Notes on Deathloop #8

Deathloop is a lot of fun! There’s nothing better than starting your day by going for a hunt and killing a visionary. I’m slowly getting the hang of how this game works: its systems, how to outwit the enemies and all of the (rather complicated) little intricacies of the time loop. But key is that I’ve accepted that it’s OK to die. Once you start building your armoury of weapons and powers that persist between loops, you start to lose the fear of dying. Which takes away the stress that usually comes with these kinds of stealth games. You’re OK with it if things start going to shit five minutes into silently creeping around.

I usually try to play it stealthy at first and then, if I get discovered I kill all nearby enemies and hide for a while. Things won’t completely go back to normal, but that way I can creep up on the next batch of enemies to murder them too. So far, I haven’t finished a single run stealthily. But you know what? The game has never given me the slightest suggestion that this isn’t the way it’s meant to be played.

Among the many things he was, John McAfee also was a gifted writer. I had no idea.

I’ve got the following plan for the next few episode releases of my podcast The Private Citizen, which should get me back up to this year’s schedule of the four episodes a month that I’ve promised for the show:

The Private Citizen 91, 20 October 2021: Bugs in our Pockets

• Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning — Whitfield Diffie of Diffie-Hellman fame (co-invented public-key crypto), Ronald Rivest co-invented RSA, Steven M. Bellovin co-invented encrypted key exchange and is credited with inventing the firewall, Josh Benaloh invented the Benaloh cryptosystem, Jon Callas is one of the founders of PGP Inc. and co-founder of Silent Circle, Peter Neumann is the editor of the RISK Digest, Carmela Troncoso was the main author of the original DP-3T paper, Bruce Schneier, Matt Blaze and Ross Anderson are well-known crypto and security experts

The Private Citizen 92, 25 October 2021: CIA vs. WikiLeaks

• Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA’s secret war plans against WikiLeaks

The Private Citizen 93, 27 October 2021: iOS Do Not Track

• When you “Ask app not to track,” some iPhone apps keep snooping anyway
• Study: Effectiveness of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency

I also have the following topics on my list, which I want to cover as soon as possible in further episodes (I might do an episode where I lump a couple of smaller topics together, too):

• Geofence warrants: Google Report Spotlights Uptick in Controversial “Geofence Warrants” by Police
• Xiaomi censorship: Lithuania tells its citizens to throw Xiaomi mobile devices in the bin, Zensurvorwürfe: Will Xiaomi vor allem Porno-Werbung filtern?
• Quad vs. China cyber war: “Quad” group seeks to set security standards for global tech industry, Quad Principles on Technology Design, Development, Governance, and Use, India, Japan flex cyber-defence muscles as China kicks the Quad, FCC details $1.9 billion program to rip out Huawei and ZTE gear in the US
• Stasi spying on car phones in West Berlin: Stasi hörte seit 1975 Autotelefone in West-Berlin ab
• The Trump / Alfa Bank story: Indictment, Lawsuits Revive Trump-Alfa Bank Story
• Facebook account deletion: Top German Court Says Facebook Must Inform Users About Deleting Their Posts Or Suspending Their Account, Explain Why, And Allow Them To Respond

Notes on Deathloop #7

This RPS story on Deathloop is spot on.

In his Deathloop review, Brendy described Colt as “playing it by ass”. I liked that line, but I didn’t yet understand its true gravitas. I am now enlightened. I have beheld the true ass of Colt, and I have grasped its magnitude: Colt’s ass is the antithesis to Dishonored’s heart. Blam. Boot. Blam. None of you are free of sin.

Absent the spectral whispers of a murdered empress for guidance, or the crushing burden of a city teetering between ruin and hope, Colt allows his glute-instincts to scribble his itinerary through Murderparty Island. While my Emily Kaldwin peers at the souls of militia trapped by poverty and circumstance and opts for the sleep darts, my Colt is stifling laughter as he sticks four proximity mines to a firework and launches it at a happy drunk.

Deathloop encourages this by not only scrapping Dishonored’s wagging narrative finger, but actively lopping it off with a machete. Then it sews on a new finger, perpetually pointing out an array of blissful idiots who simply cannot get enough of the very edge of roofs. Colt is the rare videogame shootyman who isn’t Doom Guy and just straight up enjoys his job as much as the player does. Both he and Julliana are Arkane protagonists cut from the cloth that the studio usually reserves for its much more interesting fringe oddballs while the leading parts go to stoics and mutes. I have some gripes with Deathloop, but I’ll take Colt and Julianna’s worst one liners over Corvo lamenting Dishonored’s much more interesting world while he perches on a roof like a grim, guilt-ridden, gravel-throated gargoyle. Homicidal glee is, it turns out, incredibly infectious.

