Blue Gaming

My current character in Skyrim is Hela.

Her name is not based on Thor: Ragnarok, it's one of 3 names that i've routinely used for ass-kicking Nord women over the years. Hela, Hel (same goddess, different poems), or Tyra (Tyr is god of war in Norse mythology, his daughter might go by Tyra). Nords are the local culture in Skyrim, the northernmost province of Tamriel, on the world of Nirn. Much of their culture is derived from Nordic traditions, naturally enough, and so that becomes the source of many of my characters' names.

But this incarnation of Hela is more than just an ass-kicking warrior woman. She's gone to the dark side and embraced it. And this makes her a good character for the subject mentioned in our previous post - a Skryim edition of

Meet Hela, a sweet Nord girl wearing her first crafted armour-

She still prefers leather for her armour, though she has upgraded a bit. And she is no longer "sweet" in any way...

Her gauntlets and boots now incorporate ebony, but still light weight. She goes very light on protection, heavy on offense. She likes to do her Bleach act -

Big-Ass Sword gets the job done is her basic philosophy. Though she freely embraces the bow for both Dragon Slaying and Sniper Assassinations.

As mentioned, no longer sweet in any way. Hela may have saved the world from destruction, but that's only because she was using it. Besides being Dragonborn, devouring the souls of the dragons she slays (57 and counting), she's also the head of a cannibal cult, she's restored the Dark Brotherhood by assassinating the Emperor, she killed the head of the vampire royal family so she could replace him...
Really -  you don't want to meet her in a dark alley these days-

NOTE: Most of the images for this post contain nudity and have been moved to our back room for adult content. The text remains that you may make a fair guess as to whether or not you wish to look at the pics.
Please follow this link to The Other Voice Of ODD! archive of the original post to view the artwork

Oh, and she's also not just a vampire - she's a Vampire Lord -

And, as you might have noticed from the last two pics, or inferred from her armour, Hela is an exhibitionist.
I don't mean that merely in the character design and how i play her sense. It's also mod enforced, and the character is coded with exhibitionist behaviour. If her clothes come off, she wants to enjoy it for a bit and will refuse to put them back on. Heading into a dungeon, she may decide it's terribly dirty and remove her armour to keep it clean. This changes both the level of challenge, and the visual entertainment of the game.

But don't let her appearance fool you - even dragons gather to pay respect to her while she freely enjoys the mountain air.

As mentioned last time, the physics engine of the game has been adapted to provided bounce & jiggle to breasts & butts, as well as sway to testicles and possibly to handling flaccid to erect penis transformation. Or that might just be an animated morph - i really don't know what's handling the erections.
(I'm not even going to try to claim innocence on that one.)

I should also mention that clothing, armour and NPCs have been modified, so the game has a sometimes radically different look to it. Take the daughter of the Vampire King who was my follower for a while. Her name is Serana, but she looks little like the Serana of the Dawnguard expansion to Skyrim. I'll let you guess which one is the original, and which is taken from my current game-

Umm...  no. She doesn't usually 'dress' like that. She had some recent difficulties with some bandits. They've been known to leave souvenirs after a rape, like tattoos, piercings or locked bondage devices. Sometimes in combination, as seen above.

While typically the only rock & roll is of the avalanche variety, the mods do supply drugs to accompany your sex -

One can get fucked up to the point of barely being able to function. This also comes with a system of addiction, but don't worry. There's prostitution, so you can work for your drugs if needed.
And, speaking of drugs, you may have noticed that Hela's breasts seemed a bit larger in the second picture as compared to the first. That's not a misperception. There's this drug called Lacatcid, see...
It's used by dairy farmers who don't use cows. You probably don't want to get dosed with it; certainly not on any regular basis.

It's a dark world in Skyrim these days - Dragons, Civil War, Regicide, Slavery, Banditry, Misogyny, and rampant Rape. And it's not just bandits and guards looking to take advantage of any adventurer that comes their way - even the undead in the tombs can get literal boners.

In the wilderness, one looks to quickly put down trolls, werewolves, and anything else encountered before they turn the tables and take what they really want. Even giants have a whole new meaning of dangerous-





And, the world is still more dangerous, and lecherous. You never know when it might go full Hentai on you...

Luckily for Hela, the chaurus did not lay a clutch of eggs in her. This time.

...even ancient Dwemer technology might still function to collect sexual energy from the unwary-

The local authorities have turned to extreme measures to try to deal with the bandits and general lawlessness during these dark times...

...and getting arrested can be much worse than one might suspect, not only including public shaming...

...but also guards who make cash on the side renting out the prisoners for beatings and worse.

Of course, it's not all bad times. Beyond basic seduction and charm, or prostitution if preferred, there are also full romance relationships and storylines to be explored via the mods. Some even pull unused dialog by the original actors from the data files and restore them to the game to help create new relationships.

Of course, what really gets people hot is watching Hela kill a dragon and suck down its soul...

Nothing like that post kill orgy to work off the tension of facing down a dragon.
Sometimes those dragon kills can be fairly epic, cutting to a cinematic rendering. But all too often, the randomly chosen camera angles suck bubbling farts out of dead toad frogs -

Hela can use dragon shouts to summon storms, with lightning striking the dragon twice while she climbed on its head and frelling smote it. And that's the angle from which we got to view it,  barely getting a glimpse of Hela's butt throughout the sequence. Tragic cinematography.
Sometimes the angles work out much better -

Yeah, that last scene is dark, but i like it for the stark lighting contrast provided by the flaming death the dragon was calling from the sky while we battled.

So - what was it that turned our sweet black smithing Nord girl into a demonic hellion rampaging across Skyrim? I mean, sure - she's seen some things -

...and the world is a dark and nasty place, certainly...

