Krypto? Two Days In A Row?

I'm looking forward to Blaugust beginning on Friday for the simple reason it'll give me something to write about. Let me rephrase that. It'll give me something to write about that someone might want to read. 

It's not that I'm short of ideas. More that I'm short of ideas that fit the supposed purpose and function of this blog, which started out as place where I could write brief, pithy opinion pieces about Massively Multiple Online Roleplaying Games and shifted over time to accomodate anything and everything in the broad sphere of popular culture that interested, irked or excited me.

And so it remains. Except, as astute readers may have noticed, it now features mostly posts about things I might watch or play or read or otherwise consume rather than those I actually have consumed.

Which is fine, I guess. As a reading experience I'm not sure there's a huge qualitative difference in a post where I describe some new game I read about and speculate on whether I'd want to play it and one where I recount in needless detail my personal experience with a game I have actually acquired an played, based on little more than the tutorial, which is probably as much as I'm ever going to see of it.

Ditto songs. Back when I came up with the intentionally faux-naif title What I've Been Listening To Lately for my regular music feature, it did at least tend to include some songs I'd been playing in the background while I was writing other posts. Now, it's mostly songs I've heard once and bookmarked, then  listened to once more as I decide what goes into the latest post. 

And does it matter? Probably not. They're songs I liked enough to make a note of and then enough more to keep in on a second listen. I can assure everyone I do still listen to a lot more new or new-to-me songs than ever make it onto the blog, so anything that appears here has at least passed the audition. 

Similarly, I read about and watch trailers for plenty of games I can't even be bothered to bookmark and some of the ones I do save for later get kicked out on review without ever meriting so much as a mention here. Does that make those posts materially inferior to the endless stream of uneccessarily lengthy analyses of every last, tiny development in Guild Wars 2, something that provided the backbone of this blog for the best part of a decade?

Second-to-last GW2 screenshot I ever took. Apparently in October 2023,
which means I must have played more recently than I thought.

 

Posts on TV shows describe a slightly different arc. I very rarely, if ever, write about shows I haven't seen and usually I wait until I've seen the entire run before putting finger to key. Which would be all well and good if I was actually watching any but at the moment I'm not. I literally haven't looked at any of my streaming platforms at all for almost a couple of weeks now. I'm not writing about TV because I'm not watching any.

What I am doing, as I've mentioned far too often, is making music with AI. I do this all the time now. It is close to being the only leisure activity/hobby I have at the moment. It's taken over all the time I used to use both to play games and watch shows and some extra besides. And I have more sense than to post about that more than once in a very long while, much though I'd love to. It'd be the blogging equivalent of cornering someone at a party and reading them your poetry.

With any other spare time I get, I've been scanning, digitizing and editing the novella I mentioned, from which I'm spinning off all these songs. That's taking some time, too. What I'll do with it after that remains to be seen but I won't just be putting it up on this blog or talking about it here other than in this kind of tangential reference. I want to do something a bit more substantive than that although I'm still puzzling over what that might be.

All of the above makes for a somewhat self-indulgent post on the last day of July but a week from now, as we approach Week Two of Blaugust - Introduce Yourself Week - it will suddenly become entirely relevant, appropriate and apposite. Even tomorrow, on Blaugust Day One, it will kind of make sense. 

Maybe don't read it until then? Oh, sorry... too late...

Anyway, in the spirit of writing about things I haven't done, let me say a little about the two new superhero movies that just came out - Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The first thing I wanted to say is that I have considered going to see both of them. And, indeed, am still so considering.

This is a notable event. I believe the last movie I went to see on release at the cinema was Arrival back in 2016. If I've seen anything since, I can't remember it. I'd blame my absence from the cinema on the pandemic but on that evidence I'd dropped off the wagon well before then. 

Post-pandemic I have tried to get my former movie-going partner to come and see a couple of things with me but she's not interested any more, having also had the habit broken by the enforced shut-down. As for going with Mrs Bhagpuss, who's never been a keen cinema-goer but could occasionally be tempted, now we have Beryl, who cannot be left Home Alone (Although she could sit with us as we watched Home Alone, together, at home, I suppose. I've never actually seen Home Alone...) going out together to do anything non-dog-friendly involves such a logistical performance neither of us can be bothered with it.

Which leaves going to the movies on my own, something I used to do not all that infrequently when I was younger. Much younger. 

I have no existential objections. It's actually a good way to see movies if you want to concentrate on the film rather than have a Shared Social Experience. It's just a bit more effort than I'm quite ready for... although that might be changing.

I want to see Superman enough that I did get as far as looking up the times of showings. I was thinking of going this week but my mother had a health scare and ended up in hospital so a lot of time was spent driving backwards and forwards that could have been spent sitting in a darkened auditorium.

She's back home now, though, and next week is - in theory - clear of obligations (See how long that lasts...) so maybe...

I am and almost always have been a Superman fan, of course, which explains some of the interest. All the same, I haven't felt any burning desire, let alone need, to see a Superman movie since Christopher Reeve first donned the cape in 1978. This movie feels different, though, as evidenced by my previous posts, gosh-wowing over the trailers. 

Superman (And even more so Supergirl.) fans of a certain age have a very particular view of the right way to do The Superman Family. It's been a while since there's been a movie that felt like it might come anywhere close to the mark. This one does and it seems almost rude not to celebrate the occasion by paying to see it.

If Superman has been inadequately served by Hollywood, though, what about The Fantastic Four?  Marvel's First Family, the bedrock on which the entire Marvel Universe was built, have infamously never been given the treatment they deserve by any medium other than the comics themselves. There have been some FF films and they have been bad.

  (The 2015 Version. Apparently the movie is even worse than the trailer. Scary thought.)

By all accounts, the new one isn't. It's good. Maybe very good. That alone makes it worth seeing, if only out of curiosity.

The thing about the Fantastic Four, though, is that they were always more respected than loved, even by Marvel fans. In the 1960s, Superman was old-fashioned in a way that seemed wholly appropriate to the company that published his adventures but the FF always seemed to carry an aura of The Establishment about them that made them something of an odd fit for Marvel's increasingly counter-culture image. 

