The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Kingdom of Loathing loves its Librams, but hey, at least it created a fairly new sort of Libram in the Libram of BRICKOs. This lets you summon BRICKO bricks, which you can then use to build various things. Some are equipment, like the BRICKO Pants or BRICKO sword, but most are actually monsters that you build, and then fight without taking a turn. Many of them take many, many BRICKOs to build, and have unique drops.

This really seems like an item for collectors. Granted, having a potential 10 free combats a day for getting stats IS useful, and you can do that with the BRICKO monsters, but you’ll never be able to summon enough bricks to keep yourself in high level monsters for most of a run. No, it seems like the overall goal of the Libram is to be something you spend excess mana on when you already have enough of the other Libram items. You build up a huge, huge collection, and use it to fight the high level monsters with the unique drops, doing things like building the gilded BRICKO chalice, which is basically another facsimile dictionary, only without having to ascend again, which seems like some people would find a use for. Of course, the main draw for most people would be the familiar, the BRICKO chick, which requires a combat with a Gargantuchicken and 6900 bricks to build. That’s a really long term goal. But it’s nice to have long-term goals.

That’s really what this libram is. It’s a bunch of long-term goals that you can slowly work towards with very minimal to no turn consumption. I like this, and I assume that many other players like it too, since it doesn’t mess with their runs like, say, working on the long-term stuff in the empty bottles and whatnot. Also, it seems like, since you need so, so many bricks, that BRICKO bricks will be a decent source of meat, if you just want to pawn them all off. For a few mana a day, you get 3 of an item that sells for 800 or more meat. Seems like a decent tradeoff to me, if you don’t want to jump on the building bandwagon.

Yeah, I like this one. It’s different. Unique. And, like the best IoTMs, it gives you something else to do, to extend the life of the game. That’s the main reason I pick these things up. I want to switch up the experience so that I have more fun. That seems like what this is doing. I’m down with that.

Keeping the poetry hits rolling! I read The Wild Iris, by Louise Gluck. This one won a Pulitzer prize!

I didn’t get much out of it.

Okay, that’s not completely true? There were three poems that really, really spoke to me. I stuck pieces of paper in the book to save them for later, for rereading and re-thinking. The title is the final lines of one of those poems, which seriously was like a big explosion “woah!” kind of moment when I read it, and I had to go back and re-read the entire thing, knowing what I now knew. Those sorts of poems in the book were fantastic. The rest, the vast majority, were… okay? But also very confusing. Mostly because of the use of the word “You.”

One thing I tried really hard in my book to do is to make sure that the reader always knows who “you” is referring to at any time. In the first half of the book, it is always the Deleter. In the second half, it is always the Repeater. The idea is that this builds up the idea of dialog I am going for, and also keeps from confusing the story.
There’s none of that in this book. I kept being very confused. Was “you” the gardener? The gardener’s wife? God? The flowers? It changed from poem to poem. Every one used “you” and the “you” seemed very different in each one. That’s not depth to me. That’s just confusion for no reason. There is a plot arc of sorts going through the poems. I know it’s there. I can feel inklings of it. But it simply isn’t clear, because I just don’t know who is being spoken to at any time.

This is only compounded by the fact that I also don’t know who is speaking at any time. Many poems have the exact same title. I deduced at some point that these were less titles so much as the names of the speakers in the poems. This would work, except that there are other poems that seem to be by other speakers than who is named. I’ll read a poem, and think it has to be by the wife, but it’s not titled with the wife’s name. I’m just confused even more.

I must also admit that, since this is a very nature-oriented book of poetry, I also got lost in the nature imagery quite a bit. That just isn’t my bag. I am all about humanity, fabrication, and artificiality. I am not one that walks out and enjoys the splendidness of nature. Those images just don’t move me as much as the true, human sort of conversation like I saw in Enough Said.

I feel like I can take something away from this book, but it’s mostly a list of things about how not to set up my narrative. I don’t want my work to be this obtuse. I’m sure it’s a great book, and as I said, there were some amazing poems in there. But this just isn’t for me, and I don’t want my own work to turn out this way.

Karen gave me a list of books of poetry that may be relevant to my interests based on what she knew about my own book I was looking at. I didn’t really know what to expect: she hadn’t really see the fairly… sexual side of the book yet. However, if I was going to make this my thesis, I needed to be able to place it in the conversation of poetry. I needed to read more, and her list seemed a good place to start. I ordered up used copies of the more interesting ones on Amazon, to check them out.

