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January 18, 2024

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OVA review: Azur Lane: Queen’s Orders

I’m on an OVA kick right now so here’s one that most readers definitely will not be interested in: an anime adaptation of a spinoff of a manga adaptation of a paid fanservice skin-driven mobile game. To be fair, there is more to Azur Lane than just that — I’ve had my own history with that game as the only gacha I’ve ever really played.

But even though I quit playing the game years ago and forswore gacha forever, I keep returning to the characters, first with the short slice-of-life series Azur Lane: Slow Ahead! and now with this two-episode OVA that came out last year. I can’t even figure out how this thing was sold (usually something like “attached to volume 8 of the first run of the manga and never printed again” from what I find) but I have it and watched it, and it met and maybe even slightly exceeded my modest expectations.

Don’t mind Warspite’s lack of pants or a real skirt. I’m sure this is totally a reference to her real-life warship counterpart having a gap in its defenses or something.

Queen’s Orders centers on HMS Queen Elizabeth, the natural leader of the British faction of shipgirls. (For those who don’t know, Azur Lane is all about ladies who are also ships who fight each other on the high seas, except they don’t transform into ships, only they also have real ships somehow like the above one? There’s your catchup, anyway.) Elizabeth is the queen of this faction just as her namesake Elizabeth I was Queen of England, except this Elizabeth seems nicer. Very haughty, pretty close to one of those “oh-ho-ho” ojousama type anime girls outdone only by Valiant. However, she is actually thoughtful and caring, making her about the most unrealistic depiction of a ruler ever.

Lizzie does something dumb in episode one, letting her subordinate Valiant easily beat her in a chess match with a “queen for a day” bet riding on it. Valiant therefore gets to sit on the throne and do queen stuff, which she’s excited about at first. Elizabeth, meanwhile, has to carry out all the duties she’d assigned to Valiant, taking her throughout her camp to perform manual labor like gardening and unpacking and stocking armaments.

The fans want it, so deal with it

In doing so, Elizabeth enjoys some new experiences and gets closer to her subjects and her non-subject foreign friends alike who also drop in on occasion. Meanwhile, Valiant learns that being queen means not just giving orders but also reviewing mountains of paperwork and attending tedious official events and diplomatic meetings. After finishing her term as a slightly lower-rank royal for a day, Elizabeth returns to her throne room and has a nice moment with Valiant, who swallows her pride for at least ten seconds, long enough to ask for help with all the bureaucratic stuff.

The good feelings continue in the second and last episode, in which Elizabeth has to whip an international fair held by all the most prominent shipgirls from each faction into shape, allowing us a look at some of the other cultures depicted in Azur Lane.

This is the most American image I’ve ever seen, shame most people will miss out on it. Just make this our new flag, why not.

Elizabeth uses her natural persuasiveness to get the rest of the variously haughty/lazy/drunk ship ladies to work together and put on a good show for the Commander, who’s sick in bed and watching remotely. The two of them also have a moment, though that’s tempered by the fact that as usual Commander isn’t an actual character but just a stand-in for the presumably self-inserting player (I got into all that in my Azur Lane sort-of retrospective, so check it out.)

The Soviet General Staff, 1940 (real photo.)

The characters are the only reason to care about Azur Lane as far as I can tell, and they’re pretty fun here. The hardcore country stereotype stuff reminds me a lot of Girls und Panzer, which is far older than this or its source, but those are all the sort you’d expect from a mostly non-serious series like this about military history turned into girls with missile launchers and tiny fighter jets attached to them. If you’re far gone enough to play a game like that or even just to watch a show based on it, it’s not very notable.

More notable: see above

The character designs are naturally a big draw, but some of these characters are actually pretty fun to watch for a while at least outside of the eye candy aspect certain ones carry with them. Elizabeth was a nice choice to base a manga around, being one of my favorites in the game (I may also like that “haughty on the outside, but soft on the inside” type more than I should) but more because she plays well off of others. There’s some nice comedy mixed into all the slice-of-life in Queen’s Orders, and most of it works in a cute way just as Slow Ahead! did, making me think Azur Lane should have stuck with light slice-of-life the whole time instead of trying for an action/drama with the main anime adaptation that sucked pretty badly from what I’ve heard.

As far as haughty goes, I prefer the hot smug busty fox ladies. A man can dream.

No surprise that I liked this OVA. I couldn’t really recommend Queen’s Orders to people who haven’t played the source game, so much of it relies on you knowing these characters and their stupid running squabbles. This spinoff is naturally heavy on the British faction with all its maids and tea, and maybe it could work for someone into that kind of thing who isn’t familiar with the series, as long as they’re also up for a few strong doses of fanservice, because what else would you expect? But I still think it helps to know and at least slightly give a shit about these characters, even if they are just designs made up for a game itself made to take your DLC skin money. Azur Lane has tons of characters, so why not use them?

Hey, they included Long Island, that was nice of them. She barely gets five seconds and half a speaking line, but nice anyway.

I don’t have anything to add. Queen’s Orders was pretty cool and it made me forget about my life for 45 minutes, which was nice. It’s also just satisfying to have tracked down another elusive OVA. I have a few more that I’ll probably take on sometime soon.

Until then!

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January 14, 2024

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Sky diary #7: Parade of horrors

It’s Saturday night and I’m writing this and listening to a lot of Soft Machine. Somehow I’d never heard this band, but they were right at the genesis of weird rock with their 1968 debut and the even more bizarre followup. These albums are both great examples of how to do “weird music” right — fantastic musicianship, really good beats and bass, all feeling kind of like Frank Zappa, or a precursor to later weirdos like the Residents. But their much more normal third album Third is also cool (though without any naming creativity.) Just really good jazz fusion, and right around the beginning of that new genre too. Check out Slightly All the Time.

But damn, this isn’t a music post, it’s another chapter in my lousy space adventures in No Man’s Sky. Though Soft Machine’s cosmic fusion does make a nice pairing. I should try Van der Graaf Generator next.

I return back in front of the neon yellow volcano. No question of staying here considering the environment. In fact, it’s time for another system altogether. I have plenty of warp fuel now, meaning I have even more freedom of movement than ever, and not a moment too soon.

The next system over is home to these warlike guys, who seem to be something like space Mongols aka Klingons. I guess historically warrior classes didn’t care that much for merchant classes, and even less for farmers. But who’s going to keep the economy going and feed your dumb asses if they all die?

Apparently this dude doesn’t care. I don’t know what “owley qabgar” means, but it’s probably not that positive and rosy considering the rest of his statement.

On to the planets, the first of which is a victim of “boiling monsoons.” That’s out. I scan the planet for unknown animal and plant info, since I now get stupid amounts of money for all scans thanks to a new illegal visor installation I found in another buried chest, and get the fuck out.

Another no-go. The only thing I’ll remember about this planet is this drunk animal who seems to have fallen over in a way that it can’t recover from without help. I leave without helping it.

