Saturday, January 11, 2014

Elvira: Black Magic

Instructing Elvira to create a potion out of various reagents (left side) drawn from my inventory (right side).

Some kind of combat system involving random monsters is the easiest way for an otherwise straight adventure game to claim RPG credentials. If B.A.T. didn't have wandering hostile robots and aliens, if Quest for Glory didn't have random creatures in the forests, and if Elvira didn't have undead guards popping up in every doorway, we would regard all of them as pure adventure games. Such games adopt their RPG elements to give a non-deterministic challenge to the player, contrasting with the deterministic nature of the puzzles. I rather like the juxtaposition, the same way I like it when challenging puzzles show up in RPGs.

I've already won Elvira, but rather than offer one huge posting on combat, magic, the endgame, and my final rating, I'm going to split it into two, discussing magic, combat, enemies, and equipment here and the game-winning puzzles in the next one.

Enemies frequently appear in doorways that you click on.

Elvira's combat didn't bore me, but it's not a very good tactical experience. As I recounted in the first post, most enemies--undead guards, monks, skeletons--pop up randomly as you try to navigate from one area to another. After giving you a few seconds' glimpse of your enemy's arrival (and a chance to cast a spell or escape), the game takes you to the combat screen, where you and your opponent proceed through multiple rounds of combat and defense. When in the attack phase, attacks continue until the defender successfully parries, at which point the roles reverse.

This feels uncomfortably like fighting some kind of Muppet.

I never figured out if it made any difference whether I lunged or hacked during attacking. The choice of blocking or parrying while defending, on the other hand, makes a huge difference, depending on whether the enemy is attacking from his left (parry) or right (block). After some experience, I found that the swings you need to block take longer, giving you more time to click the button. Thus, I found a good strategy was to stay on "parry" as the default and only switch to "block" when I saw the wider swing coming.

The overall goal in combat is not to escape all injury, but just to be good enough that your health doesn't deplete before the end of the game. The only way to regenerate lost life points is to drink healing potions. Elvira gives you one at the beginning of the game, good for a couple of doses that each restore 20%. You can theoretically have her mix up some more, though I didn't find all the ingredients for them. In any event, a moderately-skilled player could easily reach the end with all the initial health, making both healing spells and damage spells irrelevant.

Practically every screen has some reagents to collect. It took me a while to figure out that these reagents might appear as innocuous grass or shrubs that simply looks like part of the background, or even invisible entirely. The spiders, centipedes, beetles, and earwigs you collect from the basement don't show up on the screen; you have to click around the room until the game tells you they're present, then go into the room's "inventory" to drag them to your own. The lesson here is to click on everything in the game.

If you say so.

A key puzzle is to find the reagents for the "Herbal Honey" spell so that you can identify the various plants in the garden--the source of about a third of the game's reagents.

Loading up my inventory in the garden.

When you have the right reagents to make a spell, you bring them to Elvira (after you've returned her recipe book, found in one of the castle rooms). You specify the spell you want, and the ingredients it requires, and sit through an animated sequence in which Elvira brews a potion out of them. Some of these potions nonsensically turn into scrolls when you drink them.

Unfortunately, most of this reagent-collecting is wasted time. There are really only two necessary spells in the game: the aforementioned "Herbal Honey," and a spell called "Glowing Pride" that lights up a secret passage where one of the keys can be found. You need the former to find the reagents for the latter. There is a third spell, "Alphabet Soup," which translates runic language and is helpful to read both a sign in the castle and a message on a rock. The latter helps find Emelda in the endgame but isn't fully necessary.

There are 21 other spells offered in the spellbook supplement to the game, and most of them are optional attack and defense spells. Some increase attributes. For instance, "Knightyme Pleasure" offers protection from magical weapons, and "Brain Ache" decreases the enemy's combat skills. These might be necessary if the enemies were harder, but as it is, I got through the game without them. There is one sequence, in the hedge maze, where you face a series of goblins that poison you if they get into melee range. You need a bunch of attack spells and crossbow bolts to ensure that you kill them at a distance. It's possible that if I'd taken longer in the maze, or had to enter it multiple times, I would have needed more attack spells here, but as it was, the ones that Elvira gave me at the beginning of the game were enough.

If I don't nail him before he gets closer, I'll spend the next few minutes slowly bleeding to death.

