go once around the lich’s nest,

and past the barrows, round the bend,

then listen for the showman’s call —

the circus is in town once more.

so head towards that siren song,

and tarry not among the stalls;

we’ll do the deed at evenfall,

and send those sinners to their end.

set down your burden near the field

where nightmare creatures prance and prowl,

and where the vanquished writhe and wail;

we’ll let them share this final jest —

you’ll run your cables underfoot

of noble folk in winter best,

you’ll bring an end to this cruel war;

they’ll never know that we were there.

mad at gina

the indiana jones game is good, but it has this like cutscene sickness really bad

like its not unsual in games where the character acts different in the game part and the cutscene part, it has the thing where, its ok to beat 500 dudes to death outside the cutscene but in the cutscene when you have the villain in your power and it would solve everything if you just beat him to death but youre not allowed to

one of the problems is that gina is the fucking worst

i understand theres like a history of like, gamers dont like women, itd be cool if she was good but shes not

like there's layers to it. indiana jones stories have women in them but indiana jones hes not good with women, so she has to be in there in the role of a romantic lead, a woman that indiana doesnt get along with at first and fumbles the romance with over and over, i guess its like a will they wont they, but you dont care about this, but theyre gonna do it anyway

in the early scenes gina is like a foil to indy and so shes frustrating in a way that indy the character and you the player can feel both at once, in concert, i think they do this reasonably well, as a character to be frustrated by, she works great. and like indie should be frustrated by her to meet this story goal. but i don't like to be frustrated by a companion as a player

the game has 3 levels of gina bullshit, firstly, the game where theres no gina. it's good, its sort of a open world collect em up where you punch lots of jerks, i think good. then theres buddy ai levels where gina  accompanies you. those are pretty bad. then the third kind is in cutscenes. thats like peak gina bullshit

so the buddy ai in games, its been better elsewhere. i dont know that i've ever enjoyed a buddy ai but something like last of us handles it reasonably well, where the buddy is like invulnerable so its not like an escort mission you can fail, the buddy has different skills than you and can visit different rooms than you, so you sort of work together

gina sucks though, in a puzzle where you're counting on ai gina to do something well and quickly so that you don't die, she'll fuck it up almost entirely,  just enough so that you dont die, but youre like very mad at her. so these trust exercises with her don't really build trust.

and gina has the invulnerability thing, but she cheats a lot, and it's bad. in a puzzle where there are blades swinging from the ceiling and you carefully time it out to miss the blades, gina will follow you in a way where each blade should obliterate her but she just noclips through them, undermining the verisimilitude of the scene. and i understand it probably shouldn't be, just , gina gets obliterated, but i'd like to see her time the jumps right, like i had to.

then the story wants you to grow attached to her over time. another npc tells you. "hey. care about gina. before its too late"  but i don't want to!
you can't make me.

gina swings between wildly incompetent and wildly competent. she has i guess flaws and strengths. but they don't make any sense.  i'm waiting for some sort of reveal that gina is actually a spy ninja or something. but im worried she's just like this

in cutscenes, gina and indy both make bad decisions that you the player would not make. but gina reliably makes even worse decisions. i think when they want the custscene to have a bad outcome theyre more willing to make it gina's fault, because then its not indy/the player's fault. cutscenes are way too often used to advance the plot in ways you can't control, using the same stuff that exists in the game, in ways you would not use them

another problem - or like- constraint - is the game has these two speeds, sort of full send spiralling forward action and carefully look under every rock secret hunting, and you want to get everything, but gina wants you to keep moving, hey, hey indy, look over there, pull this lever indy, like hey, give me a fucking minute

(this post is about indiana jones and the great circle)

pimoroni fan shim problems

if you follow the pimoroni fan shim setup guide, you get to where...

the pimoroni fanshim service is installed at
/etc/systemd/system/pimoroni-fanshim.service

-------- here's the bit off the end off the install script output:

