T w e n t y S i d e d

The origin and evolution of horror movie franchises is rife with commentary, observations, and analysis. Some of it is even good. The sub-genre of “slasher” movie might be the most visible category, although personally I don’t view slasher movies as distinct, per se. The things that horrify us, or startle us, or discomfit us provide horror categories as far as the fundamental nature of a film goes. (Although, I will admit that genres and sub-genres as we think of them can be very useful when trying to find something to watch on a streaming service. Sometimes you want gory kills; sometimes you want creeping dread, sometimes you want commentary and comedy.) The fundamentals of horror, I think, are more closely associated with concepts like “conflict types.” You know, “man vs. nature,” “man vs. man,” and “man vs. himself.” While it would be easy to just say, “Well, sure; that’s ‘survival horror,’ ‘slasher,’ and ‘psychological'” you have to acknowledge the incredible number of caveats you would have to employ to subsequently categorize every horror movie. All of which is to point out viewing slasher movies, especially the big franchises, through the lens of genre isn’t useful for ALL analysis.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Slasher Movie Franchise Origin and Evolution”

Paige Francis He/him

Because of my quest to play “collector” in World of Warcraft (and I know this has been a month of World of Warcraft; my apologies…I get tunnel vision sometimes) I have been on a bit of an adventure. Playing on my laptop with its older graphics processor, a unified architecture Ryzen 7/Vega 3 (and its currently limited RAM) causes some issues. I was never able to get WoW retail running. Under a Wine install I would experience random shutdowns during the install. About one out of forty times the Battle.net install would complete, but then Battle.net would not operate fully. I couldn’t install any Battle.net game, because it kept telling me I was “offline.” Don’t go checking for solutions to that problem explicitly, by the way; you will find a lot of people telling you “well, *of course* you can’t install…*you’re offline*. Go online and then it will work.” You can just picture your favorite “head smacking/are you stupid” reaction gif now. I did read a few references that sometime in Summer 2025 Blizzard changed “something” that has disabled or at least greatly hampered Linux installs. To be sure the only success stories I found predated this past summer. But given my available hardware, I would not be surprised if it was possible.

There are, at this point, *many* recommendations to install World of Warcraft through Steam. This isn’t 100% straightforward; by the traditional instructions you have to run the Battle.net installer, cancel it out when it asks to log-in (something that is part of the Wine instructions as well), then change the configuration to point to the just-installed Battle.net rather than the installer, which will now run under Steam’s Wine overlay Proton, and successfully install World of Warcraft. Here’s the first thing, though: after the Battle.net install completed, I couldn’t ever find where it installed. *Every other game* I ever installed through Steam *and ran,* which may be the important part, is in my Steam archive folder. What *did* work is doing the Wine install (which can fail often, remember) then adding *that* installed Battle.net to Steam. This is when I hit the second issue: World of Warcraft would only install to the internal hard drive, the one that’s only 256 gigabytes and about 2/3 full. I *should* be able to change to any of my external drives, but it couldn’t see them. I’m sure this has something to do with pretending to install through Windows, and there is probably a legitimate explanation…but I don’t currently know what it is. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “When Did World of Warcraft Jump the Shark? or, A Tale Too Big For Azeroth”

Paige Francis He/him

Just a short news update, I think. Turtle WoW, which I talked about last week, has issued a public letter to Blizzard as their (known, anyway) response to Blizzard’s lawsuits. The letter basically details how other publishers have embraced whole-game modding, why can’t Blizzard?

This particular tactic has not only been tried multiple times, it’s basically a long-standing argument. Major portions of this perspective are even inherently invalid. Some of the games and publishers quoted as examples, say; Minecraft, have been designed from the beginning using a different model. When you run a Minecraft “private server,” it’s NOT YOUR SERVER. It’s Minecraft‘s. Er, Mojang’s. Microsoft’s. You just have permission to use their code and approved tools. Yes, you can get into the weeds on the “approved tools” part, but generally the entire system works differently.

Of course, the “public letter” isn’t necessarily their legal response. I would expect this is mostly for players, not Blizzard. Regardless, I don’t expect Turtle WoW to go down overnight. At the very least, there is some foreign ownership tied into the servers that Blizzard may not be able to touch effectively. Considering how easy it was to get Turtle WoW running, though; I have started looking at other private servers to see how easy it is to get any of those working on Linux. World of Warcraft live was simple enough to run until recently, and I’m not remotely interested in any of the recent content, so I expect there may be a good solution.

Paige Francis He/him