Approaching the third planet, I learn that No Man’s Sky features oceanic worlds. This freaked me out so much that I almost just left without trying to even find any land, but I girded my loins and did find one tiny island to land on. There’s absolutely nothing on this island and no sign of very much anywhere else, either, aside from a couple of similarly barren islands in the distance. But more critically, this fucking game is really playing on one of my and many other people’s primal fear of the ocean. I guess ship crews and airline pilots have to deal with that too, but this planet seems to be almost entirely water.

Of course, there’s likely a whole world under the surface, but hell if I’m going to do that. Just being here is already bad enough without having to really try my thalassophobia. Or just my totally normal fear of drowning in a horrifying abyss.

But hey, here’s a new planet that looks the closest to Earth as I’ve found. Of course, looks can be deceiving, but upon entering the atmosphere, I found a planet that wasn’t one of the many types of Buddhist hells — it had sort of Earth-ish-looking forests and oceans and a docile enough population of animals, with just a few of those Sentinels poking their asses into my business. (I want to kill all of them.)

Could look slightly more inviting, but I’m not that picky at this point. I lay out the foundation of my new base, which I only now see has misaligned tiles, and this is going to drive me crazy now until I fix it.

And my beautiful new base, finished after some work and amateur architecture with the prefab pieces, and complete with a giant vault to keep my extra junk in so I can finally clear up some suit and ship storage space.

I don’t stick around at the base too long, however. From what I’ve played so far, the real appeal of No Man’s Sky to me is in its exploration aspect. Which I guess is the main aspect of the game anyway, so it works as intended. Since I didn’t play it upon release back when almost everyone seems to have hated the game, I have no idea what it was like then, but after traveling through about five systems now I’ve seen a wide variety of worlds with some unique hazards to them (and also some very similar hazards like the same toxin-spewing and carnivorous plants, both of which can go to hell.)

I don’t know if this was also the intent of Hello Games, but their game also doubles as pretty good horror in places. I won’t even count that oceanic planet, which is probably more of a subjective thing, but here I start finding worlds that are not merely dangerous, or even necessarily dangerous, but are visually revolting to me. Like this one covered in whatever the hell living eyeball plants these things are.

Or this planet, which might resemble one of those Buddhist hells. I only grew up being threatened with one, but sixteen of them, eight cold and eight hot? At least the damned in those hells aren’t permanently damned, but an antarakalpa definitely doesn’t seem too different from an eternity to my puny human mind that can’t wrap itself around the concept.

I don’t know if 6.2 rads are a lot, but they certainly seem to be killing me on this next planet. I still establish a small base here, however, because this is the first place I’ve been able to track down uranium. Makes sense that I’d have to endure a lot of radiation to get to it, though there’s naturally occurring uranium here on Earth and our planet isn’t totally irradiated (at least not yet.)

Toxicity seems to be equally dangerous. I don’t put a base down on this planet because it doesn’t have anything special I need, and more importantly, I don’t want to be anywhere near these god damned Cthulhu terrors, whatever they are. I guess all that toxicity led life down an interesting evolutionary path over here — it’s so toxic that everything below the sky is colored in a mix of sickly green and grayscale. No thanks. I’m sorry for this stegosaurus who has to put up with life here.

After scanning everything I can and getting several hundred thousand space dollars, I leave for the last planet in the system, where I receive a nice achievement for all my wealth:

Here I learn that not all animals in this galaxy are nice. I also learn that my mining beam doubles as a gun and that these predators can’t jump, meaning standing on top of my ship is all the defense I need against them. But just wait until I run into the predatory birds.

I’ve had enough for the moment, but No Man’s Sky seems to be working on me the way it has on others, so I’ll probably be back sometime soon. Until next time, which definitely won’t be another one of these posts, however — I’ve had enough cosmic horror for a while.

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January 12, 2024

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OVA review: Heya Camp△: Sauna to Gohan to Sanrin Bike

There, I finally added the triangle. Copypasted it from MAL, anyway. And here’s something I probably shouldn’t get away with dedicating one entire post to: a ten-minute Yamaha collaboration OVA spinoff of the short series Heya Camp, which I haven’t even covered here, itself spun off from Yuru Camp, which I have covered a few times now. But hey, doesn’t Rin look cool on that bike?

No wonder, as this OVA doubles as an advertisement just like you’d expect from a collab like this. Heya Camp△: Sauna to Gohan to Sanrin Bike (or just Sanrin Bike as I’ll call it now) follows Rin Shima as she rides her temporary Yamaha three-wheeled bike in place of her moped in the shop for maintenance.

After getting used to the feel of the bike (with some nice comments about how smooth the ride is, etc.) Rin reaches her destination, leaving the cold winter outside into a hot springs. Onsen episodes are typical for a lot of slice-of-life and romantic comedy anime, but they show up even more in Yuru Camp, though not for the reason they usually do in other shows — it’s just another part of the camping/touring experience in Japan, so it’s prominent in this series.

I’m not going on vacation without my jailbroken Amazon Fire tablet I got for 40 dollars (fuck you Bezos.) I still wouldn’t take it in the sauna, though, and Rin also thinks better of it.

Rin completes three rounds of sitting in a sauna, then a cold bath, then a rinse, which according to Rin’s friend Ena and the narrator/grandpa is the recommended method to refresh your energy. (My version of this when I was younger was bar -> three or five beers or whiskeys -> stumble to Waffle House w/ classmates at 2 am, which partly explains why I’m who I am today.)

Then, because this is Yuru Camp, of course there’s an extended sequence about food.

And look, I love this series, but if there’s one thing I hate about it, it’s giving me the craving, this time for tempura. This has been one of my favorites since I was a kid — if you haven’t had good tempura, you can’t imagine the crispy warmth of it. Eating tempura is like wrapping yourself in a blanket on a 0 degree day, and so much better with the tentsuyu to put it in. And the miso, and the pickled vegetables.

Sorry for the tangent, but this OVA spinoff of Yuru Camp has maybe the best depiction of food I’ve seen in anime. Maybe throw live action in there too. I’ll try to find someplace that makes good tempura this long weekend.

But back to the story — Rin enjoys the tempura about as much as I would while at a restaurant on her way to the campsite. First, of course, she stops by a grocery store to get more food to prepare for dinner at the site. Wouldn’t be Yuru Camp without the camp meal, and it looks great once again: toasted ham and cheese. I can’t feel the same way about ham, having never had it growing up — it doesn’t impress me when I have it now, so maybe you need to be used to it already. The sandwiches still look damn good, though.

Can’t end the episode without more praise for the Yamaha motorcycle!

That’s about it for Sanrin Bike, and it’s just as good as I’d expect. Even if it is partly an extended commercial for the Yamaha bike they were trying to sell, but what the hell — Super Cub was good, and that was partly an ultra-extended Honda commercial, and I’m even willing to look past the dogshit AC condenser in my Civic for at least the time I watched that show. So I think Yuru Camp can get a pass, and honestly, if more ads were this good, they might actually be effective.