Setting up with:
Off Threshold:    55 C
On Threshold:     65 C
Low Temp:         55 C
High Temp:        65 C
Delay:            2 seconds
Preempt:          no
Disable LED:      no
Disable Button:   no
Brightness:       255
Extended Colours: no

To change these options, run:
sudo ./install-service.sh --off-threshold <n> --on-threshold <n> --delay <n> --brightness <n> --low-temp <n> --high-temp <n> --venv <python_virtual_environment> (--preempt) (--noled) (--nobutton) (--extended-colours)
-----------------------------

but no idea if it ever turns the fan on. that last bit says that if you run it again (having first gone to ~/fanshim-python/examples) with different numbers, it'll just overwrite the service

so i set it up again with... the on-threshold at 45C and off-threshold 30C, and now it shows the red light instead of the blue one, but it doesnt... run the fan

i had stuck a bit of tape on the led to diffuse it but instead of that i've now just set brightness to 20 instead of 255, so now its not as bright

when i was installing it, it gave me several errors:

E: Package 'python-rpi.gpio' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'python-setuptools' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'python-dev' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'python-psutil' has no installation candidate

and before that

E: Unable to locate package python-configparser

so it's kind of crazy that it runs at all. essentially the problem is that its all python3 these days and the pimoroni fan shim was designed to work with python 2.7, (edit: it says its python3, but i think its some sorta hybrid) but these modules python doesnt use them anymore, theyre dropped.

i have some sympathy for this because i also only learned how to use python 2.7. i'm sure python3 is the same, but it's not really compatible with old code, you gotta make some adjustments...

i dont think we really need all this shit. but not being able to control the gpio pins on the pi probably would do it

so i think the laziest way to get that going now is to use circuitpython?

hm... i filled up the sdcard (its only 8gig) installing python things before i could fix the problem. so i gotta make a new sdcard, start a new pi, if i want to get the fan going...

(edit: day 2 of raspberry pi bullshit)

I went and got a new sd card, 64gigs for AU 25 bucks, which is an ok price but it's too many gigs. there's a sort of surface tension among the sd cards i have, if i add any one sd card to the ecosystem thats too much space for the purpose then i'm risking a sd card cascade - but whatever, i got it, i put raspberry pi bookworm os on it

so the problem i have with the raspberry pi generally is i dont have a use case for it, the raspberry pi has a bunch of use cases like running kodi or retroarch, being a file server or print server or pihole or a nas or a little robot, i dont need any of this shit

if you really need a little computer you can buy a minisforum sort of minipc now, and its not significantly more expensive, so the technology is moving faster than the pi can keep up with, and i might never have a use case for it, i was betting that such a one would show up, but it might never

so it's not drawing very much power, but its still taking up space in my house, taking up a hdmi slot, taking up space in my brain, etc

anyway - i think a good use case for the pi would be screen sharing, like sharing video from another device to the tv. if it would run airplay on there, that'd be cool, but as far as i can tell it doesnt actually do that. so what about streaming from the pc? well, turns out you can run steamlink on a pi, and that works great! greatish. for me there was a sort of vertical scanline/interlace effect over the whole video, a bit stripey. but if i was sat far enough away from it i guess i wouldnt mind.

anyway, it worked great connected to the computer monitor. when i plugged it into the tv it wouldnt put hdmi out, and i fucked around in the config file for a while trying to get it to output different hdmi shit but i couldnt get it to do it. I think it used to work with this tv, several sd cards ago, but it doesnt seem to do it now.

so i think if i want to push video from this pc to the tv i gotta either move the pc over there (its a laptop so its not even very difficult to do that) or... buy a new streaming stick or upgrade the tv... or long hdmi cable

so the pi goes back in its fucking box, better luck next year little guy

i did not get the fan working

DARK EARTH: The horrible future that we were promised then forgot about but now remembered

In 1997, Kalisto Studios released Dark Earth, a post-cataclysmic action adventure game for PC, which has a really compelling look. For me, it really sets the standard for this sort of spiky rusty concrete worldbuilding.