Let's be honest - Reed and Sue Richards came off like someone's parents. Then Franklin Richards popped out and they really were. What with Johnny Storm seeming to have walked off the set of 77 Sunset Strip and Ben Grimm acting like he had to be in his forties at least, I never really got how the FF were supposed to be part of the same teenage Swinging Sixties set as SpiderMan or the X-Men. It's no wonder their classic run is a whole series of introductions for hipper heroes like the Silver Surfer and Adam Warlock. 

For all that, the team is seminal, with an importance that can't be ignored. Once again, if there's finally a version of the Fantastic Four up on screen that works, I can't but help feel I ought to make some effort to go check it out.

Chances are I won't. I'll likely end up getting both movies on DVD or even watching them on a streaming platform, although that's possibly even less likely to happen than seeing them at the cinema.

I almost said, if you've seen either of them, let me know what you think in the comments, but then I remembered I'm still trying to avoid spoilers so maybe don't do that just yet. Save it for the post when I talk about actually having seen either or both of them.

You might have a while to wait. 

Maps, Letters, Videos - It's A Friday Grab-Bag!

It's Friday. End of the working week. For some. Start of mine. Well, tomorrow is. Let's grab our bags and get started. No time to waste chatting.

It's Road Map Season!

Apparently. Everyone's doing them. Here's Pantheon's.

First impression? Ugly damn thing. It's only just beginning to occur to me that one of the reasons I've not gone with Pantheon the way I expected to is the aesthetic. I'm not talking about the once-controversial graphic makeover that removed the grit and replaced it with cute. That's fine. I mean the overall appearance, the scratchy, uncomfortable spreadsheet feel of the whole thing.

It's in full effect in this image. Everyone does Road Map graphics these days and lots of them are really pretty to look at. They make me think "Ooh! I might have to go play that again". This doesn't. It makes me go "Ow! My eyes!" 

Moving on from the look, there seems to be a lot going on this year but I notice none of it expands the world, other than downwards. There are new dungeons "throughout 2025" apparently but we'll have to wait for 2026 before we get "new zones". Well, you will, if you're playing. I don't think I'm likely to be directly involved. 

Given how few zones there are in the game now, 2026 seems a like a bit of a wait. Just about everything on the list falls under the heading of "ongoing development" rather than new content. There're a lot of "improvements" and "enhancements" and "upgrades" in that line-up, along with a few "systems" but precious little adventure. That's all kept for the grey banner along the top - dungeons, raids, boss encounters, POIs. Not sure of the marketing logic there.

I saw an interesting comment yesterday from one of the people behind the Star Wars Galaxies emu, to the effect that they discovered you can't just hang an mmorpg in a steady state and expect people to keep playing. You have to dump new content on them every ninety days or there's a huge drop-off in population. 

I mean, we all know it but it's surprising how many people, players and developers, try to put their fingers in their ears and deny it. In an odd kind of way, it might be easier for games in Early Access to hold attention. If things are going as they should, there'll be a constant drip of new content or at least disruption to what's there already, which is often just as effective. It's when the game is supposedly done that the real content treadmill starts up and with it the inevitable droughts.

By the look of this Road Map, Pantheon's a loooong way from having to worry about that. EA looks like it could take a while. And I didn't even mention the baffling current obsession going on over there with FFA open-world PvP. I do wonder what Brad McQuaid would have had to say about that...

You've Got Mail

Over at the home of the game Brad made when he was practicing, Jenn Chan, that most amiable and charming of Producers, has a couple of letters out. Producer's Letters are maybe one down from Road Maps - they don't have the graphics for a start - but they mostly perform the same function: letting players know what to expect next.

Neither of the letters, for EverQuest and EverQuest II, has anything very surprising to say. At this point Darkpaw could pretty much swap out the old SOE mission statement, "You're in Our World Now" for  "Business as Usual".

The only item of real interest in the EQII letter is the upcoming Game Update, Lure of Darkness. It brings back the Void, including a new Void Anchor in Sodden Archipelago. I bet we don't actually get one of the whirling vortexes reaching far into the sky, though. I bet it's just a portal somewhere.  

I had quite a lot of fun in Void instances for a while. There was one I used to run repeatedly for platinum, back before inflation made every in-game source of income other than selling on the Broker entirely irrelevant. 

This one ought to offer me a chance to find out just how much more effective my Necromancer is in new content, when compared with my Berserker. He usually has to wait for GUs to recede into the past before he can make any progress with them. I'm optimistic she'll do better. The Lure of Darkness arrives on the 8th of April but I imagine I won't get around to it right away. I'll get to it before the next one arrives in the summer, though.

The EQ letter is more interesting in that Jenn reveals a few secrets concerning the thinking behind some of the choices the team makes when setting up new ruleset servers. There is, of course, yet another of those coming in June because new ruleset servers are the engine that drives EQ's longevity. To some extent they always have been. The concept goes back pretty much to the dawn of the game.

This one is an "experimental" TLP server. My impression is that Everquest players are more open to experimentation than EQII players, the younger game feeling oddly more old-fashioned now and certainly more conservative than the older. 

I don't get the feeling EQII's time-limited expansion server scene has ever been quite as essential or vibrant as EQ's but it's still clearly vital enough to the continuing health of the game for new editions to be rolled out at least annually. This summer we're getting a PvP Origins server, which I would have thought was limiting the appeal considerably but at least it should keep the ever-angry PvP lobby busy complaining about the ruleset for a while.

Last but very much not least in this round-up of points of interest from the two letters, I was much heartened to see the exact same degree of attention as usual being paid to this year's Pride celebrations, starting at the end of May and running on into June. Given the current unfortunate political climate it might not have been surprising to see some backsliding there but no, the two games remain exemplars of modernity, with Patches of Pride in EQII and Pride Month in EQ each being afforded the same level of attention as any of the many established dates in the packed Norrathian calendar.

That's a deal of game news. Shall we take a short break for some music? Yes, I think we shall.

That Difficult Second Album

Catch These Fists - Wet Leg

Having covered music here for quite a few years now, I find myself in the odd position of having artists and bands I "cover" in much the same way I "cover" games. There's no necessity for it in either case but if you keep up a blog for long enough, after a while you get a feel for what it's about. 

As well as the inevitable "anything that catches my interest", this blog mostly covers games I play, games I might play and games I used to play, along with music I listen to, TV I watch and of late developments in AI as they pertain to everything else I write about. 

