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BGN interviews the cast of the Prime Video series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
Featured in the interviews are: Maxim Baldry (Isildur), Ema Horvath (Eärien), Lloyd Owen (Elendil), Benjamin Walker (High King Gil-galad), Owain Arthur (Prince Durin IV), Sophia Nomvete (Princess Disa), Markella Kavanagh (Elanor ‘Nori’ Brandyfoot), Megan Richards (Poppy Proudfellow), Cynthia Addai-Robinson (Queen Regent Míriel), Trystan Gravelle (Pharazôn) Morfydd Clark (Galadriel), Charlie Vickers (Halbrand) Ismael Cruz Córdova (Arondir) and Nazanin Boniadi (Bronwyn).
Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power brings to screens for the very first time the heroic legends of the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth’s history. This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness. Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.
Interviewer: Jeandra LeBeauf
Video Editor: Jamie Broadnax
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres exclusively on Prime Video September 2nd, 2022.
We here at Black Nerd Problems had the incredible opportunity to sit down with Courtney Lee, the social media manager for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. You can watch the full interview on our YouTube, but just in case you don’t have time for the full hour, we have provided some highlights.
An Unconventional Pathing
Mikkel: So, Courtney, I could talk about your life, but I think it would be better you do. What’s your backstory, what’s your background, and how did you end up working for NASA?
Courtney: My background’s a little different than the traditional people who study science and then apply for NASA. Growing up, I wanted to be an actress or an entertainer, and in middle school and high school, I realized I wanted to be an entertainment reporter. I wanted to be like Giuliana Rancic or Ryan Seacrest on the red carpets, introducing celebrities before their movies. I went to Curry College in Massachusetts, and I got my bachelor’s in communications with a concentration in television, and then after that, I went to grad school at American University and I got my master’s in reporting on public affairs, focusing on broadcast journalism. After grad school, I realized that was something I didn’t want to do, so it was a very expensive lesson learned. But it was one that I learned, and I’m glad I learned it before getting a couple years under my belt. During that time—I graduated in the summer of 2018—I was still applying to TV jobs, because I’m like, “Maybe I should just stay on this track. Maybe I’ll learn to love it if I’m in it.” But I was also just looking for other jobs too, and just trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and I saw that NASA had a newsroom intern position open. And I was like, “I didn’t even know NASA had a newsroom.” I didn’t even think that NASA would have a news or communications department.
Around that time I was still applying for jobs at stations, and I got offered a position to be an anchor in Michigan, and I also got offered the NASA internship. I had to make a decision if I should take an internship and stay in the area, or if I should pursue what I got my degrees in. I decided to take the NASA internship, which was the best decision I could have made, actually. I’m really grateful that I did. So that’s how I started at NASA. And actually, a fun fact: since I just graduated from school, I couldn’t really get through the NASA internship database, because you have to be currently in school in order to log into the website. But this was something I was really interested in, so I googled and I figured out who the executive producer was of the newsroom. I emailed him directly, and I was like, “Hi, unfortunately, I can’t get through the website, but I’m very interested in this position.” I sent my resume and my website, and I was like, “I’d love to talk more about this.” He really liked my initiative there, and he was like, “We’re going to figure out how to make this work.” And they haven’t been able to get rid of me since.
A Rising Star at NASA (Pun Intended)
Mikkel: So you’re one of the social media leads for NASA. You handle a couple of the different Twitter accounts from the looks of it. And I guess we’ll go back—you talked about, you wanted to be an actress. Did you ever anticipate you’d be doing social media? Was social media a thing when you were growing up, in the same way that it is now?
Courtney: Not at all. I may be aging myself here, but when I was in high school the big thing at that time was Snapchat just came out when I was a senior in high school, and Instagram was still fairly new, so I didn’t really think of social media as a job. It wasn’t really something people did as jobs at that time, besides the people who created the apps, so it was never on my radar. I enjoyed social media. I loved scrolling on it. I had a Tumblr. I remember I had an Ed Sheeran dedicated Tumblr because I just loved him so much. So, yeah, I loved social media, but I never really thought of a job in social media.
Mikkel: So, when you saw the internship at NASA, it spoke to you, like this is different than usual television production, and you wanted it. What were the first few days, weeks, months of the internship like?
We can’t admire this masterpiece enough, @NASAWebb. Can’t wait to see the rest of the show this morning!
— Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (@NASARoman) July 12, 2022pic.twitter.com/UQYdnubp9y
Courtney: I can tell you a little bit about what I did during the internship. Like I said, I was a newsroom intern, and I worked with our Live Shot Team, which is our satellite media tours. So basically, what we did is we got our engineers, scientists, and sometimes astronauts out to different media outlets all over the world. When we did them in-person, we did them in four-minute segments, so we started at 6 a.m. to 12 p.m. and we’d go, like, from Texas to the BBC to Ohio to California with a bunch of different talents, so they were quick-switching the chairs. It was a very intense time each time we did a Live Shot campaign, but I loved the thrill of it, and it gave me the newsroom feeling. I really loved doing that, and I did that even into the pandemic a little bit. We used to do 40 to 60 interviews a day, but with the pandemic, we realized we can do six interviews at a time, because those are virtual, and we went to doing like 200 interviews in that 6 to 12 p.m. time. It was a lot of fun. I got to learn a lot. One thing that I really enjoyed was that, since I don’t have a science background, I was still working with the news, so I had to be able to tell information to the public in a way that I would understand. And I think I had a good skill set on that, since if someone’s telling me about, like, exozodiacal dust, and they’re explaining it very heavily to me, I’m like, “I’m not going to know what that is, and the audience isn’t going to know what that is, so we need to work together to make this appropriate for someone at six in the morning drinking their coffee, turning on the news, and learning about it,” you know?
Mikkel: We’re going to get to the satellite in a bit. I do want to keep on the NASA progress. So you started out as an intern, and as you said, they didn’t want to get rid of you, so they just kept you around. What was the pivot into working full-time for NASA like?
Courtney: When I started my internship in the fall of 2018 I was in the newsroom, and along with doing media outreach, I was like, “We need to be reaching out to content creators and YouTubers as well,” so I started implementing that at Goddard at the center I worked at. And they liked what I was doing. They were like, “You know what, can we extend your internship into the spring?” And I’m like, “Yeah!” I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and I was like, “You know, I’m enjoying this, so let me stay here.” And in that time, I was also creating social products because we had a lull in our Live Shot campaign, so I was working with the social team on just cutting some videos and stuff and putting that together. And I’ve done social media before, like in undergrad. And during grad school, I worked at a bridal shop, which had some very interesting stories, but I also ran their social media there.
Around May of 2019, my internship was coming to an end in a couple months, and I was talking to my boss. I’m like, “Hi, I would love to be full-time, do you know if any positions are opening?” And they were like, “Well, there’s this mission that’s kind of on the up and up right now, and they are looking for a social media person, and I think you’d be a great fit for it, so can you interview with the team?” And I did, and I got the position, so in June of 2019, I became the social media lead for the telescope. The transition wasn’t too hard, it was pretty easy. I already knew everyone that I was going to be working with. I was so glad to have insurance now, like health insurance. So that was great, and a consistent salary, that was amazing to have. It felt very adult moving into a full-time role from an internship position. It was fun, and I was able to keep my desk and everything, so it wasn’t that big of a transition.
About this Telescope…
Mikkel: So, the main goal, it sounds like, as the social media lead, is that you’re trying to get the public invested in this type of content, and this will transition now into this telescope. So, give us a little bit of insight into what the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope program is.
Courtney: Yeah, so, that’s the mission I work on. I might be a little biased, but I think it’s one of the best NASA missions. So the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is NASA’s next great space observatory telescope. It is going to be working with the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as Hubble, to help us piece together this cosmic puzzle of our universe and help us know a little bit more. It’s named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, who was the first chief of astronomy at NASA. And one thing I love about her is, she wasn’t the first woman. She was just the first person. And that’s something, when you’re thinking of NASA—I think it was started in 1959, 1960—back then, women weren’t given these opportunities or these roles to be in these positions, and NASA sought her out and were like, “We want you to lead the Astrophysics Department,” and she did. And she’s the reason we have space-based telescopes now, so we decided to honor her by naming this telescope after her, because without her, we wouldn’t have Hubble, we wouldn’t have Webb, and a bunch of these other telescopes that are in space right now.
Mikkel: You mentioned the only other two telescopes that I’m aware of. How does the Nancy Grace compare and contrast to the other two? Especially the James Webb, since that’s a “recent” telescope, quote-unquote.