What stuck far more in my mind, however, was the tempura. I’m still on that, can’t stop thinking about it.

Though the sauna stuck with Rin more. I’ve never been in a sauna either. Another new thing to try, looks like it may be interesting if I’m ever able to saw off the chain attaching me to my fucking desk.

As for where to find this thing if you want to watch it, good luck. Sanrin Bike is yet another one of those elusive “got released as an exclusive addon to one volume of the Japanese Blu-ray release” episodes, and of course they’re never hosted on the streaming services, I guess because they’re not “official” and/or getting licensing rights for just the one short episode would be a pain in the ass. That’s well and good for Crunchyroll, but not for us.

Thankfully, I think you can find this OVA in the usual place — if you can’t wait another three months until the third season of Yuru Camp starts airing, here’s at least something you might have missed. Until next time, when I’ll have hopefully fulfilled my craving for tempura.

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January 8, 2024

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New year notes

I’m still at the bottom of a dank dark hole right now. Mentally speaking, anyway. I have my physical health, as far as I know, and I should be grateful for that, but the last few months have been a drag on me. I couldn’t find anything to celebrate about the coming new year, but since it’s been a while since I made one of these personal depression posts, I figured now might be the time. It doesn’t matter anyway, so here are a few disconnected thoughts and plans I’ve got going, all escapism/media-related.

I’m 2/3rds of the way through the single anime I watched last season, one that barely anyone else seems to have noticed: Stardust Telepath aka Hoshikuzu Telepath. Assuming the show doesn’t suffer from a third act fumble (how’s that for a mixed metaphor) it’s a pretty damn nice slice-of-life if you’re into that genre. Proper review coming once I work up the energy to finish it, but I can say right now that if you liked Bocchi the Rock at all, this is kind of like that, but involving model rocketry instead of music. I’m sure I’ll get into it in depth when I manage to give this show a real look, but I picked this series up partly because I was into that hobby myself as a kid, back when I was in middle/early high school before I started to understand that my dreams would come to nothing.

But if you want some positivity to make up for my negativity, I tentatively recommend this show (again, probably removing that tentatively once I actually finish the damn thing.) It’s amazing to me that someone managed to put up the entire first episode on YouTube, but fuck Crunchyroll — it’s their problem, not mine. Go file your copyright claim, assholes.

Speaking of anime I plan to watch for the subject matter, here’s a new one about mahjong. The Way of Pon / Pon no Michi looks like yet another high school club hijinks show. This has turned out to be one of my favorite anime subgenres — looking through the stuff I’ve watched, most of these shows have hit for me. And since I know how to play riichi mahjong and enjoy it (though I’m not that good at it) I figure Way of Pon is probably a good bet too. I hear it has Akagi references in it, which will probably work for me the same way those pop culture references in Marvel movies work for a lot of people over here. (I’m too much of a god damn weeb to leave my subculture bubble, myself, and I wouldn’t want to leave it even if I could, but I hope you guys are enjoying those superhero movies too.)

This show looks a lot more Saki than Akagi, but that’s no problem for me. Akagi was extremely intense, and maybe I don’t really need that kind of intensity right now. I’m content watching anime that doesn’t get much attention but hopefully has some nice stuff to recommend it.

On to a show that I have hazy memories of seeing in syndication as a kid, even though it was about a bunch of adults being neurotic and depressed at a bar. I kept getting this fucking video recommended to me, so I started it, and it’s pretty well put together. I remember Cheers and Frasier both being pretty good, and Kelsey Grammer has always stood out in that role as an extremely insecure psychiatrist who diagnoses his patients’ problems but can’t manage to deal with his own very well.

I don’t know if I’ll watch this whole thing, since it is two and a half hours long, but credit to the maker for putting the effort in. It took me back to a time when we watched sitcoms on TV because that’s all there was to watch. Yes, even shitty ones like that horrible show with Charlie Sheen as a pianist, though that was one you could work up the effort to get up from the couch to turn off even if the remote had rolled under it. Cheers is well before my time, and you could probably say the same of the 90s series Frasier given that I didn’t get a lot of the jokes about his pretentions (his love of the embarrassing musical The Mikado alone is good enough) but I still connect with this somehow.

And man, Diane was cute as hell. Even if some people might have found her character annoying — there’s a fine line between cute and annoying sometimes, and certainly some of that annoyance at least was intentional given how many issues these characters had and clashed over. I’d probably end up more like Frasier than Sam did, though, have to be honest about that.

Speaking of stuff on TV I remember from my childhood, apparently Mystery Science Theater 3000 is running an eternal marathon of old episodes on its YouTube channel, which is great to see. I dropped in on this stream a few times, and it was nice to relive some of those old episodes. For the younger generation reading this, MST3K was a series about one guy trapped on a satellite by an evil mad scientist who tortures him by showing him bad movies that he and the robots he built react to with jokes. Then that guy escaped and was replaced by a new guy, and the mad scientist was replaced by his mother, also a mad scientist.

Though maybe you kids know the show in its reboot/remake form. I haven’t seen any of those episodes because I’m incredibly resistant to change. I do think Joel and Mike were both entertaining, though, and I’ve heard good things about the new series wherever it’s airing, so check this stream out and also let me know if that new one stands up to it if you’ve watched it.

And finally, of course I’m not ending a post like this without the VTuber corner. A poignant one this time, too — long-time Nijisanji EN streamer Pomu Rainpuff, an old favorite, is graduating (or in layman terms, retiring) later this month. Pomu is one of the greats of EN VTubing and did a lot to build this very new medium in the West together with her colleagues at Nijisanji and the Hololive EN crews. People can speculate about lousy management at that company branch — I guess I am here as well — but it’s a lot better to just focus on the positive here. Smile because it happened, as they say. For the time being, check her out while she’s still around if it sounds like your thing.

That’s all for now, so until next time, whenever that is.

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January 7, 2024

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Sky diary #6: Station to station

Well wouldn’t you know it, but I lied to you again: the next post is more of this No Man’s Sky stuff. I’ll see how long I can carry this. There’s so much damn work to do right now, and together with my very low morale, I’m finding it hard to do much of anything that I’m not required to do by the people who pay me.

I’m also not in much of a mood to be romantic about fictional space travel. There’s just too much else going on with me right now. But hell if No Man’s Sky doesn’t do a pretty good job of setting a somber mood sometimes, even if I have no idea why I’m meant to care about whoever Artemis is. Hopefully they’re still around, for their sake. I came across this message shortly after my misadventures with those Sentinel assholes — maybe this pilot also got mixed up with them?

But my question is answered immediately after leaving that planet, back into the orange juice zone — some guy contacts me on my radio, addressing me as Artemis and asking me whether it’s first or last, once again like I’m supposed to know what the hell that means.

