Trismegistus

Games: I am now the proud owner of Warhammer: Dawn of War Onslaught and Wyrmspan, and am going through the rulebooks ahead of playing them with Geek BBQers in the new year.

Music: Alas, I skipped both yesterday's pub session and today's house session to focus on end-of-year adulting, so didn't do much with music this week. Nor do I dare to practice at home, given how bone dry the apartment is.

Podcasts: N/A

Roleplaying: None this week, but ma soeur did get me a ridiculously funny D&D themed mug, which I have been enjoying with an obscene amount of tea.

Television: We wrapped of The American Revolution, which was excellent overall, as have been the conversations with the GC and other friends who've watched. It's amazing how differently this history--and various aspects of it--are or are not taught depending on what school district you grew up in.

We kicked off the weekend with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which was great fun to see in theaters and just as fun to watch at home. Doric and Holga are such great characters, as is Simon, but Xenk will always be my forever character from this movie.

The Fellowship of the Ring, which is a permanent winter movie for me (just as the book is a winter read). The characters look nothing like the characters in my head, but oh my god did Jackson get the look of the world down cold. And National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is one of those childhood movies that, like The Princess Bride, I could probably recite in real time.

The GC & I weren't planning on watching AEW: World's End this past Saturday, but then one of the Geek BBQers offered to host, and it turned out to be a really solid PPV with tons of good matches. I loved seeing Babes of Wrath and FTG get their wins; the Darby Allen/Gabe Kidd match was intense, Mox's storyline is coming out of the doldrums at last, and Joe, Swerve, and MJF are guaranteed fire whenever they're in the ring, let alone when they're in it together. It was a small watch group, only six people at its height, and one of them was a curiosity attendee who'd never watched wrestling before. But she is also a TRPGer and former gymnast who got it immediately, and it was a ton of fun watching her get into what AEW is about. On top of that, we got to commune with bonus cats.

The GC and I started Max Headroom: a rewatch for me and new show for the GC. Max Headroom is sadly, criminally, largely forgotten today...probably because of how freaking prescient it was. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely A Lot of vintage '80s elements in this series, but. This show really did predict the future in a lot of uncomfortable ways. Cambridge Analytica-style micro-segmenting of audiences? Yup. Novel digital technologies that literally kill people? Yup. Megacorporations covering it all up for profit? Yup.

"Wow," said the GC when we were about 15 minutes in, "this is just Cyberpunk 2077." And it is. "Wow," said the GC after Max Headroom made his first on-screen appearance, "that's just...Jim Carrey." And I'd never thought about it before, but he's right. Or more accurately, Jim Carrey stole his entire shtick from Matt Frewer's Headroom and no one acknowledges it. We started with the show (I can't find my copy of the movie) but we're already two episodes in and it still really holds up.

Video Games: It's been a bit of a rough week, so I've leaned heavily into two of my major comfort games: Botanicula and Thank Goodness You're Here. We also got--but have not started playing yet--Sea of Stars

これで以上です。

Friday of course being Samhain/Halloween, I did my traditional daily bakes in the afternoon before heading down the street to the neighborhood's annual block party--one of the oldest and most well-established in the city. Several streets are closed to traffic (and several more de facto closed to traffic just by the number of pedestrians on them). Although a bit scaled back since covid (no bouncy castles or the like this year), there were still a ton of trick-or-treaters, and pretty much everyone of any age was in costume. Last year, the GC and I were Over The Garden Wall's Sara and Wirt, and we had such fun making those costumes that we reprised them this year.

As two of the GeekBBQ regulars now live on one of the main streets, we spent the majority of the evening handing out candy outside their place, then went in after the onslaught had wrapped up and watched:

What We Do In The Shadows an annual Halloween watch for us until it got popular enough that Kanopy lost the license to streaming services. Luckily, the GeekBBQers own a copy, so we were able to watch again. The whole movie is great, but I ride or die for the werewolves (not swearwolves! ...Seriously, I didn't think anything could ever top Adventure Time's Whywolves, but these guys absolutely do). This one is a forever classic.

The Craft I grew up with Fairuza Balk in The Worst Witch and was newly smitten with her in the melodramatic made-for-TV movie Shame a few years later, and so was very stoked when I learned that she and Melody from Hey Dude were going to be in The Craft. Then I saw The Craft. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now( Read more... ) Or rather, I like the first half of the movie a great deal, and the rest? Hard no thank you.

Dark Shadows It's a fine movie, but not one I was every particularly into, so I "watched" it during lulls in the conversation.

Music: Saturday was PorchFest. I don't know if it was because people were out late the night before, but the first two hours of the thing were dead; almost no one on the streets anywhere. It was so stark we started wondering if the thing had been postponed and we somehow had just not got the message? But there were bands playing, so that couldn't have been right. Then, at 4:00 pm a cloud of people emerged from metro like a horde of lanternflies just as we'd decided decamp for our afternoon walk; it felt like walking against the entire tide of humanity. Walk completed, we returned to find that things had picked up somewhat, although even with the new injection of humanity there were way fewer people than I've ever seen at any previous PorchFest. (I think it was a combination of Halloween being the night before, the many Halloween parties later that night, the city being under crypto-martial law, and the furlough.)

