I don't just mean I want to play again.

I feel longing to play it again.

I have honestly never felt this with any other game. A lot of games to me are just ways of passing the time when I'm not busy with other stuff. Call Of Duty is just there to kill a few hours in the Employee break room while a computer diagnostic finishes up. Destiny is there if I want some mindless loot grinding. Path of Exile is much the same.

But then there's games I play for the experience, to immerse myself in a game. Subnautica is my all-time favourite survival crafting game. Stellaris is by far the best 4X grand strategy game I've ever played. Fallout: New Vegas is among my favourite RPG games, along with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Then there's Elite Dangerous.

I began playing Elite back in 2016, right after a house fire destroyed my high-spec PC rig. I've tried replacing the damm thing, but considering that I originally started building the rig in 2009, and I just kept upgrading it till the year it got totalled, and that I spent countless hours and insane amounts of moolah building it...I just haven't had the time or budget to rebuild a proper rig.

After that fire, I had my Mac, and that was it. I still use my mac for Uni, despite its ever growing age and level of wear. Since then, I've had a loaner laptop from my Dad, but it's a Lenovo Thinkpad, and I think that's all I need to say. But I digress.

Back then, I had to use my puny mac for gaming, and it did work pretty well. I can safely say that it is possible to run high-end games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Stellaris on a Mid-2013 Macbook Air without running into significant framerate drops. I've become accustomed to dealing with framerates in the single digits. That's when I decided to purchase Elite Dangerous, and I swiftly fell in love.

Prior to playing ED, I had attempted to play the popular space MMO Eve Online. I quickly discovered that the game was more complicated than a Tzeenchian Cultist's shopping list, and stopped playing after about twelve hours. Thankfully the game had gone F2P at this point, so there was no money lost at my end. I was at the time interested in space sims, and I quickly noticed that there was a significant amount of positivity about Elite Dangerous. So, I purchased it on sale, downloaded it onto my Mac, and my god...it's full of stars.

Despite my Mac being a piece of shit when it comes to running games, I managed to get an insanely good experience out of Elite. While my framerate issues made combat significantly harder than it should have been, I soon found that space trucking around the milky way delivering cargo from station to station was fun in its own way. I'd get a mission at one orbital, load up a playlist on my iPhone, pop in my earbuds, undock from the orbital, engage supercruise, and head to the next destination. I quickly moved up from the puny Mk I Sidewinder to a Cobra Mk III, which was my ship at the time I stopped playing. I loved playing the game, and I even took some vacation days just to participate in one of the big events (I think it was some agricultural crisis in a star system, but it's been a while since I last played).

Then came the infamous day when Frontier Developments decided to slash Mac Support from the game in the next major update. By this time, I'd only played about 12 hours, but had thoroughly enjoyed the game. I was really pissed, so I tried getting a refund.

Nope, I'd had the game for longer than two weeks, and I had twelve hours of playtime. Steam support said to go to Frontier.

I asked for a refund. Nope! You have to get that from Steam.

I asked if they could give me a free copy of the PS4 version in recompense, so I could at least play on the PS4 that survived the fire. Nope! Even I think that was a bit much to ask, and I was the one asking.

Finally, I asked if they could transfer my progress to the PS4 version, of which I aimed to buy a copy. I think you know what the answer is there.

I'm not mad about it really. I know macs aren't meant for gaming, and my use of one was only meant to be temporary. But then came the long period of insurance paperwork and legal stuff to deal with the fallout from the fire, and with it also came a long period of time off going to uni. I had to put my life on hold while I sorted out my issues.

It wasn't until about a week ago that I started to feel a longing to get back in the cockpit. To play the game again. This is something I've never felt from a game before. It's not addiction, since I really didn't play all that much, and the vacation day I took off wasn't really a vacation day, since I was also sick with the flu at the time. Twelve hours is nothing compared to the 435 hours I've played Stellaris for. It's more like a desire to experience the game again, and to feel the way I did when I first booted up the game.

