Alien: Earth

Colon or no colon? I haven’t looked into it so I’m going with colon in the spirit of a creature which “gestates inside a living human host…those are [my] words.”

The premise here is one that’s been a long time coming: the xenomorphs have arrived on Earth, compliments of a crashed Way-Yu research ship (I really wish we could get away from Wey-Yu as the franchise shorthand for “shitty corporations” as I’m sure they’re all shitty). As if that weren’t bad enough, the ship crashed into another corporation’s city-state, throwing politics into the mix. As if that weren’t bad enough, we now have human-synthetic hybrids. As if all that weren’t bad enough, we’ve got a completely new corporation on the scene, called Prodigy, which I don’t think had been considered in the previous and wider Alien franchise universe and may have erroneously been created specifically for this series.

There’s a lot going on here, and although I’ve only seen the two episodes which have been released, I’m not sure how I’m feeling about it right yet. First, I don’t actually care for the human-synth hybrid bullshit for several reasons, the first being that they had to put it under the thumb of a “kid genius”, the very young CEO of Prodigy (get it?) who has that college-age Zuckerberg vibe going on about him which instantly pisses me off; his is a gross stereotype who overtly tells his second-in-command that wanted the hybrids, in part, to create someone who could match his intellect. The techbro megalomaniac stand-in character in media is already getting long in the tooth and isn’t played any differently here. The second issue is that these hybrids are created by transferring the whatevers of Very Sick Children into CW-approved young adult bodies. They have the speed and strength of synthetics, but the worldliness, intelligence, and often mannerisms of kids…so guess who goes into the crashed ship to figure out what’s going on? This whole part of the series really doesn’t make a lot of sense to me and seems overly…stupid, and takes up space that a better narrative could occupy. And then there’s Timothy Olyphant channeling his own take on Roy Batty, so make of that what you will.

Of course, we have Prodigy security forces on-scene who are explicitly not Colonial Marines yet somehow look exactly like Colonial Marines in both bearing, behavior, and kit, which I guess is a way of tethering this series to Aliens in the hope that some of that movie’s awesomeness rubs off on it, deservedly or not. There’s also a double-dealing cyborg, a member of the original ship’s crew (who are otherwise all dead because of not just the xenomorph, but because of a whole lot of other xeno-biological specimens that were contained aboard) who is hell-bent on getting the xeno captured and returned to Wey-Yu. His perpetually stoic and assassin-level professionalism seems a bit over the top to me.

Finally, people seem thrilled that this is written and directed by Noah Hawley, whom I had to look up to see what I might know him from. Turns out he’s FX’s pocket director, having handled that network’s Fargo series, and the “blink and you missed it” Legion, which I believe is somehow connected to the Marvel’s X-Men universe. I haven’t seen either, but Alien: Earth isn’t really recommending him to me, personally. Still, I have a three episode policy, and if things don’t turn around I might have to simply hate-watch this because I’m a massive Alien fan.

Warcrafting Resumes

Blizzard has a feature which allows players to put their subscriptions on hold without cancelling them; did you know? I had put my 3-month sub in freeze a while back, and it was set to reactivate like a sleeper agent at the beginning of September, but I’ve been so bored with my current compliment of games recently that I fired it up early. Now I’m forced to reckon why. I did not like the Undercity crap at all; the goblins irritate me as do pretty much all Horde races (that’s right, I said it) but I need to get through it to come out on the other side for the sake of future content. I also have a mage making his way through the entirety of Dragonflight, which I aborted thanks to the game’s not-so-gentle insistence that I moved to TWW when my main hit the appropriate level. Somewhere in the clutter of things to do I want to finally work on my pet battle pets, the majority of which are still at level 1 and the eldest at level 11; I did boost one to 25 the other day, but I need to find a way to get them all on the treadmill and into fighting shape, but in a way that won’t bore me to death. Finally, I started a new character, an Earthen, because I wanted to create a Vulpix character because they look cute. And housing. I need to prep for housing.

In other news, my friend @Mindstrike posted this video to our Discord, which I’m sure you have seen.

Now, if you’re a conspiracy theorist, the presence of the Xbox Logo at the start of the video might make you think things. You might also say that Xbox is merely Microsoft’s Game’s umbrella and that’s about it. You might also say that the new “one button rotation” mechanism would be really easy for controller players to use, or that Blizzard’s push to internalize a lot of popular mods as features of the base game is conceding that there needs to be another version of the game for when installing mods are not an option. Now, I don’t know if there’s been any official word, or any wider rumors of such, but Mindstrike makes compelling points in my mind for maybe a console version of WoW, so I’ll be tuning into Gamescom to see what all this business is about.

InstaMAT and Complex Software

I recently learned about a recently released software called InstaMAT Studio. This is another 3D texturing package in the vein of Substance Painter and Quixel Mixer. I am interested in it because, like Quixel Mixer, it’s free as in Beer (especially or specifically if you register and download now under the “Pioneer” license). I am also interested in it because, unlike Substance Painter, it’s not just an app for texturing models; it incorporates features found in Substance Designer, allowing users to create stupidly complex textures for use with those models. Hooray for companies that delight in kicking Adobe in the nuts!

