Filler King

     For all of you who don't recognize the source for the title, it is a pun (again) on a song (AGAIN!).  This time, it is a pun on the song "Killer Queen" by Queen (duh).  I used it because the regularly scheduled post for this week had to be cancelled, practically at the last minute.  See, I had something planned for over a week now.  I had everything worked out in my head and ready to type down.  However, that post was contingent upon something else happening.  That event has yet to happen.  It was supposed to have occurred earlier this week.  It might happen later on today.  However, I always try to have my blogcast over with by eleven on Wednesdays.  Because the event is still in the future, I needed some filler post for today.  Experts that I have read suggest a blogger (I prefer 'blogist') should have some 'evergreen' posts ready in case of various emergencies.  Since I prefer to write extemporaneously, that rarely happens.  Instead, I'm just typing away about the reasons why a really great post has to be delayed by a week.  Maybe longer.  Don't worry.  If there is another delay of schedule, I will have a much better fill-in post ready to go.  Some weeks, I do have a choice of topics to relate upon.  This week, I was so expecting something to happen, that I didn't plan a back-up.  I mean, when someone says something should take a week to do, one doesn't expect it to take much longer than that.  I wish I had more to write about, but I don't.  Wow.  This post is going to be extra short, isn't it?  I've written such short post before, but the majority of those were at the beginning of my blogging days.  Currently, I try to write just enough that my screen will have to scroll down automatically so that I can type more.  At least I have made this post an pangram, a work where every letter of the alphabet is used at least once.  Well, I guess that's it for this week.  Bye, for now.

I Think You Might Want To Watch My Peacock Stream

    As I have mentioned here before, I am not really into streaming online content.  I've got much better things to do on my computer than watch a 'television' show or 'movie,' much less trying to binge an entire series.  I have work, social media, and games.  Hey, just because I'm limited to about forty-five new levels a week of Candy Crush Saga doesn't mean I'm not trying to keep my near champion levels skills up.  Besides, I'm kind of cheap in that department. Anyway, when the new streaming service Peacock debuted last year, I took the plunge and subscribed to the basic level of service.  The main reason I finally entered the streaming market was the original content, specifically Days of Out Lives:  Beyond Salem.  I know, it feels slightly cheesy, but I've been watching the original soap opera since high school.  I got bored during summer vacation one year, okay. I've been watching fairly regularly ever since, recording it during the day and watching it that evening.  I was interested in the wider variety of stories that the service could supply.  The five-day event was something else, as various Salemites were traveling around the world, only to get involved with an international jewel heist.  The rainbow selection of gems were the controls to a satellite defense system, and a despondent villain wanted to use the ancestral peacock statuette that the controls were placed in to take over the world.  No, I'm not joking.  There were special guest stars, crazy cameos, and a twist reveal near the end that tied the entire story into Days history.  It took me over two weeks to schedule the time to watch the entire event, but I was satisfied.  I didn't watch any other show on Peacock since, even with the constant emails I get sent about their latest programming and special offers.  I least I set up a special email address to handle such things, or I would've gotten overrun.  Then, last fall, I heard about a special Christmas-themed movie for Days.  Basically, it was an alternative universe where certain events were changed, causing familiar couples to be broken up and leading very different lives.  Unfortunately, I have yet to see this movie, as it was sent directly to the premium level of service.  I was not going to pay anything just to watch a one-off movie with altered events.  What surprised me was the the original Beyond Salem got nominated for a few Daytime Emmy awards.  I would've thought that the event would be tagged as a main Emmy mini-series, but it was placed into the Daytime categories.  I don't think it won anything, definitely nothing major, unless it was the shared nomination with Days for casting.  Well, all of this was a set-up for the second chapter of Beyond Salem, which debuted last week.  The main stunt this time around was the return of Kristian Alfonso as Hope Brady, a role the actress had once suggested she would never return to due to what she felt was unfair treatment on the show.  Once again, I had yet to see something because of the premium level of service.  I did catch the spoilers online, although the cookies such searching left are causing my Facebook feed to veer towards soaps.  The plot was something similar to the first 'Chapter.'  Various people are traveling, visiting relatives, only to get caught up with a new plan to steal some weird crystal prisms, first mentioned decades ago on the show, that have the power to cure brain tumors.  The main villain this time is a once-thought dead member of the infamous DiMera family.  (I would tell you which one, but there have been so many of them, especially those from the time before I started watching, that I'm not sure which one it was.)  The series brought back many characters that hadn't been seen in years, including introducing a few new ones.  At least one character will be seen on the main show fairly soon.  Unlike the first event, the villain actually wins this time around, and the prisms were used to help cure someone who had been cryogenically preserved for years.  This person's identity was the big cliffhanger of the series, so I won't spoil it here.  What will come of this person's possible return is still in the air, as the series hasn't 'caught up' to the timeline of the show just yet, but the two are close.  I just hope I get get to watch it sometime without having the cough up extra money.

