The Vanishing of Ethan Carter? Yeah... it's pretty damn great.

It's somehow more beautiful than a picture. How the hell did they do that?

I'm just 1 hour and 2 puzzles in and I'm hooked. Sure it's beautiful, a lot of games are beautiful. Sure, the game cribs a lot from Lovecraft, that's going around these days. This game is what I wish a lot of what I've played lately were, compelling.  The acting is good, the story is better and I could go on an uneventful walk in this virtual wood for hours. I wouldn't even have to stumble on a failed ritual sacrifice to stay interested.

But I've said too much. It's $10 on steam right now. Get your otherworldly murder mystery fix.

Step into my office.

Work's been hell.

I chose to take up an unreasonable amount of shifts at the restaurant during a week everyone and their mother was in town for one of multiple conventions. In other words, I've spent the last 4 days running around a mosh pit screaming at the top of my lungs.

I... need a minute.

The rebooted, slightly longer, and astonishingly even bloodier history of the Whalfast Estate.

I like Darkest Dungeon, I like it lots. But I also like things that hurt me often and needlessly, read into that as much as you want. I'm getting better at it... or at least I think I'm getting better at it. I'm becoming concerned I'm not improving as much as I'm getting lucky.

While the cruel wheel of fate that is this game's turn by turn dice roll makes every second absorbing, one bad fight can positively ruin an entire party. Erasing the majority of your progress, and leaving you with nobody but rookies to tackle the over leveled missions that remain.

When DD decides to stack the deck against you, it practically seals you in a wine cellar. In other words, I don't think this game's being as fair as say, XCOM, or Dark Souls. Maybe it shouldn't be. But I live for rougelikes like this and I've never felt so blatantly abused before. What I mean is, it's hard to develop a strategy when a couple missed strikes and one enemy critical hit make them all moot.

I hope DD learns to play with it's food more in the future.

The short and bloody history of the Whalfast Estate.

My family, my legacy, my decades old meticulously curated/alphabetized porn stash... all gone.

Well... damn. Darkest Dungeon has pimp slapped me harder than I'd dared hope. I had a man down in the tutorial.

The tutorial!

I've never started a game over in less than 5 minutes before. After an hour in, I'd lost my original crew, thankfully I never liked my plague doctor (who can't actually heal you) and my leper proved to be more badass than a man with a terminal degenerative condition has any right to be. Seriously, he shouldn't be able to walk straight.

This game is designed to humble. Programed from the ground up to break your heart. I say it has done so. For an "early access" game this sure feels like a full release. I I bet it falls apart in the end game, though.

So if you feel like chipping in 20 bones to be part of the tester army... and it looks like it's already Steam's top seller, do it. It's a steal at twice the price. Seriously, I'd happily pay $40 for this kind of strategical turn based agony.

Happy 5th, Nerdist!

I've been a huge Chis Hardwick fan since at least 2010. And since 2010, I've also become a fan of Matt Mira and Jonah Ray. Comradery is a fickle, frustrating, chemistry that a lot of podcasts out there don't pull off half as well. The Nerdist is about these three dudes as much as it's about Paul McCartney, or Bill Gates, or Tom Hanks those two times. Oh, and that Mel Brooks one is an all timer.

They can get prickly sometimes. Vaguely antagonistic, in a way most shows or podcasts would edit out. But they leave it all in, or a lot more than a PR rep would be comfortable allowing. In that way it's the most honest podcast I've ever listened to, as well as the most fun.

They deserve all the success they have, I'd even go as far to say @midnight is the best late night show since the Colbert Report.

I mean, look at this! This is culturally significant:

 

So happy birthday!

So... Darkest Dungeon looks good. I'm having a rough week.

I just can't seem to get myself to bloggin'. I dunno why. Whiplash broke my heart, I had expected more from it. Mostly, I don't understand how Miles Teller keeps getting work. He held back "The Spectacular Now" (another movie where the female lead is inexplicably attracted to... you know what? I shouldn't.) and was just ok in Whiplash. He wasn't bad.

Also the second episode of Tales from the Borderlands should be out, now I remember why I always waited for the majority of their episodes to release. Because they lie. All the damn time. They're no George RR Martin... but still, "around" January 27th today ain't.

But Darkest Dungeon! It's in early access, but I can still see me enjoying the crap out of those bare bones. Yeah, maybe that'll get me out of my funk.