Courtney: Hubble, I believe, is now 32 years old, so it’s had a long, amazing mission, and it’s still giving us some beautiful data. I’ve worked with the Hubble team. They’re amazing. I love Hubble too. But Roman is going to give us the widest fields, or the widest images of space known to date. So think of one Hubble image—it’s a hundred times wider than that. So yeah, that’s our big spiel. If you see the shape of Roman—and you’ll see it in the video game—it’s kind of this weird detector shape, and that is what we’re going to be using to take these—that’s going to be what the photos are going to be looking like. It has the same resolution as Hubble but just a hundred times wider. And with the James Webb Space Telescope, Roman is actually going to the same location, so LaGrange Point 2. So they’re going to be in the same place. And Webb’s field of view is similar to Hubble’s, but Webb is going to be looking further and deeper into space, whereas Roman’s going to be looking wider. So they’re actually going to be working together out there, where Roman’s going to take the big pictures and be like, “Hey, Webb, I think you should look at this for a long period of time.” And then it’s going to do that.
Mikkel: So when does the Nancy Grace actually start looking wide into the vastness of the unknown?
Courtney: It is set to launch no later than May 2027.
About this Game made for the Telescope…
Mikkel: Alright, let’s talk about the thing that really brought everything together, in terms of NASA reaching out to us, is that you have a video game that you made to promote. Do you want to talk about the game first, or shall we play the game first?
Courtney: I can talk about it a little bit and then we can get into it. I can give the backstory about the game. So, I am a huge gamer. I love playing games. My main console is the Switch, but I also have a gaming PC that I work on, and my cousin, who might be watching this stream, gave me his PS4 that I have in my room. So I’ve always loved games, ever since I was young. I still have my PS1 that I have The Rugrats on, which is a game I still haven’t beat yet, which I’m planning on beating. I have my Wii set up over here so I can play Glee karaoke. So I’m a huge gamer. And I wanted to find a way to meld the loves of gaming and work, and one thing a lot of people say is our detectors look like the Space Invader alien, and we get that often. They’re like, “Why is it that weird shape?” And I was thinking, I was like, “Why don’t we play into that? Why don’t we create an 8-bit-style game where it teaches you about the telescope?” So it’s called Roman Space Observer, and you play as the Roman detector, and you have one minute to capture as many astronomical objects as possible. It took about a year of planning and working with a developer and our illustrator, and there’s the Roman Communications Team—I call them the “Rom-Com Team”—in order to get this game up and out, and we released it on June 2nd, and it’s been a success ever since. It’s something I’m really proud of, because how many people can say they were playing video games for a couple hours, just to make sure it works well, during their workday, you know?
Mikkel: It’s incredible that you got this idea from the panels of the telescope and made it into something that helps people understand. That’s not a jump that a lot of people would make, and it’s really cool. So we’re going to pivot over to the actual website where people can play this game right now.
Mikkel: And now you want to make a whole arcade cabinet for this game?
Courtney: Yes, so we would like two: one for the visitor center, like a big one, and then a little tabletop one that we can bring to outreach events. So hopefully we’ll be able to get one of those, the tabletop ones, because I think it will be fun to just see the Roman Space Observer logo on the side of it, and people will be like, “Why is there an arcade game at this astronomy conference?” and, “Well, come on over and learn about Roman!” You know? And at conferences, a lot of people kept coming back, because I had a scoreboard on the side and just kept track of people, and they were like, “I need to beat the highest score.” Or when they came back and they were like, “My score is beat,” they were like, “Move over.” They started stretching and were like, “You need a chair here, so I can be able to sit and play this.”
Mikkel: (laughs) I need the focus, I need the positioning, I need the grounding.
Courtney: Yes.
Mikkel: So, are you going to take an old arcade cabinet and retrofit it? Or are you going to try to make one from scratch for the bigger cabinet for the guest center?
Courtney: We’re still figuring that out right now. What I would love to do is to be able to buy a cabinet that we can just put something in and program the game into the cabinet there. So not taking an old one, but buying a new one, just like a shell, and building around that.
Writer’s note: Checkout the live gameplay over on our Twitch.
A Brief Lesson on the Coronagraph
Mikkel: Before we transition on, I do want to go back to this talking point of making it accessible to the public. How do you transition from talking about space dust that has many syllables and trying to translate that into a common thing? Because as a tech writer, I do that all the time, where it’s sort of like, here’s what software development wants. It’s this complicated 17-step process, and I have to break it down, like, okay, here are the four things you need to know first, and then we’ll build on top of that, and then we’ll build on top of that. I’m curious if it’s a similar process for you.