Well, I just finished reading Enough Said: a Poetry Dialog Between Father and Son by Michael and Kiev Rattee, and it was pretty fantastic.

There are definite things about it that make it very different from what I am trying to accomplish. My book is two characters, and these are two actual people. This works in a back and forth style, and my book gives all of one side, and then the other. But when I opened up the strangely-built book (the back says that only 250 of these were created, by hand, with a weird printing press, and I would believe it. The texture of the pages is really weird and wonderful, and you can see where it is actually sewn together in the middle. It’s pretty cool.) and read the first poem, “Big Things,” I completely saw glimmers of what I was trying to do in it. It was filled with direct conversation with the other party spliced with poetic images and ideas, and it was just fantastic. I was in love.

From there, the book deviates from that feeling. Michael and Kiev seem to play off of the key image or idea in each other’s work, giving their own spin, and keeping a conversation going. It’s really interesting, though I admit that I missed the direct contact between the two after the first. The conversation turned almost completely to poetic metaphor, with figures standing in for the authors and whatnot. There was nothing wrong with that, really. Many of them were completely excellent poems. But the ones that resonated more with me were poems that more directly expressed their connection, such as “The Sky Is Full” which ends with the lines “as I should have said / I guess at the beginning” which just feels so… real to me. It establishes a connection that I just love seeing, and also works with the theme of the poem, which is talking about how the sky tricks, and Michael is admitting that how he lays out the poem also tricks away from the real meaning. It’s very open and heartwarming. It’s a real emotion there. It means a lot. I loved seeing that throughout the book.

It also spikes near the end, where Kiev apparently was slow in responding, and we get a gentle poetic prod, followed by a lovely poem by Kiev called “Silence,” which is just a perfect end to his side of the conversation. “I’ve talked all evening / with it caught in my throat” Fucking perfect. You can fill the air, but it’s not necessarily with substance. It’s the silence that’s important, at times, and you can’t get it out in the right way.

I feel like I need to read it again to really “get” everything completely? But good poems work that way. To really dig into them, you need to read them multiple times. But the truly good poems still leave you with a strong feeling that first time, and most of this book does this. It’s pretty great.

Makes me look forward to digging into what else Karen suggests for me.

Because of some footing-ball event that may have happened this month, the IoTM in Twilight Heroes was the Insanely Super XL Bowl. Now, this is an item I get behind. Not only is it mechanically interesting (and also a bit telling about where TH is going to go in the future) but it’s also just got flavor that, for whatever reason, I find pretty hilarious.

Basically, this is a set of four items, one for each of the character classes. Or, at least, each class gets a special benefit from one of the forms. How do you change between these forms, you ask? Well, you rotate the bowl 90 degrees, and, magically, it becomes a Breastplate! Or a Helmet! Or a shield!
I don’t claim to understand why I find this so hilarious, but I totally do. Mostly because it’s such a mundane way to do such a complete and total transformation. Just the idea of my character casually rotating it a little and then going “WOAH,” just… man, I don’t know. I’m easily entertained, I guess.

The stats on each version also seem very useful. The main bowl itself, with the additional item and chip drops, are something that everyone is going to get a good use out of, especially Elementalists, with the spell damage boost. All of them, though, seem like they would be very relevant to their respective classes, and have their uses outside of them, though perhaps not as something you equip all the time.

What interests me the most, though, is that this really, really seems to indicate that you will be able to cycle through the classes much easier in the future. Retcon? Something like that. There’s just no way that these class-specific bonuses make sense unless you have a good way to switch between them from time to time, and transmogrifying just really isn’t a good way to do that. I look forward to that kind of stuff! I know it’s hard to do, and it’ll probably still be awhile in coming, but I do look forward to it. I’ll hold onto this bowl until then.

I once suggested, casually, that Jonathan try League of Legends. “Oh, it’s like DotA,” I said. “You’d probably enjoy messing around with it.” He said he’d try it.

Now, basically all of his free time is spent playing it. He’s dropped a sum of money on new Champions, and plays at least a game every day, if not more. He’s having a great time.

And I’m along for the ride.