I assume the answer doesn’t matter, because either way, I get an invitation to visit a space station that materializes out of nowhere in front of me. Suddenly No Man’s Sky is getting all weird on me — with the exception of those Lovecraft abominations I met in part 2 of this series, I haven’t seen anything so strange in this game.

Speaking of strange, I’m greeted first by this catfish brain tentacle alien. I might be terrified if it weren’t so friendly. I get the sense from this and other station residents/visitors that this is about the friendliest place in the galaxy possibly. Maybe I need to be more accepting of dramatically different-looking lifeforms here, a nice lesson to take away (and credit to Hello Games for making more than just the standard “human but green skin or has head ridges” type of alien, Star Trek style. Though Star Trek is pretty cool in general otherwise, at least what I’ve seen of it.)

I have no idea what most of these people are going on about with their mystical-sounding talk, but my best guess is this station can travel instantly between distant spots by creating a wormhole and that it can maybe beckon certain pilots to it somehow, which seems to be what it’s done with me. The game features warp travel between star systems at well faster than the speed of light, totally impossible according to what we know about physics currently, so the idea of pulling a wormhole out of your ass might be reasonable in this universe.

After poking around the station for a while and finding extremely helpful shops that took my stuff and gave me more useful stuff in exchange, I left, but not before hanging out in the lounge here.

This looks like what the late 90s thought the future would look like, which is pretty cool. Maybe the Hello Games guys also grew up in the 90s like me and remember that aesthetic.

But there’s no drink service here sadly. Nowhere at all to get a damn drink. I could get wasted in Yakuza but I can’t here? So much for realism.

I leave the station, now with the ability to call it back into existence wherever and whenever I want, which is extremely convenient — just like if I could summon a QuikTrip into existence anywhere I liked. If only I could summon a Waffle House too and then die from heart congestion three years later, now that would be something. For now, however, it’s time to go to still another system, since I think I’ve exhausted my explorations in this one. I have the fuel for my hyperdrive, I have my base in this system established, and it’s time to strike out into wherever the hell I’m headed. I barely have any point of reference for what any of these systems are like, so I pick one at random out of the several in range.

I exit into a new system with an alarming level of conflict, which is exactly what I wasn’t looking for. I couldn’t escape into this giant octohedron fast enough to hide from the conflict. This thing looks like an Evangelion angel, and I don’t feel good about that.

And what the fuck is this. Suddenly this game is a Megami Tensei crossover, featuring YHVH in the form of a giant red liquid metal ball. I have no idea what it wants from me — I guess submission, but it didn’t make me submit to its will or anything, and I was free to leave the station.

Just a word here about the visual design: I like a lot of it, and especially places like this space station, which is controlled by a faction the guys on that last anomaly station I was on seem to mistrust. I can’t see why; this place seems perfectly normal and not ominous at all with its god-emperor liquid metal orb that demands submission. I wonder if I’ll have to tangle with these guys at some point. Though if they can help me kill those bastard asshole Sentinels then I’ll gladly join them instead.

Time to explore this system, which doesn’t start off on a positive note with this dead planet devoid of anything but rocks. Rocks are still useful for their raw ingredients, which provide a lot of building material, but the lack of an atmosphere hits your life support system hard. There’s not much for me here, in any case.

Not so with the next planet. I’m not even paying attention to the randomized names at this point (the game just likes to stick Roman numerals on some of them as if that means a damn thing — “Taunce VII” or whatever it was implies there are at least six more planets in a system orbiting a star named Taunce, which wasn’t the case in that system — but this is just nitpicking on my part.) So here’s this new planet I’ve come across, which looks even more like a Dr. Seuss setting than the last habitable one I found.

This time the lakes are made of something more like a bisque than tomato soup, maybe. Fine with me. Since this planet seems to be temperate, I put down roots here as well. Actually habitable planets seem to be few and fair between so far, considering the various dead and either overly hot and cold worlds I’ve visited, where going outside requires the constant resupply of life support systems with sodium (there’s another question about how I’m just collecting pure elements like sodium, oxygen, and carbon, but I’ll chalk that up to extremely advanced technology; I can buy that much at least.) This planet does have a slightly toxic atmosphere, but I’ll damn well take what I can get at this point.

Lucky for me, I’ve collected so much carbon that I’m able now to quickly build a decent lakeside house. This is so much better than anything I could possibly afford in real life that it makes me sad, especially as I sit in my shitty apartment. But that’s a complaint I share with so many people right now that I won’t bother talking about it any more.

So this all seems pretty idyllic, or at least it did for a while, as I ran around this Dr. Seuss world finding buried treasure with my scanner and identifying rocks with an apparently illegal scanner I dug up that nets me 20,000 in this game’s currency for each mineral discovered — I have no idea who’s paying that much for rock discoveries, but I won’t ask questions, since money is now not a concern at all for me. Things were looking up. And then it started raining.

It’s nice to know that this superheated rain makes my jetpack more efficient, since it’s also quickly killing me. It’s very easy to shield yourself from these extreme conditions even if you’re out in the field — just dig a hole with your laser and hide in it until the storm passes. But it’s annoying to have to hide in a hole and wait it out, so I make a break for my new house, which provides protection from the 200 degree plus temperature.

Still, this planet doesn’t feel quite as promising as it did before. I’ve established yet another base here, but maybe it’s time to check out the remaining planets in this system. Like this one:

That’s a bust. Though I think I have felt weather pretty close to 138 degrees in real life — at least 115. Go to any Gulf country in the height of summer, or Death Valley in California. Or pretty soon, the way things are going, just about anywhere that isn’t a polar region. I wonder how land prices are in northern Canada?

This planet sucks for habitability purposes too. Cool neon yellow volcanoes, though.

Until next time, though I have no idea what I’ll post then. I’m not making promises anymore. This year isn’t starting out so well for anyone, it seems, but I hope you can be more positive than I am today.

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December 25, 2023

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Sky diary #5: Honeypot

Happy Christmas to everyone here. I’m not in much of a celebratory mood these days, but I hope you can find some comfort this season. There’s no comfort in Bethlehem right now, but I’ve exhausted myself thinking (and arguing) about that issue.

This is partly to hopefully excuse the fact that I’m only writing these lazy, rambling let’s play posts right now. There is at least one review on its way, of an anime that’s flown well under the radar this season, sadly, though not surprisingly. I’m looking forward to giving that some deserved attention, but until I can do that properly, I feel the need to keep posting.

So it’s more No Man’s Sky yet again, here outside my frozen Antarctic base. Like A Place Further Than the Universe, except I have no friends. Though that might not be quite true, since some fucking mysterious space anomaly keeps trying to contact me, sending me broken messages. I’m sure that won’t get me into any kind of trouble out here.