...but what really sent her over the edge was when bandits captured and gang raped her, and then sold her off into slavery -

After she killed her master and escaped, she went on a revenge spree that never really stopped.

I should also point out that the mods are in no way limited to female characters, with some excellent male only adult options available, too.

If you ever wondered why people are still playing this old game when so many newer worlds are available to play in, the mods might give you an answer.

One of the big things that makes the Elder Scrolls games so great to play for so long (Morrowind - Elder Scrolls III released in 2002 - is still getting regular updates and expansions) is the design philosophy that sets it apart even from other in-house games like the FallOut series. They build a huge world first, then stuff it full of stories instead of writing a big story and building a world around it. (That may not be the actual chronological order, but it's the priority order) This results in a world that can be played in and explored without ever bothering with the main story. I had played for a year or more before playing the Dragonborn story through for the first time, and Hela is only the 3rd character to complete the basic story of Alduin, the World Eater and the returning dragons. In fact, many of my characters live in worlds where the dragons are still legends. With an alternate start mod, the standard opening is bypassed and dozens of beginning options are available. As long as one never approaches the town of Helgen, the dragons never appear. And still the game world is expansive revealing new things after years of play.
The other big thing is that they leave the architecture for building that world open so that gamers may freely expand and alter the world, making it ever changing and growing.

We've only barely glimpsed the Blue side of Skyrim here, it goes deep into the dark. Pretty much the only place it doesn't go is children. The mods enabling the sex animations and interactions will not recognize children, nor characters scaled down to child size, and will disable themselves if mods tagging children as adults (to make them killable) are present in the game.

Of course, the blue mods are only a small percentage of the overall options available. There are huge adventures that don't even begin until after one has completed primary game quests, extending the stories long past their original endings. If one even follows any of the many primary quest storylines in the game. Simpler stories abound - playing a young alchemist or jewelry smith becomes an entertaining game by itself, just seeking to acquire materials and learn skills while trying to find shelter where Inns might cost as much as a couple hundred dollars a night for a bed. I've had characters who've never held a weapon or never cast a spell play for 30 levels or more. Placing character based limits greatly enhances the replay factor, too.

Hela, for instance, uses no magic. Nords look down on spellcasting. But she does work the magic in metal, not only forging her own weapons and armour, but enchanting them as well. This suits her world view. And it makes the game completely different from when Selene, a necromantic conjurer who never held a weapon,  was dealing with some of the same situations.

And, of course, though Skyrim may be a bleak, cold land...

...it's not too hard to make new friends...

all screens from (heavily modded) Skyrim (TESV)

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

Hermiting

Despite any implications of my absence, it has been a pretty good Xmas for me. Got to spend a few hours with my elder son and received a couple of presents i very much liked - a food dehydrator and a set of professional lock pics.
Already making up a separate shopping list for the dehydrator - first up is prepping a veggie mix for soups. Then comes the jerky. Hopefully i can get some nice venison to work with. And i do a mean sweet/hot teriyaki/sriracha jerk for lesser tasting meats.

But this time of year does tend to promote withdrawal from the outer world, reinforced by the snowy weather. We're all very much alike, but very different as well, much as that goes against our society's either/or limits on thinking. (I shake my head at the inherent tragic stupidity every time i see a scene where the hero recoils vehemently at the thought of being any way like the villain. How fragile is their sense of self?)
So, anyway - While we're normally here finding some common interests in my odd digging through comics and culture, let's go the other direction today. I thought i'd ramble on a few things that make my life likely very different from yours. Perhaps, in some ways, unimaginably so.

Let's get the biggest out of the way right up front - i neither own nor use a phone. I don't believe i've handled one in this decade. After absorbing the social and connective implications, think about how often the only contact option given is by phone and you'll get a glimmer of how much that reinforces hermit isolation. It took months to acquire internet service simply because they're all geared towards people who already have phone and/or internet. Most of the walk-in offices have shuttered, and no mailing addresses are provided.

I have neither television nor radio, and the only clock is the one on the stove for timing food preparation.
Of course, i do have computer and internet, and it can tell me the time when i really want to know.

I have no vehicle, having relied on foot and public transportation since before the turn of the century. That worked quite well until the nerve damage in the feet made walking so much more interesting. These days i mostly do my Duke Ellington routine, but never no lament.

My feet suffer the indignity of shoes for about 8-12 hours per month.

I go out to eat food perhaps 2-4 times per year. (This includes fast food joints, pubs, roach coaches, greasy spoons, etc.,; not just "going out" to fancy restaurants or the like)

I typically go days without seeing another human being - frequently weeks without greater contact than a nod or passing greeting.

Here's a very simple truth about being a hermit - you better like yourself. That's with whom you're spending the most time. Fortunately, knowing oneself was an important aspect of early life lessons for me (See Babylon 5 for the importance of knowing this before asking what you want) so i get along pretty well with me. But, i can be frustrating company when the artwork output has been hobbled as it has in recent months by ongoing technical issues with the computers.. That creative energy that can't get out turns inward instead.
So now i find myself indulging in silly things like playing with clothing textures for my Skyrim game or planning out an Emmanuelle In Tamriel screen cap blog as outlets for that energy.

No - seriously...

Fresh off the boat from Cyrodiil-

...with her first view of the Great Arch, upon which Solitude, the capital city of Skyrim, was built...

A closer look at our heroine-

Think of the Adventures Into The Woods incarnation of Emmanuelle...

 ...fallen into a darker fantasy world; one torn by dragons, civil war, and slavery.

Now if i can just get Ron Jeremy to reprise his Crocs-wearing Merlin for that Men In Black hip hop musical number.
Again, seriously...

 I, um... may have rambled again.
Sorry about that.

Pics from Skyrim (this morning) and Adventures Into The Woods (2012)