He keeps asking me to play, and I’m more than happy to. Especially when we get on voice chat through Steam and play, it is a ton of fun. I’m finding Champions that fit my play style, and really getting good with them. Just the other day, I went 3/3/5 with Twisted Fate, which I just find completely awesome. (That’s three kills, three deaths, and five assists. I had the lowest death count by a big amount.) I also really have gotten the hang of Taric, who I enjoy every much, even if he has some of the stupidest things to say as he moves about. He fits my play style perfectly, being a strong, heal and buff-based tank.

Every other day or so, Jonathan and I will play a match. We’ll stick together on one lane. Jonathan will give me play advice coming from the fact that he plays all the time, and I’ll play a good game, though certainly a more simple game than some who teleport around the map all the time. It’s… pretty great.
One thing I missed about Jonathan moving out was the fact that we had less time to do things like this. It became a serious schedule issue, and it sort of killed our “us” time. He’s my brother. I want to do this kind of bonding with him. Playing this with him all the time is really doing that for me, and it’s pretty fantastic. Hell, I even re-came out to him while playing LoL. It’s just a great medium for that kind of thing. The fact that it’s fun is just a side benefit.

I have a feeling we’re going to keep playing matches for quite some time. Eventually Jonathan will move on, and I’ll not be interested without him to constantly talk about it and draw me in. But you know what? That’s okay. We’re having a great time, and that’s the important part.

Essner is a fan of Werewolves, as more sane people are. He’s also a fan of seeing all kinds of movies, which is why he dragged me off to see The Wolfman last Friday. Now, I had saw a preview for this movie, and it looked kind of interesting! Up until the title. I thought the title was lame. Then I learned it was a remake, and my interest went down even farther. But, you know, being social and all is important. I went to watch it.

This movie has absolutely no characters in it, and that is its real flaw. Sure, people were getting murdered right and left! Death and death and death! But you didn’t know anyone, and couldn’t really give a shit if they died or not. There was no tension in it, because nobody was interesting in any way. They tried to make these people characters by listing off things from their past, but a list doesn’t make a character. It’s a good starting point, but it doesn’t work on its own, and that’s all they do. It also doesn’t help that, in their rush to flip between actions at full moons, we miss huge chunks of time where, supposedly, these characters would have gotten to know each other, developed relationships, and so on. You know, the kind of things I needed as a viewer to care about them at all.
Because you don’t care about the characters, there’s nothing interesting in the plot, either. The moment Mr. Hopkins turns up, you go “Oh, he’s the villain.” It’s so transparent. There are absolutely no surprises, because there’s nothing inherent in the characters to make them do anything surprising. If you could write a short summary of “Generic werewolf movie” on a piece of paper, it would exactly mimic The Wolfman.

The whole generic thing is not helped by the weird choice of effects in the movie. I know this is a remake of a really old film, where effects were constrained by the tech of the time. But attempting to recreate the same-looking Wolfman just did not work. It was so stupid-looking, it wasn’t the least bit scary. This was a monster that was decapitating people without any problem, but you just couldn’t find anything to fear about it. Worse yet, when it became obvious the movie was going for a Werewolf on Werewolf showdown, I cringed. I knew it would look stupid. And it totally did. It was almost comical.

The movie tries to keep that comedy away by making it incredibly gory. You see all kinds of awful wounds, dead bodies, and chunks of flesh. I had to look away a bit. However, it’s very realistic gore. It’s not over the top, and I think that’s a problem. The movie isn’t trying to be cheesy, but it has cheesy-looking Wolfman. It’s trying to be serious, but it doesn’t spend any time making serious characters. It wants to be scary, but it just goes for lame jump-scares time and again, and doesn’t actually attempt to create any sort of atmosphere were one could actually be scared.

The movie isn’t bad enough to laugh at, and I feel that’s a problem. There was one humorous moment, where the female lead opens an Encyclopedia, it seems, looks at the page for “Lycanthropy”, and then turns the page… where the next article is “Ancient Gypsy Lore.” That was entertaining. But the movie as a whole is far, far from good. It’s painfully mediocre. It assaults you with mediocrity. I really can’t recommend giving this movie a view. It’s pretty much a waste.

