Elite dangerous: Noir against deepest night

Elite dangerous: Noir against deepest night

In a gentle star port out beyond the cares of wistful old terra; I watch the ships come and go from a sleepy little lounge. Maybe it’s just me? Sagging down, face pressed into white table cloth. I watch the effervescence flitter away in my Andorran chardonnay. Head heavy from long hours over the inky expanse of night, I pull up at her approach; I’ve seen plenty of stars before, but none that twinkle quite like her.

I try to smile, like the fool that I am, high-G acceleration day after day have done a number to this old mug. The Cybrex interface has left me with a slight tremor in my features. I must look like an old mutt in the pound. I certainly feel like one.

I don’t catch her eye, lucky me, another chance to straighten out at a clinic before picking up where we left off. It doesn’t feel like a lifetime ago, but it does feel like a dream. Even more cliché, but it’s true, I’m not trying to be corny: it’s just the way the implants make me.

A day later, the repairs are done, and I’m back in my shell; hauling cargo across an endless night. I just sit there and let the computer think it all over for me. I twiddle my thumbs and make those few minor adjustment now and again. I watch the stars flicker, I try to make friends with a few; me and proxima hit it off, she’s a riot, a real out there gal. The loneliness is setting in again, nothing like the stars to remind you how small you are.

I’ve been punching this run for the better part of a week, and the money’s good, but the only way to spend it is on a better ship, more features, and bigger engines. Whoop tee doo! Worth the overtime for sure.

We pilots aren’t like other people, and we’re not big on mirrors either. We haul ass, make bank and haul more ass. No time for a family, no time to stop and talk to the fifteen trillion souls of this galaxy, I pay fines, buy fuel and have my virtual therapy all through the same screen. I can’t remember the last time I took a stroll, or smelt flowers. Heck, all the shrink has to do is run down the clock, I’ve got more problems than they’ve got hours in the day.

I overshoot an orbital and come careening around at a 1/10th C, sloppy piloting. It’s faster to let the ship fly itself, but I got to feel something. Pilots need buzz: you hear that a lot. Out amongst the stars there’s nothing but a low thrum on frame shift drive. If you can make your soul feel that; make it buzz, just a little, then it ain’t so bad.

I think there’s some kind of war happening off somewhere deep on the edge of known space. That’s all I’ve got for news. There’s some factions back home got beef with one another, but I can’t tell one from the other, it’s all the same to me. They pay the same, issue the same fine; have the same rules, customs, regulations, demands. I’m not sure what they have to disagree over? How about the font size on a liability waver? Big whoop, thanks for the waste of recycled air. Back to shipping.

My shrink says I need an outlet, so a flash some cash on a combat model and go prowling for blood. It’s alright, certainly up the pace of things a little; though it doesn’t quite sit right with me. As I watch the flashing lights, and trails of shrapnel spill into the void. I feel as though pieces of me are flying off with them. No, I don’t mean my ship, I mean myself; though at this point that’s not a marked distinction. I wanted to visit the stars, and here I am taking out my frustration by ending the lives of two bit crooks. I’m doing the laws job for them, a janitor in space taking out just another form of trash.

I wanted to visit the stars, but there’s a thin layer of glass and million miles of void between me and touching her face. Space however is cold and empty, which is how I know I belong out here.

Marvelling at the scope at my own ignorance: BVGROTI takes on media empires with wanton abandon

 

It’s a tale as old as time (2008) Iron man film movie experience made super hero films kind of mainstream or whatever. People watched them before that, and they were alright, but the momentum of pumping them out became more of a thing at that point. This is the standard opener of a trope that had become tired and worn out, a thing that people are getting more and more sick off.

 

Superhero-fatigue fatigue. People are getting increasingly tired of commentary about superhero fatigue and these online articles are being pumped out at ever faster rate, so that new hot takes don’t feel fresh or as interesting because of their sheer volume and repetitiveness, not to mention repetitive. Every time a super hero film comes out, which is more frequent than the tubes at peak times, it is accompanied by a super hero fatigue commentary. With outlets commenting on whether this is the straw that will break the camel's back in what has become a jenga of mixed metaphors, and forced similes like trying to cut a dead whale open with a spork.

