January 2025 Newsletter

emerging into the sunlight, coughing and hacking up clouds of dust and moths

Wow! The end of last year got kind of rough, huh? Must've blacked out for a while after writing the November newsletter, forgetting to post it, while also continuing to type up all these wild paragraphs about… podcasts and stuff? Well thankfully that means I only have to arrange my notes on all the hijinks the Ranged Touch gang has gotten up to.

So first of all: CMRN and Danni back in October released an episode of the Patreon podcast. And then they did another??? If you're a Patreon supporter you know about this already, probably. Anyway, the time of painting miniatures is upon us, and you can probably look forward to way more of that in the future. I hope you enjoy it? As an intelligent gecko whose job it is to write newsletters, miniatures confuse me because I think the paint tastes much better when you drink it straight from the little cup. The miniatures strike me as unnecessary. Obviously I'm in the minority though, as there are apparently whole conventions dedicated to people not drinking their miniature paint, such as PAX Unplugged, where CMRN and Danni also showed up to see the sights, producing a Live from the Floor ep as well as a retrospective haul report. Then, just for good measure? A  third PAX Unplugged episode, sharing some final thoughts! And speaking of final thoughts, or rather thoughts on finality, in December Michael continued the MICHAEL ON MICHAEL project by giving his take on Michael Bay's third film, ARMAGEDDON.

Meanwhile, on GAME STUDIES STUDY BUDDIES, Michael and CMRN paid tribute to the late Marxist theorist Fredric James by reading his formative essay "POSTMODERNISM, OR THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM." It's not quite game studies proper, but longtime listeners will probably be able to pick up a few threads left implicit, and in the meantime, this is probably the most you'll ever hear any of our podcasts discuss a specific hotel lobby and what it's like to walk around in it (spoilers: it's distressing). We followed that up with Aaron Trammell's provocative manifesto, REPAIRING PLAY: A BLACK PHENOMENOLOGY, which poses some serious questions about the field of play studies, and paired it the following month with Flanagan and Jakobsson's PLAYING OPPRESSION, which takes a long and critical look at the colonial history of boardgames. Next month's reading is still undecided, but whatever it may be, like the others, it will probably eventually appear on our Bookshop page.

Speaking of books: several more book-centered shows to talk about! JUST KING THINGS covered Steve's first 2004 entry in the Dark Tower saga with SONG OF SUSANNAH, a brief but surprisingly intriguing turn into metafiction that sets up a lot of questions for the next book in the series and the conclusion of King's personal epic. Also there's a neat turtle. For a Bonus Episode, the guys began the "A Lot of 'Salem's Lot" mini-event by sending their eyes back to 2004 with TNT's 'Salem's Lot miniseries, a fairly solid adaptation that updates the setting and maintains some spirit of the original novel despite its limitations and the fact that the vampires look pretty mallgoth. But that's sort of how vampires worked in 2004, so who are we to judge? After that, we closed out the Dark Tower saga with, uh, well, THE DARK TOWER, the book where the method of the show paid off like it never has before. We paired that with a bonus ep on the new 2024 Salem's Lot adaptation, for which there is not a Patreon link for some reason!!! But if you support us and have the feed, it'll show up there. Just like our subsequent episodes, the odd 2004 baseball memoir King co-authored with Stewart O'Nan, FAITHFUL, and its bonus episode, the equally oddball Boomer fantasia film FIELD OF DREAMS. Next on our slate for all Friends of Steve: the novella THE COLORADO KID and its tangentially-related TV series adaptation, HAVEN, dropping not too long after this newsletter!

The bookchat continues with SHELVED BY GENRE, where Austin, Michael, and CMRN completed the unit about Mercedes Lackey's THE LAST HERALD-MAGE TRILOGY. Since the last newsletter, we capped off the first tragic steps in Vanyel Ashkevron's journey with the second episode on MAGIC'S PAWN before swinging into a new mode with the first part of an episode on MAGIC'S PROMISE, wherein Vanyel visits his family before a plot steals him away. There was also, of course, a Bonus Episode–this time on the formative animated Rankin/Bass fantasy THE LAST UNICORN. Note: the Last Herald-Mage trilogy does NOT contain unicorns. The episode on MAGIC'S PROMISE PART 2 would make this very clear, as would the first and second episodes on the concluding volume, MAGIC'S PRICE. Luckily the two outstanding bonus episodes, on the 1985 romantic fantasy film LADYHAWKE and the shlock epic THE BEASTMASTER also contained no unicorns. Nor did the topic come up in our closing Q&A bonus! That did provide some opportunity to talk briefly about horses, however, and luckily the episode on the Hallmark romantic comedy LOVE IN PARADISE provided plenty of opportunities for horse chat. If you're reading this, well, our next unit on William Gibson's SPRAWL TRILOGY has already started–but I gotta save SOME of those links for next month. Maybe take the time to catch up on your reading? Or maybe take the downtime and listen to the BONUS Bonus episode, on 1998's vampire action classic BLADE. By the way, all these episodes and the JKT Bonuses, by the way, are all produced through the work of Jordan Mallory, so let's clap (as we always do) for Jordo!

And that's about it! Whatever happens next–probably nothing, here in the bunker in the quasifuture where me and the other geckos live, in case you forgot I am a talking gecko in the future who writes this newsletter–you'll hear from me again next month, when I talk about the podcasts that happened, uh, this month. coughs up one additional moth, and then eats it, because I'm a gecko