Courtney: Yeah, definitely. There’s a lot of complex jargon words that are at NASA, and one thing I also try to do is not steer clear of the jargon, but try to teach people about it, to kind of make it into everyday language. So one of the techniques that the Roman Space Telescope is going to be doing is called “microlensing.” Actually, I’m not going to talk about microlensing, that’s more complicated. I’ll talk about the coronagraph. A lot of people don’t really know what a coronagraph is, like you kind of know it blocks out light from a star; we’ve used it kind of with our sun. But what we’ll be able to do with Roman is we’re going to block out the light of stars far away, in order to be able to see planets around them, because we assume that there’s at least one planet around every star that’s out there, but we can’t see them. So using this technique to block them out, we’re able to see these exoplanets that are out there. And that’s a crazy concept to think, you know? That the stars we see up there have planets. But I think just breaking it down like that, and doing it over a period of time, and starting with the easier terms and being like, “Oh, exoplanets: planets outside of our solar system. Every star might have at least one planet, if not more, circling around them, and we have this instrument on the telescope called the coronagraph instrument that we are going to be testing in order to be able to see these planets outside of it.” So kind of telling a story a little bit backwards, in a sense where it’s easier to getting into the more complex once they’re in it.
Down to Earth Nerdity
Mikkel: Alright, so. You are also a gamer, a nerd, and passionate about many other things, so it would be a waste not to talk about some of the things that you do outside of NASA, some of the nerd content that you like to consume. So, let’s spend the back half of the interview just talking about some of the stuff that you’ve been enjoying. So I guess we’ll start with: What have you been watching recently? Anime, TV, movies, documentaries, anything that’s been in your streaming queue. Or your cable queue, I don’t know.
Courtney: Yeah, so I’m all over the place when it comes to watching things, like, I haven’t watched in a while, but I love trashy reality TV shows, like the dating shows, you know? They’re like my chef’s kiss, I love that. But my go-to: I love horror. I’m a huge horror fan. I love scary movies. You can’t see, but I have a Beetlejuice succulent right behind me, which I got in a horror mystery box, as well as a Camp Crystal Lake Jason snowglobe thing, as well as a Chucky doll that’s in my room that my mom made from a My Buddy doll she got at a thrift shop. So I’ve always loved horror. I think I watched Halloween when I was in kindergarten, I remember, I was living in Boston at the time. So yeah, I’ve always had horror movies on. I watch them to go to sleep. It just calms me, you know?
Mikkel: Okay. And then finally, we’re going to talk about your gaming, which is really cool, because you actually have a gaming Instagram that I’m going to bring up on a separate screen as you talk about things.
Courtney: Yeah! Like I said before, I’m a huge gamer. My genre of games vary a ton. I play from Phasmophobia to Cozy Grove to Animal Crossing to I just finished Little Misfortune. And I’m excited for the new Bear and Breakfast game that’s coming out, so I can’t wait to get that on the Switch, where you play as a bear who runs a bed and breakfast. Like what’s more fun than that, you know?
Closing Thoughts
Mikkel: So what I like to do to close off every single interview that I do is to ask the interviewee, what’s a piece of media that you wish had more attention? Not your favorite, not the most popular thing, just something that you wish more people knew about so you could talk about it with more people. So do you have something like that for us?
Courtney: The one that comes to mind, so I was thinking about this. Well, there’s a couple things. I love K-pop, and the group Got7, so if more people listen to Got7, I would love to talk more about that. But there’s a YouTuber called MyFroggyStuff. She has a lot of followers, I think she maybe has two million. But she makes the most—and we actually did a collaboration with her a couple months ago for a black-hole-themed doll room. So she basically makes doll rooms, and they’re so detailed, and I love it so much. She’s my favorite person; I want to give her all of her flowers. I’ve been watching her for almost a decade now, since 2013.
And then, another media, kind of…I don’t know if really this answers the question, but I want people to know that there’s comms and arts and more creative jobs at NASA that people can do, you know? I didn’t know there was a newsroom position, and I want people to know at a younger age, you can run social media, or you can do animation. Our CI Lab is where they create a lot of our animations, and it’s the coolest office because it looks like a spaceship. It looks like a spaceship from—I forget, some TV show. But some of the animators used to work on Disney and then they came over here and now they animate for this, and then they’ve done stuff with, like, Transformers.