Time to explore even more, like this planet that’s entirely made of the badlands from Western movies, along with these strange cylindrical rocks or tree stumps or something. This planet kind of sucks, though it’s certainly not the worst I’ve been to. This might even be in the top half so far, which is pretty damn sad.

There are plenty more planets to check out, however, like this one:

The ship’s scanner has a nice planetary analysis function that indicates what resources you can expect to find. Copper is common and rusted metal is apparently useless, but what was I looking for to make those margaritas? Salt. This planet looks like it might be entirely made of salt, in fact, which might not be great news for my health if I land here.

Though maybe not as bad for my health as going after that fugitive I’m being alerted to. Maybe once I’m better equipped, I’ll try life as a bounty hunter.

No, it’s an ice world. I did find salt here, but its many tall volcanoes are the planet’s most prominent feature. This isn’t a very friendly place to make a home, but I do anyway, because I know I’ll need more salt sometime.

It also has those whispering eggs on it.

I’m sure building a portal between this world and the others I’ve visited, including the space stations, is a great idea. No space tentacle monsters are crawling through that to murder me in my sleep or worse.

Note also that this is marked as a “forsaken planet.” I’ve found verdant planets, empty planets, and forsaken ones like this, but I’m not sure what exactly “forsaken” means in this context. Forsaken by its former inhabitants, meaning I might find some ruins here if I look around long enough? Or maybe it means it’s been forsaken by God — that would explain why this unholy abomination is present.

While peacefully minding my own fucking business and leaving this salt/horror planet to find other worlds, another group of pirates showed up to attack me. I tried fleeing from them, but with my high-speed drive disabled by their jammers, I couldn’t shake them. Well, the joke was on them: I have autotargeting and aiming capabilities, and their armor was still trash. Maybe they’re using aluminum foil or something.

The automated combat still feels lazy to me — not much satisfaction to winning a fight. But I got a nice explosion, at least.

After the battle, I returned home briefly, but then realized my house was empty and I got no benefits from entering it. I never use the toilet or sleep. Please save me from this existence.

Looking cool, though. My house looks like a café that makes that pour-over coffee, the kind hipsters make in those weird chemistry flasks. I used to live in a hipster college town, and I really miss that café. They could make a real cappuccino. Starbucks my ass.

But the story has to continue, and I follow it to a distress signal on one of the crappier planets from a downed ship. Plot stuff happens, and I’m on my way again.

But not before having to reload an old save. When I visited this wreck, the game gave me the option to claim it. I assumed this meant I could claim the ship for myself in addition to my current one and maybe sell it for scrap or something. Selecting this option apparently gave me possession of this ship that I couldn’t do much with, but I then lost my original ship’s marker, and since I parked over 1 km away and ran here through a wilderness with no landmarks, I couldn’t find my way back.

Either this was caused by me being an idiot or the game being unreasonable. Claiming another ship doesn’t seem like it should make me surrender my old one or lose track of it. Maybe I need to read the manual (I miss old game manuals.)

After correcting my dumb mistake, I went back to read the signal again, then headed off towards this giant facility in the desert. I’d only seen abandoned or desolate planets until now, so it was nice to find some activity outside of a space station. Even if this place turned out to be a pirate base where I’d get murdered and have my ship stolen. At least it would be something different.

But no, it’s just an airport or something. I expect I’ll be trading with these merchants if I play very long, though I don’t know how they expect their customers to stand in -76 degree weather. This guy probably has a space heater back there.

After making some acquaintances at the airport or factory or whatever it is, I head back to my ship, but not before stopping to loot another abandoned settlement. Is it abandoned? Maybe not, considering the nearby facility is active, but nobody was there when I showed up and their doors were unlocked, so.

Sadly, my string of thefts wouldn’t go unpunished. When I returned to my ship, I followed another signal to some sort of treasure I’d gotten a map to somehow. This rare artifact was an orb — whether it had some function beyond just being valuable I have no idea, because the moment I picked the fucking thing up, those little Sentinel robot assholes put out an alert, summoning the police to hunt me down.

I thought briefly that I might be able to wipe these guys up like I’d done the pirates, but no such luck — the bastards had far stronger armor and better firepower, and they just kept coming. I gave up soon enough, knowing I was lost and cursing whoever the fuck put that orb on that pedestal. Just look at how it was sitting there. It’s obvious now that this was a trap, one I might have avoided if I’d been smarter about the situation. Lessons to learn for next time, anyway. Though it would be nice if I could somehow get away from these Sentinel shits, because I hate them so much. Maybe once I upgrade my firepower.

But just who the fuck are they, anyway? These dicks have been poking around me on almost every planet I’ve visited so far.

Nice of the game to give me the achievement after I had to reload, anyway. Until next time!

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December 20, 2023

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Sky diary #4: Stupid interview questions

No Man’s Sky again, back in the central settlement of Drammen, Norway I founded last post. I managed to get enough wood to expand my somewhat pathetic house into a slightly respectable one, now with a second story and a sort of ramp/deck thing. It’s still dark as hell inside despite my placing lamps and glowy plants in there, though. Apparently these assholes can’t afford better than 40 watt bulbs.

Exploring my surroundings, I find the lake isn’t dangerous to swim in. Whatever that crap in there is, it’s not toxic. Looks like tomato soup from this angle, in fact, one of my five favorite soups probably (alongside lobster bisque, mushroom, French onion, and cod chowder. Subscribe to my upcoming soup-dedicated blog.)

See also the dinosaurs. I don’t know my dinosaurs very well beyond the basics, but these look like they’d fit in one of those crap-looking Jurassic Park sequels. It’s almost impressive how, excepting the first movie which I think still holds up decently, the makers managed to make dinosaurs of all things so damn boring.

Aside from the usual mineral deposits and resources to extract, I find these Dr. Seuss looking trees. The whole area looks like a Dr. Seuss setting a bit, but it’s still the best planet by far I’ve come across.

But why can’t we find a better one even than this? It’s a relatively safe planet, but the toxicity is still a little too high, and there are plenty of resources I just couldn’t find here. I had some fuel in the tank, so I decided to take off and check out some still-undiscovered worlds in this system.

Like this entirely snowy mountain range planet. Here in the US, for some reason some of our worst beers like Coors love using the Rockies as an advertising gimmick, like making their drink seem colder makes it also seem less shitty. That doesn’t work. Anyone who’s had ice-cold Popov out of a plastic jug can tell you that from experience (i.e. every living American college student. God, that stuff was piss.)

My point is this planet reminds me of shitty mass-produced American beer so far, and that’s a bad sign.

And of course more god damn farting plants. What is it with these things.

After doing some exploring, I decided to establish another base here. Not because it’s all that nice, but because this is the first cold world I’ve found, and I figure these places have their own unique resources to collect that I might need. A new base means a new name, however, and this time I used something I still fucking need to watch as a reminder to myself:

One of the classic potentially offputting anime titles, and a perfect name for a base. I guess. It’s really a little unwieldy, but though nothing compared to modern light novel titles. “I Died and Reincarnated as the Princesses’ Horse” etc. Hell, if they made that isekai, I might actually watch it.

