They're done. For now, anyway. (Follow up to this.)

It's only five episodes, so I'll just embed them all here, for the hell of it.

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( Youtube embeds behind cut )

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There's also an "after each episode discussion show" called Tales Unraveled, which I will not be embedding here, but there's the link, so yeah.

And that's it. At least until they record more episodes over the course of this month, apparently, though who knows when they'll get those all edited and polished up for release. The individual "session zero" episodes for Karna, Maud, and Martin will be made available at some point in the future as well. (Or, alternatively, are already available, if you pay them cash money via Twitch or Youtube membership or Patreon or whatever, none of which I am nor will be doing in the foreseeable future.)

So... I liked it a lot. I especially like the pared down edited nature of it, which cuts out all the chaff of excessive math, trying to figure out spells, an hour or however long of playing a gambling game, etc. That was always a problem with Critical Role for me, because in that, pretty much nothing is edited out. Which, I mean, it's fine for what it is, but I much prefer an hour or maybe two of just the "good stuff" (with the extra bells and whistles of art, music, animations, etc.), compared to four or six hours of all of it (with few, if any, extra bells and whistles). Even so, that's still about seven hours of stuff right here, in the first season. There is also the fact that there are only three players, as opposed to seven or eight or however many they have on Critical Role now, which helps. And it also helps that Nick is playing Karna as a character who is very conflict-avoidant, and that Stephan as a DM is entirely willing to allow the party to avoid fights altogether if it makes sense. Combat was always the least interesting part of Critical Role for me.

I'm not saying I like this better than Critical Role, but... I'm kinda saying I like this better than Critical Role. At least so far.

Maud is still my favorite... but... she does, at times, veer a wee bit too far into almost chaotic stupid territory. That said, Jesse is doing it because it's (usually) funny and is in character for Maud, not for the purpose of being a contrary dick, and it hasn't caused any real problems... yet...

*weary sigh*

I mean, they're going to do what they're going to do, and I'm sure it will probably work out just great for them and all, but... I don't like the live shows. I think I watched like maybe an hour into the next episode after that last live show I watched there, if even that much, and then just shut it down, because the "taste" of the live show was still too strong at the time. And then... I just never went back to it after. So, yeah, I guess you could say that the live shows are literally the thing that finally drove me away from Critical Role.

Full headline, due to Dreamwidth's continued inadequacy of subject field length: "'Critical Role' Star Ashley Johnson, Six Other Women Allege Physical and Verbal Abuse By Brian Foster"

On the one hand, this is kind of like holy shit. o_O

On the other hand... it isn't actually all that surprising, as there have been rumors for years that Brian W. Foster was kind of a dickhead behind the scenes. Hell, even in his former on-screen role as the host of Talks Machina[1], he seemed like sort of a real asshat (thinly veiled behind self-deprecating "humor"), and if that was how he actively chose to comport himself on air, it sort of makes sense that he would've been even worse off the air.

Tangentially speaking and almost entirely unrelated to the above (or the below), I did indeed stop watching Critical Role again very shortly after the last time I mentioned it and haven't really been keeping up with much news about it or around it until now. I've vaguely considered picking it back up again from where I'd left off in the second campaign, but it's been over a full year now, this time, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] - Which isn't even available to watch anymore, as it (and almost everything else Critical Role-related that involved Foster) seems to have been scrubbed from the Internet, or at least from the official Critical Role Youtube channel anyway.[2] This has apparently been the case since July 2023, which is apparently when news of the above mentioned shit first leaked, though I'm only just hearing about it now, via that Variety article there, which randomly popped up in my Google News app today. Though, as I said, I had heard some of the other rumors going around after Foster was initially fired, back in 2021.

[2] - I mean, fucking hell, they didn't even do that with Orion Acaba (and, to be frank, very little of value would be lost if those first 27 episodes of Critical Role were removed entirely, especially considering that the whole thing was already in media res to begin with, since it started as just a continuation of their private home game), so I guess that is indicative of just how big of a shitheel Foster is. As bad as Orion was (in game and out of it) toward the end of his time there, nothing I ever heard about him comes even close to the stuff Foster is said to have done.

Just finished a playthrough of Saints Row The Third Remastered an hour or so ago (as of beginning this post), which I started a week or two ago, so I thought I'd install and start a game of Saints Row IV. First time playing either of these games. I'd played the original Saints Row on the Xbox 360 over a decade ago, though I never beat it, and though I do have Saints Row 2 on Steam, I decided to just skip it and go straight to The Third. I played as a female Boss with the Laura Bailey voice, naturally. It was pretty cool. I didn't do every little thing, like completely taking over all the territories or finishing all the shitty Escort or Snatch or Trail Blazing or Professor Genki side missions or whatever, but I did complete all of the main story missions and the main DLC missions (said DLC came with the version of the game I got).