Lighthearted time loop stories usually feature a sort of ‘seven stages of grief’ arc. Confusion. Despair. Acceptance. Then playful nihilism, like Bill Murray eating facefuls of cake for breakfast. This is always the best part. Deathloop knows this. Personal growth and altruism are for suckers who don’t recognise a good thing when they see it. Revenge is best served in perpetuity, in the pettiest ways imaginable. Bill Murray never had to floss again, and Colt never has to wash the face fragments off his best kicking boots.

I think that sums up pretty well why I like this game so much. It isn’t as full of itself and its world as Dishonored and it’s simply a lot more fun to play than Prey. And the time loop, while on the face of it being a pretty tired literary device, does explain a lot of things rather neatly that videogames often struggle with. Like how you come back after you die as a player. Why the main character speaks to himself. How he knows certain things. And why he doesn’t care what happens to people and happily goes on a murdering rampage.

Games like Dishonored give you a ton of cool weapons and then basically tell you off for using them. Because you killed someone or didn’t completely ghost a level. Deathloop does away with all of this crap and lets you have fun. This time, you actually can play the way you like. That was probably the best decision Arkane ever made.

I took part in the beta weekend for Icarus and streamed my gameplay of it yesterday and today. I’m planning to do the same for the next two of those beta weekends, as I’m currently writing a review of the game and might as well. If you’ve missed the streams and want to watch the first ten hours of me figuring out its mechanics, check out these three recordings on YouTube:

Notes on Deathloop #6

I’m actually getting somewhere in this game! And it’s fun! I think I really dig this one. First Arkane game I can actually enjoy fully.

We have now reached a stage of collective madness where a drug that could potentially save thousands of lives is actually seen as bad, because it doesn’t fit the accepted propaganda line. Or as Matt Taibbi puts it so eloquently:

Since the start of the Trump years, we’ve been introduced to a new kind of news story, which assumes adults can’t handle multiple ideas at once, and has reporters frantically wrapping facts deemed dangerous, unorthodox, or even just insufficiently obvious in layers of disclaimers. The fear of uncontrolled audience brain-drift is now so great that even offhand references must come swaddled in these journalistic Surgeon General’s warnings.

• The Cult of the Vaccine — “The jab” is just the latest story to be reported as mantra

Security story of the day:

• Navy Warship’s Facebook Page Hacked to Stream “Age of Empires” Gaming — The destroyer-class USS Kidd streamed hours of game play in a funny incident that has serious cybersecurity ramifications.

Twitch has reset everyone’s stream keys. Presumably because of the hack. Funnily, they don’t say why in the email they sent out to streamers. Maybe they presume everyone knows of the hack by now? Interesting corporate communications strategy there…

Notes on Deathloop #5

Well, played as Julianna the first time and promptly my game crashed.

Apparently this is a know issue with the game’s handling of refresh rates and VSync under strain. If it happens to you, this might help. Seems to have fixed it for me.

Notes on Deathloop #4

Jesus. This game is fucking with my brain on so many levels.

Notes on Deathloop #3

Well, a restart of the game fixed the dual wield icon issue. At least that’s something… Although I still don’t understand the default layout. Such a weird design choice.

Notes on Deathloop #2

Why the fuck is the dual wield control on mouse/keyboard this idiotic in this game? By default, left hand is right mouse button and right hand is left mouse button. And even if you change the bindings, the permanent icons at the bottom of the screen are still wrong. What the fuck!?

The amount of times I’ve ended my stealth run by accident now because I looked at the icons and squeezed off a (very loud) SMG burst instead of using my (silent) machete… This is infuriating!

Notes on Deathloop #1

Well, despite continuous warnings that my old GTX 980 has about 2 GB too few VRAM, the game actually runs quite well. I mean, it isn’t exactly pretty and I sometimes have some screen tearing, but it’s very playable and actually quite smooth. And since it’s a very stylised look anyway, even more than with previous Arkane games, it’s actually not that jarring to turn the graphics settings down to low.