Of course, the moment I lay claim to this territory, some strangers fly overhead in their spacecraft, violating my sovereign airspace.

I can’t sue them for trespass, since this system doesn’t seem to have any courts or laws, but on the upside that also means I can probably kill them and get away with it. At least I could if I had anything more than one sad little ship with just enough firepower to shoot down a few poorly armored pirates.

But just in case all this excitement is giving you the wrong impression, let me ground you. This has been at least half of my experience with No Man’s Sky:

Shooting rocks and plants with my extraction beam for resources, excitement. Though again, I guess that’s a lot of what Minecraft is as well, and there’s a lot of understandable love for that game — and still another obvious comparison between the two games here. Not that it either helps or hurts No Man’s Sky for me, since I’m too old to have had any nostalgia over Minecraft, but the building options in that game seem to be far more interesting. Then again, I’m not that far along in this one.

Before leaving this ice planet, one look at my newest base with its fancy flag and trailer as the only shelter. Naturally, there’s nothing inside aside from a few plants, no furniture at all. Let me bring a damn chair down from the local space station at least, since they’re not using most of them.

Speaking of, back at the station. This is the only place I’ve found so far where I can buy and sell goods, but I like the decor and feel as well. I never minded flying that much back when I did a lot more of it — I always liked hanging around at the airport, sitting in the lounges (not the fancy ones that I wasn’t admitted to anyway, the ones at the gates) and watching planes land and take off. I do wonder who the hell owns and maintains these stations, though, since this one looks exactly like the one I visited in the previous system, even down to the layout. I hope they didn’t just copy-paste these damn things all over the game.

This other Portal 2 ball acts as the interstellar marketplace. It’s good to know I have a place to buy dirt. I can probably just get some dirt on one of the planets I’ve visited if I need it, but maybe this is special dirt for gardening or something.

After going through the usual talking to aliens and exchanging our cultures (note, I have no idea what my character’s culture is, however) I took off again and headed out to possible the shittiest planet I’ve found so far after the toxic tutorial planet. This place is truly a dump. Where are all the nice waterfalls and flowers and whatever? I didn’t love Avatar all that much, but something like the planet in that movie. Maybe that’s around here somewhere and I just have to find it.

But I didn’t come here just on a lark. I was following yet another signal, this one to some sort of phallic-looking shrine. Apparently there’s a message for me there. Why these god-aliens or whatever they are can’t just contact me on my ship’s radio is beyond me, but I guess they have to be all mysterious about it.

The Heart of the Anomaly I have to assume is related to the Eye of the Anomaly. I wonder if I’ll have to fight each of them at some point and then have a final battle when they’ve all joined together, only the final form is somehow weaker than even the weakest individual part. That’s a Grandia II reference if anyone else reading had a Dreamcast back in the day. That was a damn good JRPG, even if the plot got a little silly at points.

As for this anomaly, I’m going to lose my patience with it pretty quickly if it keeps asking me cryptic job interview questions like this and others. “If you were an animal, what kind would you be?” An eyelash mite, and I’m not explaining that answer either. Asshole companies with their bullshit. Maybe Anomaly is a tech company or a fucking law firm.

Back home, and away from No Man’s Sky again for a day or two. I feel I’m getting near a point where I can predict how this game will go, and I don’t know if that’s in a totally positive direction yet. Flying around trying to solve a mystery in space makes it hard not to compare it to that other popular space exploration game, even if it’s a very different game in every way so far apart from those elements, but I’ll give No Man’s Sky all the due it deserves either way once I’m done with it. Until next time.

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December 15, 2023

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Sky diary #3: Welcome home

It’s No Man’s Sky time again, oh yeah. I hope you wanted more of it. Finally I can make it to a new system that hopefully won’t suck so bad.

I exited warp speed into a star system infused with orange juice. That might be a good start — all I need now is a vodka nebula or something to make 10 to the 30 cubic meters of cosmic screwdriver.

But I was distracted from my alcoholic thoughts by some pirates or something who attacked my ship as I was approaching a space station near my entry point. Killing them was pretty easy once I recovered my senses — more or less point and click and the rest was automated. I don’t know if combat will continue being this easy, but I won’t assume so.

Once those assholes were dead, I proceeded to the station, where I met a lot of guys wearing Daft Punk helmets and learned bits of a different new language from them. This seems to be the standard experience at these stations.

Taking a break. It’s nice to be able to sit in chairs, even if it doesn’t have any practical use. I can’t escape my pressure suit, but at least I don’t have to stand all the time, though a fucking cappuccino or something would be nice. Why no coffee shop? And now that I’m sitting here, I realize I look like Daft Punk too.

Before I leave the station, I’m tempted to jump down this hole into whatever this is. Looks like a frame from a late 90s-early 00s movie theater pre-film animation. I know that’s bizarrely specific, but look it up on YouTube.

The first planet I chose to land on doesn’t look very promising. Looks like a Tim Burton movie world, and I don’t need to live on one of those. The surface is home to various dinosaurs with more randomized names, some okay-sounding and some stupid. This was about the point I realized far too late that I could make money by scanning new animals and plants like this “Honeymafoe”, which is a pretty good name.

Ultimately, this planet is another bust, at least for now. It’s got 1.3 rads in its atmosphere, which is 1.3 rads more than I’m comfortable with, and even if it didn’t, I just don’t like the look of this place.

But all’s not lost. After leaving this nightmare world, I flew to a far larger planet nearby, maybe the planet to this moon. Upon landing, I found a temperate climate, grass, and even more toxin-spewing plants that I assume exist in some form on every planet in this fucking game. There’s even a rainbow to welcome me. This must be my new home.

70 degrees? Perfect weather too. There’s nobody around aside from the usual plant and animal life that pretend I’m not even here, but that’s fine with me. Even better — I didn’t come here to make friends, aside from the friends I’m making on those space stations. No, I can be happy in total solitude here, even if it does have these weird red lakes that I’m afraid to swim in.

This being by far the best planet I’ve landed on since starting my journey, I immediately decided to plant my flag here. To set up a base, you need to build a few tools including a computer that require you to gather even more materials, so after the usual scraping around I was ready to begin. But first, a name better than the “Adfornj Base” the game thought up. Sorry if your name is Adfornj, but it’s not the name for my base.

This time, instead of using a meme joke from a 20 year-old anime, I decided to pick a name by searching for a random city on Earth. Not having a globe handy to do that “spin the globe and go where your finger lands” game, I went to some “random city generator” site and got this:

Drammen is a city just southwest of Oslo. I’ve never been to Norway, so I don’t know whether this Drammen resembles the Earth one, but any Norwegians reading, please let me know.

Pretty sure Norway doesn’t have dinosaurs either, but this planet does. They ignore me like everything else, though I still take care not to get trampled by them when they run around.