As the years go by, there are certain games, shows, creators and performers that come up over and over and after a certain point I start to feel I "should" mention it, when I find something new involving any of them. That's why there's stuff in this post about Pantheon, EQ and EQII and it's also why there's a video of Wet Leg's first single from their upcoming sophomore album, Moisturizer.

Because I was an early adopter and because I went somewhat overboard about the first few singles, Wet Leg have become a band this blog pays attention to, even though I don't quite feel the same attachment to them I did a couple of years ago. I like Catch These Fists well enough but it isn't demanding the same level of attention from me that Chaise Longue, Wet Dream or Too Late Now did.

The band is currently out there, playing live and debuting a whole load of tracks from the new album. I watched audience videos of half a dozen of the new songs and they all sounded good but none of them really wowed me.  

Rhian Teasdale has a definite new look she's really working and the band have what keeps getting described as a punkier sound. It all looks and sounds like it would be a great time in a club or on a festival stage. As something to listen to at home, I'm not so sure. I await the album with interest to see what the songs sound like in their fully produced form. I will be buying it, anyway, or at least putting it on a list so someone else can buy it for me.

Horse Latitudes

Here's the oddest MMORPG story of the week by some margin. Have you ever thought that what the genre really needed was more horseback riding? Or more murder mysteries to solve? No? Well how about more mysteries to solve while you're out horseback riding?

It's a niche pitch, for sure, but it's happening. The game is called Equinox: Homecoming. Nothing like hanging your entire fortunes on a convoluted pun, is there? As if the concept wasn't high enough already.

It's in production from a company called Blue Scarab, the guiding force behind which is one Craig Morrison, a name that may be familiar from his time at both Blizzard and Funcom. The official website describes the game as a "multiplayer online role-playing game that’s a surprising and unique blend of cozy exploration and dark mystery. Perfect for fans of horses, murder mysteries, and relaxing, story-rich gameplay!" 

There's a trailer, which looks a bit janky in the way of most early-development footage, but which also makes me think it might be something worth keeping an eye on. The pitch is for a “unique blend of cozy escapism and true-crime” but I'm getting some Secret World vibes, too.

Morrison goes on to say

"We're very excited to see what people make of Equinox. We’ve had faith throughout development that there is an audience out there for different and interesting experiences... there is definitely a risk, but we're in a position where we can take this shot and try to provide players with a truly unique world and story."

We do all keep saying we want developers to try new things, take some risks and stop copying whatever's just made money. It'll be very interesting to see if this one goes anywhere. NetEase is backing it so it probably will.

Take Me Home

A few months back, James Gunn gave us a first look at his new take on Superman in a short trailer that featured Krypto, the Dog of Steel. The NME keep reporting the reaction to it as "mixed" but I'm pretty sure just about every actual DC fan did that thing where you relax a whole lot of tension in your shoulders you didn't even notice you were carrying. The comment thread on YouTube is that, all through.

Now Gunn's put out an extended, five-minute version with a whole narrative section from the movie and it does not disappoint. For a Superman fan there are all kinds of oddnesses, like Krypto having long fur and the Superman robots not wearing costumes but instead of detracting from the lore those differences feel like an evolution of it.

Put simply, this is Superman, in a way almost no version of the icon since Christopher Reeve really has been. It's also very clearly the work of someone who understands not just the character but the backstory. Like, all of the backstory, not just that tedious bit on Krypton before it blew up, the part that's been done to death about a million times now.

I am more than optimistic about this one. Whether the movie can survive the current resistance to all things super-heroic evident in the wider cinema-going audience is another question but I'm confident the longtime comics fans in that audience are going to be well-served, in the best possible meaning of the phrase.

And On That Blondshell

Much of what I said above about Wet Leg applies here, too, except for the implied part about the dangers of over-exposure. This is the third single from Sabrina Teitelbaum's second album, "If You Asked For A Picture" and once again I'd say it's good but not great, which is pretty much how I felt about the other two as well. I do think this one might be a grower, though. That chorus is sticking.

Where Blondshell differs from Wet Leg in this respect, at least for me, is that Sabrina's sound is a lot more amenable to repeated listening. Wet Leg have the immediacy of a great singles band. A lot of their songs sound like they were made to be heard coming out of car windows or transistor radios. Blondshell is more the sort of thing you play at home on the stereo on a Sunday morning.

For that reason alone I'd bet that, even if the two albums are equally far behind their immediate predecessors in essentiality, it'll be Blondshell's that gets listened to the most in this house and by a margin. That's already the case with their debuts, although I've probably watched the Wet Leg videos more than the Blondshell ones.

Speaking of videos, although I've embedded both of them here, I don't very much like either. The Wet Leg one is okay but feels a bit like they might be trying just a tad too hard for the wacky funster vibe they nailed so effortlessly last time around. 

The Blondshell video, on the other hand, goes right to the opposite extreme. It looks like a bunch of pals goofing around but doing it with a degree of self-consciousness that makes it slightly uncomfortable to watch. Also, they clearly bought the absolute cheapest strollers they could find, just for the purposes of the video, and they bought them as a job lot. It just looks false.

As for the song itself, I love the chorus and the overall Blondshell sound. The words are typically elliptical in that way I love about her writing but the subject matter is a little disturbing. It reminds uncomfortably of "Too Much, Too Young" by the Specials, an unnecessarily harsh and judgmental song I always disliked.

Fortunately, these days you rarely get a new song without a gloss on it from the songwriter and what Sabrina says about the lyrics makes me happier. As per Stereogum  

“The song is partially about being in your twenties and feeling like you’re supposed to know everything (your parents even had kids around that age!) yet you’re truly in the weeds trying to figure out who you are,” 

That's a much warmer vibe than the words feel like they support. I find this a lot with Blondshell's lyrics. Possibly because they're so pared-down, they often feel harsher than Sabrina's explanation of them suggests they were meant to. It's the good, old intentional fallacy at play again, I guess, although here it's working in my favor.

Anyway, I like "23's A Baby" best of the three singles to date. Looking forward to the album in May.

And with that, I'm off to make some music of my own. There may not be another post here until Wednesday, what with me working and also having something to do on Monday but we'll see.

