The Dull-Gleam Monody

The 11th day of April, the 102nd day of the year, is known the The Dull-Gleam Monody in the Universal Solar Calendar, which begs the question: what the hell is a monody?

If you're curious, I'll let you Google the answer for yourself. My point in bringing it up, though, is that we've been looking forward to April 11, um, The Dull-Gleam Monody, for a while.  

The Sports Desk is excited because The Dull-Gleam Monody is the date of the semifinal game of the NCAA's Frozen Four - the college hockey championship. It's been a while - the quarterfinal game was back on March 30, The Topaz Glove. Boston University beat Minnesota, 6-3, that day and advanced to today's semifinal against Denver. Today's winner will go on to play in the Championship Game, most likely against Boston College. These games are kind of a big deal here at WDW.

Meanwhile, the Gaming Desk is excited because The Dull-Glean Monody is also the premier of the show Fallout, Jonathan Nolan's television adaptation of the Fallout games. Nolan was the person behind the HBO series Westworld, and collaborated with his brother, director Christopher Nolan, on the films Memento, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, and Interstellar. The Nolan brothers are kind of a big deal to WDW.

The Gaming Desk is also a big fan on the Fallout games. According to our Steam statistics, we've played 1,094 hours of Fallout 4, 346 hours of Fallout 76, 199 hours of Fallout - New Vegas, and 117 hours of Fallout 3. That's 1,756 total hours in the Fallout universe, or 73 full 24-hour days.  

We watched the first three episodes of the show on Amazon today, and are pleased to report that the series is good.  It doesn't indulge in the Nolan narrative-time-POV twists that made his Westworld adaptation frequently bewildering, but it's still quite interesting. It doesn't slavishly follow the plot of any one particular Fallout game the way HBO's The Last of Us followed the game, The Last of Us Part 1. But it is faithful to the lore of the game, especially the post-apocalyptic set designs, outfits, Pip-boys, soundtrack, and monsters. So far, we've seen ghouls, a radroach, a Yao Guai, and a gulper. It's an original story, centered around vault 33, but the narrative feels very much in keeping with the writing of the Fallout games. We're enjoying it.

Anyway, the hockey game's starting now, so we gotta run.  After the game, we'll probably watch another episode or two of Fallout.