If you want a great experience with a brilliantly realised universe, with a huge amount of detail, and enjoy the space trucking experience, get Elite Dangerous. It's well worth the price tag, and it's still being updated and improved by the devs. Maybe I'll see you out there one day. o7, PPC.

Dammit this manga is good. But I really wish I liked it more.

Let me back up. Planetes is a manga by Makoto Yukimura, the same man who would later go on to write Vinland Saga, one of my favorite mangas ever. It's set in the near future and follows the crew of the DS-12 "Toybox", a ship tasked with cleaning up space junk and debris from earth and lunar orbit—an unglamorous but important job. Yuri knows this all too well: He lost his wife when a single screw hit the spaceship they were in at low-earth orbit. To Fee, it's just another job—a way to support her family and pay for another pack of smokes. For Hachirota, it's a way to get into space, a gateway to better things, to becoming a real astronaut like his father. As for Tanabe... well, she just seems to be glad to be here.

I'm about to rag on this series a bit, so let me just be clear—Planetes is good. Like, really good. It's full of strong sociopolitical commentary, memorable, lovable characters, and the whole story has a strong central message that ties everything together.

But.

The ending has... problems. It really feels like Yukimura was planning something longer and was forced to end it abruptly. Fee's arc does complete, but it doesn't really feel completed—it feels cut short. Hachi's ending scene feels like it came too far along and his arc should have been wrapped up earlier. More to the point, it was wrapped earlier. And new characters like Baron and Colonel Sanders (yes, really. Yes, he does look like the fried chicken mascot. Yes, other characters make fun of him for it) didn't really get the screen time and development they needed to feel fully realized. It feels like the story should have either ended sooner, or later. As it stands, it's somewhere in between and everything feels unresolved. Far too unresolved for the series to end with a big ending speech.

Maybe the anime, which ends earlier and changes around some plot elements, fixes this. I haven't actually seen it so I can't guarantee, but by all accounts it is a very good anime so... yeah.

On the whole, I do recommend Planetes if you can find it. The anime is impossible to purchase or legally stream now so you'll have to either buy it used or pirate it. Meanwhile, the manga got an extremely nice two-volume omnibus release from Dark Horse, which is great... but only the first half is in print. Copies of the second half are available online, but they're going for twice the price of the first half.

Or, if the ideas and strengths interest you but you don't want to go to all this effort, go read/watch Vinland Saga, which is even better and by the same author.

1917 is the best gorram war film I have ever seen.

I’ve seen a lot of war films.

I can safely say it’s better than Saving Private Ryan, Dunkirk, Black Hawk Down, Full Metal Jacket, or even Apocalypse Now.

So, if you haven’t seen it, and ignored the spoilers tag, here’s a quick run down on the film. It’s 1917, and the world is embroiled in WWI. In France, two soldiers are sent on a dangerous mission across No Man’s Land to deliver a urgent message to another Allied unit that is about to fall into a deadly trap.

Right off the bat, the movie draws you in as the protagonists walk from the relatively untouched grasslands of the rear lines, and into the ever more cramped and grimy world of the trenches. The whole movie is cleverly shot as if it is a single take. There’s never any noticable cuts, and there is only ever one camera filming the pair. The camera appears to just be a floating portal in the air, following these soldiers on their mission.

The uniforms, equipment, and other period stuff are entirely accurate from my ammature historian’s perspective. To make the film, they recreated a entire trench system, with parts of it scattered across the British countryside. IIRC, a part of it was built two miles from Stonehenge on the Salisbury plains.

In terms of how it plays out, there’s moments of relative calm- which can even be quite beautiful (for example, the scene of a soldier singing to a massive group of his comrades right before they go into battle is a almost otherwordly scene, both strange and entrancing). There’s a equal amount of action setpieces, from a collapsing German bunker near the start to a battle with a German sniper near the middle.

Overall, 1917 is a extremely thematic film, representing not the blood-soaked, testosterone-driven action of more tasteless war films; but the melancholy and pointlessness of war; where a small number of men can sacrifice so much, but achieve so little in the end. I highly reccomend this film for anyone who hasn’t seen it.