We watched a few "solo woman with an acoustic guitar" performances, a husband-and-wife duo (both veterans; the "likening everything to soldiers/combat/honor/patriotism" lyrical lens did not resonate with us personally, but they were still very, very good), and several very good punk and blues bands, and the neighborhood cover band that has played as long as I've been going to PorchFest.

Podcasts: Episodes 9 and 10 of the Grimfrost podcast, with academics Neil Price and Anders Kaliff, both fascinating guests. I enjoyed the conversation with Price a little bit more because it felt slightly more grounded in fact than academic speculation, but the speculation in the latter episode was presented as such and also very interesting.

Television: As ever, the current Last Week Tonight episode (the main segment of which was unfortunately not as nuanced as one would have hoped), and some halfhearted poking at AEW Collision and AEW Dynamite.

However, on Sunday, the GeekBBQ crew reconvened to watch episodes 2 and 3 of Dimension 20: Titan Takedown, which brings together three of my longstanding loves: Greek mythology, D&D, and pro-wrestling. Gawd, what a great freaking campaign. I love The New Day. I love Bayley. (Chelsea Green came after I'd all but stopped watching WWE but holy crap, she may just get me back into it.) When I was first trying to get the GC to dip a toe into wrestling, I plugged it as "a D&D superhero campaign with live acrobatics", and it is. Which is why this campaign in particular just works so well. Because, while some of the party members are new to D&D, they have definitely roleplayed fantasy characters with ideals, bonds, flaws, and defining personality traits in a longform improv storyline. It's incredibly funny, it's dramatic, it's more emotionally rewarding than it has any right to be, and I am very much looking forward to the final episode.

Video Games: I am very much into comfort food gaming as I wrap up my fourth week of being forced to work full time for free. And so it was that I got my hands on Suikoden I&II Remastered...

...and began a replay of Ultima IV, having ceded the console to the GC, who has never played any of the Suikodens before. ("Do you think I'd like them?" he asked. "As long as you realize going in that they are not BG, let alone BG3, yeah," I told him. And by and large, he has enjoyed them albeit with some--warranted--groaning at the most Extremely Retro elements. For my part, I have enjoyed watching him react to the game in real time, and yeah, these games still hold up.)

As does Ultima, once I'd gotten into the grove of replaying it. It still is one of the OGs of computer RPGing, and I have a renewed appreciation for how cleverly it's written given all the development constraints--graphics, sound, memory, distribution--in play when it came out. This is a game without a world map, let alone fast travel. I spawned as a mage and spent an exasperating three days grinding just to get off the island where mages spawn and to Castle Britannia so that I could get the gear, reagents, and party members necessary to get going on the actual Avatar quest. But I am well on my way now, although irritatingly grinding again along the coastline, waiting for a pirate ship to spawn so I can commandeer it and get to the other islands I need to visit. (There were a billion pirate ships when it was just me, with no spells, armor, or ranged weapon, and thus no hope of surviving an encounter with them. And now...nada. Go figure.)

これで以上です。

Challenge #9

Rec Us Your Newest Thing. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Right now, everything old is my Newest Thing again. Maybe it's because chez lebateleur has recently emerged from the bout of seasonal illness we thought we'd successfully avoided, or the recent snowfall (the most accumulation since 2016 🥳), but my recent fandom consumption is very old favorite focused.( Read more... )

As far as earworms go, I have been all over Pádraic Keane, Páraic Mac Donnchadha, and Macdara Ó Faoláin's live album Beo since the first time I heard it. These guys get what the tunes are about (And as one Bandcamp commentator put it, that bass drone.) It's good, good stuff.

これで以上です。

Another wrap-up post? Sure, why not. I'm only listing media I actively consumed and finished (i.e., no movies on in the background, no games or television series still in progress, no podcasts where I cherrypicked specific episodes to listen to).

Given everything that went down, I really didn't have the attention span or joy in imagination to consume much visual media in the latter half of the year, but that means there's just more for me to wrap up this year. On the flip side, it was a pretty good year for live music (and we didn't even get to half of the shows we were interested in seeing).

I may come back at some point and add notes or thoughts about each, but for starters, let's just get the list down.