Oh, Pun Says Me

     In case you haven't noticed yet,  I use a lot of puns in my post titles.  Pretty much too many.  I can't help it.  I like writing, and I like games.  Put the two together, and you get quite a few groaners.  Or a rhyming word that begins with 'b.'  Hey, wordplay is my thing.  Before writing today's post, I looked back over all 300+ posts, including a few I hid, to make sure I hadn't used today's title in a previous post.  I hadn't, but I was surprised that I hadn't used such an easy and obvious pun before.  It's funny, for multiple meanings, that I chose to use this pun today.  Frankly, I'm running out of things to write about, so I'm forced to write about what I write about.  Boy, was that a self-referential sentence or what?  I noticed that a rather high percentage of my post have puns in their titles.  On the one hand, puns are an easy way out of coming up with a pertinent title, one with just the tiniest bit of humor to help set the mode of the entire post, even when the post isn't always so funny.  On the other hand, I've been forced to stretch the meaning of a pun so far, that the original source becomes lost.  Take today's title.  It's from 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.'  I'm afraid that some of puns get lost on some people because I take them too far.  Now, some may think that puns should go out very far to help make their point.  Others feel that using too many puns cheapen a work.  This is all accounting to a person's taste level.  Let's take a famous pun, that some literary critics still disagree about, from William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.  Some researchers claim that the pun in question doesn't really exist and that even if it does, it may not be as directly a pun as some say it is.  The line in question is from Act 2.   Scene 5.  Malvolio has just found a letter he believes comes from a woman he is smitten with.  However, it is actually a forgery committed by Malvolio's rivals Sir Andrew and Sir Toby (heh, heh) to get him into trouble.  In lines 89-90, Malvolio comments on certain letters that he feels confirms that the handwriting is that of his female love interest.  When taken together, along with a repeated reference later on, the lines suggest something rather lewd.  Some critics say that the wordplay involved is too convoluted to contribute to something so suggestive, even when other contemporary authors use similar puns.  As Twelfth Night is a comedy, I prefer to think that the wordplay was intentional, at least to some degree.  Now, it might not be as bad as some of the suggestions in The Decameron by Boccaccio, an influence on Shakespeare.  (Just look up the third day, tenth story.  Very funny, but quite lewd, even in most English translations.  Many of the stories are like that, so be warned.) Anyway, I just hope that my little excursions into puns can one day stand up with such great works.  Probably not, but I can dream.