You'll Believe A Dog Can... Run Really Fast?

It's going to be kind of a Grab Bag of TV and Movies today, I think. Hard to be sure. I'm making this up as I go along. Then again, what else do I ever do?

First up, Ted Danson's new Netflix hit show

A Man On The Inside

I straight up would never even have looked at this if it hadn't been for The Good Place. I'd always thought of Danson - assuming I ever thought about him at all, something I certainly wasn't in the habit of doing - largely as an amiable buffoon, someone who got lucky in the 'eighties and was coasting on that luck ever since. This, clearly, is complete nonsense.

Following his excellent comic turn in the afterlife sitcom, Ted appears here in another show from approximately the same team and turns in a subtle, nuanced and very moving performance, playing a recently-retired, recently-widowed professor, now so adrift from any kind of meaningful life he's been reduced to cutting out endless "interesting" articles from newspapers to send to his only daughter, a busy mother of three teenage boys, who has neither the time nor the inclination to read them.

That's how we see him as the series opens, anyway. From there, the extremely unlikely plot has him taking a job with a private detective agency to act as the titular man on the inside. The inside of a retirement home. 

Here's the thing about the plot: it's ludicrous but it's one hundred per cent internally consistent, which means it works. More impressive yet, even though I finished watching the show more than a week ago, I could very easily rehash the entire storyline here and now without having to look anything up. I can even remember the names of most of the characters. Given my memory these days, that's one heck of an endorsement.

The plot isn't the main reason to watch the show, of course. It's more of a sitcom than a mystery. Do we have a portmanteau name for those yet? We should. There are enough of them. Mystcom, maybe? Sittery? Someone workshop that for me...

The show has been very well received by both viewers and critics. About the only bad thing anyone seems to be able to find to say about it is that it may be very heartwarming but it's not that funny. I read a few comments like that before I watched the show for myself so it may be that I'd had my expectations lowered but it made me laugh. Quite a few times. 

As for the heartwarming part, it manages to walk that difficult line between sentimentality and genuine emotion with great facility. Danson himself is just about as good as you could imagine anyone being in the part, which isn't an easy one to play. It requires him to be sympathetic but also slightly annoying, amusing but also kind of sad. He also has to come across as basically competent while also being goofy and out of his depth.

Perhaps the toughest sell of all is his ability to get along with, well, everyone. You have to believe that both old and young people would find his character almost immediately appealing; that they'd want to spend time with him, listen to him, tell him stuff they might not tell anyone else. As an actor he's playing to the audience on the other side of the screen but his character is also playing to an audience on the inside, some of whom have no idea he's acting, some who suspect it and some who know. It requires a complex set of skills and Ted has them all.

Danson is the center and the star but as usual these days there's a whole ensemble of supporting roles, all of which are played well, some very well indeed. I particularly liked the three non-pensionable-age women who orbit around Ted in the roles of his actual daughter (Sometimes pretending to be his niece.) his employer (Sometimes pretending to be his daughter.)and the owner of the residential center where he pretends to have settled, who has the good fortune never to have to pretend to be anything other than the caring, empathic, over-worked professional she is.

It's an unusual show, especially for a hit, in that a lot of the roles are given to actors in their sixties, seventies and eighties. As someone in his mid-sixties, I imagine I'm supposed to find that an added attraction but actually I just found it a bit weird. I'm not entirely convinced old people in general like to watch other old people being old. I know I don't. They all do it very well, though.

The end of the final episode absolutely screams "Give us a a second season!" and I imagine there will be one, given the show's positive reception. One more will probably fly but it's very hard to see how the premise could be parlayed into a long-running series. I mean, just how many cases could there be that need a guy in his seventies, willing to act as a P.I.'s inside man to solve crimes? As many as make Netflix money, I guess.

I'd happily watch another eight episodes, anyway.

The Sticky

For reasons I already forget, I'm back watching Amazon Prime Video again after a months-long lay-off. It's good to leave the streaming services to lie fallow for a while. When you come back you find all kinds of new things have cropped up.

As soon as I came back I found this one being pushed at me in that unsubtle way Prime has, shoving its latest offerings to the front of the queue like a proud stage parent. I glance at the shills and mostly ignore them but this one caught my eye because of the peculiar title. The Sticky? Who the hell calls a show that?

The title, it transpires, refers to maple syrup. It's an odd name for a very odd show. It's a comedy crime romp (Cromedy? No, don't start that again.) inspired by an actual theft known as The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist.  The makers of the show are very concerned you know it's Not The True Story. Every episode starts with a disclaimer to that effect.

I'm not sure what they're worried about. Having watched all six episodes I feel safe in saying no-one could possibly mistake anything that happens here for reality. It's a black farce from start to finish. 

Every character, pretty much without exception, is a type and the playing, by and large, is directly to that type. Occasional hints of backstory or personality peep through the facade but mostly everyone sticks firmly to their assigned role, occasionally hamming it up like it's panto season.

That makes it sound shallower than it is. I thought it was pretty good fun all round even if it didn't have a lot of depth. 

I had been hoping it would be a Canadian version of the excellent Australian show Deadloch  and of all the shows I've seen, that is the one it most reminds me of, although it's nowhere near as funny or as dark. Still, the similarities are hard to miss. 

There's the abrasive, big city detective, sent to a small town to sort out a murder for a start. The extremely brief, barely acknowledged, sexual frisson between the incomer and the local cop even seemed as if it could be an intentional parody of the same relationship in Deadloch. Then there's the small-time power-broker, top of the local dung-heap, pushing their influence too far and getting their come-uppance. Plus there's swearing and casual violence and some solid one-liners but every show has those.

Mostly, though, The Sticky feels too odd to be derivitive, what with minor-key elements like one character being in a coma for the entire series and one of the supposedly most sympathetic characters running a mink farm. 

Peak weirdness arrives with the appearance of Jamie Lee Curtis's character, Bo Shea, a hit-person with a limp and a cane, who manages to be both terrifying and hilarious all at the same time. Her bravura turn in Episode 5 does a lot more than just steal the scene. It makes the show.

