September 2024 Newsletter

A picturesque sunrise over a hillside farm. Grieg's "Morning Mood" on the soundtrack. Next to a proud red barn a metal-finned windmill squeaks lazily in the golden breeze. Amid the branches of a stout oaktree, a bird's nest. In it, a series of scrawny, near-featherless baby robins turn their beaks to the air and begin squawking out their hunger for PODCASTS, a desire immediately sated as Mama Bird drops a bundled print edition of this very newsletter in their midst and the little birds go hog wild clicking on the links and whatnot.

Listen: MAGES AND MURDERDADS is almost done with Baldur's Gate 3. ALMOST. August saw one and then two episodes where CMRN and Danni led Ticklevarr and Balthazar toward the end of their respective quests that are also the same quest, sort of, where a giant evil brain is making some octopuses get too rowdy. Then, just under the wire, COMES A THIRD EPISODE that ties the whole thing up and discusses the game's epilogue, or in some cases, lack thereof.

Then over on GAME STUDIES STUDY BUDDIES, Michael and CMRN discussed Noah Wardrip-Fruin's HOW PAC-MAN EATS, a book that tells you all about how Pac-Man eats and more, such as how games work on "operational logics" and "playable models."Next month we'll continue the trend with David Guerra's SLANTWISE MOVES: GAMES, LITERATURE, AND SOCIAL INVENTION IN 19th CENTURY AMERICA, which is, uhhh, fairly pricey but on our GSSB Bookshop list if you absolutely gotta have it.

More widely available, of course, are the many novels of Stephen King–and some of them are pretty dang good, as JUST KING THINGS will often tell you! Last month CMRN and Michael were both impressed by the evil car/cosmic speculation novel FROM A BUICK 8, though they were way less impressed with the Bonusode material for the month, a dual adaptation of King's short story "Chattery Teeth" and Clive Barker's "The Body Politic" in the disappointing TV movie Quicksilver Highway. But what is NOT disappointing, or at least hopefully note, are the bevy of RECIPES the honchos put on offer in their long-promised JUST COOKING THINGS cookbook zine, available to Patreon supporters now.

And Shelved By Genre sees them reuniting with Austin to close out the unit on horror manga superstar Junji Ito, with a bumper crop of episodes covering the fish-machine zombie apocalypse nightmare of GYO, the absurdist cosmic pessimism of REMINA, and one of Ito's most unique stories to date, the vaguely hagiographic tale of volcanoes and gross bugs that is SENSOR. Somehow amid all that we had time to pop out a bonus episode on the interesting if not very great UZUMAKI film adaptation from 2000, and decide that our next unit would be a brief detour back to fantasyland with Mercedes Lackey's THE LAST HERALD-MAGE TRILOGY, available on our Bookshop.

As a final bonus treat for the month, the Genre Guys also got together for a long Patreon-exclusive chat about their shared beloved adolescent touchstone THE ANIMATRIX.  Putting out all these episodes would be near to impossible, of course, without producer Jordan Mallory, who does work after we've exhausted ourselves gabbing, and yet still has time to fill his own store with merchandise of many iconic phrase. And that reminds me, we have a store, too, which is, uh, pretty cool, but man, I really need to get to work on that shirt about keyjacking everyone wanted, huh?