I need to catch up on some Disney films, especially the ones the Kingdom Hearts series already spoiled for me. I decided to start with Tangled, since it’s a standalone, and I’m ostensibly going to finish watching The Mandalorian with my brother next week.

Spoilers follow for Tangled and Kingdom Hearts 3.

It’s interesting that the movie actually gives away the twist (or what I thought of as a twist) right in the prologue, so that’s it’s actually not a twist at all. We start out knowing Rapunzel is the kidnapped princess right out the get-go, which made for quite a different feeling from when I played through the Kingdom of Corona level in KH3, where I only figured the connection out just before the scene that revealed it. It kind of feels like they were wanting to keep the plot simpler to emulate the feeling of the older Disney adaptations of fairy tales, rather than newer Disney films that seem to always have a twist lately. And it’s fine. I still liked the movie quite a bit, though I don’t think I rate it among the crazy-good Disney films like Lilo & Stitch or Frozen.

I’m amused that the token “I want” song of the film’s opening is basically a song about keeping busy to avoid boredom. I can relate. (Could Mother Gothel really not get more than three books for Rapunzel? I know she’s the bad guy, but come on, lady!) I don’t think Rapunzel can quite replace my girl Cinderella as the workaholic’s token spirit Disney princess, but it was still kind of fun imagining myself locked in a tower and coming up with projects to keep busy . . . What do you mean that wasn’t the takeaway of the scene?

Mother Gothel’s character is something else my KH3 play-through skewed expectations for. In the game, she gets manipulated by a villain from another world, and generally doesn’t have a lot of early scenes alongside Rapunzel, so I found myself sympathizing with her more there, up until she kind of snapped at the end. In the film, though, I was very quickly shocked out of that mindset by their very first interaction, where Gothel’s blatant insults straight to Rapunzel’s face are just . . . just horrible, and felt enough like realistic verbal abuse among family members that it even made me a little uncomfortable just to be listening to it. The writers also gave Gothel some lines that have very different meanings than they would in a more normal context. The ones that stood out to me were “Rapunzel, I’m not getting any younger down here,” which Gothel means literally, and the fact that Gothel calls Rapunzel, “Flower” as a pet name—except it’s not a pet name, but a sign that Gothel only sees the princess as a replacement of the object she needs for her eternal life. Gothel is quite a nasty addition to the Disney villains pantheon, and her vanity and selfishness come through with just about every word. I was glad to see her meet her end, after so many centuries of bonus life.

Flynn’s vague, G-rated womanizing and general attitude turned me off almost immediately, because those sorts of characters tend to get on my nerves pretty quickly. Fortunately, he turned out to be more tolerable than I was expecting, and I like that the development of his relationship with Rapunzel made a lot of those negative character traits vanish by the end. A volunteer I work with in Small Mammals building had told me that the horse was the best character in the film, and he really does carry a presence to him every time he appears onscreen. Despite being fairly natural-looking and non-anthropomorphized, at least by Disney standards, Maximus’s facial features and body movements are so incredibly expressive, even without saying a single word. In a movie that’s so human-focused, it’s delightfully hilarious to see this horse behaving so dutifully and seriously, to the point where it sometimes feels like he’s defying the laws of physics in hunting down Flynn. Pascal is well portrayed, too, and with the same lack of speech, which is impressive. But Maximus is definitely my favorite of the movie.

I found the music to be largely forgettable, which is unusual for Disney. That opening boredom song has a decent beat, but it just doesn’t grab me for some reason. Actually, I think the song with the most energy is the reprise of “Mother Knows Best.” The voice actor put a crazy amount of emotion and power into her voice for that, and it’s sticking with me longer than the rest of the film’s music, even the original version of the song that the reprise is reprising.

—doctorlit isn’t going to watch any of the modern Winnie the Pooh films, for the record

“No, it wasn’t us! It was the old spoiler!” “No, it wasn’t us! It was the old spoiler!” “No, it wasn’t us! It was the old spoiler!”