Castle Magus

The above is a bullshit clickbait headline for an article (actual link replaced with an archive.is version to reduce traffic to the offending site) I happened to see in my Google News app just now. I hate that kind of stupid shit.

No, Dave Sundstrom, Barney Rubble dressing up as Mr. Spock in a Cocoa Pebbles commercial is not a fucking Star Trek/The Flintstones "crossover." That's not what crossovers are. That's not how crossovers work. Simply licensing the rights to use the name and likeness of "Mr. Spock" (for $50,000 in 1992 money) does not a crossover make. For it to have been a "legitimate crossover," the actual Mr. Spock would have had to show up. It would be like taking some Halloween-themed sitcom episode in which some rando happened to dress up as Superman and calling that a "crossover."

And, yes, I did already know about this """""crossover""""" before reading the article, because I saw that shit on TV when I was 13 and thought it was passingly amusing at the time. I said to myself before going into the article that this better not be about the fucking Cocoa Pebbles commercial, but, sure enough, that's exactly what it was about.

I am rather irked by this. Perhaps unreasonably so, admittedly.

Took me longer than I thought it would (but not really since I went several days at a stretch without even touching it at all), but I've finally unlocked everything in Ode to Castlevania. The last character to unlock cost over 17 million gold, and I only had like 3 million at the time, but one trip to Moongolow with Sammy and weapon slots set to 1, and I had 20 million gold in less than 15 minutes, or about seven minutes in real time (had it set to Endless, too, along with Hurry and Hyper, but didn't even need that, since I exited out before I even reached what would have been the 15 minute time limit).

So, now I'm going to get into spoiler territory beyond this point (behind a cut, if you're seeing this on my main page).

( Silly, nitpicky, and also spoilery character stuff behind cut )

"The full-circle moment we've been waiting for."

Huh. How about that.

Watching the trailer, I saw some pretty deep pulls in this, like Saint Germain and Pumpkin. And, wow, they're even including Sonia Belmont in this, despite her being officially declared non-canon by Konami almost 20 years ago. I didn't notice any Lords of Shadow characters, though. I also didn't see Aeon, either. However, I did see several characters in the trailer that I didn't even recognize.

Be kind of funny if Dracula himself was left out of it so as not to break the trend of not having vampires in Vampire Survivors. There's no mention of him in the release announcement, and I didn't see him in the trailer... though it did play a bit of "Dance of Illusions"/"Illusionary Dance" at the end of the trailer. (Also, Alucard isn't a vampire, he's a dhampire, so him being there doesn't break the streak.)

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Vampire Survivors join forces once more with KONAMI, this time featuring their notable Castlevania franchise, in a new DLC which many have been anticipating!

The Vampire Survivors have come a long way in their honorable hunt, and after joining forces with the Belmont Family, they are the closest they've ever been!

This all-out celebration has over 20 new characters, 40+ weapons including more whips than you can count on one hand, 30+ music tracks from Vampire Survivors historic composers Daniele Zandara and Filippo Vicarelli, but also from fan-favorites Evelyn Lark and Keygen Church! The BIGGEST stage we've made yet! Even though we're literally at Dracula's Castle, there's still zero vampires?

And the cherry on top: a man.

Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting is the upcoming 'Among Us' themed DLC, for Vampire Survivors by poncle! 🧛🚨

The Survivors join forces with totally trustworthy Crewmates to be the bullet hell... in space! 🚀

Coming 18th December 2023 to PC & Xbox 🧄
Nintendo Switch & mobile arriving later, sorry for the delay.

In collaboration with the wonderful 'Among Us' developers, Innersloth.
Trailer and Emergency Meeting soundtrack: Filippo Vicarelli
Animation and Key art: Studio Yotta

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Okay... I have to admit that when I first saw this, my initial thought was that VS is really starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel for content now.

But then, I remembered that I was mostly okay with the all the Terraria stuff and the Bloodstained stuff[1] (and, hell, there's apparently a new thing in Bloodstained that I didn't even know about until the writing of this very post), so I guess this crossover thing in VS is in line with all of that.

(It's just that I don't give the first flying fuck about Among Us at all, and I am more than a little tired of how rife the Internet is with memes relating to "Amogus" or whatever, I guess. That's all. And VS doing a crossover with AU isn't going to change that opinion, either. If anything, it just reinforces it. ¬_¬)

In any case, I would have to reinstall Vampire Survivors if I want to try this new stuff, since a few weeks ago, I finally uninstalled it for the first time since buying it. And, you know, buy the new DLC when it comes out, since it apparently will cost $2.49 USD. I'm not in any great hurry, to be honest. The "Adventures" stuff sounds kind of interesting, though.

[1] - Well, not so much the Blasphemous one, since the crossover was only one way, as there still has been no Blasphemous content added to Bloodstained as far as I am aware (as of now, at least).

"My taboo teenage pastime introduced me to the wide world of internet subcultures."

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I've definitely had fanfic phases over the years.