Inspired by games like Bioforge and Alone in the Dark, Kalisto set out to create that new type of game: an action game, that was also, an adventure game. In Dark Earth's gloomy future, a catastrophic meteor strike has caused most of our world to be covered with clouds of ash - with a few remaining places where people can live, called Stallites, where sunlight penetrates the cloud. Dark Earth is set in such a citadel, Sparta, ruled by monastic sun worshippers, and features an upper and lower city, outskirts, and the cursed Darklands beyond. You play as Arkhan, a warrior-cop who, in the beginning, is a respected guardian of the city, but who in the course of things is corrupted by a dark curse, and transforms into a creature, and gets cast out into the wasteland to search for a cure and to discover forbidden secrets.

Since it's only available for PC and it's from 1997, it can be hard to find a way to run it on modern hardware - but Collection Chamber has had a installer up since 2017 that worked for me just now, it's running in a Win95 emulator in DOSBox on my Windows 11 PC, but I didnt have to work out any of that stuff, I just ran Biffman's installer and I didn't have to set anything up manually.




Kalisto also developed Dark Earth as a tabletop RPG, but it's out of print and only in French. There are two editions of the tabletop game, and the first edition document that I have uses art from the video game, so I'm assuming that the video game came first. The esteemed ZebraDestroyer3000 on reddit has collected a good number of pdfs from the tabletop game, that are up here. I don't read french, but ChatGPT does, so i'm working thought those slowly.

Mostly I wanted to talk about the sort of visual worldbuilding of Dark Earth. For me this is a coveted memory of a world I glimpsed as a child, and while all the stuff I liked is in there, it's a little tinny, a little goofy, and I'm trying to sort of approach it slowly and carefully in case it's not all as brilliant as I remember.

On of the pieces of key art for the PC game is this one, I'm not sure if that's supposed to be Arkhan, I think of this guy as just Dark Earth Man.

So that's on the cover, it's on the disk. Then the second disk has this:

 

Which, I guess If I'm going to talk about the visual language I should mention this sort of thing. Kalisto in the interviews talks about Dark Earth as a game designed to appeal to men and women both. I like to look at a sexy lady as much as the next person, and I don't want to appeal to the notion that you can't do this sort of thing anymore because of woke, certainly in the current climate some want to make it so you can't really see anything sexy anymore, and the push for that comes from a conservative place, about like what's family friendly, and that's fascism, no bones about that. But this bronze-nipple-pasty tits out lady feels anachronistic and egregious to me, the 2024 reader, and, idk, it's whatever. It's not really what I'm talking about when I say I like the visdev of this game. I think the sort of 90s French Comics aesthetic includes having your tits out and being a perv, that it should have that, and honestly I wish I knew how to use that in my own work, this sort of thing is both marginalized and dope. But here it feels unfortunate to me, it's not doing it for me. They chose this to be the key art for a reason, they wanted this to be a part of the appeal and the marketing strategy for the game. The slave leia stuff is in there, but as far as I'm concerned it's not really about that. It's whatever. It's not a huge draw for me.

What I like about Dark Earth is this shit:

Yeah. Give me that animated pre-rendered rusted metal menu screen, you saucy little minx.

I love the way the furniture is designed:

(concept art by Frédéric Menne)

I want to say that nobody does this anymore, but I know all the objects in video games and movies are carefully designed by somebody. What I mean is nobody does it quite like this anymore. Something about the way the sort of carefully detailed adventure comic concepts for these hand-hammered objects interact with the pre-rendered lighting, the concrete textures with the blown-out bump mapping, the grainy dither on the crafted accents. It's so lush.

This is at odds, then, with how it feels to control and navigate the thing. 1997 presents us with such a mix of old and new design sensibilities. Some things feel very modern, some things feel positively ancient. You move the guy with tank controls, the backgrounds are pre-rendered and the cameras are static. The combat in particular is very janky. For every gorgeous well-realized environment there's a weird cramped one. But when it hits it hits.

That's the stuff.