Now, for the reason for the subject line of this post. While The Third ran with no problems for me (despite Steam reviews for Remastered claiming otherwise), with Saints Row IV I couldn't even get past the title screen main menu. The fucking game would freeze every few seconds. I looked online and saw a bunch of banal solutions like "verify your game files," "run in compatibility mode," "update your graphics drivers," and so on, but the solution that actually worked (or, at least, seems to have worked, though I haven't technically started the game itself yet) was one I found in this reply to this Reddit post.

So, apparently, when it was first released, Saints Row IV had some kind of telemetry thing that would presumably check every little bit. Ostensibly, it "worked" "fine" when the game was new and didn't cause any issues. But then, that whole thing apparently went away. And now, when you first install the game but before manually editing the Windows hosts file to block that shit, the game tries to phone home, and then fails, which causes the game to freeze for several seconds, every few seconds. Adding the "127.0.0.1 sr3.hydra.agoragames.com" line to the hosts file appears to have resolved the problem, though, at least for me. One would have thought that the developer/publisher of the game would have had this shit fixed themselves, but apparently not.

I'm not as incensed as I could be, right now, given that I found a fix, but I'm still too tired and pissed off to actually try the game itself, at least for tonight, anyway. Also, I'm not sure if there's a way to transfer one's Boss from SRTT into SRIV, and if not, I don't feel like going through character creation (which will be a female Laura Bailey[1] Boss again, of course, or as close to my SRTT Boss as I can get her anyway) again right now. And it's after 4:30am as I wrap up this post, so to hell with all of it for now. I'm going to bed.

(EDIT, the next day) Yeah, the game seems to work fine now. I did have to recreate my Boss in the character creator, but she basically looks the same as in the previous game. Perhaps a bit less janky, which is good.

The game is basically an entirely different genre than the previous games, or similar games like GTA or whatever. It's still open world sandbox and all that, but in this one, you very quickly get superpowers, which kind of make cars and even guns obsolete, or at least it has so far. (/EDIT)

[1] - I literally stopped the car on the sidewalk before reaching the waypoint and let that play out when I got to that mission. Spoiler: in the end credits for SRTT, they played all of the various Boss voices singing it at once. And, spoilers again (for me as well, this time), there are some other sing-along scenes in SRIV, too.

Just another "the live shows of Critical Role suck ass, explicitly because they're live shows" post. I haven't even started it yet, just want to get this out of the way. Aside from this here, I'm probably not going to bother to comment on it again, at least not until I get to the next live episode, whenever that may be.

In any case, from what I've read about it beforehand, this episode is apparently particularly bad, due to terrible audio issues. (Though, on the bright side, bad audio means less crowd noise, I guess? ¬_¬)

"Song by Sam Riegel & Mr. Fantastic
Produced, arranged & mixed by Peter Habib of Mr. Fantastic
Vocals by Sam Riegel"

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As seen at the start of Critical Role, Campaign 2, episode 21, which is based on a little jingle for D&D Beyond that Sam Riegel did way back in episode 7.

Okay... wasn't exactly expecting... that... for the new intro to Campaign 2, I have to say. It's cool, I guess, though not nearly as much as the previous one was. I suppose it made sense to have such an... unspecific... intro as this, though, since nobody would have seen their new characters yet at this point (and by "this point," of course, I mean the first episode of the second campaign, which I'm watching now).

Oh come on!

I only just finished Campaign 1 and haven't even started Campaign 2 yet! ¬_¬


Oh, they pre-record episodes now rather than doing them live? Makes absolutely zero difference to me, as I almost assuredly wouldn't have been watching them live in the first place, assuming I ever get caught up. *shrug*

As I've said before, I seriously don't care for the LIVE episodes of Critical Role. -_-; Really wish they would just save those for one-shots or something and leave the main campaign for the regular show.

It's kind of weird that I'm already up to episode 91 of Critical Role. That means I'm 25 episodes away from being done with it[1]. Hell, on the other end of it, when I was only 25 episodes into it, Orion was still there. >_>;

[1] - The first campaign (Vox Machina), that is. There's still all of the 141 episodes of the second campaign (Mighty Nein), obviously, along with Exandria Unlimited, and then whatever one-shot sessions I want to watch, which is probably most of them. And also Talks Machina, on top of all that. So yeah, overall, I'm still not even halfway through all of it yet. >_>;; And that's not even counting the animated show, The Legend of Vox Machina, whenever that comes out, because I will watch the shit out of that, too.