Extra delivery: Miss peregrine's home for peculiar children (non-spoiler review)

I watch Miss peregrine's home for peculiar children this very evening and walking in blind so to speak, being entirely unfamiliar with the source material I was partially bracing my self mentally. After all I sat through City of Bones and came out feeling like I had just gargled a kitten soaked in absinth... I was very confused. 

Good news... Miss peregrine's home for peculiar children is a coherent story that is fairly easy to follow and hit all the needed notes. I would even say that it is enjoyable as long as one can disengage the brain enough. 

I am not going to go in to the story at all because it is pretty much impossible to do so without spoiling things. But I have seen in being compared to the X-Men franchise and that is not a bad place to start. But it is still a coming of age story leaning on the classic heroes journey. So don´t expect a earth shattering experience with twists so sudden that you fall off your chair. Instead prepare for a fairly innocent and adorable young adult fantasy story with clear sides and distinct characters. Also the actors are well cast and do a very nice job, again nothing that will win a Oscar but still a solid performance. 

I will do a more in dept review come Monday (I need to look in to the source material among other things) but my initial thoughts are that you should go see it for a nice wind down from the summer blockbusters and enjoy something a bit more quiet before Marvel injects you with some digital LSD by the way of Benedict Cumberbatch.

A good movie and for the genre one of the best we have seen so far... Even if that in it self is not saying much.  

Be kind and stay safe. 

Calling all units on the Crew

So I was planning to talk about this earlier but my driving  game of choice is getting a expansion. Last time it was crazy car meets, this time it is centered around the blue lightning, the fuzz, the 5-0, the bear... Yeah.. The cops are getting some well needed reinforcement from the players. Take to the road as one of the boys and girls in blue, busting racerns and issuing fines like there is no tomorrow.  I am not going to rehash the info we have so far, just read up about it on the homepage for the Crew. 

I am sort of underwhelmed, it is not the expansion i was hoping for, not is it really one I feel the game needs, But then again in know it is a popular feature with many other players and it is fairly optional so I guess I will live with it. Also it give mes a chance to turn my Nissan Fairlady Z in to Prowl, expanding my lineup of Transformers inspired cars. 

With this expansion we will also get the Nissan GTR, the lovely computer on four wheels. That will make a bunch of people happy, but since it is a expansion exclusive car... it will make people angry. Ubisoft gives and Ubisoft takes away I guess. 

Beyond that i am waiting for the next Overwatch hero and looking towards Blizzcon. I think Blizzcon is the closest i get get to actually having a annual event that I watch. My Superbowl experience so to speak. Not as much that I feel I have to go to it but to sit down and watch it. This year is a odd one and i look forward to see what they will show off. 

Short post this week. 

But take care and be safe. 

So about that ARK DLC..

Wild Card, the studio behind famed  (and still in development) survival game ARK recently released the aptly named scorched earth expansion... Normally this would not be cause for any rising of eyebrows. 

But seeing how the core game is still not released, a paid expansion does sound a bit weird. Especially as this can look like using money people paid to develop the game to make something people need to pay for again. Creating a interesting double dip effect. Now i do not think it is quite as heinous as some very (very very very) vocal fans on the games steam page, but rather i feel it is a short term publicity suicide and a future thorn in the side of the games marketing. A really unfortunate move seeing as the game up to this point had done pretty much everything right... Or as right as one can when one is crowdfunded. Now this will be mostly forgotten in a few months but will also be one of these things that detractors will bring up every time they need something to bash the game over. 

Now this i just my own theory but i think they might have needed the fresh cash that this expansion might bring, and that this injection was worth losing some customers over. The game as a pretty fanatical core fan base and many will get this no matter what, So it will absolutely do good things for the company coffers. It will be interesting to see if this will be but a fart in space or something that will slowly erode the fans trust, the next couple of moves from Wild Card will be crucial and i hope they have a plan for this. Because if they did this unaware of what the backlash would be (seeing the name of the expansion i doubt that) they are in deep shit right now. 

Time will tell. 

I am going to round off with saying that i will miss Chris Metzen on the upcoming BlizzCon but that i do not feel that his retirement is not earned. Heck he created such wondrous worlds. 

So Chris, enjoy the good life with the family. 

Take care and be safe. 

Can´t spell SONY without a N and a O

So the latest thing people got angry over was... well... SONY being SONY. 