The Game Is a Book

     I was expecting the new version of a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) to come in today, but because of the holiday shipping schedule, it won't be available for pick-up until tomorrow.  If it even comes in.  Now, some may be asking "Why didn't you order it through your book store?"  Good question.  The short answer is that the publisher stopped dealing with my distributor at the start of the year.  The long answer is very complicated and starts back in the mid-90s.  I was still suffering through my major panic attack/anxiety outbreak, when I decided to try new things.  One was an RPG system.  I had heard about it for a few years, and I finally broke down and starting buying some of the books before actually playing with other people (that part still hasn't happened, either in real life or online).  The system was reaching the height of its popularity.  While the individual lines shared the same 'universe,' as it was, the various games didn't always interact precisely.  While the main rules and a few systems were the same, others were not, to the point where the games couldn't really be played together.  Sure, you could try, but something had to suffer so that the games would work, either one game had to change a fundamental rule or an important aspect of the metaplot would have to be ignored.  Not much fun, but it could be done.  One of the reasons I decided to open a book store, when forced to start a business, was so I could get my books easier, and cheaper, than going through my local gaming store.  While they had a fairly good selection back then, they also had a spotty record of remembering all of my orders.  The fact that my main distributor at the start didn't work with that publisher forced some change, but I was still able to use a secondary distributor to get my books.  In 2003, the publisher realized that the games were not going to be able to work together, supplements were starting to just be updates on older material, and the hanging metaplot of overarching destruction needed to be dealt with.  Therefore, they decided to end all of their game lines the following year.  This really affected me, as I found this out a few months after I had lost about 75% of my books in a flood.  While I was able to get most of the core books and a few supplements, the thought of never being able to ever get full replacements weighed heavily on my.  Even the promise of a new, updated system barely helped.  This was also coupled with the publisher being bought out by a Scandinavian video game company (Iceland, I believe).  Well, the new game lines were still carried by my secondary distributor, as well as the new primary distributor I had to switch to when my original one went out of business.  This worked well for a few years, until some shipping hiccups began starting.  It was harder to get any books from my distributors, as well as having not a single order come in from the gaming store.  Turns out that the publisher was getting ready to switch to a print on demand (POD0 model, with the possibility of downloadable PDFs.  They were also sold to another video game company (Iceland, again). Since I didn't own a computer back then, this meant I was no longer able to get any more books.  As such, I basically lost interest in gaming.  I would occasionally look some news up online, but I barely followed such things anymore.  That's why I would miss out on the great deals on special anniversary editions of the original game line, featuring bonus deals on PDFs of older supplements and the possibility of new material as well.  I got my computer just after the last of the first anniversary editions Kickstarters had ended, so I missed out on everything that I would have liked the most to get.  However, I was able to purchase and download the PDFs of the new material.  (I couldn't afford the costs of getting physical copies.). Since then, I have participated in the Kickstarters for some new projects, getting some of the new PDFs as bonuses.  I was even able to get some older material as well for a discount.  Not as much as I would've liked, but a few things I would like.  I also found out that the original company was dissolved when it was purchased by a third Scandinavian video game company (country of origin unknown).  All of this new material was created by a new company created by some of the staff of the original company.  They still had to get permission from the current holders of the intellectual property (IP) though, for each new supplement, as well as the extras featuring older material.  Well, the video game company saw that there was a market for this material. So, they got a European TTRPG company to create a new version of the most popular game line, using the sensibilities that the company could use to cross-promote the IP in other formats.  This RPG company did so, to mixed results.  Many fans were thrilled that there was a new edition coming out, but they were sort of turned off by the many, many changes in the rules, systems, and even plotting.  This confusion was increased when an early version of a supplement was sent out featuring material a little bit too politically incorrect to stand.  Changes were made, but the company would soon loose the license.  Meanwhile, the video game company was forcing changes in some of the new material being made for the anniversary editions for the second company.  The second company would wind up making a few supplements for the new edition, to a much better received following.  However, they were not offered the license to take over the new edition of this game, or any others.  No, the video game company first went with one other RPG publisher, only to go with a second one for various reasons.  Things got a little dicey, when plans for the second game line's new edition got delayed for a different, less popular one.  This new edition sped through very fast.  This is the book I expected to get in today.  Early reviews from those who bought the early PDF suggest that it will not follow the original's basic design at all.  While it's not too bad, I fear it might not be that great either.  At least early criticism got the cover image changed to something a little better.  Anyway, for some reason, the RPG company has stopped doing business with my distributor.  This includes the reprinting of works made by the second company rebranded under the RPG's banner.  At least I was able to get one last supplement before it happened.  Again, reviews suggest that the book fell just a little short of being really good and reflective of what a sizable portion of the fanbase wanted. As such, I was lucky enough to be able to order this book from my local gaming store.  I don't know if they will receive it, but we'll see.  I'm not up to ordering directly from that company just yet, or trying to start having my store deal with them directly either.  Quality issues aside, I'm just glad I get to return to the things that helped me get through some hard times.