Last week, Spaeth, Jonathan and I did our first foray in to MUA2, also known as Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2. Now, I hadn’t really heard much about the game. I very much enjoyed playing through the first one with my brother, where I was the Invisible Woman for no reason whatsoever, so I wanted to check it out. People at work had talked about how they took a lot of the RPG elements out of the game, and that it made it a worse experience, but these were also people who thought Transformers 2 was an amazing film. Enjoy working with them, love them, but don’t really trust their taste, perse. This was all the information I had going into the game.

After the first session, it’s pretty clear we’re going to keep playing it, but there are some very strange decisions being made here.

First off, the camera is kind of awful. It is zoomed in much, much closer than it was in the first MUA, and in the X-men Legends before it. It seems clear they expected this game to be played with four people online, not offline like we were doing. That’s just stupid, though, as that offline, all on the couch co-op was the whole appeal for the first few games for me. It’s not impossible to get over, much like the weirdness with the menus in Borderlands split-screen, but it does seem like sort of a stupid move.

Secondly, they really did strip out most of the RPG elements. You still gain experience and put points in powers. However, in previous games, you had four buttons to assign powers to, and at least 6, if not more, powers to choose from. Now, some are obviously more effective than others, but you still had the ability to spec out characters in ways that fit your gameplay style. For example, the Invisible Woman had a bunch of powers based upon stealth and crowd control, which I completely ignored to make her into a long distance caster for whatever reason. There’s no options of that sort in this game. The Invisible Woman has four powers she learns, and while you can prioritize some, it puts arbitrary blocks in your way to make you bring the other powers up to speed before putting more points into them. You don’t have very much control over builds.
Similarly, they’ve gotten rid of loot drops and equipment. Instead, the entire team has a set of “Boosts” that give their bonus to everyone. You can only equip three. This is a stupid idea, because a nuker like Gambit or my pointlessly beloved Susan Storm needs bonuses to power strength, MP regen, and things like that, whereas brawlers like Jonathan’s Superhero Black Man Luke Cage need bonuses to melee combos and things like heath siphoning and whatnot. It would make sense to have a varied team, but it punished you for it, by making you gimp characters you aren’t prioritizing with your Boosts. It’s kind of silly.

Thirdly, and this is an Invisible Woman only problem, they made her little grabby ball do stupid things. Her basic power lets you either charge up a force ball, or grab someone in said force ball and then toss them away. It’s really fun to use! However, the force ball is huge on the screen. I have to hold it in place to aim, and, for no apparent reason, it blocks projectiles from other heroes. Spaeth was playing Gambit, and this huge-ass ball would block his cards. Why they would make a character that actively hampered the usefulness of other characters is beyond me. Maybe they never expected anyone to play the Invisible Woman. Well, I showed them!

The last weird decision I want to point out is the conversation system. This has dialog trees like Mass Effect or something. But they are so bad. They zoom in on character faces which were only designed to be seen from above. They look so plastic and fake, it’s kind of hilarious. There’s also a questionably-defined morality system where you can respond “Aggressive,” “Diplomatic,” or “Defensive.” You apparently get different bonuses for favoring one over the other, but it’s not really clear in the game what you’re getting from it, and if it would actually affect the plot in any way. Plus, you just have to laugh as your character stands there, motionless, not emoting at all. It’s so bad.

Still, in the end, brawling through the stages with your friends is a lot of fun. The varied power combo system is much better than the generic bullshit in the first few games, and it really makes you strategically use combo powers, instead of it just being a happy accident once and awhile. I like that. And, hell, getting a bunch of people together on a couch to punch things is just fun, period. Maybe not fun for hours and hours, but great for a short session of fun. So, you know, we’ll probably give it another time or two before I send it back. Why not? SOMEONE has to use the Invisible Woman.

There was a new magic set that came out. Fuck if you can tell by looking at the Magic website, though. It is impossible to find information on that thing. Still, we somehow managed to decipher the cryptic runes on the page and determine that Worldview, the latest of the Zanarkand block, was out, and purchased many a pack for a draft.

Impressions: Multikicker is a fine, if unexciting ability. I mean, I liked my Angel that healed me 2 life every time I kicked her. (Which is just a wonderful way to say that, isn’t it?) She saved my ass a few times. But it’s certainly not something one should build a deck around perse. It’s just nice to have. Landfall continues to be decent, and the Allies continue to be completely stupid. Essner had two, count ’em, two of this ally, and it was just so ridiculous. It would be significantly worse if he was running a deck more equipped to take advantage of them. Yeah, I don’t really like how broken the Allies are.

