The Casual Gamer: Shelf Sort Games

Screen grab from Goods Match 3D – Triple Match

Since I’ve critted books, movies, and shared worlds, why not games?

I don’t mean immersive ones like Halo or Dragon Age. These require far too much investment for me. I prefer casual games, the kind players can download on their phone or iPad, try out, and delete if they don’t like them. Casually… just like the name says.

I’ve been playing them since the 2000s when I downloaded them through Big Fish Games (still in business and rockin’ it) to play on my Apple tower and, later, PC laptop. Since 2012, when I got my first iPad, it’s been mobile all the way. I’ve found these games are a good way to pass the time when you’re at the airport, on a break from work, or trying to fall asleep at night. The best of them are mini-masterpieces in in their own right and immersive as any console game. The best of them are cultural creations of their place and time, perfectly crafted to strike your dopamine receptors and soothe with a combination of sounds, graphics, and ease of playtime.

For this post, I’ll look at variations of Match 3 games.

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 11/6/24: Toy Dog Breeds, Part 1

Toy Dogs are a show class of the American Kennel Club referencing small, cuddly canines whose chief job is human companionship. They can be of various breeds — spaniels and terriers for example —  or shrunk-down versions of larger dogs like poodles. The one thing they all have in common is their diminutive size, which makes them easy to carry around.

Since I love dogs, and I loved making up dogs, here’s some breeds you can use for your world.

 

Toy Dog Breeds

Argier d’Jules Court Dog This breed has long light brown fur, small pointed ears, and a short pugged muzzle. Its eyes are large and soulful and can be either brown or blue; the most prized have one brown eye and one blue. Calm and observant, they are beloved by court ladies because they never bark or cause a fuss. At an average 10 lbs. in weight, they are easily carried in the lady’s silk muff.
Frigate Terrier A small dog once kept by ship’s captains to keep the rats in check, the frigate terrier has a cheerful, happy-go-lucky personality. It is black or blueish-gray in color with a wiry, rough double coat that sheds water and also makes it buoyant. Its ears are small and fold over. This breed has a muscular build with short powerful legs and webbed feet for swimming. The tail is curved and carried over the back when the dog is happy.

The Frigate Terrier has adapted well to city life and is known as a low maintenance breed because its hypoallergenic coat requires little care other than the occasional brushing.
Hairless Temple Dog Up to 14 pounds in weight, this hairless breed has a thin, athletic build and a narrow muzzle in proportion to its face. Its skin is a grayish brown in color and  on its belly it is pinkish white, with speckles of the grayish brown. There often is a white tip on the long, graceful tail. Its ears are pointed and small, and the  eyes are pale blue with a hypnotic stare.

The breed was once kept to rid temple complexes of vermin like mice. The largest temples could have  over 100 of these animals and it was considered a grave sin to kill or neglect one. These dogs are friendly and energetic, but have a strong prey drive, with a loud bark and a scratchy, wavering howl. As they have no hair, owners must be protect them from the elements. (In temples, they wore specially made little silk coats.)
Ishido Reddish brown with black eyes and nose, a short, straight tail, and a yodeling bark. Kept by nomads in their wagons to alert them of strangers. These dogs were fed on cooking scraps and encouraged to be fat so they could keep their owners warm in their beds at night. Their fur is short, but soft. If not allowed to become overweight they make fine companion dogs for the elderly.
Lapsian Singing Toy Dog Tiny pet favored once by royalty, it weighs no more than 8 lbs. It has a brindle coat, tufted ears, and a prominent underbite. It does not bark, but whines in a musical way.

AI Art Adventures: Fiddler on the Ref (Ref’ing on Classic Art)

I was going to call this the Art Forgery Edition, but realized that wouldn’t go down too well.

My post on the 17th century artist Diego Velázquez made me think. What if I took one of those imaginary lost paintings and used Midjourney to create it, using –sref and –cref parameters? As a plus, he’s long dead, so no one can accuse me of ripping off someone’s artistic creations.

So let’s create Two Dwarves Posing in Armor Before a Fountain. 

Here’s the first image using just the prompt “two dwarves posing in armor before a fountain, painting by Diego Velázquez.” Not bad, the AI is clearly drawing on the many Velázquez paintings floating around, as well as, I’d guess, other 17th century ones. The armor is clearly Spanish Baroque style (think Conquistadors) and the men are clearly dwarves, with adult heads but small hands and feet. They are clearly posing. But let’s select a more specific painting for reference and insert its URL right at the beginning of the prompt. Lucky for us Velázquez supplied us with several dwarf paintings so I’ll pick one.