Curtis also co-produces, along with Jason Blum of Blumhouse and indeed the whole thing has the feel of a personal project, something someone with the power to make it happen thought would be fun to do. I imagine they were right. Jamie Lee certainly looks like she's having one hell of a good time as Bo. Luckily, it was fun to watch, too. I enjoyed it. I even laughed out loud a few times. 

Like A Man On The Inside, The Sticky ends with the clearest possible lead-in to a second series. I hope it gets one.

My Old Ass

From TV to movies. I've watched more movies this year than... well, in quite a while. Still, it hasn't been all that many - maybe half a dozen - but at least I feel like I'm getting into a rhythm. I'm optimistic for next year. I mean, one a month wouldn't be too much to shoot for, would it?

Two of the movies I watched in 2024 starred one of my top three current favorite actors, Aubrey Plaza. She's in the select group of people whose name on a cast list is all the information I require to add it to my watch-list.

In this case that could easily have led to disappointment and possibly anger. Not because there's anything intrinsically wrong with the movie. Just because Aubrey Plaza is hardly in it.

Okay, that's a slight exaggeration. She's probably present for about a third of the running time. The thing is, I have only ever seen My Old Ass referred to by the various movie and entertainment sites I follow as a movie "starring Aubrey Plaza", a claim that, not unreasonably, led me to believe she would be playing the lead. 

She is not. The lead is played by Maisy Stella and very well she plays it, too. Maisie is Elliot, just turned eighteen, in her last summer at home before leaving for college in the big city. Aubrey Plaza plays the same character at thirty-nine. 

Not to dwell too much on the plot, which once again has complete internal consistency and works perfectly even though objectively it makes literally no sense whatsoever, what happens is that Maisie takes a bunch of shrooms and hallucinates her older self, who proceeds to give her enigmatic advice about her future while bantering with her in a most amusing fashion.

When this happens, the film has already been running for a while. By the time the older Elliot (or her hallucinatory imago) disappear, maybe half an hour has passed and Aubrey Plaza been on screen for about ten minutes of it. 

It was at that point that I began wondering how they were going to keep her in the picture for the rest of the running time. It turns out it wasn't going to be a problem. They weren't.

For most of the rest of the movie, all we hear of Aubrey is her voice on Elliot's mobile phone which, through some form of metaphysical magic, she is able to use to talk to her older self from two decades in the past. Then even that stops and for quite a while there's no Aubrey at all until she makes a brief, visible and possibly physical return right at the end.

As I say, this could have led to my feeling somewhat cheated but fortunately Maisy Stella provides an entirely satisfactory substitute. The supporting cast, for once, is neither extensive nor particularly foregrounded, everyone pretty much sticking to their supporting roles and doing so solidly, without anyone being especially noticeable or memorable.

The exception, at least from my perspective, was Percy Hynes White as Chad, who stood out from the rest mainly because I did not like him at all for most of the time he was on screen. I did, eventually, come around to him but more through the writing than his performance, which I found quite annoying. You'e supposed to think he's a good guy, though, and I guess if you like goofy puppy-dog types, it tracks.

The script is by Megan Park, who also directed, doing a great job in both departments. This is a very high concept coming of age story and the absolute best thing about it is the way no-one ever attempts to explain how any of it is happening. The set-up verges on magical realism and the last thing you need with that is any kind of pseudo-scientific rationale.

At under ninety minutes, My Old Ass is short and bittersweet and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Even if I still do kind of feel like I was short-changed on the whole Aubrey Plaza deal.

Superman

Is it a movie? Is it a TV show? No, it's a Trailer!

I don't watch a lot of movies but I do watch a lot of trailers. They're a bit like demos for games, I think; sometimes the trailer's all you need.

That absolutely does not apply to the first trailer for the Superman movie, the one that's coming out next July, directed by James Gunn of Guardians of the Galaxy fame, now heir to the cursed throne of the DC Cinematic Universe. The link popped up in my NME feed yesterday, with the teaser headline "First ‘Superman’ trailer sees Krypto the Superdog make his live-action debut." 

I was more than a little curious to see the non-CGI Dog of Steel so I clicked through right away. And he's sooo cute! I mean, seriously! Krypto has been a lot of things since he first appeared in Adventure Comics #210 nearly seventy years ago but I don't believe "cute" has often been one of them. 

Most of that is down to his signature look. I've never been sure what breed he's meant to be - he looks like some kind of cross between a Staffie and a Labrador - but whatever it is, it doesn't scream cuddly ickle doggy. 

This time, instead of the smooth-haired look he's sported for all those decades, they've gone for a much rougher, tousled, almost-terrier appearance and I am so totally here for it! It's these small changes that sometimes make all the difference and even as a long-time fan, this make-over works for me.

It's not just Krypto, though. For a Superman fan, the whole trailer is just amazing. It hits exactly the right tone and sustains it for entire the 2.17 run time. I quite literally felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck watching this one and the moment it ended I watched it again, at which point I admit to tearing up a little.

If the YouTube comments are anything to go by, I was not alone in my immensely positive response. Superman has been made over so many times it's hard to believ upermae actor there could ever be a version that feels fresh but this promises to be the one. It's certainly going down well with actual DC comic fans, if not with those of former Superman actor Henry Cavill, which should at least make for good pre-release word of mouth.

Whether the finished movie will have any significant appeal beyond that demographic, I guess we'll just have to wait until next summer to find out but I hope so. DC - and super-hero movies in general - could do with a hit..

If there's one thing I really hope for this iteration, though, it's that it isn't just the damn origin story all over again. I appreciate the logic of the Groundhog Day approach: there's a new generation of movie-goers every decade and if the huge majority of the audience is going to be 12-24 every single time, you can't just assume everyone knows who your characters are...

But this Superman ffs! Everyone does know who he is. Just take the origin as read and move on.

Which is just what I'm going to do. Laters!

So, When Is Superman Day, Exactly?

Did you know yesterday was Superman Day? I didn't and Bree at MassivelyOP didn't remember the date either. It turns out there's a good reason why we might have been confused. There's more than one Superman Day.

Bree was reporting on what she'd read in a press release from Daybreak Games' subdivision Dimensional Ink, which confidently begins "April 18th marks the official celebration of Superman Day across the web, the world, and the DC Universe." And that's the truth. Or one of them.