Movies

Ant Man: Quantumania

The Banshees of Inisherin

Barbie

A Christmas Story

Dungeons & Dragons

Flash

Guardians of the Galaxy 3

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

National Lampoon Christmas Vacation

Oppenheimer

The Room

Scrooged

Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse

Spotlight

올빼미

TV

Adventure Time: Season 3

Adventure Time: Season 4

Last Week Tonight: Season 10

Legend of Vox Machina: Season 2

Loki: Season 2

Ms. Marvel

The Owl House: Season 1

Ragnarok: Season 1

Werewolf by Night

Podcasts

30for30: Bikram

Computer/Console Games

Wordle

Live Music

100 Gecs

311

Asking Alexandria

Beck

Bush

Breaking Benjamin

Candlebox

Cherry Glazrr

Cold War Kids

Collective Soul

Dandy Warhols

Disturbed

Explosions in the Sky

Fear Factory

Fever Ray

Filter

Franz Ferdinand

Garbage

Godsmack

The Hu

I Ya Toyah

Jinjer

Live

Live (unplugged)

Machinegirl

Matt & Kim

Metric

Mix Master Mike

Mushroomhead

No Second Troy

Noel Gallagher's Flying Circus

Paul Okenfold

Phoenix

Pixies

Stabbing Westward

Staid

Static-X

Silversun Pickups

Toni Smooth

Visors

Walkaways

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Live TV

AEW Dynamite

AEW Rampage

Tabletop Games

The Captain Is Dead

Delta Green one-shot

D&D Delian Tomb homebrew campaign

D&D Dragons of Stormwreck Isle

D&D Feywild homebrew campaign

D&D Homebrew campaign: Season 2

D&D Spelljammer homebrew campaign #1

D&D Spelljammer homebrew campaign #2

D&D Spelljammer Jpop homebrew campaign playtest



これで以上です。

The new season of Dragon Prince is coming in November.

YAAAAAAAAS.

I am so ready.


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Challenge #13

In your own space, share a favorite memory about fandom: the first time you got into fandom, the last time a fanwork touched your heart, wild times with fellow fans (whether on-line or off-line), a lovely comment you’ve received or have left for someone. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

( Years ago, I sent ma soeur the first season of Adventure Time on DVD. ) She is definitely a fanwork that touched my heart 💖 and one that brought our fandom interaction over Adventure Time full circle.

これで以上です。

...did the New York Times just name AEW's very own MJF as one of its best performances of 2020?

( OH YES THEY DID. )

It is consistently some of the best stuff going on TV.

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Food & Fandom
The past few weeks have found us increasingly subsumed into AEW's entertainment ecosystem. I suppose it was only a matter of time: we already watch Dynamite and now AEW Dark pretty regularly. To which we may now add AEW's online cooking segment; a timely discovery since we've already watched each episode of HU's in the kitchen? several times. And anyway, I am a sucker for cooking shows where the hosts eyeball the ingredients, because that is how I cook too.

June 6, or The Gaming Day That Wasn't
We logged on to the Destiny servers at 1:03 to watch the live event. Virtually no players were there, although a few rando NPCs were pointing up at the sky. Had the event already ended? Was Bungie waiting for more players to show up before starting whatever it was that we were there to see? We checked back in after half an hour or so of grinding, but nothing had changed, so we logged off.

Of course, everything went down right after that. So we missed all the missiles and the Almighty crashing to earth. A bit of a bummer, but not so much of one that I regret not sitting around for 90 minutes on a Saturday afternoon to see it.

Larian was also set to preview new Baldur's Gate 3 content on the 6th, but #GuerrillaCollective announced on the 4th that they were pushing this back to June 13-15 to allow for Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which was a very cool thing to do.

これで以上です。

And now for the better stuff.

Acquiring the overpriced, POS laptop (now dubbed Oppos) meant I was able to join one of my two regular D&D groups for last night’s session. I always look forward to these sessions, and even more so now that they are the main social event left to most of the players. ( Read more... )

In other news, Charles Yu has a new book!


I can’t believe I only found out about this the other day—especially since it’s been out since January 27th, and Yu’s How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is one of my all time favorite books. I have been eagerly awaiting another volume from him, and I am super excited to finally get to read one.

In other book news, a very good friend became the first person I know well to catch coronavirus; they have spent the last few weeks isolated in their bedroom while their partner leaves them meals and other necessities outside the door. This is objectively awful and could not have happened to someone who deserved it less. On the bright side, I sent them The Goblin Emperor to read, so here comes one more into the fold.

In televised entertainment, AEW has steadily moved in to fill the wrestling void since I—for Reasons—abandoned WWE for good in 2018, to the point where I finally gave in to the inevitable and started watching Dynamite. I have not been disappointed. And then came ( THIS. )

Keep cutting those promos, Brody Lee, because I will keep eating them out of your hand.

And finally, Castlevania season 4 is confirmed!


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...as I imagine there will be a lot of these in the coming days.

I read the first book at the urging of a friend in '99 and thought it was a bloated pot boiler.

Also at the urging of friends, I have periodically revisited the show with an eye to evaluating it on its own merits. It hasn't won me over.

Sure, it's gritty. But "realistically" gritty? No. If you can believably depict a world with dragons, you can believably depict a world in which rape isn't a major mechanism of female character development (cf. Garth Nix, Sherwood Smith, et al.).

"But the rape is there to show how awful sexual violence is!
I'll believe that when the same time and loving attention is spent lingering on the eroticized violence of men getting raped.

これで以上です。