 

I don’t chase trends, I preempt them in order to maximize my clicks and revenue. I’m already tired of superhero-fatigue fatigue and have grown disillusioned with my own review despite it still going fairly strong with a few ups and downs as is to be expected from any medium. I think this will be the end of the genre of metacommentary, any second now, purely because speculation and citing other think pieces is easier than saying something new, and saying nothing simply isn’t an option.

 

The above paragraph isn’t even insightful, it just explains a business that everyone already understands, but in such a snarky way as to count as a take. The genre of superhero-fatigue fatigue-fatigue is as tired and trite as the thing it’s attempting to comment on, mostly because of the media ecosystem it exists in is one in the same. It’s made of the same fundamental incentives, a form of memetic parasitism, unable to actually kill its host but slowly sucking on its vitality. Like how a poorly tacked on simile, can, or quite often will, ruin the pacing of a paragraph and make it harder for the reader to remember what you even on about and re-read the dam thing.

 

The first known depiction of the oroborus is in the 14th century bce or bc for those that don’t feel the extra letter actually does anything to separate the system from its ecclesiastical origin, (like the rest of post enlightenment thought.) found in the tomb of king tutankhamen, aka king tut for those that were often chided by him. In this version its about the union of gods of life and death and the ascendency of aten or whatever and enough exposition. It would make a really cool film, with lots of big budget SFX and a totally forgettable sound track, and then some other schmucks will do an adaption of the mahabharata which will lack any understanding of the SOURCE MATERIAL… I’m not even synthesizing here. This is just a one:one graft.

 

Google news dates the first article about superhero fatigue to 2013. I’m not going to go more in depth because I am intellectually lazy. The next is in 2015, and there's a few every year with a marked absence during covid times (wonder why?). It really kicked off big in late 2022 and has only intensified with each new release since. With 5/7ths of the articles listed coming from this period (there are 7 pages of results for the term, and late 2022 onwards is page 5 to 1, that’s why i used that number, i am very, yes!)

 

A fair number of the articles talk about how a given film overcomes the fatigue, Like The Ol’Superman of freddy Nietzsche triumphing over his own nihilism (would not make for a good adaptation unless they cast Leonardo decaprica sun as fred and he rocked the full brush tash.) that might just be the winning combination to overcome superhero fatigue!  

 

Thing that is popular continues to be popular is perhaps the driest take imaginable, so you need a supposed adversary to generate a story: One with all the same powers as the hero but set on making their life harder. It’s reasonable to assume a genre will have its day and eventually move on, I’m sure no one thought cowboy films would last forever, but was there a continual commentary of how each film overcame cowboy fatigue? I am genuinely asking this, I have not looked it up, but my guess is no?

 

To foresee and preempt the downfall of this narrative is to replicate its structure, to comment on how the superhero fatigue genre continues in spite of its evident tiredness is to become it entirely. It’s an ouroboros, that smacks of the reddit comment section and no amount of self-awareness can excuse it. This article is a waste of your time and mine! Tune it out like white noise and get on with your lives. Who cares about the streams of articles that deserve to be written by chat bots, go read Candide: that sounds pretentious but it’s just a lot of toilet humor and gags, it’s not a hard read either: it’s easier to consume than this and is more fun too.

The Odyssey of Valheim. How does it hold up compared with the masterwork of James Joyce?

 

Telemachus:

It is first thing in the morning and the argument over readiness is in full swing, one player is gathering the last of their gear, debating on what and which to bring; weighing the cost in a purposeful deliberate but slow process. Across a small stretch of grass sits the jetty and the waiting boat. Another player sits by the oars, calling out and making the urgency of their need to depart felt. I myself dither between two positions.

Nestor:

Let me explain to the class, we’re playing Valheim, a Viking styled survival game it’s got a smattering of other games features, with some of its own charm. A flawed game, for sure, but a useful vehicle for this review: this is my third play through.

I strut along the pier to the waiting ship; the pier was as Stephen Daedalus puts it, ‘a disappointing bridge.’

