Saturday On Monday

Strange things are afoot with the stats for the site.

I spent the weekend thinking there had been zero page views since Thursday, and so, believing none had seen it, i didn't feel any pressure to put up the answers to Friday's question. Looking deeper into the stats, i see that the summary report is codswallop. Scores of visitors passed through, but the turnstile seems to have been broken.

So, late, but finally here -  Saturday  Monday Solutions with the answer to where you can find Max Von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Claudia Christian, Michal Hogan, Robin Atkin Downes, Lynda Carter, Neil Dickson, Michael Gough, Daniel Riordan, Susan Eisenberg, Mozhan Marno, Vladimir Kulich, Tim Blaney, Renee Victor, Michael Donovan, George Coe, Diane Louise Salinger, Christopher Corey Smith, Charles Martinet, and April Stewart all working together. (See original post for pictures in the same order)

The answer -

I've been playing Skyrim for years without realizing the incredible pool of talent voicing the game, much less how many of them were 'genre' stars. Star Trek, Babylon 5, Flash Gordon, Battlestar Galactica, Biggles,  Wonder Woman (twice!), Batman (Live and Lego), Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Super Mario Bros., South Park...   and a bunch of others. And those are only the names i quickly spotted and recognized when skimming the credits. 

Many play multiple roles. For example, Lynda Carter plays the legendary warrior Gormlaith Golden-Hilt (where you expecting something else golden?). When i say legendary, i mean that in the literal sense. When she first appears, it's in a vision across millennia to the legendary warriors who originally destroyed the dragons ages ago...

Viewing the past through a time fracture to watch Lynda Carter putting the hurt on Daniel Riordan while Paul Ganus watches.

 When next we meet her, it's after chasing the World Eater into the realm of the dead where we team with her and her old partners to face him down, hopefully once and for all.
Appropriately enough, Carter also plays the goddess Azura -

Azura doesn't manifest on this lowly plane, so one must commune at Her mountaintop shrine.

Michael Gough (Alfred in the Batman movies before Michael Caine) voices too many to count, and not just figuratively. Because he voices the male Nord racial type, he not only voices scores of characters in the base game, but his voice gets used by innumerable characters in the thousands of mods that have been released for the game.

And those thousands of mods are the reason it's still so popular that they've released an updated version of the game. Bethesda's open engine used for the game allows tremendous potential to expand and alter the game. They even left huge tracts of land open to allow gamers to create in their world. The base game installs at 12.9GB, IIRC. Mine weighs in closer to 50GB. There are new lands to travel, hundreds of new NPCs and stories, altered landscapes (always foggy marshes, sometimes forest instead of tundra), new/old cities (missing cities from back in Arena/Daggerfall days restored), even basic functions like interface and character needs. My characters need to sleep, eat and bathe on a regular basis, unlike in the vanilla game. Elaborate systems of buffs and debuffs have been developed for use so now when well rested, the character gets bonuses ranging from stamina to focus & ability to learn from experience. That will wear off, and then as fatigue sets in, those bonuses will slowly become minuses. I need a caffeine mod.
With bathing, one can craft a variety of soaps using the alchemical ingredients in the game combined with a bit of salt and fat. The effects can be subtle, enhancing confidence and charm, or dramatic, like making one invisible to dwemer (dwarven) machines.

Even the very look of the game. Not just the texture and model upgrades available, but systems to change how the lighting and mood are rendered, allowing one to set the look and feel of the world from a dark and gloomy fantasy world to bright and colour saturated fairy tale realm.

With a good mod organizer, like Mod Organizer, the world can be kept ever changing, and many of my favorite mods are still being updated and expanded on a regular basis.

And then there's the other stuff.
Like the physics engine in the game. It's used for all sorts of things, like making a body tumble down the side of a hill when you've just yelled "This! Is! SKYRIM!" and kicked them off the cliff.
It didn't take too long for someone to adapt that to weighted skeleton and modified body. Now breasts & butts have bounce and jiggle. I don't think that's what they use to make Schlongs Of Skyrim gain erections, but i really haven't checked the math to see.

So.
Guess what Blue Monday is going to be about later today.

screens from Skyrim