You can get into trouble with some of the spells, as there are a fixed number of reagents in the game. There's only one "flame flower," and you need it for the "Glowing Pride" spell, so if you blow it on "Fire Sponge" instead, you can't win. You could also lose by mixing two "Iced Magick" spells (these cure wounds), using up both thistles, one of which is also needed for "Glowing Pride." Until I won the game, I didn't know what spells would be necessary to solve puzzles, so of course I erred on the side of not mixing spells I didn't absolutely need. By the time I had it all straight, I'd already won, so there wasn't much point in replaying just to experience more of the spells.

"Spagetty [sic] Confusion" decreases enemies' combat skills.

The spell system also, in several ways, serves as a copy protection system. First, you have to learn from the book what the various spells actually do. Their names ("Maidens Turnover"; "Lucky Surprise") don't often give much hint as to the effects (half damage from non-magic weapons; increase dexterity). Second, you need the book to know what reagents to give to Elvira to mix. If you give her the wrong ones, she gives you a warning. If you do it three times, she kicks you out of the game.

Oh, no! If only "restoring" were a thing!

Finally, the original game came with a red acetate lens that you needed to read some of the text in the book. This prevented players from simply photocopying it for each other.

As I mentioned in the last post, there is a ton of items in the game, most of which are unnecessary for any puzzle, so you have to be careful about which ones you choose to pick up. Fortunately, the game remembers where you dropped stuff, so I just ended up using Elvira's kitchen as an equipment depot and dumped everything there until I knew I needed it. There is a small selection of weapons: the initial dagger, a long sword, a battle axe, a sledge hammer, and a "Crusader's Sword" that you get late in the game from puzzle-solving. You have a separate associated "skill" score with each, and it increases incrementally as you land blows in combat. I'm not sure if the axe is a better weapon than the long sword or vice versa, but I found it was best just to stick with one, since you never break or lose weapons and it maximizes your skill development.

Armor (which increases the "resilience" attribute) consists of a few shields and a suit of armor. The latter seems like a good idea--it increases resilience from 10 to 55--but it weighs so much that you can't carry much else without getting overtired. Once you pick up too much stuff, the game gives you  a message that "the combined weight of everything you are carrying is tiring you," and it saps two points of strength every move until you lighten your load. The strength drain is, as far as I can tell, permanent, so you don't want to get into this situation in the first place. Eventually, if you persist in carrying too much stuff, you sink to your knees and fall asleep, and Elvira fires you.

Does that mean I don't have to risk my life for you anymore? 'Cause that's kind of like winning, right?

I suppose a good strategy, if you were having a lot of trouble with combat, would be to don the suit of armor, don't pick up anything else besides your weapon, and fight random combats until your skill improves. Ditch the armor when you're more skilled and experienced.

Most of the game's key enemies don't fall to standard combats and spells. The vampiress sleeping in one of the bedchambers needed some wood through the heart. At first, I thought the crossbow would be the answer, but it didn't work. Later, I found a stake among some fireplace logs and thought that was all I needed. Unfortunately, piercing a sternum with a piece of wood, however pointy, isn't quite as easy as Buffy the Vampire Slayer would have you believe. I had to find a sledgehammer in the gardener's shack before I could effectively use the stake. When I did, I was treated to a mildly horrifying animation sequence--one of the few times in an RPG that I've felt truly bad about killing an enemy. She looks like she's in legitimate pain and terror.

I also don't think that's how a "sledgehammer" works, but whatever.

Her death wasn't even necessary. All I got for it was a bit of vampire dust--used in one unnecessary spell--and a couple of crossbow bolts from her closet. Incidentally, looking at the vampire dust provides the description of "a small pile of dust from an ex-vampira," which might be a sly reference to Vampira, the TV horror hostess from the 1950s upon whom Elvira partly based her character. She later sued Elvira for copyright infringement and lost.

There's a mid-game puzzle in which Elvira's kitchen gets taken over by a fat, monstrous cook who beheads you with a meat cleaver if you linger. Thanks to Sheila's warning about paying attention to what Elvira had to say, I figured the key to beating the cook was to use salt.

So, just to be clear: you've been eating what the monster in the kitchen has been cooking?