Proteus:

We set off crawling against the wind and turn off to go up a river, there sits my own equally disappointing bridge, shoddy around the edges, and well…at once we realise the mast is too tall, and so the midsection of the bridge is unceremoniously brought down, and hastily altered.

I consider it the antithesis of London Bridge. This is where the book first really lost me, somewhere in the endless milling of thoughts, I lost the thread of what Joyce was really writing about, but I feel that was somewhat the point. The seemingly chaotic jumble of thoughts, yes thoughts, warts and all. Strangely punctuated? Did in-fact present themselves, very convincingly. My own attempt to invoke confusion here is far less clever: a disappointing abridge, though one without pier, for that was left behind by this point. Adieu.

 Calypso

It’s at this point the book brings us round to our protagonist. Takes it a fair ol’while tho.

Valheim is structured into a series of regions, with bosses for each, in an open world. Each region has its own tiers of mobs and environmental hazards, going up in layers that require by design the previous to be completed before real progress can be sought in the next.

This is less based on grinding personal stats and more around grinding food, armour and weapon types; which means you essentially are what you eat, and are only as big as the stick you carry. When cooking it perfectly possible to burn ones food and get coal. Much like Leopold bloom in this chapter of the book, where he burns his breakfast kidneys, while bring his adulterous wife: Molly, breakfast in bed. I had a similar arrangement with a smelter.

Lotus eaters

Back on the boat we take a different course to our previous, avoiding the grave markers from our previous expedition. Before I can tab out and look for some relaxing music to slap on during what is likely to be a lengthy trip, we instead reminisced about that prior adventure and decide that this voyage will be hopefully be different.

It is in this chapter we learn bloom has an erotic penpal, and uses a pseudonym to avoid getting caught. My own character in Valheim is named sten ormlegger meaning stone-snake-leg or as I like to think of it, rock hard big cock. There are three other infrequent players on our server not participating on the voyage, one using my real name, another using my screen name, and the third simply titled, “better than you,” an attitude I find I have an affinity for.

Hades.

The prior voyage was one of suffering; we build a low tier raft and sailed down the coast into the second tier area called the black forest. The boat was painfully slow, and so we pulled in at a set of ruins that we mistook for a cave and were set upon by a horde of angry forest creatures. Three died as we ran it back to the boat, the creatures followed into the water, pelting us with rock until the raft was smashed, and we drowned.

Aeolus

Out on the waves, with the winds at our backs, we started chatting about the day’s news and the general politicking of Westminster. There is very little else for us to do in game at the point other than hope the winds stay favourable, which they won’t.

In this chapter Leopold bloom narrowly misses running into Stephen Daedalus at a newspaper office, they’ll be of much importance to one another later in the story however, at this stage I can’t see what the two threads of analogous discourse are in the review, perhaps we will never know.

Lestrygonians

In the black forest lurks the trolls, they are blue, wear loincloths and are tall as trees. One must use the forest as a shield between you and them, or else one will find themselves quite dead. The only issue is they are strong enough to topple trees and smash rocks with their fists. In a reversal of fortunes of dear Odysseus, we have only lost a single craft to the man eating giants, during an ill-fated voyage by one of our players up a river. They can in fact toss rocks.

Scylla and Charybdis

The game has a fairly low level of graphical splendour; it’s nice enough to look at sometimes, just not in that perfectly rendered horse plop kind of way. Think ps1 graphics with shaders and better lighting. The debate on this issue, during our voyages, has been considerable and repetitive. One player asserts, “it looks like arse,” the other counters saying it’s stylised, and really good actually”

This misses the point entirely. The game is really quite small: Only a few gigs. I don’t much care to bloat my hard-drive with 4k textures that I wouldn’t give two shits about even if I could load them.

Why, oh why, do games ship with high end textures as bloat ware, this shouldn’t be necessary on a PC. How hard would modularity be to implement, given some games have additional optional textures packs in excess of 30gb, not super hard I’d gather.