Portrait of Sebastián de Morra, Diego Velázquez, 1644

This fella was employed as a jester in the Royal Spanish Court. His look says it was a rather ambiguous position and he wasn’t treated that well. Velázquez himself considered dwarfs fellow humans and not animals or pets, but most of the royals weren’t that enlightened.

Let’s see what happens with a URL reference: “https://s.mj.run/9LfsE0BHxqs two dwarves posing in armor before a fountain, painting by Diego Velázquez”.

Right away we have a difference. The brushstrokes are more notable and feel more authentic, but the dwarves have also aquired the pointy ears Midjourney wants to put on every humanoid related to fantasy art. The armor had been lessened to cuirasses and some bracers. Red appears in the picture from the jacket of the reference dwarf.  Their facial expressions appear more lively, but that may be me.

The same prompt with Velásquez’s original now used as an –sref (“two dwarves posing in armor before a fountain, painting by Diego Velázquez –sref https://s.mj.run/9LfsE0BHxqs”) Note one set of pointy ears is still there and the rim of the fountain is… weird. There’s no spray and the ledge wobbles slightly upward. Also note the dwarves are looking more alike, as if they’re becoming twins. I do like the deep colors of the clothing, and the cuirasses still seem authentic (though I’m no expert.)

With a –cref, “two dwarves posing in armor before a fountain, painting by Diego Velázquez –cref https://s.mj.run/9LfsE0BHxqs”. Very nice and authentic looking. You can see how the original dwarf’s face has been replicated, used as a model. Both have large, square heads, small feet and hands with no extra fingers. While their ears are still slighty pointy it is within the human norm. There are subtle signs of pride on their faces as they pose, and the dwarf on the right seems to have a pistol of some sort. In back of them is a fountain, but there’s no water. Oh well, you can’t have everything. (Did I just make a pun?)

Which one gives the best result, that’s up to the user. I can’t help but like the first one as the armor is more extensive and there’s a gushing fountain, but it doesn’t scream “VELAZQUEZ!” like the –cref one does.

What happens if I use the last prompt, but replace dwarves with dogs?

I love the way they are staring at each other as if thinking what the hell? in mutual puzzlement.

The character at left COULD be a dog with some styling, his doggie haunches hidden by the voluminous sleeves, or a doggified dwarf. There’s no way of telling.

Too much to drink

Aliens who indulge in too many x’Qyschn shots should be very grateful to have helping hands lead them  home from the bar.

(The English translation of this — it’s Dutch — means “Horror on Alpha Centauri” while  “Vlaamse Filmkens” might indicate it was a movie.)

It Came from the Closet [Review]

It Came from the Closet –
Queer Reflections on Horror

Edited by Joe Vallese
The Feminist Press, 2022

Time to squeeze in one more book review for October!

It Came from the Closet is a collection of essays by LGBTQ writers about their favorite horror movie and why they like it. That it scares them isn’t always the reason. In most of these essays it’s because they find some sympathy with the monster, or see in them some relation to their sexuality. In others, the movie’s protagonists are cited, the lens through which the movie may be given a queer interpretation.

As such I’m not really the intended audience, but I enjoyed reading most of these anyway for the writers’ particular take.

For example, S. Trimble’s essay on The Exorcist focuses not on the esoteric rituals of Catholicism but on Regan, the 12-year-old girl who becomes possessed. She goes from being an innocent pre-teen to a powerful (albeit demon-possessed) adult who can do exactly what she wants – cussing, masturbating, and pissing off (literally) the adults in her life, yet she’s being continuously quashed by the authoritative adult males of the movie. The doctor, the therapists, and the priests all want her to act more infantile and ladylike; the movie becomes a feminist parable. It’s a plausible reading.

More than one writer was enamored by the slasher genre — there were pieces on Friday the 13th (Jason) Sleepaway Camp (Angela) and Nightmare on Elm Street (Freddy Krueger). I never liked that kind of horror, yet the essays were enlightening for me. What I got out of all this in the end was how horror, more than any other kind of genre, acts as a way for these folks to process their feelings of being different and feeling alone in that difference. (A fair amount came from rural and ultra-religious backgrounds.)