Even back before I'd ever heard the term "fanfiction," I was writing it. For a span of five years or so, give or take a year, starting when I was something like eight or nine years old (for reference, I am not quite three months shy of 44 as I write this post), I would write stories in spiral notebooks. I wrote at least twenty different stories, all of which involved OCs (again, probably at least a decade before I ever heard of the term "OC") named "Main Man" and "Black Devil" and "Slauter Man" (the world "slaughter," misspelled, but I just kept it as that even after I realized I'd been misspelling it the whole time) and such. In the very first story, the Main Man was the good guy and the Black Devil was the bad guy, but then they became friends at the end. Slauter Man was at first the main villain in the next story, then demoted to a recurring villain in most of the rest of the stories, typically forming temporary Enemy Mine alliances. Anyway, these stories basically involved the Main Man as the leader (with the Black Devil as second-in-command in everything after the first story) of a team of pretty much every fictional good guy character that I was aware of at the time, e.g. the Ninja Turtles, the Thundercats, the Ghostbusters, the various crews of the starships Enterprise, and such. Slauter Man was the leader of a team of the villains, of course. And then, I started writing myself, as myself-with-grotesquely-nigh-omnipotently-strong-superpowers, into the stories as well, basically the worst sort of Mary Sue/Gary Stu author insert character... which was also around when I started losing interest in it overall. (Though the fact that that was also around the time I got my first video game console, an old gray brick Game Boy, and then a proper SNES not too long after, probably contributed to my loss of interest in doing it as well.)

Besides the "Main Man and Black Devil" stuff, I would stop every five stories or so and write what would probably be considered more traditional fanfiction, based on just a single work/franchise. I know I wrote a Star Trek story and a Castlevania story, though I don't recall what the others were now.

For all of these, I'd also draw incredibly shitty little pictures on the title page and the flip side of that, depicting some scene or other from the story. They weren't great. As bad as the stories may have been, the art for them was worse. ¬_¬

I still have most of these stories, in a box in the garage, which I found in my old room at my parents' house (which no longer exists). I looked through them a while back, but some of them were too degraded to even read, which kind of depressed me, so I haven't messed with them since.

Actually... even before the "Main Man and Black Devil" stories, I vaguely recall that my first ever story was a fanfic of the old Legend of Zelda cartoon. The only things I recall about that story now is that the main character was "Link, Jr.," i.e. the son of Link and Zelda, and that it was written on several sheets of ancient green bar computer paper, rather than the spiral notebooks of the later stories. This one I don't have anymore, sadly.

Then, several years later, there was my whole Sailor Moon phase and what that led to, of course.

And then, at least a decade after that, there was my whole My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic phase and what that led to.

And that's just what I've written myself. I've read an assload of fanfiction over the years. Not recently, mind you, but I do still have a bunch of stuff saved as bookmarks which I can always go to if I ever get an urge to read some more (assuming it still exists at that point and hasn't fallen into a 404 Not Found black hole or something).

So yeah, I'm pretty okay with fanfiction as a thing that exists.

Huh... well, when I did the search for "Freddy vs Ghostbusters," I was initially looking for the old fan film of the Ghostbusters fighting Freddy Krueger...

...but this is fine, too.


(My favorite bit was when the dude was singing the Filmation Ghostbusters theme.)

Similar to what I did with the Michael Bay TMNT movie, I have opted to read/watch reviews of Batman v Superman instead of seeing the movie myself.

So yeah.

( All that stuff behind cut )

I truly don't feel like I am missing too awfully much by not seeing this movie.

I'll just leave you with what could've and should've been the movie about Batman and Superman, but wasn't, because it's just a fan-trailer made in 2004, and not an actual movie. Unlike "Batman v Superman," which is the movie we did get. Disappointingly.

Maybe I'm just weird, but a Star Trek/Green Lantern crossover just doesn't interest me all that much. Maybe because it's the reboot Trek universe with Pine-Kirk rather than the Prime universe with Shatner-Kirk? I don't really have a problem with the reboot movies, aside from them being way too action-y for my tastes, but still... Or maybe it's the fact that out of all the big DC superheroes, the Green Lantern Corps are among the least interesting to me? I don't know. In any case, this just doesn't appeal to me all that much, despite the fact that I'm usually a huge sucker for crossover stuff like this.

Then again, I still haven't even gotten around to reading the Star Trek TNG/Doctor Who crossover comic yet either, which I have far more interest in (for some reason, despite having never seen even a single full episode of any season of Doctor Who as of yet... I really, really need to get my hands on that stuff and watch it someday).

So I was watching that and thinking, yeah, that's a pretty cool pony-fied take on the Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia intro, and I thought that was all it was going to be. Then it got to the end and I was like, wait, there's an actual game associated with this? As it turns out, there is. (EDIT) And, apparently, it's almost a year old. How have I not heard of this before now, I wonder. (/EDIT)

Details here. It sucks, but oh well. :/ Hope to be able to come back to this sometime next yearwithin the next decade.