How is it already August?!
I read books 3-7 of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. They had me lol-ing (sometimes in public!). I couldn’t get enough and now I have to wait a whole year for book 8. Apparently the audiobooks are fantastic. My friend suggested we start a listening while crafting club in the Fall. I think it’s a great idea. 50/50 chance we follow through on it.
https://fb.watch/Bdubm88qON/?mibextid=z4kJoQ
To ease the pain of leaving the DCC universe, I read Nightbane, the sequel to Lightlark. As I’m always #teambadboi, this series has been teasingly fun. But omg the goldenboi is so bland that it’s barely a believable competition. Also the MC is super insecure. She’s annoying to the point of being whiny. Get your shit together girlfriend! You have two hot kings tripping over each other trying to help you see what they see in you.
I watched Untamed (Netflix) starring Eric Bana. I don’t know where he’s been hiding for the past decade or two. Apparently he’s Australian and a comedian (he was hawt in the before internet stalking times so this is news to me). He’s still very attractive. The limited series was so-so. Too much crappy CGI for such a beautiful setting and very predictable plot reveals.
I watched Ziam (Netflix) which is a combo word for Zombie and Siam…very clever. The movie was what one would expect from the title. Fast zombies, tower ascent, muay thai fight scenes, stupid kid sidekick, save the girlfriend plot, maximum belief suspension required. The only thing that was original was that the zombie disease originated from a contaminated angler fish. When the zombies got wet their mouths transformed to resemble that of the angler fish minus the pashmina (😆 does anyone else get that reference? Here’s the video so that you can be in on it).
DCC made a reference to a heavy metal song. So that’s the only new to me music that I listened to this month. I blasted it on my speakers and my littlest kiddo immediately started headbanging. The most natural reaction to hearing metal for the the first time.
Sooooooooo what media have you been consuming these days? Come across any crazy house/island listings that you want to share with us Deadsplinterites? Been to or looking forward to seeing a show/concert? Please do share… something… anything.
Re-watching a few episodes of Miami Vice (the TV show) on Bozo’s Prime for the 80s nostlagia, I guess.
The pilot was a lot more adult than the rest of the series. Kind of funny to see pre fame Bruce Willis, Ed O’Neill, etc as guest stars. Brought back some of the “old” school Miami before it became party central for the rich and wannabes (like Bozos.)
Lots of MAC-10s and Uzis carried by big hairy greasy heavy set goons in tropic wear… sigh.
Despite what Phillip Michael Thomas believing he would be an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony), he did sort of acheive it (Extensive infomertials, Grifting, Overacting, Turfed (from Psychic friends network.))
I also continued the Nostalgia kick with rewatching the Naked Gun Series. Leslie Nielsen plays the dour oblivious straight man Frank Drebbin very well. Seems odd to see late murderer OJ Simpson as goofball sidekick Nordberg, but he’s okay in the role. It contrasts what was the reality and knowing the timing of the murders he would commit which was just a few months after the last Naked Gun movie was released.
I had a few good laughs especially during the Oscar Scenes of the last movie.
…I mentioned the other day having started in on something called “trigger” about guns & police & korea & it wasn’t the wire or anything but it was interesting as a point of comparison about how gangsters with/without guns plays as different values of realistic in different contexts…while the tortured hero & his nemesis highlight one another’s inherent contradictions without worrying the audience they might have to worry the good guy will wind up on the dark side
…& I only really found that because it got served up when I ran out of new episodes of sakamoto days…which I failed to ignore for long enough to binge a whole run of but is still enjoyable nonsense for them as likes that sort of thing
…& another korean show that amazon translated to “goodboy” has a bunch of one-time olympic medalists now in various police roles as a sort of underdogs team of outcasts & misfits & that was…fine…the animated thing called “your forma” that has androids & bio-hackers & AI terrorism was/is fun to the extent that I’ve made it through some of that…so I might poke about & see what else amazon is giving away in the anime aisle while I wait it out to binge strange new worlds & make up my mind about whether I don’t go back to paying paramount money again…but either way…the forma one reminded me that I shouldn’t have left person of interest out of my late comment on the NOT…despite what happened to caviezel down the line that was a pretty good show…but…unsurprisingly perhaps…I digress
…think that’s about all the time I’ve had for that sort of thing lately?
…at some point though I am definitely reading the dungeon crawler books…probably as soon as I get done saving the latest rivers of london for a day or two when I might have time to enjoy it & I need something that won’t run out for a little while
The latest River of London is worth savoring. Fox secret agents are awesome.