The DC establishment backs April 18. James Gunn is Mr. DC for the moment and he certainly thinks April 18 is Superman Day. So does Elizabeth Tulloch aka Lois Lane from Superman and Lois, the show now set to mark the swansong in the long-running and fitfully fruitful relationship between the CW and DC Comics.  

April 18 has apparently been "Superman Day" in some realities since 2004. The date was chosen because it marks the anniversary of the first appearance of the Man of Steel in Action Comics #1 back in 1938. 

If you google "When is Superman Day?", though, Days of the Year, supported by many other calendar websites, offers June 12, citing an official announcement to that effect by DC Comics in 2013. There's clearly some confusion going on, which may or may not derive from the sheer number of possible anniversaries available: Superman's birthday, Clark Kent's birthday, the arrival of Kal El on Earth and the first appearance of a comic featuring the Man of Tomorrow.

According to one of the sources linked above, there's a lore explanation for choosing April 18: it's the date Superman gave as his birthday in an interview with Lois Lane and the date he uses for official purposes. Unfortunately, whoever made that claim neglected to provide details of where and when the interview took place and I haven't been able to verify it. (Okay, I haven't tried to verify it. I have other things to do, you know...)

The same source, which I am not convinced is reliable, asserts that in his alter ego of Clark Kent, Superman claims June 18 as his birthday. Most other sources suggest what I seem to remember from my own comics-reading days, when Superman's birthday was usually given as February 29. 

A possible clean-up for all this comes from the unlikely source of Sky History, whose This Day in History column explains - while citing June 17 as Clark Kent's birthday - that in the 1950s Superman cut his cake and blew out his candles (Carefully, one hopes...) in October, before shifting the celebrations to Leap Year Day in the 1960s, where it remained for a couple of decades before moving to June. Just to be awkward they also throw December into the mix with no supporting evidence at all.

At this point it has probably become clear to us all that no-one knows when Superman's birthday is, nor when or most likely even what "Superman Day" is supposed to be. This is why Dr. Egon Spengler was so insistent the streams should not be crossed.

What I do know is that DCUO is celebrating its own version of Superman Day from now until... actually, I'm not clear on when it stops but it carries on into next week at least, because that's when they're giving way some free posters. 

I'll be there for that. DCUO gives good poster. I'll have somewhere to put them, too, because thanks to the games obtuse and confusing UI and patent lack of clarity I now have two entire bases to decorate. Or, in one case, re-decorate.

How did that happen? Well, I'll tell you. Only I'm going to keep this extremely short for once. I feel I've written more than enough two-thousand word essays on my own incompetence for anyone to want to read another. I certainly don't want to write one.

The key points are these: I logged into the game to spend 2000 DBC on the new prestige lair, Superman's Fortress of Solitude, for some reason now renamed the Sunstone Fortress. I have cash shop money to burn so even though the real-world equivalent is allegedly $20, it cost me what I consider to be nothing.

I bought it with no problems and added it to my Base collection but then I spent the best part of an hour, including much googling and watching YouTube videos, trying to figure out how to set the damn thing as my second base. You can have up to eight of them, allegedly, but I just could not figure out how to get more than the one I already had.

In the process I managed to completely strip all the furnishings from my old base, move it across town and replace it with the Fortress and still end up with only the one lair. In the end I figured it out (You have to buy a Deed from the cash store AS WELL as the Fortress, which is technically just a visual skin, not an additional property. Also the Deed is really hard to spot due to the way the menus work and the dumb color scheme they've gone with. It took me three passes to find it and I only spotted it then after I'd watched someone do it in a video...)

After an hour and a half, during which I even got half-way through submitting a Customer Service ticket before I decided I was going to make myself look utterly ridiculous by doing it, I finally got everything sorted to the point where I now have two bases, one of which is my new Sunstone Fortress and the other my old Gothic Lair.

They are both completely empty, of course. All my furniture - and I have a lot, almost all freebies - is in storage. It's going to take me several solid sessions to get both lairs as I want them but if I'm honest, the first one was a mess. It really needed a makeover and now it's going to get one.

Decorating in DCUO is fun so it's more of a treat than a trial. And Krypto's going to love his new home, I'm sure. 

When I'm all settled in I'll probably do another post about that but for now, enjoy the sense of space in all those outdoor shots. That view is what I really bought the place for...

Just The Facts, Ma'am.

I had no more idea what I was going to write about today than yesterday, until I sat down at my PC after breakfast and read Redbeard's post over at Parallel Context. It wasn't the content of the post, Redbeard's spur of the moment decision to run a character through the Dark Portal in World of Warcraft, that got me thinking; it was the title he chose: Great Caesar's Ghost!

As he explains in a footnote, "Great Caesar's Ghost" was Perry White's catchphrase. It may still be for all I know. After more than eighty years of continual iteration, Superman's history is as dense and opaque as the neutron star that gave his Justice League colleague Ray Palmer his Atom powers. 

Redbeard remembers Perry White's tagline from reruns of the Superman TV show, which he watched as a child, a couple of decades or so after it was originally broadcast at the beginning of the nineteen-fifties. I remember it from the comics I read, first when I was growing up and then on and off for the rest of my life.

Seeing the phrase attributed that way, to something I'd consider a derivative version, started me thinking. I used to know a lot about the Superman mythos. I read all of the Superman comics I could get my hands on, the Man of Steel's own headliners, Superman, Action and the rest and also those of his supporting cast, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane and anyone else whose name was ever considered sufficiently commercial to carry a book of their own.

I read widely outside of the comics themselves as well, or as widely as was possible back then. Over the years I acquired a good deal of knowledge, covering both the internal and the external construction of the legend, the literary canon and the commercial and circumstancial factors that shaped and moulded it. I had a fair conception not only of who Superman was but also why and how, an understanding broad and deep enough to encompass not just Kal El of Krypton but his extended family on Earth, his adopted home, and out into the stars beyond.

And then I forgot almost all of it. That's the problem with knowledge. It's not skill. Knowing facts is not like riding a bike. It doesn't come back, instantly, at need.

Memory is tricksy, though. It's possible to know you knew things once even though you know don't know them any more. Sometimes all it takes to bring back a memory is a gentle prompt. Like the title of a blog post.