I found some salt in the cellar, brought it back, and threw it at her. This provided another memorable animation. Afterwards, Elvira returned to the kitchen and things returned to normal.

Was she a slug or something?

The major quests of the game are to find the six chest keys, find Emelda's chest, collect the items needed to defeat her, and then find Emelda herself. I'll detail finding the keys now and the rest of it next time. Four of the keys were quite easy to find:

1. In a stable. You have to get past a werewolf by killing it with a silver-tipped bolt. I recounted this last time.

2. On a notice board in the gate captain's office. He falls, after a long time, from a regular combat.


3. Around the neck of a hawk. You need to shoot him with a crossbow bolt before he plucks your eyes out. Shooting him kills both the hawk and (for some reason) the undead austringer.

Was the hawk undead, too? If not, I feel kind of bad.

4. In the basement on the body of a dead torture victim.

The fifth was a little harder, but not much. In the kitchen, there's a dumbwaiter that, when operated, reveals a secret passage. You can't go down the passage yourself, as Elvira tactfully points out. Elvira will happily crawl down--and, to the delight of 1990s teenagers, back out . . .


. . . only to report that it's too dark. Thus, you must mix up that "Glowing Pride" (light) spell and send it down the passage in advance of Elvira. She returns with a key.

The sixth took far longer than the others combined. It's held by a guard on the battlements, but he won't die from standard combat (the game warns you he looks "invincible"). You have to shoot him with a crossbow, which causes him to fall off the battlements and into the moat.

There's no easy way to get to the moat. You have to explore the catacombs (a separate map from the basement) and deal with the nasty creatures there, including a bunch of flying skulls and the demon who hurls them.

This looks like some creature from another game or film. It's driving me crazy, but I can't quite place it.

One of the coffins, when opened, floods the catacombs and supplies a secret exit. You have to swim through flooded passages--quickly, or you drown--and emerge in the moat.

The moat is an odd map area with three horizontal water "rings" between the castle wall and the moat's edge, three vertical rings of depth, and maybe a dozen movements in any of the rings either clockwise or counterclockwise around the moat. You have to get to the middle horizontal ring at the moat's bottom to find the guard. It took me a long time to explore, as you can only move a few spaces underwater before you have to come up for air.


After you find the key, you have to find your way back through the passages and a locked grate before arriving in the castle's well. Again, there's lots of opportunity for drowning along the way.

There's one other object, besides the keys, necessary to find before the endgame: the aforementioned Crusader's Sword. This was my favorite puzzle of the game. It starts with the recovery of Elvira's missing ring from the hedge maze. You have to fight your way through a bunch of goblins (being careful to destroy them at distance) before reaching the goblins' lair. A few bolts or spells flung into the lair kills the rest of them, and the goblins disappear from the maze.


The ring fits into a receptacle on a cross in the chapel's castle. This opens up a secret area containing a mural of knights and an angel along with a gold crown. If you try to leave with the crown, you get another of the game's memorable death screens. (A note in the gate captain's office served as a warning about this.)


The solution to the puzzle lies, of all things, in the Latin on the image: QUICUMQUE MEUM REGNUM REDINTEGRAT ILLE GLADIUM SALUTIS TENEBIT. It translates as: "He who renews my kingdom will hold the Sword of Salvation." If you use a Christian prayer scroll here (found in a bible in one of the bedrooms), the mural falls apart, revealing a skeleton behind it holding a sword. "Renew my kingdom" means to put the gold crown on the skeleton's head, at which point you can take the sword and escape safely. Technically, you could solve this without knowing any Latin, but the translation does enhance the experience.


This is the kind of puzzle I like. It forces you to pause, consider your inventory, consult some resources, and figure things out logically. Most of the game's puzzles have been like this--moderately challenging but fair. (Only one, having to do with tongs, depends on unintuitive use of the game's commands and inventory.) For the most part, there was never a moment in the game that I felt I had no avenues left to explore, and I had to resort to a "shotgun approach" of just trying everything in my inventory. That's a measure of a decent adventure game, if not a great RPG.