Another one of my neighbors is this Shrek slug guy. It’s cheerful, which is a nice attribute for a giant creature that could probably easily crush me if it felt like it.

After getting my bearings, I finally build a proper house in a place that’s not depressingly awful.

It’s still more of a pathetic shack than a house, but at least less pathetic than my last shack. And this time my surroundings are pleasant and temperate, so maybe I can do some work outside expanding this doublewide into a mansion. Does anyone remember those doublewide homes? Was that just an American thing?

A shorter post, but that’s it for now. I hope this new post format isn’t too annoying if you’re not into it. This isn’t taking away from anything else I’m working on, anyway. So until next time, avoid those toxic plants.

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December 12, 2023

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Historical drama film review: Cromwell

Continuing a tradition with the Japanese poster this time. I love this poster design too.

I know I started that Hollow Crown watchthrough a while back that I’m only three films into, but I’ll try to justify covering this one in between, because it’s sort of relevant in some sense. Or maybe I’m just bullshitting, but it’s fine — this one’s about a king of England too, so it’s close enough.

Cromwell is a 1970 big costume/war drama detailing the events of the English Civil War of the 1640s, when the country was torn between King Charles I and the rogue Parliament. Or Charles was the rogue one, which turned out to be the case as far as victor’s justice goes when he lost and got his head cut off in 1649 (sorry for the spoilers.) I’ve had my eye on this film for a long time, since the war is interesting to me for the power struggle and legal history behind it, and also for its legendary leads: Richard Harris as Oliver Cromwell and Alec Guinness as the doomed King Charles.

I should preface all the stuff below by saying as an American, I didn’t grow up with this war in my cultural consciousness the way the American Revolution and Civil War very much were. Being neither English, Scottish, Irish, nor Welsh (though I have some distant cousins in all those countries like many Americans do) and neither Catholic nor Protestant, I just don’t have a dog in the race.

That said, I don’t think Cromwell is a great film. It doesn’t seem like a lot of people do considering the ratings I’ve seen, so maybe that’s not a hot take anyway, but this movie did have some major problems. If it weren’t for Harris and Guinness especially carrying the entire film on absolute talent, or for the nice costumes and sets, there likely wouldn’t be much reason to bother with Cromwell at all.

But first, the basic plot: King Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland is pissed because he needs money to wage war in Ireland against his own probably pretty unwilling subjects, but to get that money he needs to convene Parliament. At this time, Parliament wasn’t anywhere near the powerful institution it would become starting in the next century, but it already had a long history as a body of England’s top guys representing the lords and the commons and approving certain vital measures presented by the monarch. This was a serious problem for Charles, however, because Parliament was pissed off at him already for his imposition of heavy taxes and arbitrary rule, and so if they were going to open the purse, it was going to be on condition that he be less of a shithead absolutist.

Charles wasn’t into that, however. In response to Parliament’s demands, he dissolved the body and ended up at war with them and their supporters, one of whom was a member of Parliament named Oliver Cromwell. This guy was a landed gentry type and a major Puritan, which meant he even hated the moderate Protestantism of Charles’ Church of England. Even worse for the Puritans, Charles had a French Catholic wife and was suspected of being a Catholic sympathizer. There’s a lot more to the religious aspect of the conflict, almost none of which figures into Cromwell, so forget about any of that high/low church controversy, the major role the Scots played in that controversy, or anything at all about William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury who also got his head cut off.

Cromwell ended up one of the leaders of a rebellion against the king, or the legitimate government’s fight against the rebel king as Parliament saw it. After a lot of fighting and failed diplomacy by the king, including trying to get a Catholic army from Ireland to quell Parliament, he ended up on trial for treason and convicted, sentenced to death, and beheaded (and see also King Louis XVI a century later.) Then a few years later, Cromwell was called in by Parliament, which as it turns out was full of assholes who couldn’t govern properly without an executive, and so he became Lord Protector of the new Commonwealth of England. The end.

Except there’s a lot more to it than that, like the fact that Cromwell did serve as Lord Protector for several years after Charles’ execution and that he did a hell of a lot of war crimes in Ireland that he’s remembered for there to this day. Cromwell ends far too early to touch any of that material sadly. Granted, there’s only so much you can put into a single film like this, but maybe instead of Cromwell the film should have been titled Charles I, because I think he’s more central to the film’s events than Cromwell is. That’s all aside from the other simplifications of the actual history, making Cromwell’s early role in the war larger than it actually was and doing weird stuff with the chronology.

Cromwell kind of reminds me of Richard II, about another king of England who tried to invade Ireland by taking money from people who got pissed off at him and killed him. All the more so since Shakespeare also wasn’t that concerned with historical accuracy, himself fucking around with timelines, events, and entire characters to tell the story he wanted: if he hadn’t died in the reign of Charles’ father King James, Shakespeare probably could have written a Charles I that might have been something like this in terms of the story structure.

But then character motivation is also hard to tell at times, maybe partly because of this compressed timeline. Why did the king agree to execute his buddy the Earl of Stafford, for example? That was a major event leading up to the war, but here it takes about two minutes in the film for the king to sign that warrant, and it’s not clear really why or how he was made to agree to it when it’s extensively documented in real life. The film’s battle tactics don’t make a lot of sense either as they play out, but since I’m not at all a military history guy I can’t say much about that, except that that Battle of Naseby I wrote about back in my review of King Crimson’s Lizard, partly a concept album about that battle, is also featured in this film. They even have Prince Rupert himself here, played by Timothy Dalton years before his James Bond fame:

I’m still not a fan of either this film or of Lizard, but damn if there isn’t some good acting here at least. Despite my problems with it, I think Cromwell is worth watching if only to see Richard Harris being really pissed off for an entire movie and to hear Alec Guinness talking about his authority and divine right, rolling his Rs in a way I could never get down to the disappointment of my Spanish teacher at grade school. Both were legends, and of course in any one of these clips you’ll see comments like “Dumbledore kills Obi-wan”, so hopefully the kids are getting to know their deeper bodies of work. The film also does at least address some of the struggle around whether countries need kings at all, with even a little mention of the proto-socialist Leveller movement that Parliament’s leadership crushed (though if this had gotten a full miniseries treatment like I, Claudius, that could and should have had near a full episode dedicated to it.)

I can’t address the religious controversy stuff too much, since I don’t have a dog in that race either, but I know the film glosses over a lot of both the religious and legal aspects of the conflict between king and Parliament. For a nice overview of both, I recommend Historia Civilis’ videos on YouTube here and here. The trial of Charles I was especially significant in creating a sort-of precedent, even if Charles’ son Charles II did end up coming back and blowing up the English Commonwealth shortly after when he won back his father’s throne in 1660 — even then, he was never able to exercise the kind of absolute authority his father attempted to grab.

