appears. Luna Girl, for example, spends her days… where? Sleeping in someone else’s attic or something? Yes, eventually she gets a moon fortress of her own…and is kicked out of it by Mothsuki, who treats her something like a yo-yo, which is seriously creepy. That said, Luna Girl is always ‘dressed to the nines’, so someone is obviously taking care of her, and she isn’t a hobo. It would be interesting to learn just who, though, exactly. Anything else?

No, not really. PJ Masks is the reverse side of a show such as ‘Agent Carer’, (AC). AC was a small-cast show that ran a tight ship and was very cohesive and fun to watch. PJ Masks are also fun to watch… once or twice, and then you start falling into the plotholes and begin to get bored seeing them defeat Romeo yet again via some same stunt just dressed in a different clothing. The show might be for preteens, but still, such disrespect? Oh well, that’s Disney for you – as MCU and co. showed, they and their franchises treat their older audiences hardly any better!

….Well, for now, this is it. I didn’t expect my first 2023 blog entry to be about such a subject, but still, what is – is, what will be – will be. See you all soon, I hope!