Hi @hammerzeitgeist! I just added book 1 of Dungeon Crawler Carl to my Kindle; thank you for the recommendation.
I forgot to mention that there are some misogynistic elements speckled throughout the series. Which sadly continues to be inescapable when it comes to humor geared towards what they presume will be a mostly male audience.
…sigh
…I didn’t go delving in it but it was clear that as recently as yesterday someone somewhere on the outskirts of all the stuff about whether or not the sydney sweeney jeans ad is or isn’t overtly white-power-coded someone had the temerity to suggest that if somewhere among the legions of people complaining about the andrew tates & jordan petersons & whoever-wrote-that-PUA-manual-called-the-game from somewhere to the left…a few offered some better suggestions about things young, dumb boys could do that might make the prospect of deigning to sleep with them a more appealing one to “the ladies”…that might not be a terrible idea…& have scope for being something other than “the same thing but with different politics”
…looked from a distance like that went…poorly
…I fear that stuff isn’t going away any quicker than the randomly-inserted-for-no-apparent-necessity-or-particular-convention ick-factor in nearly any anime but extra for anything with teen protagonists
…there’s things that do better at not pulling that…& hopefully they’ll get easier to find rather than harder…but star wars isn’t going to be all andor-ish as it were…so the proofs of concept may continue to be cast as exceptions that prove the rule?
I think that the author’s subconscious logic is that Carl is constantly objectified and sexually harassed by the AI, who is omnipotent while running the dungeon crawl, therefore it balances out the misogyny. That logic always fails because our culture stems from a patriarchal foundation. Making fun of men in that way doesn’t come with the same built-in power imbalance as degrading women.
…had a similar annoyance with the mostly-likeable one where the geek with the top tier necromancer gets trapped in-game & is embarrassed by some of the settings for the NPCs when those are people now
…part of me accepts that it’s a decently observed bit of artistic licence but…then it never quite gets around to ameliorating it & it gets leaned into instead
…other examples are legion but here or there you get a sort of minimalist riff like the one about the humble swordmaster who seems to be oblivious to the competitive affections of several generations of female prodigy badasses that are united in their conviction that they owe all their skills to him & they’re not worthy to even admit they fancy him
…& that’s better but it’s not as though it seriously shifts the genre conventions the way some of the more fun things people have done with stuff like a post-joker harley quinn manage
…one of the things that made it sad to find out neil gaiman might be not so great was things like “black orchid” or “violent cases” or “the tragical comedy or comical tragedy of mr punch” or even just the calliope arc of the sandman suggested there were reasons to believe he knew better
…remember having this conversation a lot around the time I was trying to…not defend exactly…but explain why I liked frank miller’s sin city stuff
…by the time the film version came out people had kind of got the picture that frank might be a little off about some stuff…but along with the original dark knight returns & reworking daredevil into the character a lot of mileage has been made of he’d done a thing with some sci-fi/2000AD-esque aspects called ronin & the manga influence was strong enough he even admitted in interviews to having scanned through reams of the stuff without being able to read the dialogue
…it’s obvious to anyone who read scott mccloud’s understanding comics…or even just the parts with the bar charts for frequency of stuff like different kinds of panel transition or layout or abstraction/realism of image or a bunch of stuff…but the visual syntax of the japanese form was (arguably is) just a more developed & thus broader & more complex medium in several senses…& designed to be read differently to the point of dialogue-free sequences for pages covering fast-paced action like bullet time stills from a moving picture rather than a two-page “splash” of expositional dialogue plastered across a still image of a big superhero bust-up DC/Marvel-style
…ronin was like the workshopping before the daredevil run let him hone it into a big-two house style…an arc or two in & he’d got to the point of checking all the mandatory “this is our hero & this is how he got super-powers” stuff that had to be captioned in for the first couple of pages of each issue into stuff in the first panel like the way modern film/TV can clue a viewer into a tone/setting that short-hands a ton of world-building & scene-setting that used to add minutes to the run-time
…anyway…to pretend like I’ve managed to say anything that belongs in a brain drain thread let’s say that all reminds me that this guy did one called the system
https://www.peterkuper.com/the-system
…no dialogue…only speech/text is “incidental”…multiple narratives…pretty cool
…he’s done some other cool stuff but that’s the one of his I always think of first
…& the guy who did a bunch of gaiman’s artwork/covers & I know of no reason not to show some love is/was dave mckean…so…likewise there’s a bunch of stuff…but
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cages_(comics)
…was pretty good & was all dave & no “hanging out with neil & the dream king” the way tori amos did
…& while I’m on a dave kick…if you haven’t come across dave mack’s kabuki you might like that?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabuki_(David_W._Mack_comic)
…the first volume is/was pretty much his coursework submission so you can see the rough edges getting smoothed as he hones what he’s doing but by the time you get to the volume that you have to rotate to read parts of what he’s done with a pretty cyberpunk-ninja starting point is pretty virtuoso of you ask me
…still probably fails your bechdel-equivalency test on a strict reading but hard to argue it’s pretending ignorance as a defense?
