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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • The point of putting a property in the public domain is precisely so anyone can do whatever they want with it. The basic idea is that all creators draw on their wider culture for ideas, and therefore all creative works belong, in part, to the wider culture, and need to be turned over eventually. The fact that Willingham uses so many public domain characters in his comics is itself a good illustration of how this works. Two of his main characters are Snow White and the Big Bad Wolf (among many other fairy tale characters). They eventually get married. Are you concerned about preserving the “spirit” of those original stories, which Willingham freely reinterprets? I doubt it, and you shouldn’t be. We all, as a culture, own those characters and can use them however we want. What this decision means is that the same now applies to Willingham’s specific versions. I have immense respect for the man for making a principled decision.

    As for how it damages DC, it doesn’t do anything directly. They can still make and sell whatever they want, same as before. It’s just that now they have competition, because other people can also make and sell Fables books. Assuming DC loses the inevitable legal battle, at any rate.



  • Dead Space 1, the original. I recently realized I own it on the EA account I forgot having made and figured I’d take a look. I’m partway through chapter 3 now. The game really shows its age graphically, the ragdoll physics on the many corpses lying around keeps glitching out, and if the game is actually trying to be horrifying I feel a touch more subtlety would have been called for. It often feels more like a haunted house than something that’s supposed to seem like a real place.

    That being said, the combat is satisfyingly visceral (the gimmick of focusing on cutting off limbs was a very good idea), and tech limitations aside both the art direction and sound design are very solid. The times the game actually manages to be unnerving is almost always due to the tension of hearing the monsters in the walls but not being able to pinpoint its location.

    Overall, I’m not exactly in love with it but I’ll probably play it all the way through.



  • As a super casual player, I’m mostly enjoying the spectacle of the campaign. Coming from rts like age of Empires 2, which has a sometimes pretty strict population cap in it’s missions (and also medieval technology), being able to build up an unlimited army of giant tanks and mecha is pretty fun. Maybe that loses its novelty at some point. Speaking of novelties, the fmv cutscenes are an interesting choice. I realize they were a fad when the original game was released, but I respect that they decided to preserve that portion of the series’ identity.

    The use of only one resource is strange. It feels like there are only a couple places on the map (the tiberium fields) that actually matter, and the rest is just empty space. I haven’t seen what the multi-player maps look like, maybe they add neutral buildings or something to give the players something to fight over. They’ve been a couple of those so far.

    My opinion is also heavily influenced by the fact that the game is from the time before all the modern bullshit with microtransactions and stuff. Like, I paid for a game, and I received an actually complete game that doesn’t try to sell me a bunch more stuff. Wild. Having just moved on from Immortals: Fenyx Rising, which really suffered from being a Ubisoft game despite its charming setting and characters really drives that point home.