the website of author and local favorite blake michael nelson | about | contact: theblakeshow@gmail.com
|
NEWS AND VIEWS - MAY 2022
WRITING NEWS I made some pretty good progress this month: I finished the new Signalverse short story ("Going Viral") and added another 5,000 words to A City Burnished Silver (the third novel in The Chemical Empires trilogy). I'm planning on including "Going Viral" in the new, expanded edition of the Signal City Visitor's Guide. I had also been planning to add some illustrations to the book, but I'm having second thoughts about that now -- I need a lot of character art, and it looks like most of the artists on Fiverr (for example) want about $60-$100 per piece. That's reasonable, and about in line with what I was expecting, but my financial situation is kind of uncertain at the moment and I can't really justify spending something like $2,000 all at once on a big vanity project like this. I could try Kickstarter again, I suppose, but the last time I tried to Kickstart a project ($600 for cover art for Champions Weekly) it didn't go very well at all -- I think the funding only hit $130 or something like that. Crowdfunding can work if you're already a popular writer, artist, or YouTuber, or if you've got a ton of followers on Twitter, but if no one's ever heard of you it's very difficult to get anywhere with it. So I might just forget about the illustrations for now and just release the book as-is. I haven't made up my mind yet. (Even without the illustrations, this thing is a beast: it's 120 pages of pure Signalverse geekery. The timeline has been expanded, there's way more trivia, I've added probably two hundred new entries to the character bios section, and I've written over a dozen mini-essays on various aspects of the Signalverse. It's also got that map of Signal City, more thorough descriptions of the alien worlds and other dimensions that have appeared in the series, a cover gallery, and, of course, "Going Viral", which is a 10,000-word short story. * * * * * * * * TETRIS 99 I'm getting pretty good at this. 
Tetris 99 is a little different from Tetris Ultimate and the NES Tetris, which are the Tetris games I usually play -- the most important thing in Tetris 99 is to clear lines as quickly as possible, to avoid getting overwhelmed by other players sending garbage at you. In the older, single-player Tetris games I trained myself on the main goal is racking up points, and the best way to do that is to let the blocks build up a bit until you're able to clear them with a straight tetromino. If you try to do that in Tetris 99 you're probably going to get swamped. * * * * * * * * MUSICAL WIZARDRY This is the most underrated soundtrack in the history of video games. Every single track is gold. I actually own a copy of this game; I bought it when I was about fourteen years old. It's pretty good, but the gameplay's a little blah and it certainly didn't entrance me the way Shining Force did. * * * * * * * * REVIEW: HE-MAN AND THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE: THE TAKING OF GRAYSKULL Another review/recap of an old Masters of the Universe episode, which I wrote a few years ago for another site. This might be the wackiest He-Man episode I've ever taken it upon myself to review. Not only is the story totally crazy, the dialogue is full of hilarious pseudo-scientific gobbledygook, He-Man solves virtually every problem he encounters in some incredibly ridiculous way, and the visuals that appear in the latter half of the episode look like they might have been inspired by a bad acid trip. Weird! We begin at the palace, where we find Orko in his room, talking to himself in front of a mirror. We learn that it's his birthday, and that he's very excited about it. Unfortunately, no one else around the palace seems to have remembered, and the hints he keeps dropping about it being a "very nice day" aren't picked up by anyone. So he decides to go to the kitchen to see if the palace chef is preparing a birthday cake for him. 
The palace chef -- Chef Allen, he's called -- turns out to be a dumpy, double-chinned fellow who won't let him into the kitchen (it's obvious, of course, that Chef Allen is hiding a cake, and that everyone in the palace is simply pretending to have forgotten Orko's birthday in anticipation of some huge surprise party, but he doesn't get it). The chef shoos him away, then reenters the kitchen, where we find Adam and Teela and Cringer chuckling over their little deception. Their party-planning is interrupted, however, by Man-At-Arms, who waltzes in and starts yammering about some "trouble in the province of Basilia." The group immediately sets out for the province...except for Chef Allen, who remains behind, obliviously stirring something in a pot. (I loved this "Chef Allen" character. Too bad they never made an action figure out of this guy.) Oh, and Man-At-Arms offers up a snort-worthy line in this scene: "I'll contact Ram-Man. He may be of help." Ha! Well, it would be the first time. Adam and Cringer transform into He-Man and Battlecat respectively, while Teela and Ram-Man fly off in hovercars or some damn thing. They all reach Basilia in about ten seconds (it never seems to take these folks very long to get from one region to another -- evidently Eternia is a very small kingdom/planet). The province, we discover, is indeed beset by trouble: earthquakes are dislodging huge round Raiders of the Lost Ark-style boulders all over the place, and a big whirlwind is zooming around wrecking things. Teela saves a couple from a rampaging boulder by shooting it with the cannon built into her hovercar (the cannon shoots a beam that makes the boulder simply vanish into nothing -- wow, high-tech), but she can't do anything about the whirlwind. Fortunately, He-Man shows up to deal with it in a really ridiculous way: he takes his sword and kind of...how do I describe this...okay, he kind of spins it around, which somehow gathers the whirlwind around his body, which he then throws into space (seriously: they actually include a shot of the whirlwind leaving the planet). Go He-Man! It's not over yet for our hero, though: one of the boulders is headed his way. He reaches for his sword, only to find that the weapon has suddenly and mysteriously vanished. "Use your sword, He-Man," Ram-Man suggests in his stupid duh-I'm-a-moron voice. What a great help Ram-Man has been so far! Anyway, He-Man explains that his sword is gone, but everything turns out all right anyway -- the boulder simply disappears before it reaches our musclebound friend. Confused, the group heads back to Man-At-Arms's workshop to try to make sense of things. There, they discuss the possibility that Skeletor is screwing with them. Orko, who had earlier gone to Castle Grayskull to talk to the Sorceress, returns and informs the group that Castle Grayskull itself has gone missing. Yikes! Naturally, our heroes head out to investigate. 