Last time... i promise.... 

The story goes thusly.... 

Sony nixed Fallout and 

Skyrim mods on the PS4. 

Something that makes fair sense going by the very rigid and monolithic nature of SONY. Heck it would cost them a lot i guess... for no return... Not a wise move if one is in the market for money. (what other reason is there). Now on one hand this does suck, especially if you are a console gamer. But on the other hand having your hopes and dreams being crushed should be fairly common ground. 

Now the fun part of this is ofc Microsoft gloating like there is no tomorrow, having been the small kid having his lunch money stolen, this egg on the face of the tormentor is a god sent. Not that the thrashing they will get for it won´t hurt. Nut short term satisfaction is worth it i guess. Rest assured MS will find a way to completely fuck this up too.

Now for me, as a outsider looking in i get equal amounts of entertainment and uneasy feelings from this. Especially as MS move their PC stuff closer to the consoles, not the other way around. The PC will always be a superior medium if you are willing to invest in it. But it will also always be more expensive and need more attention. But it is that complexity i like. That and the fact that i can do all the fun, work and... well... other stuff on it. 

But getting back to the whole no mods on PS4. This i guess will set the tone for the war going forward, on one hand MS that is willing to do pretty much anything for more customers and SONY trying to set them self up as a "elite" brand but in the process dicking over part of their customer base. 

Now the tie-breaker will be if Nintendo smoked the good or the bad weed.... Time will tell. 

Not really much to say about the situation... I fully understand why SONY did what they did, but i thin it was a bad move and will kost them short term. But i also guess they will save money on it long term because CSR are expensive, as is multi skilling. 

Now i am going to sleep because i have worked a 10 hour day today. 

Cheers and take care. 

So YouTube did a thing... again... Angry people ensued.

So…. We are at the point again where we need to talk internet…. I tell you to chill the fuck down but you refuse. I am not sure what to do with you…

This is how i view the internet, thank you South Park.

Now this time around it is a bunch of people getting angry over YouTube… And don´t get me wrong, there are plenty of things to get angry with over YouTube. But in this case it is mostly just a matter of piss poor communication. You see the lifeblood of YouTube is and will most likely always be ad revenue… Heck that is what keeps it free and fairly unregulated. Well it turns out that those people paying money to Google want to have a say in what type of content their product is the opening act to. YouTube have starting to remove the ability to earn money of videos that does not follow a set of vague and fairly puritanical rules.

This is nothing new, it is in fact about as old as marketing itself, after all you do not try to market Jack Daniels to five year olds and if you have positioned yourself as the beacon of family values, you are not going to want to see your ads running before a clip of a person cursing like a sailor while smoking something best left in the Shire and pounding back Absinth… No matter how often this person sings “let it go”. This is just a fact of life. The fact that YT did not give people a decent heads up is them being arseholes but that should not be news to people trying to make a living on YT. It is more or less a drinking game at this point what will be the next dick move.

So… Here is where things take a sharp left out in to cray-cray land. A bunch of firebrands started to call this censorship… Now keep in mind no videos have been removed (as part of this issue… Fair use and the insane claim system is a very different issue.) only the ability to make money should YT deem a video to be “bad”. Now one could say that it is a way to starve out the unwanted ones and only keep the loyal dogs fed but in reality YT have been staring all the dogs for years. Shortly thereafter came the usual idiosyncrasy about free speech… At that point I simply zoned out.

So who is this impacting in reality… Well most YT channels make little to no money from ad revenue anyway. Most big ones supplement the income with sponsors and donations. So having a few videos every now and then get flagged will not matter, no this will only really hit home with channels built on abuse and being shitty human beings. My sympathy for these people are less than zero.

Now it is sad to see that YT keep up this system of communication so poor it make the IKEA building instructions look clear as day… And it is really bad that they simply did not enforce their rules sooner, setting precedence for what was ok and that was not. After all if you stick your dick in a wall socket and nothing happens because the power was off, you might get the incorrect ideas that it is a harmless thing to do.

But toasty genitalia aside, I fail to see that people would be willing to actually pay to keep YT open, just look at the angry words that people tossed around regarding YT RED. So if we like to keep our free entertainment channel… well free. We will have to accept that the people who actually pay have some input, just like in the “real” world. 

Any way 

Stay safe and have a great week.