It didn't take any kind of prompting for me to remember where I'd heard the exclamation "Great Caesar's Ghost!" In my memory it's clearly stored in the sector marked "Important - Priority Access", which should tell you plenty, both about why all kinds of media absolutely dote on taglines, catchphrases, running jokes, choruses and other heavily repetitive hooks and also about the kind of thing I've trained myself over decades to treat as worthy of note.

What I had forgotten was anything much beyond the bald fact that "Great Caesar's Ghost!" was what Perry White, Editor of Metropolis's Daily Planet newspaper, would exclaim every time he was surprised or angered by anything. Usually something Clark Kent, Jimmy Olsen or any other of his hapless employees might have done to make his life more frustrating than it already was. 

Perry wasn't exactly J. Jonah Jameson, always ready to think the worst of anyone, but he was a newspaperman of the old, fictional, school. He suffered fools very badly. He was always prone to explode at the least sign of incompetence. He was a consummate professional with decades of experience. It must have made working in the same office as bumbling Clark Kent and gauche Jimmy Olsen quite a trial.

As I thought about what Redbeard had written in his explanatory footnote it made me start to question my own memory. For sure, I'd always associated the phrase with the comics I'd first read as a child but wasn't there something else I'd learned later, when I was digging into the backstory of how these stories became to be legends, then myths?

It seemed to me that maybe Redbeard was closer to the truth than my suface-level memories suggested. I could feel some kind of queasy undertow as long-forgotten facts began struggling to free themselves from the black ooze at the bottom of the pit of my memory. 

Once upon a time there would have been no easy way to reach down and pull those facts loose. I might have had to spend the morning up in a dusty attic, digging through boxes as I looked for articles in old fanzines. I might have needed to make a trip to the big library in the center of the city to riffle through the card indexes in search of books too obscure to be kept on public display. 

I might have had to keep the whole thing in mind until the next time I visited a convention so I could quiz my comics contemporaries in the hope their memories were sharper than my own. If I couldn't wait that long I might have sat down to write a long letter to whichever of my friends I thought most likely to know the answer.

All of those are things I really did, some of them more than once, in the 1980s and '90s. I remember filling out the form at the Cambridge Central Library so I could sit at a desk in the Reference section and leaf through Dr. Frederic Wertham's infamous, inflammatory "Seduction of the Innocent", the work of pseudo-science that led directly to the introduction of the Comic Book Code. I couldn't begin to count the hours I've spent paging through old 'zines looking for some article or other I only half-remembered, sometimes finding it, usually not.

I don't do that any more. Nowadays, all I need to do is tap or click, maybe type a few keywords, then there it is, laid out before me, the way Alfred might have laid out Bruce Wayne's tuxedo before a gala dinner. 

Of course, someone still has to do the research. It's just not me any more. Oh, I can call what I do research and I do. I call it "research", I call it "fact checking", I call it "due diligence" and I do a lot of it. I try my best to make sure everything I say here is supported by something stronger than just my memory, unless I make it quite clear it's pure opinion, attitude, fantasy or snark. No-one fact-checks those.

Most times, though, all I'm really doing is referencing someone's else's hard work, for which I try always to give full credit. And you wouldn't believe how much work some people have been willing to put in.

When I googled "Great Caesar's Ghost!" a couple of hours ago I was expecting to find a thread I could pull on to unravel the whole mystery, if there even was one. I didn't expect to find an entire two-part entry, fully annotated and attributed, not just with pages from the comics but video and audio clips as well.

The extensively, I might say exhaustively, researched piece, is called "When Did Perry White First Say 'Great Caesar's Ghost!' in the Comics?", which is literally the exact question I was asking. It's by Brian Cronin and it was published in 2018 by CBR, one of a myriad of comic-related websites I haven't heard of before. Seriously, there are so many...

I'm not going to rehash the entire Caesar's Ghost origin story here. For one thing, I very much doubt anyone's all that interested and for another, if I'm wrong about that, please follow the link and read Brian's piece - you'll learn a lot. 

I did. I learned that the phrase didn't originate in either the television show that Redbeard watched or the comics I read. As I vaguely recalled even before I saw it confirmed in the article, like a lot of things we now take for granted as being "from the comics", Perry White first grunted "Great Caesar's Ghost!" in the 1940s radio show "The Adventures of Superman", initially starring Bud Collyer as the Man of Tomorrow.

Specifically, Perry first said what would come to be his signature expletive on November 26, 1946, in
an episode called The Secret Letter. According to Wikipedia, there were an astonishing 2,088 episodes of the Superman radio show, which ran for more than a decade between 1940 and 1951. I heard a few of them, back when I was in the habit of listening to episodes of old radio shows while I was playing mmorpgs, although mostly I favored the private eyes and police procedurals over the superheroes.

Most, maybe all, of those radio shows are public domain now, so the ones that survive are easy enough to find. I used to use a couple of sites, mainly the inevitable and invaluable archive.org's Old Time Radio although there are also plenty of examples on YouTube these days. 

The particular episodes in question, The Secret Letter, don't seem to be there but I found them here, at yet another of the vast range of comic book resources, Comic Book +. I'm listening to it now but there have been a number of real-life interruptions and if Perry's called on the ghost of anyone I've missed it. I certainly know plenty about Kellog's Pep and the comic buttons you can find in every pack. More than I wanted to know, if I'm honest.

Just to drive home the way the very concept of "research" has changed out of all recognition in recent years, take a look at this. Three words and a mouse click and you can browse the entire collection. If you want the real thing there are plenty for sale on EBay and Etsy. I'd link to the sales but that's a link that's going to rot so I'll just say you can pick up some of the less-popular characters for under a fiver. Superman himself will set you back a strangely specific £27.68.

What would have been the chances of seeing even one of those pins back in the 1980s, when I might have been interested? I went to more marts and conventions than I can remember and I never saw a single one. As for listening to the radio show or watching the TV series Redbeard remembers... fat chance!

There are debates to be had about whether increased ease of access makes things that used to be rare more or less significant but I'm not having it here and now. I'm just happy to have been fortunate enough to have lived through both eras. It adds spice, knowing how hard this information used to be to find but I'm very happy it's not any more.