Yeah, there’s so many different people in different walks of lives, and you don’t have to do a traditional path to NASA. There’s a woman, you can look her up, her name’s Paula Cain, she works at Goddard in the Blanket Lab, where she sews the blankets that go on these telescopes. Yeah, there’s the thermal blankets that are on there. And you know how she found the job? She was looking at the newspaper and NASA was looking for fashion designers to hire to do these things, and she was a fashion designer. She applied and she’s been there, I think, over ten years, maybe a little more. She’s been there a long time. I just met her for the first time recently, but I’ve heard about her for the last four years. But just to know, she was a fashion designer and then came to NASA to sew blankets for spacecrafts. That’s crazy.
Mikkel: That’s a great note to end on. So, as a general summation type thing, thank you, everyone, for joining us in chat. Thank you, Courtney, for giving us an hour of your time.
Courtney: I’ll just say, shoutout to our Rom-Com Team and our animators who illustrate some of comics. It’s just an amazing way of also reaching people where they are, creating these cute little comics. We did a Star Wars Day one where Roman was one object and Webb was another—I’ve never seen Star Wars. I know, I don’t know how I work at NASA and have never seen it, but other people get it, you know? But yeah, it was a pleasure being here, and I really appreciate you guys taking the time out to even talk to me about this. And I hope you all have learned a little more about Roman and some of the fun stuff that we do at NASA.
You can find more of Courtney at @NASARoman on Twitter, and on her personal Instagram, @proto_zoa_. Be sure to watch the video for even more insights and media!
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The post Highlighting Courtney Lee, Social Media Manager for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.
One of the first games I ever reviewed for this site was Subset Game’s Into the Breach, the follow up to their first foray into the game development, FTL: Faster Than Light. Both of these games are self-described by the developer as roguelike-likes. If the term sounds unfamiliar, the abbreviated history is that an ASCII game called Rogue was released and the game was characterized by its procedurally generated levels, high degree of difficulty, and dying meant you had to start the whole run over from scratch. No save states, no progression carried over, nothing.
And this game inspired an entire genre of games just like including the infamous NetHack. Over time, the genre expanded in scope and function resulting in the broad label of “roguelike-likes,” which includes pretty much my entire gaming catalog. Top contenders for my roguelike resume include 1000+ hours in Slay the Spire, 100+ hours in Hades and Dead Cells a piece, about ~100 hours between both of Subset Games’ although the number is going up with the Advanced Edition of Into the Breach now available via Netflix on Mobile and all the usual platforms. Oaken, Despot’s Game, Castle Morihisa, Evertried, Griftlands, and about a half a dozen other games of various degrees of roguelike.
I live for the endless cycle of living, learning, dying, and repeating. I love the slow mastery that comes from incessant experimentation, the constant honing of skills and decision making, and the erudite and patient investment that each and every trial will eventually pay off.
And the question then becomes, what happens to all of that grit and determination when faced with a Soulsbourne.
Parallel Philosophies
Soulsbourne is a fan name for the collection of games produced by FromSoftware. They are notoriously characterized by their high degree of difficulty. There is an expectation that you will die several hundreds if not thousands of times trekking through their perilous worlds, slowly learning the cadence of combat, slowly marching towards a grand summit of a final boss. Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodbourne, Sekiro, I had never touched any of these games as they felt like an significant investment.
However, when the Steam Deck entered my house and it came time to get a high intensity game to put it through its paces, I bought into the hype of Elden Ring. The latest game from FromSoftware, Elden Ring was an unholy union of Soulsbourne challenge with an expansive open world with inspiration from George R.R. Martin. It had also managed to capture the public eye and fascination selling over 13.4 million copies three months after launch. This was achieved by somehow satisfying existing fans of the franchise while also enticing waves of newcomers who were drawn in by the unique aesthetic of the world.
Gather ‘round Tarnished! Let’s look at the breakdown of how Elden Ring garnered 3.4 billion video views in 60 days, making it one of the biggest launches ever on YouTube
— YouTube Gaming (@YouTubeGaming) August 2, 2022pic.twitter.com/252qjZsmOv
Fundamentally speaking, the Roguelike and the Soulsbourne share a virtually identical philosophy. You will fail, but you will learn from this failure. Your persistence will eventually be rewarded. Mechanically of course, the way this philosophy is implemented is vastly different, but as someone who has not wavered from a long line of roguelikes, I figured what better way to test my mettle than with my first true Soulsbourne.
One Real World Day in the Lands Between
As of the time of writing this article, I have barely scratched the surface of Elden Ring. I spent the first thirty minutes of my first play session customizing my character and ultimately settling on the aesthetic of the Prisoner class. Something about the mask spoke to me, and in short order I was slowly fumbling my way through the nicely labeled tutorial caverns where I took several hits as I learned the controls. I walked out to the opening area, saw a knight on horseback, and proceeded to get completely demolished in short order.