The Wall Street Journal once again very good at pulling people into a story, even if the story is largely just what anyone with a modicum of common sense would expect:

• These People Who Work From Home Have a Secret: They Have Two Jobs — When the pandemic freed employees from having to report to the office, some saw an opportunity to double their salary on the sly. Why be good at one job, they thought, when they could be mediocre at two?

I mean, why are you surprised? The reason for this is obviously that many people are only working half as much when they are working from home. I can’t possibly be the only one who noticed productivity tanking across the board with all kinds of organisations last year – from Ikea’s invoice department to all kinds of support hotlines to governmental offices and even regarding teachers in schools (from what I hear from people who have kids.)

There are clearly people who work well (and a lot) when left largely to their own devices. I’ve been a freelancer working for myself for almost three years now, I ought to know. But these people are clearly in the minority. Most people just work less, the less supervision they have. And it should surprise nobody that some of these people have figured out how they can work just the same at home, just for two employers making bank twice. Especially in America. Come on, you don’t have to be a genius to figure this out!

Why are there so many possible podcast topics cropping up exactly when I have so little time to produce new Private Citizen episodes? I hope I can catch up on all of this stuff at some point…

• HTTPS Is Actually Everywhere
• India, Japan flex cyber-defence muscles as China kicks the Quad — Tokyo’s new cyber-security policy names China, Russia, North Korea as sources of increasing threat
• FCC details $1.9 billion program to rip out Huawei and ZTE gear in the US — Carriers with under 10 million customers as well as some schools, libraries, and health care providers can apply for FCC funding to dispose of Chinese-vendor network equipment from October 29.
• When you “Ask app not to track,” some iPhone apps keep snooping anyway — To test Apple’s privacy protections, we watched the data flow out of 10 popular apps.
• Study: Effectiveness of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency
• Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA’s secret war plans against WikiLeaks

Holy shit! After saying for decades it wasn’t going to happen, JMS is working on a remake of Babylon 5!

To answer all the questions, yes, it’s true, Babylon 5 is in active development as a series for the CW. We have some serious fans over at the network, and they’re eager to see this show happen. I’m hip deep into writing the pilot now, and will be running the series upon pickup.

It seems whoever had to die or otherwise move on has done so.

And JMS is keeping with the spirit of the original show while not being afraid to change it up.

The network understands the uniqueness of Babylon 5 and is giving me a great deal of latitude with the storytelling. As noted in the announcement, this is a reboot from the ground up rather than a continuation, for several reasons. In the years since B5, I’ve done a ton of other TV shows and movies, adding an equal number of tools to my toolbox, all of which I can bring to bear on one singular question: If I were creating Babylon 5 today, for the first time, knowing what I now know as a writer, what would it look like? How would it use all the storytelling tools and technological resources available in 2021 that were not on hand then?

How can it be used to reflect the world in which we live, and the questions we are asking and confronting every day? Fans regularly point out how prescient the show was and is of our current world; it would be fun to take a shot at looking further down the road. So we will not be retelling the same story in the same way. There would be no fun and no surprises. Better to go the way of Westworld or Battlestar Galactica where you take the original elements that are evergreens and put them in a blender with a ton of new, challenging ideas, to create something fresh yet familiar.

To those asking why not just do a continuation, for a network series like this, it can’t be done because over half our cast are still stubbornly on the other side of the Rim. How do you telling continuing story of our original Londo without the original Vir? Or G’Kar? How do you tell Sheridan’s story without Delenn? Or the story of B5 without Franklin? Garibaldi? Zack?

The original Babylon 5 was ridiculously innovative: the first to use CGI to create ships and characters, and among the very first to shoot widescreen with a vigorous 5.1 mix. Most of all, for the first time, Babylon 5 introduced viewers accustomed to episodic television to the concept of a five-year arc with a pre-planned beginning, middle and end… Creating a brand new paradigm for television storytelling that has subsequently become the norm. That tradition for innovation will continue in this new iteration, and I hope to create additional new forms of storytelling that will further push the television medium to the edge of what’s possible.

Let me conclude by just saying how supportive and enthusiastic everyone at the CW has been and is being with this project. They understand the unique position Babylon 5 occupies both in television and with its legions of fans, and are doing everything they can to ensure the maximum in creative freedom, a new story that will bring in new viewers while honoring all that has come before.

This is beyond exiting! The original Babylon 5 is in my top three of best TV shows of all time. And with JMS involved like he seems to be, this is going to be epic. I can’t wait to see this show!

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