Well, most of it. And only provided someone's done the work in the first place. At the moment, all of this still relies on someone becoming sufficiently obsessed to spend great swathes of their time doing primary research. It doesn't always happen, as my recent complaints about not being able to find much hard information on Chimeraland demonstrate. There are gaping holes that information just falls through. Most weeks I try to look up something online and come up short.

And then there's the testing question of authority. It's all very well googling and clicking or asking Alexa or Siri but that should never be the end of it. It's always wise to cross-refer. There's still work there for the full-time researcher and the part-time blogger. 

I thought about doing it for a living, once. Maybe I should have given it a go. It's engaging and rewarding although maybe that's only when you're researching things that actually interest you. And you do learn things. 

For example, just this morning as I followed up some of the sources for this post, I discovered that, in the first episode of that Superman radio show from 1940, Clark Kent goes to work for Perry White not at the Daily Planet in Metropolis but the Daily Flash in New York. Did they change that from the comics, which would only have been going for a couple of years by then, or did the comics change the names from the radio show?

Great Caesar's Ghost! Now I have a whole new thing to check! It just never ends! Kent! Get over here!

Everyone Thinks It's So Great Being Superman

When it comes to superheroes there's one name that stands above them all: Superman. He started out as a strong guy who could jump really high and somehow turned into a god. By the late 1960s he was so all-powerful few writers knew what to do with him and ever since then he's suffered a series of cuttings down to size.

He was my favorite superhero when I was a child because who else would be? I have never subscribed to the theory that all-powerful protagonists aren't interesting. I prefer stories in which I know from the start that the hero will win and win easily.

It's been a long time since Superman topped any sales charts. He's iconic but he's hardly of the moment. Nevertheless, his name and a number of his long-established tropes are embedded in the culture to such a degree it's hard to see how they could ever be excised. Like Holmes and Dracula and Achilles he'll be with us always.

It's probably not surprising, then, that he's been used countless times as the subject or inspiration for songs. I can't imagine any other superhero comes within a mile of touching his cape when it comes to music.

Songs about Superman fall into a few distinct categories: straight-up paeans of praise, downbeat deconstructions, sexual allegories and fluffy, happy pop tunes that use his name as a touchstone. Most of them are frankly awful, including some of the best-known.

They cross all styles, from country to hip-hop, disco to industrial. I spent an hour trawling YouTube this morning after breakfast and this is the pick of what I found. I'm sure there are shinier nuggets buried somewhere in there but after several hundred results I was starting to feel like someone had slipped kryptonite in my rice pops.

I already had the first one, of course. Peggy Sue, originally Peggy Sue and the Pirates, are one of my favorite bands of the last decade or so and this was one of the earliest things I ever heard by them. There used to be a better video of this floating around but it seems to have vanished. I have it downloaded somewhere but I'd need Superman's super-memory to remember where.

One of the most familiar of all Superman songs has to be REM's "Superman". I'm not much of an REM fan and never have been. Decent singles band. A bit obvious. Never listened to any of their albums.

I always liked this one but I had completely forgotten it was a cover. The original, by The Clique, is much better.

Before Blur were Blur they were Seymour, named after Seymour Glass from the J.D. Salinger Glass Family stories. What else? They'd still be called Seymour now if their first label, Food Records, hadn't insisted they change the name - and that drummer Dave Rowntree stop wearing pajama bottoms on stage. Is it any wonder bands want to self-publish these days?

There's some live footage of them floating about and they look pretty darned good even via the medium of hand-held audience shakey-cam. Damon looks like someone clipped an electric cable to his wooly jumper as he flails and thrashes while he wonders "What's it like to be superman/Oh what's it like/To be so special?"

Guess he knows now.

Still waiting to find out is Nataly Dawn, although she's getting there. Here, she's covering a song just called "Superman's Song", originally recorded by The Crash Test Dummies, a band about which I can't say I've ever given a second's thought. I vaguely remember they had an annoying novelty hit of some kind a long time ago and that's about all I've got.

I'm not all that struck on this song, come to that. I looked up the lyrics and it seems we have yet another of those "Superman really gets a raw deal" numbers, very similar in tone to the far superior Peggy Sue number. I can't say I quite get it. I find the "Superman's got it all - I wish I could get some of what he has" take on his character and life a lot more believable. Can being invulnerable and able to fly really be so bad?

I do like Nataly's performance, though, particularly the slight distortion on her vocals and her attack.

Speaking of someone who has it all, in walks Taylor Swift. Old Tay, from nine years ago. This is a great lyric that seamlessly stitches myth into reality : "I watch superman fly away/You've got a busy day today/Go save the world, I'll be around". Maybe she should have called the song "Lois Lane" instead of, yet again, "Superman".

Moving on from Taylor's wistful, romantic vision of the Man of Steel we come to Celi Bee and The Bizzy Bunch, who have something else entirely on their minds. A cover of a Herbie Mann disco floor-filler (I imagine), this is a prime example of the SuperMAN school of songwriting.

I could have used Eminem's "Superman" but, much though I like a lot of Marshall Mather's oevre, I have to draw the line somewhere! I should warn you that Celi Bee is a) not very good and b) quite scary. It also goes on far too long, like a lot of disco tracks of the period.

Speaking of songs that go on for a long time, I was thinking of including Lori Anderson's superb modernist classic "Oh Supeman" but despite the title I can't honestly say I ever thought it had anything to do with Superman. There's a very strange cover by David Bowie that's unusual in that Bowie, for once, sounds less futuristic than the artist he's covering.

Instead, let's finish with a radio regular from what was arguably Superman's heyday, the 1960s, the same decade when Donovan peaked, although I did once own his 1973 album "Cosmic Wheels", which I quite liked.

Ancient French TV features heavily on YouTube these days, luckily for the rest of us. There are some very strange performances on display but this is extremely straight, with the cameraman barely cutting away from the singer at all. Donovan looks a bit bored, most likely because he's lip-synching, but his white suit carries him through to the end.

If that's just whetted your appetite for songs about Supes, I found this alternative list after I finished combing YouTube. If I'd fiund it before I started I could have just ripped it off and saved myself an hour! I'm going to listen to them all later. Looks like some good stuff in there and it's just one of a series, too, but I'm about Supermanned out now, as I'm sure is everyone else.

Next time I'm thinking Pony Club. That could run long... maybe two posts. Or three...