As it turns out, Orko was right: Castle Grayskull has disappeared and been replaced by a huge glowing white orb. Man-At-Arms, the brains of the outfit, is quick to realize what they're looking at: the orb, he tells them, is in fact a rare white hole -- "like a black hole, only it's not as dense!" Some extremely strange speculation follows: "I suspect he [Skeletor] utilized the Council of Evil after he located a dying neutron star!" To which He-Man, catching on, replies: "And was able to direct it over the castle to use the tremendous suction force from the nova to pull the castle with the Sorceress into another dimension!" All this was a bit over my head, but I'm sure Man-At-Arms and He-Man know what they're talking about. They probably both have PhD's in this stuff. In any case, He-Man decides that the best way to get Castle Grayskull back is to jump into the white hole and look around for it. So he does. A moment later, Teela winds up accidentally falling into the hole as well. (She screams "I'm falling!" as she falls, which I thought was pretty funny.) Anyway, the inside of the white hole is a terribly weird alternate dimension, where trees grow down and waterfalls fall up and all sorts of bizarre colored things float around in the air. Very surreal. He-Man and Teela quickly meet up and work their way past a series of boring obstacles: a bottomless pit (which Battlecat merely jumps over), some kind of dragon-like, tentacled creature (no match, obviously, for He-Man), and some other crap I can't remember (I was getting pretty bored by this point: almost fourteen minutes in and still no sign of Skeletor). Meanwhile, back in the real world, Man-At-Arms -- worried about Teela -- sheds a single tear. 
Finally, He-Man and Teela and Battlecat find Castle Grayskull. Inside they find Skeletor (yes!) sitting on a throne, the Sorceress chained up at his side. He gloats when our heroes threaten him: "Now we're playing in my dimension, and I make all the rules!" So saying, he blasts He-Man with a "stun ray" from his staff, and then begins to laugh manaically at the fun he's having (blasting He-Man around being one of his favorite things to do in the whole world). He-Man, however, is unperturbed. His sword -- you'll recall it vanished early on in the episode -- suddenly reappears, having been somehow recreated by the "good of Castle Grayskull." Sword in hand, he calls Skeletor a "loser" and, acting on the telepathic advice of the Sorceress, draws his adversary in front of a mirror (she says she'll be able to "use her powers in reverse" if He-Man can get him in front of this mirror). Immediately, a yellow fog emerges from the mirror to envelop Skeletor. I didn't really get it. Anyway, with Skeletor captured, all that remains now is to somehow get the castle back into the real world. How does He-Man accomplish this? Well...he picks it up and throws it. Yeah. He gets underneath it, lifts up the whole castle, and tosses it into the sky. And while it's flying away, he produces a grappling hook from somewhere, lobs it at the airborne castle, and rides it out of the white hole. 
Everyone arrives safely back in Eternia. Skeletor somehow manages to escape (the good guys don't bother to chase him, of course), the castle's restored, blah blah blah. Back at the palace, Orko -- still under the impression that everyone's forgotten his birthday -- conjures up a huge meal for himself, leaving him too sick to eat his birthday cake at his surprise party later. The end. Overall...well, I liked Chef Allen, and the scientific-sounding gibberish about the neutron star, and the preposterous ways in which He-Man solved his problems. The thing with Orko's birthday never really goes anywhere, though, and the story as a whole is actually kind of boring -- and it doesn't help that Skeletor, who is probably the show's most entertaining character, makes his appearance so late. It's not terrible, and the surreal stuff is fun, but you won't really missing anything if you decide to sit this one out. |