Still, the draft went well. As per usual, it seems, I went with a White-based deck which focused on evasion and flyers. I was augmented by having some really, really good removal in Ioun’s Judgment, which I had gotten two copies of. I was also given an advantage in that apparently everyone else at the table was trying to force Black, and more specifically, Vampires. So they were fighting over black, and I had my pick of White and somewhat of Blue.

We ended up with a three-way tie, though. Essner was the only one who failed! Those occultists were powerful, and when he got them online, they were pretty unstoppable. But without them, his deck kind of fizzled. Spants’ Black/Blue deck had some really annoying and solid creatures, including a tapper that untapped every time you played a land, which was frustrating. Jonathan had a solid Red/Black deck with lots of burn. The highlight of which was him killing me with a land. That stung a bit.

I think what we all learned from the draft, though, was that… we like drafting. Building constructed decks is very, very time-consuming at this point. There’s joy to be found in it, but it’s a lot of work, and certainly isn’t something you want to attempt very often. With drafts, you get all that joy, as well as removing the “oh, he’s playing THAT deck, I’m screwed” element out of the playing field. It’s just a damn good time.
Almost a shame we can only find an excuse every few months when a new deck comes out. Oh well.

Okay, that sounded bad.

This is my spoilarful discussion of Mass Effect 2 day. If you want a non-spoilar, mechanical review, you’re looking for yesterday’s post.

Okay? All ready for Spoilarz? Neat.

It’s kind of amazing the amount of time Bioware invested in making your decisions from last game carry over to this one. I mean, I’m not going to replay the game four times just to see how things change. I’m not that kind of person. But it’s really neat knowing that things I did years ago in the original Mass Effect actually are impacting the world. A lot of times, it’s only little tricks, like getting an e-mail if you completed one of the side missions, but it’s really effective in making you feel like your game is continuing. I liked it a lot.

The overall plot, though, was only okay. I agree with some of the podcasts I’ve been listening to. I feel like the game lacked something by not having a real face to the threat you were trying to fight off. There was a “collector threat” for the whole game, but in reality, the focus was completely on building your team and making them happy. You looked inward, not outward to the “suicide mission” you were supposed to be undertaking.
This is only emphasized when you face down the last boss, which is really just kind of stupid. I really don’t know why I was fighting a giant terminator. I mean, Brer went on and on trying to explain it and blah blah blah, but no, it was just lame. You can explain it, sure, but they didn’t in the game, and so it leaves you with a weird feeling. The basic concept that Reapers are part machine and part flesh, and need to harvest flesh to reproduce? That’s a great, great concept. That makes them scarier, and puts forth the idea that they may have motives and aren’t just this deadly force. The idea that the reaper has to look like the flesh it’s harvesting? Makes no sense whatsoever. Annoyed me. Didn’t ruin the game in any respect, though. Just seems like they could have done better.

The characters in this game, I think, were very well done. Having very unique missions to help out every single one of them really helps to flesh them out. I connected with all of them in some respect, I think. Even characters that you worry won’t be interest, like, say, a certain Badass Biotic Bitch, are really well written. You may not end up liking them, but you can at least understand why they are they way they are. They aren’t caricatures for the most part, which is really wonderful, especially when they have so many characters to choose from.
The downside, though, is that you really go through what they have to tell you pretty fast. Any time I did anything in Mass Effect 1, I felt like everyone on my ship had a new conversation to have with me. In this one, each character only has so many. Once you’ve gone through them, they no longer want to talk to you, or just say the same things over and over. It makes it so after you have their loyalty, you’re kind of told just to ignore them, and frankly, I don’t like that, especially with Garrus. I wanted to have sex with him (which I will get to in a second) and I wanted to keep talking to him, hear what he had to say, but eventually he kept cycling through this same conversation where I could let him down about the sex if I wanted to have some of the intercourse with someone else, and so I stopped going to see him.

