Get Your Words Out

Games: This was a busy weekend for games. We spent ::mumblemumble:: hours playing a session of Eldritch Horror, and actually managed to vanquish the Ancient One 💪 so the sleep deprivation winning entailed was ultimately worth it. Twenty-four hours later at a gathering at Favorite Indian Buffet, we decided to reconvene to spend another ::mumblemumble:: hours playing Wyrmspan.

Both games are great fun. I like Eldritch Horror even more than Arkham Horror, I think because its whole-of-globe canvas just feels like the appropriate setting for 1920s pulp/supernatural horror to my brain. And while both Wingspan and Wyrmspan are both gorgeous and I love birds, I really love fantasy dragons, so I'm an easy mark for the latter. Nor did it hurt that I'm currently reading Novik's Buried Deep (and am about to start Brennan's Onyx Court) and so would have had dragons on the brain even if there weren't a few Temeraire-verse stories in the anthology.

Movies: The anime fan-subset of the Geek BBQers wrapped up our Rebuild of Evangelion (re)watch. As one of the viewers who watched the original anime back in the day but had not seen any of the remakes before, I was not quite sure what to expect (and still have vivid memories of watching a bunch of very upset and equally committed otaku protesting the release of 2.0 at the movie theater across the street from my workplace in Kyoto). I enjoyed it! It was definitely a nostalgia trip but also interesting to watch knowing 1000 percent more about Japan's domestic experience of WWII versus viewing it through the lens of adolescent angst (Everything is so hard and no one understands me!) We tackled Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo and Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time during this session, meaning I was wholly out to sea as to what would happen in many places. But it felt like the new stuff dovetailed really well with the original, the new additions were fun, and (without spoiling anything) there was a lot about it that I felt improved on the original while still keeping its patented "psychological turmoil as interpreted through Christian mysticism by someone who did not grow up Christian"-weirdness vibe.

Music: We saw Carpenter Brut and Health at the "Okay but not great" concert venue. Carpenter Brut was fabulous We got our tickets months ago when the show was first announced and were bemused to learn that it had sold out in the meantime. As a result, we did not arrive early and did not have great sightlines on the stage for the first half of Carpenter Brut's set. But honestly? There was not much to be seen anyway, given that Carpenter Brut is primarily an auditory experience. And it was an experience: his music is eerie and foreboding enough on a set of earbuds or speakers. In a proper venue it is wicked.

Health was a bit of surprise. I mainly knew them as "the guy that remixed that Crystal Castles track" and was surprised to learn that "that guy" was actually an entire band, and that said band has been around for about 20 years. We'd assumed, judging from the venue info and the tickets, that Carpenter Brut was the headliner (as did most of the crowd, who took off after Carpenter Brut's set ended) but upon realizing that Health was actually the main acted, said "Eh, we already paid for it" and decided to stick around. Their guitarist's cringe high school jock jokes aside, they're actually pretty good. Their vocalist sounds like the forlorn lovechild of maynard keenan and Brian Molko, and their music is clearly pretty heavily inspired by APC, NIN, and the like. Having only heard it once I have no real opinion on theme or lyrics, but I would certainly listen to it again.

Podcasts/Articles: Too many to mention them all, but I did revisit Patrick Radden Keefe's A Teen's Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld while I wait for my hold on London Falling to come in. (Guys, Keefe is one of my favorite nonfiction authors and I lust after this book. Luckily, I'm only about #17003 on 35 copies! 😒)

Roleplaying: Having Put Together A Crew^(TM) from the star players of our various D&D homebrew and official campaigns, the GC held a pretty excellent Session Zero for a new Wild Beyond the Witchlight campaign. I am playing a fey swarmmaster druid, who I'm envisioning as a sort of fish-out-of-water by virtue of the fact that as a few amongst a bunch of human children in the feywild, she's the only one who 1) knows what's going on, but 2) doesn't know how out of their element any of the others are.

Television: AEW continues to be an absolute delight. My heart and soul increasingly belong to Thekla, who is about as close to an IRL incarnation of Karlach as I think this timeline can get. Her Collision match with Alex Windsor was fire. Pac versus Lio Rush was a verrrrry close second; I love how good Pac was at playing the straight man to Rush's Smeagol-brand creepiness, which made me an instafan. (Seriously, it's the best wrestling creepiness since Velveteen Dream. Also, Pac continues to be criminally underrated and underused.) Mina Shirakawa and Hikaru Shida's Japanese smacktalk is fabulous. Nick Wayne made Mox look both fast and not boring 😂, Brody King continues to dominate, MJF continues to be the consummate heel, and FTR and Stokely will always crack me up. This is an absolute match and storyline golden era, and not even the unnecessary reintroduction of Jericho can spoil it.

Video Games: It's been a dry period for me for video gaming, but I am casually spectating as the GC plays his way through Metaphor, which, hysterically, he keeps inadvertently referring to as "Persona", and which, hysterically, everyone still knows what he's talking about.

これで以上です。