The book was published in 2022 when wokeness was near its height. If you’ve got no time for that, be aware there’s matter-of-fact references to various sexual kinks, fetishes, labels, and communities that can be annoying. I’d rather not have heard about one writer’s confession he likes to have sex with overweight gay men he has belly-pushing contests with. I mean, that’s his kink to proclaim, but also one for readers — all readers — to judge.

And I also feel I must comment on a gay male trope I see a lot of in coming-of-age essays. That is, the encounter of the writer, as a gay male child, with an adult male who tries to molest them, as if “seeing” the gayness in them and (the writer thinks) wanting to initiate them into that world. This is a conceit I’ve got a serious problem with. Frankly, no, the molester is not to rescue you; they’re merely looking for a convenient victim and know diddly-squat about your inner secrets. That the writer has regrets about turning them down is more horrible to me than any amount of monsters from this book. It’s child abuse and predation.

 

Worldbuilding Wednesday 10/30/24: Mummies

Universal’s The Mummy, 1932

The 1930s and 1940s were a golden age for horror movies AND graphic design for horror movie posters. Look at the color, the composition,  the pleasing mix of typefaces in the poster above! It’s gorgeous.

Which brings me to the subject of mummies.

Mummies are part of the rarefied classic movie monster club that includes Dracula, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein’s monster. Universal movies all, and subjects of a failed 2010s attempt to bring them into the modern age as an interconnected movie franchise. The concept lacked legs, though it gave us the stunning re-visualization below.

The Mummy, 2017. That’s Sofia Boutella in the title role as cursed Princess Ahmanet.

The original Mummy was about the discovery of the tomb of High Priest Imhotep by a British expedition. (King Tut’s tomb was found a scant ten years before and was still much in the news.) The expedition’s leader reads an ancient scroll he finds, bringing Imhotep back to life, and promptly goes insane. Ten years later, Imhotep, now in the guise of a modern Egyptian historian, sees a woman he believes is the incarnation of his lost love Princess Anck-es-en-Amon, with whom he carried on a forbidden affair. She also happens to be the love interest of Frank, the son of the original expedition’s doctor.

Unlike the Frankenstein and Wolfman movies, The Mummy had an obvious sexual aspect. It was also the only Universal monster movie that had a script co-written by a woman: Nina Wilcox Putnam.  The theme of romantic predator and prey was similar to that of Dracula, but unlike Dracula’s dreary gothic setting, the Egypt of The Mummy was colorful, exotic and sensual.  A 2001 sequel called The Mummy Returns even featured a duel-to-the-death between two female characters (Rachel Weisz and Patricia Velasquez) wearing skimpy clothing and golden masks, armed with swords in each hand. But, back to the plotline of the original.

Imhotep kidnaps the love interest and chaos ensures as her would-be male rescuers find themselves out of their league. Going against the usual burger and fries of helpless victimhood, she saves herself by praying to a statue of Isis in the mummy’s tomb. The statue emits a beam of light that ignites Imhotep and burns him to death in spectacular fashion.

The 2017 reboot, in contrast, featured a male ingenue and a female mummy. Ahmanet was a Egyptian princess who was cursed and mummified alive, coming back to life with black, branded symbols on her face and an ability to generate a freaky extra pupil in her eye that coincides with her telekinetic powers. She seeks a magic dagger that will reincarnate the Egyptian god Set into the body of the assholish explorer (Tom Cruise) who discovered her tomb, but winds up captured, chained, and experimented on by Dr. Jekyll. Yeah, big question mark there. There’s a wild scene where, hanging from the laboratory ceiling seemingly by her vagina, she turns into a frenzied human spider in her struggles to escape.

I saw the movie, and though it wasn’t very scary or involving, I did enjoy its visual style. Overall it was hard to make a “hot Goth chick” (as one reviewer said) truly terrifying without rendering her not hot, and perhaps that was the reason for the movie’s failure, along with its convoluted plot.

One thing all the Mummy movies have in common, though, is their Egyptian setting and Egyptian names. So here’s a list for your own version of this movie monster.

 

Mummy Names (Egyptian only)

The Woman of Apep

Queen Ahnemshet

Princess Meerti

The Cheetah Prince

The Blasphemous Scorpion

High Priest Senekh

The Leopard Queen

Nephenit the Pharaoh

 The White Charioteer

Umn the Liar

The Crocodile Poacher

Sisterhood of the Ka

King Khameq

Queen Sheshilmem

The Slave of Tiboros

General Gebeq

 

AI Art Adventures: Homemade Halloween Costumes

Stoner Baby Shark costume

In 2018 and 2020 I posted lists of randomly generated Halloween costumes and I thought it would be fun this year to see what Midjourney came up with for those prompts.