In any case, as far as favorite characters go, Garrus is definitely up there. He was one of my favorites from the first game, all confused about justice in a world where following the rules often gets you less justice. I loved that he was back, and I loved that he was fuckable. He’s been through a lot since the last game. He’s lightened up in some ways, and also found the huge burden that Shepard is carrying around as the leader. He’s made mistakes, and he wants to stop making them and do some good, and this character arc plays into his romance arc. He never thought about having sex with a human, and has no idea how to do it, but he wants to connect with you and make you happy, because he trusts you so much. So he is incredibly nervous, and tries way too hard, because he doesn’t want to ruin yet another thing. And then you tell him that it’s not a big deal, he isn’t going to ruin this. Then the sex. It… actually means something. The sex in the other game didn’t really mean anything. This was a sensible end to Garrus’s character arc, and it was completely awesome because of it.

The other character I really took to, and probably would have romanced if Garrus wasn’t there, was Kelly. I loved Kelly. She was flirty in a fun, not obnoxious way, and she had a personal philosophy that I agreed with. She had a quote that could have word for word come from my mouth, which was something like “Gender, Race, Species, anything like that doesn’t matter. It’s their consciousness that matters.” That was the moment where I knew I was right to like her. Heh. But yeah, not only did I find her an interesting person, and a nice change from the more military-style people on the ship (not that that doesn’t make sense, but you know) but she also served an extremely useful purpose in game and served to make your crew being captured really hit home, because she was no longer there to connect with. She was pretty well the perfect character. I loved it.

Anyway, I’ve written tons about Mass Effect 2 now. It’s safe to say I like it, right? Because I liked it.

Sometimes it’s so hard to come up with good title jokes.

But no, seriously, Mass Effect 2: Amazing, amazing game. Possibly game of the year. I can’t think of anything else that’s likely going to knock it off. Then again, I didn’t expect Red Faction: Guerrilla last year, so who knows. Still, the game is completely worth your time, even if you aren’t the sort who likes RPGs, because it’s gotten away from that significantly. It’s not a competent third person shooter that has choices you make which matter. Also, you get to have sex with people. But I’m so glad Gamefly randomly sent me the game on launch day so I could play it.

Basically, as I said, it’s just a third person shooter. They’ve tightened the cover stuff from the first game, added ammo, and given classes who don’t have a special weapon a submachine gun to help them out, as well as the concept of the “heavy weapon,” which are things like rocket launchers. In the first game, I mostly rushed out of cover to get my AI partners to get out in front of me, firing like crazy, then went and hit before I did another rush. It felt kind of stupid: I was playing Infiltrator, which was supposed to be a sniper, but I couldn’t snipe because my squadmates couldn’t be told to get out there so I could hold back. The AI is much, much, much better in this game. I had the option to order everyone around, but I rarely did it, because they did useful things without me trying to micromanage them. Occasionally I would tell a character to switch to a Sniper Rifle or something, but otherwise I left them alone, and they were a huge help.
The combat was also very different because I changed class. I loved Infiltrator because I had more armor than an Engineer in the first game, but had access to all the tech spells, which I very much enjoyed. I spent most of the game casting Overload and Overheat. In this game, they actually made Infiltrator a class which could infiltrate, giving them a cloak and such. This didn’t seem like the sort of character I wanted to play, so I went ahead and switched to full Engineer. I feel like it was the right choice: due to it being more shooter-y, I didn’t feel gimped at all by my smaller selection of weapons, and my spells were so useful, I’d often go through combats without firing a shot. I’d send out AI Drones and just maneuver to cast Incinerate over and over, and since my squadmates were smart now, they’d finish off everyone I weakened. It really made me feel like I was commanding the battlefield like I wanted to.

People are saying the scanning/mining minigame is the worst part of the game, and it probably is. But it’s not that big of a deal. I’ll take it over driving around aimlessly on the Mako any day. You can mostly refill your various resources with just a few minutes of flying around and mining, and you’re often rewarded for doing so with side missions. If you’re not obsessive about always having those resource meters full, it won’t take all that long to get the resources you need for an upgrade you want. I just put on a podcast during those parts and had no problem. Just do buy the scanning speed upgrade for your ship. It makes it so much less tedious.

Bioware really did it. They kept everything that makes their RPGs so much fun to play, and refined the gameplay of the first game into an actually fun shooter. It’s excellent, and I’m right on board with the third game. Hopefully since they finished this gameplay overhaul, it won’t take them as long to get the story stuff on board for the third game. I can cross my fingers anyway.

Now come back tomorrow for spoilarz and such, hm? I’ve got to talk about characters and plot.