Whiplash Review: Drummed down.

 
 Before we get started... lemmie set the mood.

Whiplash is a movie I loved and hated at the exact same time. Parts of it are horrifying and suspenseful with just dialogue alone. Parts of it are so clunky and pointless that I skipped entire scenes. I felt like I lost nothing, with a good script that shouldn't be possible.

Whenever the film is about drumming, or showing Miles Teller drumming, or if J.K. Simmons is on camera, the movie is on literal fire. But that feels like less than half of the whole thing. I'm sure if I looked more closely it would actually be the vast majority of the film. But the parts of Andrew's life outside of his sociopathic teacher's artistic dungeon are so amateurish in comparison, that they kill the film's roaring momentum every single time.

Let's start with the "girlfriend"character. I don't remember her name, but Whiplash doesn't want her to be an actual person, so I'm not too cut up about that. Screw the "manic-pixie-dream-girl" the worst female stock character in film is the "gorgeous-girl-who's-inexplicably-drawn-to-plain-uninteresting- male-lead-because-there-ain't-no-time-for-a-three-dimensional-love-interest-with-agency." That sounds petty and angry. Maybe that's because it is.  But never has a movie this good hit my pet peeve cliche so hard. Just... so hard.

He bombs in his bid to ask her out. And she says yes. He is absolutely terrible at conversation and can't stop talking about himself or his obsession at dinner. She laughs at his painful not-jokes and rubs her foot on his. If it were not for her last off screen conversation I'd buy a Tyler Durden-esque fantasy plot twist. She's barely a human being. She should have been cut out of the whole damn thing.

Oh! and there's this bizarre dinner scene at his cousin's house where Andrew wryly sh*ts on his recent division III football win after no one understands what being in Fletcher's jazz band means. Then his uncle, a grown f**king man, asks Andrew if he has any friends. Knowing that he doesn't. Parents and family that hate each other don't say "you're weird and nobody likes you." This guy knows Andrew's mom walked out on him when he was little. It's so spectacularly cruel. Family wouldn't do that!

 ...to his face.

Get ready for a lot of blood on a lot of drums.

But aside from that, the agony and the ecstasy of Fletcher's homicidal jazz crucible is pure hypnotism. Unlike in the rest of the film, the slightly heightened reality works in it's favor. Fletcher's band members have the look of prisoners. Feigning humanity and outside interests until their warden walks though the door. They stand at attention, absolutely terrified that something they do will grab his.

There aren't a whole lot of actors that could handle Fletcher and Simmons owns every frame of it. His Lee Ermey rants flow naturally. His anger, horrifying. But he can switch it all off in a second. He can be warm and forgiving, again, you believe it all. His warmer side is somehow even more unnerving.

The only band teacher I ever had wasn't a fraction as rug-humpingly insane... but there were several major points of similarity. I have no doubt that Fletcher's real life inspiration didn't fall too far from the tree. Even still, he becomes just a scoach too evil in the end. It's a fun twist in the moment but again... characters in this movie have a tendency to stop doing things that make any kind of sense. That kinda robs it's staying power.

It's like they follow you wherever you go...

That and Andrew doesn't have that much to do, outside of looking amazing playing the drums. Which he does. But Miles Teller is still an unknown talent to me. In that, I'm yet to be convinced he's actually talented. Does Teller play him as a detached cypher because that's the kind of person Fletcher knows he can manipulate the most? Or is he just not that great at filling in the character's blanks left in the script? The kinda thing Chris Pratt is a third degree black belt at. Not being sure if a performance is brilliant or terrible kind of speaks for itself, doesn't it? It's like you can see smoke but you can't find the fire. Acting? Editing? Writing?  Something f**ked up, at any rate.

The fact that Fletcher isn't an unbearable caricature is award worthy. I'm not being glib, Simmons has the supporting character Oscar sown up. I couldn't be happier for him, because getting into that character must have been a special kind of murder. For all my misgivings, you should definitely see Whiplash. Because what it does well, you have never seen before. What it does wrong could easily be fixed by a rewrite. By that, I mean the director, Damien Chazelle, is an arm's length away from greatness. He's so close! Grand Piano was so much fun, and this was so dark and thought provoking. The happy medium between the two could knock me off my feet.

I'll wait for that train as long as it takes.