Though considering his reputation as the Party King, Charles II might just have been too concerned with getting piss drunk with his many mistresses to care about that authority, but he was wise not to try to take it anyway since neither the common people nor the lords were putting up with an arbitrary monarch anymore, and especially not a Catholic one (see Charles II’s brother James II, who became king after Charles’ death because all his royal brother’s kids were bastards — remember those many mistresses — but who was also a barely secret Catholic and ended up ousted in favor of his possibly gay Dutch Protestant son-in-law. History takes some strange turns.)

Now that’s some diplomacy. I’d take Luxembourg, seems like a nice place.

Anyway, I said it would be a slow month, but I think when I get deep into a depressive state, on a long low end of that wave like I feel now, I always end up writing a lot more than usual. It’s the best distraction I have outside of work, and lack of sleep probably helps. Don’t take me as a role model, kids. Until next time, whether it’s more anime, history, or No Man’s Sky, I hope you’ll return.

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December 9, 2023

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Sky diary #2: Unwelcome visitor

Back in No Man’s Sky, and back to my waste of a planet. Though since last time, I have found enough resources to build this computer somehow that allowed me to name my base. I wanted to give it a welcoming name, even if it is just a shitty shack and a couple of trailers in the desert. (Points if you get it, though you can’t spend them anywhere.)

After scouring the area and drilling for copper and other metals, minerals, and gases, I managed to brew some spaceship fuel. This seems like a dangerous proposition, but I guess my character is proficient at this kind of stuff being a space pilot.

I also made a small addition to my house, from two floor panels in area to four. Truly living the good life now. Also see this fun camera angle, staring at my character’s flat ass, the poor guy. Or maybe that suit is just too bulky.

But now it’s finally off into space again. I’d like to find a better planet than the last two busts, but first I need to visit a local space station. But even before that, let’s appreciate the nice graphics. I’m not much of a graphics guy, unless we’re talking not ultrarealism but rather specific art styles, but this does look pleasant. I like the color in space above the atmosphere, though I’m not sure how accurate that is to real life. Maybe we’re in a gas cloud or something?

I also wonder whether I can fly into the local star. I did that quite a few times in a certain other space exploration sim, but in this one it seems like you need to very deliberately fly into it given the far larger scale.

There might be time for self-immolation later, but for now, the station, which looks like one of those talking balls from Portal 2.

This thing also looks like one of the Portal 2 balls. Must be important with its central positioning in this station, with the light shining down on it as though it were God’s himself. This looks more like a futuristic temple the more I think about it.

This station is home to a lot of this space bird civilization, the Gek. I’ve begun picking up their words from talking to other pilots in the station and from mysterious stones back on my current home planet, so I might be able to manage a conversation soon, but not yet.

But finally I get to customize my look. There are plenty of options here, though none that let me see what I look like under the visor. Maybe that’s for the best, since I don’t seem to have any opportunity ever to take it off — I live in an eternal hell trapped in this pressure suit. I have to assume there’s some eating and evacuation mechanism in there like real-life astronauts have. Maybe it’s better not to think about such details.

My new look. All pink to really stand out in any environment, and all slimmed down to the point that my character now matches me in probably not being able to physically cope with life as a space colonizer.

I really don’t know about this language-learning mechanic. I don’t mind the concept, but it feels awkward to have to talk to everyone on a space station just to learn one word each from them. Also not sure whether “DESTRUCTION” is the best way to start to show that I’m friendly to these penguin reptile aliens, but this one didn’t seem to mind.

The station core, or the central computer more or less. Some asshole just wandering in off the street like me probably shouldn’t even have access to this, much less have the ability to get special permissions with a code. I guess people out here are pretty trusting.

Back to the desert planet now, which is pretty easy since I now have a teleportation device that links directly to that station. I’m not sure whether this works on Star Trek “scramble your particles” rules — the problem with that system has been discussed a lot already — but at least it’s convenient.

My focus is now not on expanding my base any further but finding a better planet. That signal I need to locate will hopefully help me out with getting me out of this star system. But on the way, I stopped by an old manufacturing plant that also seemed abandoned. There has to be good loot in a place like that, and if it’s abandoned, then hey — there aren’t any laws about not breaking and entering on this planet that I know of.

I tried shooting the door with my mining beam, which was both totally ineffective and triggered automated drone guards nearby to start chasing me.

Thankfully, the sprint button helped me escape from the armed drones, who gave up looking for me once I was over the ridge. I guess I need more tools before I can raid these old facilities and properly defend myself from security.

But I finally found that signal, coming from the wreckage of a crashed ship. Can’t say I’m too invested in this story yet with the total lack of actual characters in this game so far, but maybe that will change? More importantly for now, I also received plans for a hyperdrive, which is exactly what I needed. After some more boring rock-shooting with my mining tool, I got the stuff I needed to make this advanced engine, installed it in my ship, and was off once again, though still without the special warp fuel I need to use it.

Before I can leave the system, it’s off to still another planet in this one, this time with almost no atmosphere and low gravity. I wouldn’t have bothered with this place, but it was home to yet another signal the game wanted me to check on before I could progress. Here I found another abandoned and wrecked facility inhabited by a new alien lifeform.

That doesn’t sound good. I’m not sure I want any dealings with whatever “The Eye of the Anomaly” is, but it sounds like this Eye is interested in me unfortunately. It also seems to have tentacles, which is even more unnerving. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if No Man’s Sky turns out to be a cosmic horror game, or at least if I can opt in to play that section of the game if it exists, because that sounds like more fun than just a giant sandbox.

I didn’t want to use the term Lovecraftian, since that term is probably very overused these days, but when I see a “Whispering Egg” attached to another tentacle I can’t help it. And of course, when I saw this thing, I reacted in the only way I knew how: by shooting it.

That was yet another mistake. Multiple tentacle creatures emerged to defend their friend, or maybe it was all one entity buried under this lunar landscape. I didn’t stick around to find out, using my sprint button and my jetpack (which I haven’t mentioned until now somehow, but it’s very useful as well especially in low gravity) and fleeing back to my ship to get the hell off this rock. I got what I came for anyway — apparently all I needed to do here was read that mysterious message.

Fleeing back to my temporary home, but very soon I’ll find a better place to settle down in once I make this antimatter I need to fuel that warp drive and get out of here. Hopefully the grass really is greener in the next system over.

Never mind, the whole region is green on the map, even though that doesn’t seem to match up with anything I’ve found so far. Next time, it’s off to this Sunanj system.

Dec	JAN	Feb
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OVA review: Azur Lane: Queen’s Orders

Sky diary #7: Parade of horrors

OVA review: Heya Camp△: Sauna to Gohan to Sanrin Bike

New year notes

Sky diary #6: Station to station

Sky diary #5: Honeypot

Sky diary #4: Stupid interview questions

Sky diary #3: Welcome home

Historical drama film review: Cromwell

Sky diary #2: Unwelcome visitor