43 comments:

  1. If B.A.T. didn't have wandering hostile robots and aliens, if Quest for Glory didn't have random creatures in the forests, and if Elvira didn't have undead guards popping up in every doorway, we would regard all of them as pure adventure games. - I agree about B.A.T and Elvira, but disagree about QfG: even if you take all combat out of it (and it's quite possible to do an almost combat-free playthrough) it'll still be an RPG since its puzzles have multiple solutions based on PC's skills and there's still some resource management involved. That in my opinion is what makes this series and Legacy: Realms of Terror the only true RPG/Adventure hybrids (there's also Arcatera that attempts that, but it's an unplayable overambitious mess).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. QfG definitely incorporates multiple RPG elements. I think its skill development system is one of the best out there. I think I'd still have a hard time calling it an RPG if it didn't feature any combat, but you make a reasonable point.

      Delete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Is this the creature the demons reminded you of?

    https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT2hsji7diawQ3toSko9sbjAMrcs0-kKsRk9PjNtdFb3uI9mX7vWg

    ReplyDelete
  4. Regnum could mean also reign, which makes more sense in this context.

    ReplyDelete
  5. "Only one, having to do with tongs, depends on unintuitive use of the game's commands and inventory."

    If you're referring to the death that happens if you try to take the tongs from the torture chamber, the solution to that is to bury the bones of the torture victim. You can circumvent that puzzle by putting the tongs into your backpack instead of your inventory, but that's unintended.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, that's what I was referring to. I didn't realize that putting the tongs in the sack was an unintended work-around; I thought it was the solution to the puzzle.

      Delete
    2. The hint to bury the bones found in the torture chamber is given in the sign right at the entrance of the castle (after you have eaten "Alphabet Soup" so that you can read it). However, the only place to bury them is the empty coffin right next to the one that floods the catacombs, so if you open the latter first you come to another walking dead situation (couldn't they put the empty coffin in another room?).
      Incidentally, another walking dead situation I can think of is if you deplete the crossbow bolts before knocking the guard off the battlements.

      Delete
    3. Crossbow is also mandatory for killing the wolf and the hawk, so you need to save a minimum of three bolts for quest purposes. There's only ten bolts in the game, so if you wander into the hedge maze early and kill the gremlins with the bolts (or just use it on normal guards), you may end up screwing yourself over.

      Unrelated note: The guard captain is possible to kill right at the start of the game if you have quick fingers. One of the potions Elvira gives you in the beginning grants three flame dagger spells, and if you manage to fire all of these into him before he rises from his desk, he will die before the battle mode even starts; the timing is very tight, but doable.

      Delete
  6. RE: Staking vampies in BtVS

    Buffy did, after all, have super strength from her Slayer powers. So in her case it's explainable. However, I'm pretty sure Giles, Xander, and Willow (and even Cordy?) did their fair share of staking, for which there would not be a plausible explanation.

    I guess in BtVS lore the excuse could be made that although a stake would have a harder time going through regular human tissue, vampires have a supernatural weakness to it that makes the wood just sink right in. Apparently Elvira's vampiress does not have the same weakness. :^)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What I never understood, in the Buffyverse, is why vampires didn't just wear some armor over their hearts. You'd think if you had such a limited vulnerability, you could protect it better.

      Delete
  7. This looks like some creature from another game or film. It's driving me crazy, but I can't quite place it.

    Abe Sapiens from Hellboy?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, that's not it. Maybe I'm just thinking about the gargoyles from Ultima VI.

      Delete
    2. Maybe it's the green color, but it looks to me like a human / fish hybrid. Since I've recently re-read Lovecraf's "A Shadow Over Innsmouth", I can only think "Deep Ones".

      Delete
    3. Probably way off on this, but it reminds me of the movie Krull. It was during the final battle with the good guy, armed with a ninja throwing star that always returned to him, vs the invading demon lord from another planet.

      Cheesy film, but I have a soft spot for it.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krull_(film)

      Delete
    4. Maybe the Creature from the Black Lagoon (http://static2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20131005135635/headhuntershorrorhouse/images/7/75/Gill_Man_001.jpg)

      Delete
  8. "which might be a sly reference to Vampira"

    Heh, sly references seem to be a theme for this game/review series.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Congratulations to another win! It sounds as if this game was a bit on the easier side. I guess it makes sense to make license games easier than other games because they're just an addition to the main experience (the book, the movie, the TV-presenter...).
    I really like this game's approach to death.
    That monster looks like a mix of Aliens and Predators.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    2. I was thinking about some HR Giger creature, the artist of "Alien".