Most were variations on ” [person]  dressed as a [randomly generated thing] , homemade costume,  candid, casual photo, Halloween setting –c 15″. The –c is there to add a little off-kilter realism to prevent things from looking too neat.

Row 1: Mermaid Clown, Proud Boy Aerobics Instructor.

Row 2: Robot Corgi, Unicorn Doctor.

Row 3: Riot Grrl Flapper, Redneck Batman.

Row 4: Baby Death Metal Guitarist, Donut Bitten by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

(What’s with me and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you ask?)

Overall an excellent job for generating off-kilter Halloween costumes that are clearly handmade! Only glitch was the AI translating “Proud boy” as “(Gay) Pride boy” hence the rainbow crop top.

I was surprised by the AI’s creative choices, like the doughnut girl dressed in a pink fuzzy onesie that mimics the doughnut’s frosting and a building that looks like the White House behind her. (I had specified “college campus.”) Note that the Death Metal baby was supplied with an equally black stroller, and the dirty, hairy exposed chest on the redneck Batman.

Passing Obsessions 10-24

 

The Chefs of Culinary Class Wars face off.

Culinary Class Wars on Netflix aims to popularize Korean cooking with a hyper-competititve, grueling reality show challenge between master chefs.

In that vein, what is Bibimbap?

Ursula K. LeGuin criticizes J. K. Rowling for using her “Magic School” concept. Well, yeah, more people shoulda said this.

And shares her thoughts on gendered writing.

The wild and wonderful world of playing and tarot cards.

Manuscript Wish List details what literary agents wish they had on their desks.

Worldbuilding Wednesday 10/23/24: Horror Movie Antagonists

Flamboyant vampire Vladislav the Poker (Jemaine Clement), based on the Romanian nobleman Vlad Tepes who was the inspiration for Dracula, crashes a party in What We Do in the Shadows.

As it’s turning towards Halloween, I thought I’d do a post on second and third-tier horror movie antagonists. The human kind, not monsters.

There are many versions of Dracula, The Wolfman, and Mummy and even more imitators. From the get-go, the Silent Movie era spawned Count Orlok (Nosferatu, 1922) an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula which caused a copyright disagreement with the Bram Stoker estate. There was also Count Yorga, Barnabas Collins, Blackula, Deafula (yes) and the bloodsucking housemates of Taika Watiti’s mockumentary  What We Do in the Shadows. Mad scientists in the Dr. Frankenstein mold also had their day, along with various witches and creepy housekeepers, debauched aristocracy, and, in the past few decades, serial killers with deceptively friendly names like Norman, Freddy and Jason. But for this post I’m going to stick to the classics.

Here’s a set for your own use courtesy of randomgen.

 

Horror Movie Antagonists

Dr. Neurocypher

The Pallid Wyrm

Baron von Oculus

Count Angulus

The Yellow Saint

Lady Blamora

Lady of the Pale Arms

Princess Asheeba

Madame Scorpina

 Vassa the Tyrant

Lord and Lady Traumont

Count Zenula

Queen Hemiza

Marquessa d’Angezon

Senora Rosa del Carmenia

The Duke of Azlau

Dr. Phantasmos

Comte d’Hemorais

 

Y/N [Reading Challenge 2024]

American cover, top; British edition, below. I prefer the British one.

Y/N

by Esther Li
Penguin Random House, 2024
[ #23  Out of the park on first at-bat: A debut ]

Update on Authors Watercooler Reading Challenge 2024. I wasn’t getting anywhere with my paranormal pick, The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Welles. Who, unknown to me when I picked it in January, also wrote the Murderbot series. But, the truth is, I had to drop it for something else. Which is odd because it’s normally the type of fantasy novel I like: a alternate-world Europe (specifically, France), lots of interesting characters, magic and sorcerers, a revenge plot. I enjoyed the writing style. But I also didn’t have the time or inclination to sink into it. It was missing something for me… passion, maybe? A dash of shameless bad taste?

So, my new pick comes from a different category, #22 Out of the park on first at-bat: Y/N, by Esther Li. I’ve been wanting to read it for a while and it came up in my library availability list. It’s about a woman who becomes obsessed with a Korean Boy Band member and promised meta commentary on fanfics, Y/N fanfics, and Korean boy bands. In my world a guaranteed recipe for success.

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