This is apparently par the course for Soulsbourne, and thus the goal became “find things that you can actually manage and maybe come back to this once you have some actual levels, gear, and experience.” After about an hour of struggling through the hybrid melee/magic class of the Prisoner, I realized I needed something with a more linear learning curve as I was just adjusting to the Soulsbourne. I rerolled a warrior, embraced my tank tendencies, and started afresh.
I explored the peninsula, slowly learning to fight vassals and creatures, and avoiding anything that could conceivably eat me. I fumbled my way to the third campfire, got the ability to level, met a witch who gave me spirit wolves, and slowly I began to piece together my place. Heeding the advice of a friend, after encountering a particularly difficult opponent, I set out to find even more advantages in the world only to fell the troll and come to the realization that the actual difficult encounter they mentioned hadn’t happened yet.
In game, my last achievement was defeating Margit, the Fell Omen, which is the very first proper boss of the game. Since that victory, I am now slowly fumbling my way through Stormveil Castle, where the last thing I did was get blown away by a flying bird with blades affixed to its talons, yet it could still carry a whole explosive barrel to kill me in an instant.
The map is large and empty. My character is still wearing some starting pieces. I am fully aware that I’m in the shallow end of the experience, but my experience as a Tarnished is incidental to my thesis.
Variance
A shared commonality between the roguelike and the Soulsbourne is the concept of a “biome.” True to its ecological roots, a biome is a unique environment with unique obstacles and enemies. To simply call these zones would diminish the amount of life they have and the pain they can inflict. While there is an aesthetic difference between biomes, the fact remains that in both genres of games, the area changes how you play the game on a fundamental level.
Elden Ring‘s presentation of biomes is more akin to the actual use of the world. All of the biomes coexist on the same map, and you traverse the world. There are various crevices and creatures, and your pathing is like that of an errant feather on the wind. Your exploration of the land may have similarities to another, but the individual journey will be extraordinarily unique by the end of it. The chests may be deterministic, and the enemies spawn reset every time you rest at the site of grace. So while you’re cohabitating in an instance of world, the traced steps are almost like finger prints.
Roguelikes are somewhat more linear in their progression. Slay the Spire and Hades will always take you through the same zones in the same order, even if the encounters and gear you find will be different every time. Conversely Dead Cells and FTL will give you options on which biomes to visit, thereby lending you some agency in the trials you must face. But without seeds, the instance that you’re playing will never likely be played again.
This duality of variance even permeates to the verbiage in guides. Elden Ring guides can be perspective in nature. If you want X weapon, do Y task. If you’re struggling with Y task, trying finding Z NPC. The knowledge that is shared can be concrete and explicit and detailed. Conversely, roguelike guides are descriptive. In Slay the Spire, going for “builds” and “archetypes” can be deadly to the success of your run because you aren’t guaranteed specific cards and relics. Instead, guides are more suggestive. In Act 1, trying to prioritize damage because of the elites. While preparing for Act 2, trying to area of effect at the ready. Act 3’s bosses may be able to counter your deck, make sure you look for solutions and fill the gaps.
It becomes addictive, basking in the possibilities and eventualities.
A Meta Progression
Yet these choices play out on vastly different scales.
Roguelikes are quick loops. While it’s easy to sink hours on hours mastering the game, the run unit is only a few hours at most. The genre is designed to loop. You die, you start with a fairly clean slate. Maybe you unlock some additional items that may or may not show up in the next run. Maybe the game features a way to empower your character holistically like with the Mirror upgrades in Hades, or maybe the game features a way to challenge yourself beyond the limits of the possible with the Pact of Punishment in, also in Hades. A typical escape to the surface can likely be down in one or two sittings, and the allure is in finding the flow state for each individual attempt.
Elden Ring is a trek. The twenty-ish hours I’ve spend exploring Limgrave have been the equivalent of going to the store to get supplies for the long journey only to realize that you have severely underestimated the size of the grocery store. The metaphor is a bit skewed, but the point is that I have friends who have spent hundreds of hours in this game in the pursuit of the end, and some have the ends of the earth, and others are still grinding at the finish line. It is an investment, and one that pays off. I have maybe explored 50% of Limgrave, and that’s probably a poor estimate. After discovering that it would behoove me to have a ranged attack option to fend off terrifying hawks, I started scouring the lands and discovered that there were entire areas and enemies I missed, including a goddamn dragon. I have a vague idea of what awaits me in the castle and an even vaguer idea of what’s after that, but as I slowly take my Tarnished on this journey, I find that even if I fundamentally know that death is inevitable, that it is part of the process, for some reason it hurts more while playing a Soulsbourne.