      Delete
  10. The developers definitely did a lot of things right and had good imaginations. I like that the stat system isn't a straight D&D ripoff, the gathering and crafting play, the variety of spells, and the special solutions for certain combats (stakes, silvered bolts, etc.). The latter improves on the typical, "Ho hum, kill another monster the same way I kill every other monster."

    As for spells, it's unfortunate that most weren't needed; they could have made a few combats that could only be fought with magic, or in which spells gave the player a big advantage.

    Ref "dead man walking": Those are unfortunate, but I don't really consider them design flaws, more careless in implementation. Any item that is absolutely required in the game needs to be replenishable. I can see the two coffins next to each other as an artistic decision. A design solution would be to make the flooding coffin impossible to open until you have obtained the tongs (whether or not you buried the bones).

    All in all, I'm impressed. By the standards of the early 90's, the developers did quite a few innovative things with Elvira.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. About the two coffins (and forgetting about the walking dead situation) it was probably only an artistic decision. However, having the empty coffin next to the flooding one distracts the player's attention that it might be important to the plot later (his focus at the moment will be entirely at the flooding one), whereas putting it next to a regular coffin will guarantee that he/she will remember it when needed.
      Still, I think that the game is very good, and apart from the few dead ends and the somewhat weird spell system, the elements of exploration, combat and adventure puzzles are very well implemented and integrated with each other.

      Delete
  11. I'm not a fan of the "walking dead" situations, especially the ones that arise because of limited reagents. Oh, you cast the wrong spell in your spellbook? Too bad, game's unwinnable now.

    The TV Tropes wiki website has pages dedicated to Unwinnable games and situations. The "Unwinnable by Design" page doesn't say anything about Elivra Castle of Blood (anyone want to add that to the wiki?), but it does say, and I quote, "Elvira 2 is pretty much Made Of Unwin."

    There are a LOT of ways you can accidentally mess yourself up in Elvira 2, without any hints or indications of what you did wrong. So if anyone here tries that game... good luck.

    ReplyDelete
  12. I'm curious. Did you ever figure out what the monster reminded you of?

    ReplyDelete
  13. The demon looks half xenomorph, half Cthulhu, and half Mara from Shin Megami Tensei.

    ReplyDelete
  14. "The major quests of the game are to (...) find Emelda's chest"

    I misread this as "Elvira' chest" and thought "Ain't nobody gonna have trouble noticing THAT."

    ReplyDelete
  15. I am building this castle in survival mode in Minecraft. While doing so something occurred to me that I never noticed before even though I played this game alot in the days, there is no visible moat outside the castle wall in the garden even though there is supposed to be a moat surrounding the castle perimeter.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I got the impression that the garden was supposed to be on the inside of the castle wall. What makes you think it's supposed to be outside?

      Delete
    2. When you enter the castle initially you have to circle around the keep to the back where the entrance to the garden is, you must pass through the outer wall of the castle to enter.

      Delete
    3. Okay. I should have opened it up again before trying to comment from memory. That is an odd oversight in a game that is otherwise pretty consisted about its geography.

      Delete
    4. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
  16. Heh. I liked you comparing the Monks to muppets. You seem much more favorable to the game now. I have one more page to read though.

    ReplyDelete
  17. I'm remaking this. I've got quite far. The only areas left to add are the moat, and most of the maze. I'm also the one that made the graphical maps and spellbook online yeeeaaars ago, and warned the world not to waste the flameflower on fire sponge. I'm POSSIBLY the biggest Elvira-game nostalgia nerd left. I came accross this post because I'm trying to find specific weapon stats, and you included my keywords - several weapon names. I'm SURE I've seen them before...

    Regnum, in that context, means kingship, and "sword of salvation" is debatable. I interpreted it more like "legendary sword". And the maze creatures are called gremlins and the "basement" is the dungeon. I've worked out that when you enter the moat from the duct, if you go to the middle concentric ring, turn right, the knight is six (or is it four?) steps forward, and getting back to the grate is easier too, knowing that.