[ETA: …the sin city thing…it’s got a rashomon thing going on the movie(s) either ignored or missed the full deal with…the scene they had jessica alba do the cowgirl stripper thing for is like the sort of hard points in the time/world-line like losing his uncle making spider man spiderman…& which overlapping characters show up where else in relation to when they intersect with that moment wraps the whole thing into a chronology that spans all the books…but which the movies spannered up for…reasons?]
I love True Facts & have watched almost every one. Since basketball season is over, I’ve been watching silly violent movies. This week was Accountant 2 & Heads of State. Both were silly shoot’em up fun.
I just picked up The Cult of Trump book, trying to figure out if it is safe to read on an airplane or even bring through TSA when I travel next week?
Listening to: A Funk for Fela
We are going to Tahoe in a few weeks & always a pain to get our timeshare so I started looking at places in the area. I’ve seen this one from the water before but…HOLY SHIT! You asked for crazy house listing? You got it!
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/580-Gonowabie-Rd-Crystal-Bay-NV-89402/7323087_zpid/
That house is crazy… crazy incoherent. I can think of better ways to spend 45million.
and Fuck you Frank!!!
note to self….dont forget to order dungeon crawler carl…
that aside ive been watching nyaight of the living cat
which..in the 4 episodes available to me so far is played surprisingly straight….you know…considering they are dealing with a nyandemic…tho i also suspect im missing out on a lot of puns as my japanese is not so good i dont need to rely on the subtitles and the voice acting and animation are not so over the top i can take my cues from it….that said…it took all 4 episodes to get back to the start of episode 1 and the introduction of the first of the extended cast….so i suspect it gets sillier from here…
other than that…my good intention of only playing one game at a time has already failed completely as ive added pal world to the list of games im currently playing
which is actually pretty good fun so far…tho i have some mixed feelings about clubbing cute little pokemans (and cant believe nintendo hasnt sued them into oblivion..they must have really done their legal homework)
buuuut….well…now that im a little higher level…im running into the same barrier i hit with every resource gathering/base building game with or without a story line….which is my attention span…. now that things are taking longer to do and maybe requiring a little organization on my part..my attention is waning and im feeling the pull of other shineys to entertain me
and listening to faaschtbankler
coz periodically ze germans invade my youtube and im okay with that
Hahaha they are suing the shit out of them! I discovered the game not too long ago and wondered out loud why it wasn’t on my radar. To which my husband replied that its rollout is likely being suppressed because of Nintendo and Pokemon suing them.
oh yeah..im aware they are getting sued…just kinda seems like nintendo isnt winning at the moment…which is a little surprising..and why i figured they must have done their homework
but well…if the game suddenly disappears off steam i guess i wont be too shocked either
I’ve been trying to read a bit, but with everything going on at home I fall asleep almost as soon as I pick up the book.
I’ve picked up a few contemporary romances from the library. It’s not the flavor of the genre I prefer, but you know, no reason not to try them out!
I don’t like all the first person perspective. I know that’s probably a weirdly-specific complaint. I just don’t need a running monologue of everything in the lead character’s brain.
If you have Amazon prime video, season 2 of Shiny Happy People about the fundie Christian white nationalist youth group industry in the 90s and 00s is a good watch. Season 1 was just about the Duggars and their Christian white nationalist group.
Oh and glad to hear that Nyaight of the Living Cat is good! I figured it could go either way.
ah…im actually not sure if its good exactly yet…the 4 episodes ive seent so far were not quite what i expected….but i think its a slow starter thats going to get sillier as it goes
(mostly coz i dont see how the full story of wtf exactly brought about the nyandemic and how to fix it is going to be anything other than batshit nuts)