A Mental Progression
In order to effectively use a new armament I got after defeating what I can best describe as an arena lizard with the help of a wolf man, I ended up farming a particular troll spawn for runes, the combination experience item and currency. These two trolls in particular were beasts of burden chained to a caravan which meant they were slow, easy to engage with individually, and otherwise trivial to deal with (or so I thought). I used the grind as a way to get used to the flow of combat, learning how to use spirit summons, dodge, and aim my attacks to weak points. And I felt good about my progress. Until of course, while I was doing one last run, I got complacent with my inputs and health and almost died to my prey because I didn’t chain my sword swings fast enough resulting in a panicked exit on my horse. Had I died, my stockpile of runes would have been dropped and I could have retrieved them, but it was a harrowing experience that as strong as I thought I had gotten, that the game would punish my carelessness.
Death is part of the process. The reason the game drops your spoils on the ground to pick up is a challenge, a call to return to what bested you and best it (or at least recover and regroup), and failing to do so may be of little consequences or set you back hours. And even though I know that progression requires repetition, the continuity of character and inventory changes the perception. A death in a Soulsbourne feels more personal, but in more ways than one, a victory in a Soulsbourne feels a particular kind of exhilaration followed by a deep seated exhaustion that there is still so much more road to go.
Beating Hades in Hades, beating the Heart in Slay the Spire, there was a deep satisfaction in the accomplishment. That I had made the right decisions, played correctly, and maybe just got a little bit lucky. But it was different conquering Margit. Perhaps it was because the combat is more visceral, or perhaps more likely it was because this was the singular culmination of all the experiences. It took 15 some hours to defeat the first boss. Fifteen hours could easily be fifteen to thirty roguelike runs depending on how reckless I play. And that fifteen hours is just a drop.
The Only Way Out is Through
The Roguelike and the Soulsbourne are rooted in repetition. Do this until you understand how to do it, and then do this until you understand why you’re doing it. And hypothetically, you really would think that all of the conceptual understanding of the endless loop from Roguelikes would acclimate me to the Soulsbourne, and while that mentality is what got me started, there is something special about the Soulsbourne genre. All that theory means nothing when failure is the potential loss of tangible investment and a shaking of your skills.
Still, as I slowly begin to piece my confidence back together to more diligently take out warhawks with a newly minted crossbow, the Soulsbourne mantra does sound oddly similar to the roguelike mantra: again.
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The post The Roguelike Enthusiast Describes Their First Soulsbourne Experience appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.
After over thirty years since its publication and several attempts at film adaptations, the highly-anticipated Netflix series The Sandman finally graces our screens.
Based on the DC comic series of the same name by Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, and Mike Dringenberg, the first season adapts “Preludes and Nocturnes” and “The Doll’s House.” The novelistic television series, developed by Gaiman, David S. Goyer (Foundation), Allan Heinberg (Wonder Woman), stays true to the comics while expanding, altering, and diversifying some elements of the original story.
In 1916, a cult called the Order of Ancient Mysteries led by amateur occultist Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance) attempts to summon and entrap Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) but instead, they get Dream (Tom Sturridge), her younger brother.
The seven siblings of the Endless act as personifications of life-defining concepts: Dream, Death, Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), Destiny, Delirium, and Destruction. The latter three aren’t in this season, but we still get to see the twins Desire and Despair. Park’s gorgeous and cruel Desire reminds me of 1980s models rocking power suits and sleek haircuts.
Each sibling has their own domain to rule, and though they are immortal, god-like beings with massive responsibilities to humanity, they still find time to be like a regular dysfunctional family. Their relationships are strained but some are closer than others.
After decades of imprisonment, Dream (aka Morpheus, aka the King of Dreams, aka the Sandman) escapes and returns to his realm, the Dreaming, to find it crumbled and mostly abandoned. To regain power, he goes searching for his stolen tools —sand, helm, and ruby. Along the way he encounters characters like Cain (Sanjeev Bhaskar) and Abel (Asim Chaudhry), occult detective Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman), and the truth-seeking John Dee (David Thewlis). Lucienne (Vivienne Acheampong), the chief librarian in the Dreaming (who does much more than just tend to the books), sends Matthew the Raven (Patton Oswalt) to accompany Dream on his totem travels.