Wandering rocks

In the book this chapter consists of a bunch of short views from a whole host of characters, if you think I have a way of alluding to that is the scope of this review you are sorely mistaken. It took me a while for conceive a debate on hamlet as being close enough to a rönt on graphics bloat.

Sirens

It’s fast approaching 4pm (3.39pm) as I write this and I need to throw my pizza dough together for my supper. So to save on chatter I’ll talk of that thing that so often tempted us off course. The open ocean in Valheim is populated with sea monsters that stalk any so misfortunate to enter. Island hoping is safer but far slower. The voyage we undertake after this one would take a full hour and a half, on the way out and a mere twenty minutes on the return, after a player joined the server and said travel on the open sea is far safer than we had assumed. This is the voyage I will write about from now on.

Cyclops

During our circumnavigation of the coastlines, we came close to third and fifth stage biomes, so that as we rowed slowly over choppy seas, leaches from the swamp swam after us in a meagre attempt to pester. We largely ignored them, and hoped in turn they would ignore us. Yet they kept probing in an attempt to unsettle, mindlessly blind and hostile, unthinking things.

Bloom is this chapter is confronted with a set of Anti-semitic remarks directed at his person while in the pub. Not bothering to hang around long after that, he first politely ignores, then corrects them, and leaves. In so doing he displays a degree of wit, in his use of deflection and decorum, that could never be expected of his monstrous detractors. The rules here are inherently unfair because where bigotry is normalised they are held to an entirely different standard. They are blind to this privilege of course, bigots being narrow sighted Cyclops.

The chapter stuck with me, it’s a very accurate depiction of interacting with a bigot; which in truth has little to do with Valheim, thankfully.

Nausicaa

One need not romanticise this game, turning around to see it wondering the shores: it is as dishevelled as our Leopold bloom, but mistake not: like him, it has charm in abundance. There are simple flat textures when using portals. The sounds in caves are looped in a very predictable pattern, and graphics are very simplistic, as is the games structure and progression (yes, unlike Ulysses)

The open ended nature of it, and the capacity for a situation to go from fine to fuck very quickly makes it really quiet engaging on occasions; while at other times it’s relaxed and laid back. it’s a nice mix and it feels good enough to play, at least early on that none of these are really deal breakers. The same cannot always be said of Ulysses, see the next chapter.

Oxen and the sun

I don’t know if this review will be at all amusing, alea iacta est, In Ulysses this chapter is a progression of writing styles culminating in the present of 1920, consequently it becomes more comprehensible as it goes on, simply because Iċ ne sprece Englisċ. Perhaps the same can be said for this review? For it is debatable after reading if i can really speak English.

 

Circe

We find our Promised Land, where the second boss was located, we set up a little portal home, ran back to get some much needed food for the voyage; then off again to bring the boat to home. We waited a little time for our other player to join us, but didn’t really want to hang about, so left promptly.

Eumaeus

Back at the village one of the players was defending it from a mob attack, luring them away from the settlement before they can smash it all to bits. These happen periodically and generally set about ruining’s one’s day. The game has a fair few “fuck you,” aspects and this is one of them. Combat is largely about managing stamina, and stunning one’s opponents, it’s definitely in the same vein as dark souls but less tight in its execution. I’ve still yet to decide what the point is in the special attacks.

Ithaca

The building system is a lot of fun. There a need to properly support structures, and allow smoke to leave closed rooms; mistakes are easily rectified. These limitations are little challenges to seed creativity, just to get the ball rolling. Everything snaps together nicely and it still looks fine when it doesn’t so it’s quite visually forgiving too.

My own home morphs and expands as required but others are more purposeful. Some building tree houses, elaborate in detail. While others build interlocking struts that are angled in a way that make the entire structure feel precarious. There is fun to be had if one wants it, but building something just good enough is done easily enough, if it’s not your bag.

The nice feature of this is that a well-furnished the home improves the rested buff, meaning that having a nice home does actually confer a gameplay advantage.  

Penelope

In summery Valheim is definitely a game, and one best played with friends. If you’re wondering who is Penelope/Molly Bloom in this review, it is you dear reader, faithful or not, I wait until the very end to consider your perspective and do so in the custom of sailors, fleetingly.