    Yes, the moat makes no sense when on the other side of the outer wall is an immediate garden with fields and a massive maze. And going around the castle in the moat doesn't account for the eight towers or deployed drawbridge, and the outer wall is circular. I considered a few ways to compensate for this, like a bridge to the garden or only semi-circle moat, passing under the drawbridge... but it's all pointless and annoying area. Sooo I'm going to have the dead knight on the other side of the locked grate (which does line up map-wise) and prevent wandering along the "rings". I'll probaby abridge the annoyingly large/complicated maze as well. Apart from that my mapping is perfect and I've done loads of tweaks to correct visual inconsistancies and fill in missing details. I've been at this for weeks and haven't told the world, but may as well micro-announce it here.

    And, yeah, that tongs puzzle. Jesus. I don't want to change the basic structure but that's the one puzzle I'm thinking of replacing. Why would it even occur to the player character to fire the cannon at a tower to somehow access the top? And why would he need to sanctify some remains to get a torturer's tongs to then use burning coal to light the fuse in a castle full of candles and fire spells? It's so 90s and convoluted and weird. And it's funny you mentioned the sledgehammer because I was considering putting a mallet (like in the staking animation!) in the smithy instead. Blah blah.

    If anyone's interested. :D

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Irene and I really got a kick out of this comment, agreeing that the great thing about this world is that no matter the subject, there's someone out there with an absurd level of enthusiasm for it.

      I hope that doesn't sound condescending. I honestly admire how you've put so much thought into correcting minor issues of logic while remaking a 27-year-old game that few people remember and even fewer care about. Please keep us updated and let us know when the remake is available.

      Delete
    2. I get it, though. Every obscure little thing has someone clinging to it. I'm well aware how eccentric most of my nostalgia hobbies are. :D
      27-year-old? Gawd. Thanks for the encouragement, especially the "even fewer care about" part. haha. Yeh I'll let you know.

      Delete
  18. Hey.. I doubt I can be bothered to do much more of it. It's quite far developed and you can have a copy of you're still interested. Email streaksy -at- gmail -dot- com if you want a copy.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Hi. Just remembered this. It's been on my site since a few month ago.

    Here is it's main page: http://www.streaks.xyz/project_elvira.php

    Here is it's dev blog that shows a lot of changes and screenshot comparisons: http://www.streaks.xyz/project_elvira_dev.php

    ReplyDelete
  20. I just got serious "Mars Attacks!" vibes from that weird skull-demon, though that could be the proximity of the skull to the top of the demon's head that looks a bit like a segmented brain. And the vague "horror B-movie" crossover in general, I guess.

    ReplyDelete

I welcome all comments about the material in this blog, and I generally do not censor them. However, please follow these rules:

1. Do not link to any commercial entities, including Kickstarter campaigns, unless they're directly relevant to the material in the associated blog posting. (For instance, that GOG is selling the particular game I'm playing is relevant; that Steam is having a sale this week on other games is not.) This also includes user names that link to advertising.

2. Please avoid profanity and vulgar language. I don't want my blog flagged by too many filters. I will delete comments containing profanity on a case-by-case basis.

3. NO ANONYMOUS COMMENTS. It makes it impossible to tell who's who in a thread. If you don't want to log in to Google to comment, either a) choose the "Name/URL" option, pick a name for yourself, and just leave the URL blank, or b) sign your anonymous comment with a preferred user name in the text of the comment itself.

4. I appreciate if you use ROT13 for explicit spoilers for the current game and upcoming games. Please at least mention "ROT13" in the comment so we don't get a lot of replies saying "what is that gibberish?"

5. Comments on my blog are not a place for slurs against any race, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or mental or physical disability. I will delete these on a case-by-case basis depending on my interpretation of what constitutes a "slur."

Blogger has a way of "eating" comments, so I highly recommend that you copy your words to the clipboard before submitting, just in case.

I read all comments, no matter how old the entry. So do many of my subscribers. Reader comments on "old" games continue to supplement our understanding of them. As such, all comment threads on this blog are live and active unless I specifically turn them off. There is no such thing as "necro-posting" on this blog, and thus no need to use that term.

I will delete any comments that simply point out typos. If you want to use the commenting system to alert me to them, great, I appreciate it, but there's no reason to leave such comments preserved for posterity.

I'm sorry for any difficulty commenting. I turn moderation on and off and "word verification" on and off frequently depending on the volume of spam I'm receiving. I only use either when spam gets out of control, so I appreciate your patience with both moderation tools.