Dream also visits Lucifer Morningstar (Gwendoline Christie), the ruler of hell who speaks with a calmly wicked tone. Lucifer is a character that can be easily over the top but Christie perfectly blends menacing, authoritative, and cunning. I loved the contrast between the angelic hair and wardrobe with the enormous black wings.
Meanwhile, the Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), a rogue nightmare, is enjoying being a charismatic, well-dressed, eye-nabbing serial killer in the waking world. For him, Morpheus being free means his days of preying on the living are over, so he does what he can to maintain his own freedom.
It was a wise decision to make this a series because there are too many characters and individual story arcs for one film, even a series of films. Morpheus is the main protagonist but not all of the stories are centered on him. Sometimes those kinds of “narrative detours” can be distracting but not in the case of The Sandman. Of course, there were points when I was a little confused, like when an entire episode took place in a diner. However, I was too enthralled in the story to dwell on it. It felt almost like an anthology, especially with the introduction of 21-year-old Rose Walker (Vanesu Samunyai; formerly known as Kyo Ra), who finds herself connected to the world of the Dreaming while also trying to find her little brother.
I can see why many fans cite Death as their favorite character. An endearing, optimistic goth girl in place of the archetypal scythe-wielding skeletal Grim Reaper is truly amazing, especially since it also subverts the common misconception that all goths are doom and gloom and mean and scary. Death might be the most emotionally taxing role in the universe, and yet she’s the kindest member of the Endless, someone you actually want to see at the end.
As with most, if not all, page-to-screen adaptations, people were upset with some of the casting choices, particularly Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death. The character appears in the comics as pale, and casting a Black actress was just so outrageous for some “fans.” Howell-Baptiste’s Death is so beautiful and mesmerizing and has the most soothing voice and presence. Anyone who finds her portrayal problematic clearly doesn’t understand the comic or its author at all. The characters have always been diverse.
It’s interesting how fans like to tell creators what to do with their own work. Had Gaiman not been involved in the production at all and a bunch of illogical changes were made against his wishes, that’s when backlash makes sense. But the author himself was heavily involved in the adaptation as an executive producer and a writer, which should be of comfort to true fans. If you’re attached to a specific version of a character, then maybe, I don’t know, only watch/read works with that version.
As Sturridge said at the SDCC panel, “Each episode is a different film, it’s a different cohesive story, and that change is inflicted on their journey.” I would absolutely watch a supernatural detective series starring Jenna Coleman’s Johanna Constantine, or a three-hour movie following Vivienne Acheampong’s Lucienne and Mervyn Pumpkinhead (Mark Hamill) working in the Dreaming’s library. Following Howell-Baptiste’s Death as she makes her rounds would make for some heart-wrenching but captivating series. Holbrook’s Corinthian exudes main character energy. And I’ll simply watch anything with David Thewlis playing anyone.
There’s also Hal (John Cameron Mitchell) and the colorful residents Rose lives with in Florida. Their “found family” dynamic is a show in itself. Plus, I’ve been a fan of Mitchell since Hedwig and the Angry Inch and seeing him perform is always a delight.
Cinematographers Will Baldy (The Pact), Sam Heasman (Doctor Who), and George Steel (The Aeronauts) craft some beautiful visuals, maintaining the bleakness of a gothic fantasy while still incorporating fairy-tale elements. The art of Sandman is iconic and translating that onscreen is no easy feat but it was done.
Having not previously read the comics, I immediately started reading Vol. 1 after I finished watching the ten episodes. I’m surprised just how much the series stayed true to the source material; it included some dialogue word for word, and some imagery comes right off the page. You definitely don’t need to be familiar with the comics to enjoy/follow The Sandman TV series. But if you are, there are still some changes that you won’t expect.
It’s the type of fantastical storytelling that feels grounded in reality. All-powerful, non-humans still have very human traits and behavior — pettiness, jealousy, arrogance. Otherworldly realms don’t seem too implausible. Characters may be hunting down a bag of magical sand but they have to visit someone’s ex-girlfriend to retrieve it.
The Sandman is a cosmic tale of dreams, nightmares, humanity, and morality. With a stellar cast, impressive SFX, and the rich characters and wonderful words of Gaiman, all make The Sandman a magical series you can’t miss.
The Sandman begins streaming Aug 5 on Netflix.