While the texturing portion of the app seems to work a lot like both Painter and Mixer, there are a lot of features I’m interested in that I simply cannot figure out in part because all of the documentation and the bulk of their instructional videos are at least a year old, and focus on a version of Studio that has changed in the interim. For example, I supposedly can throw a raw FBX into Studio and have it do the UV unwrapping for me; while I agree that manual unwrapping is almost always best, I want to see what Studio can provide and how well it can provide it. Trouble is, it’s all black box right now and there’s no good way to understand how to integrate UV unwrapping into the workflow. Even the folks behind the software admit that their content is behind, and needs updating…back in March. This explanation doesn’t actually explain anything, except that there’s no information on how to do what the OP is asking.

Maybe I’m too old school, but I believe that if you’re going to release software of the magnitude represented by something like InstaMAT Studio, then there should already be up-to-date support content for it. The fact that the Internet can contain a whole lot of historical information doesn’t really do us many favors when we’re trying to find current data, because while the videos and tutorials I did find were pretty clear, they were no longer accurate. In my mind that’s unintentionally misleading, but also doesn’t make me think well of the software or the people behind it who can’t be bothered to ensure people actually have resources to learn this thing they’re so proud of releasing. Yes, it would have taken more time to get the documentation written, but when did that become a liability? Right now, the software isn’t worth much to me because I don’t have an accurate way to learn how to use it, and that frustrates me.

Your Weakly Star Citizen Brief

Patch 4.3 finally hit the live servers and I only have about an hour with it under my belt. In some ways it’s an improvement. In Star Citizen fashion, however, when one door opens, the roof collapses.

My primary concern at this early stage was not the ASD Onyx facilities as ever Tom, Dick, and Bigger Dick will be rushing to those locations, causing a clusterfuck the size of which only a Star Citizen “but it’s a PvE event!” event can generate. Instead, I wanted to work on the “Save Stanton” cargo missions that have been extended due to the absolute trash fire that were the problems in 4.2.1.

I took a medium haul contract and headed out in my Raft this morning, arriving at the designated pickup area which was pleasantly devoid of any other human beings or their abandoned ships. All of the freight elevators were up, and — thankfully — working as they should be. I managed to use a community ATLS to load the boxes into my ship, and delivered them without a single issue. Thinking that I was now blessed, but also haunted by the specter of “you’re pushing your luck and you know it”, I took a large haul contract next. The Raft can handle the load, but I knew it would take time. I need to catch up with the event, and this would do nicely in that regard.

Once again, I headed out and found my pickup location empty. Elevators were working, but I figured I should split the cargo in the warehouse because the elevators were small and couldn’t handle the entirety of each cargo class (there are usually three cargo classes we have to retrieve, each with a different count). The first nine boxes went smoothly, albeit slowly as I only had the large tractor beam this time. The second set of nine boxes also worked fine. It was the third set of nine where things started falling apart.

I made the mistake of pre-splitting the last 18 SCU stack into 2 nine box piles before bringing up the third nine box pile. When I returned to the elevator, not only had that pre-split stack re-stacked itself into the original 18 box stack, but I now had another, apparently duplicated 18 box stack. Neither of them would get on the elevator, so I returned to my ship to maybe jump to another of the facility’s loading zones, only to find that the elevator of my ship wasn’t responding. I tried stacking crates from the cargo grid in front of the Raft to get in via the airlock, but no dice; I couldn’t jump high enough, even with the low gravity. Once again, rage quit, and here I am, typing out this post.

This week, beleaguered content director and Chris Roberts’ personal riot shield Jared Huckaby took to the air to once again issue a mea culpa on behalf of CIG, this time for the issues of 4.2.1 getting in the way of the Save Stanton event. I like Jared a whole lot as a person and a spokesperson, and I don’t envy his having to don the Kevlar vest to get out in front of the community every time management fucks up, but these apology tours are becoming useless. Apologies are meant to be turning points towards better behavior and a promise to not repeat mistakes or problematic behaviors. While I again acknowledge that game development is hard, guys!, when a company promises to get their shit together and then showcases that their shit is decidedly not any more together now than it was before the pile of previous apologies, I have to think there are deeper-rooted problems than just the fact that “game development is hard, guys!”. I will not stoop to the smooth-brained response of “their developers suck” because I believe that A) they do not, B), they cannot, because for all it’s issues Star Citizen is a complex and intricate beast that mostly works, and sucky developers couldn’t have gotten it this far, and C) it’s almost always a management issue. We can talk tech problems all we want, Jared can apologize on behalf of the development team, but at the end of the day it’s the management that decides that the answer to a Game Which Doesn’t Work Well is “another shitty event”.