Podcast appearances and mentions of penny arcade

In this mini-episode (or is it an infomercial?), we discuss our upcoming RetroMagic 2025 event, coming to the Coronado Springs Resort at Walt Disney World the weekend of September 26-28, 2025. Tickets are available at https://retromagic.net How much would you pay to see Imagineer Tony Baxter? $700?! $900?! How about $185!!! BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!!!! How about the creative and technical leads responsible for The Living Seas pavilion, Tim Delaney and Kym Murphy? BUT THAT'S NOT ALL!!! ·  A charming feature of Main Street USA, we'll take a deep dive into Walt Disney World's Penny Arcade. Arcade expert Todd Tuckey of TNT Amusements will join a panel transporting you to the cool, dark haven of novelty games of yesteryear with rare photographs of the arcade, a look at some of the vintage games that resided in the space and where some of them live on today · Historian Hastin Zylstra will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the Lake Buena Vista townhomes and their California origins including their connection to Disneyland. This oddball slice of Walt Disney World history is one you won't want to miss. · Author and historian Foxx Nolte will revisit Lake Buena Vista shopping village. Before Disney Springs, Downtown Disney and Pleasure Island this quaint shopping and dining oasis was a charming beacon for locals and tourists alike.  You'll learn about its diverse offerings and its real-life counterpart its design was based on. ·        Disney Legend Tom Nabbe will reunite with members of the opening day monorail crew from October 1971. You'll hear tales and travails of the early years of the Highway In The Sky. Panelists to be announced. · A panel of “opening crew” and executives for Walt Disney World in 1971 and EPCOT Center in 1982 will join us to reveal behind-the-scenes stories from their storied careers. Steve Baker, whose 23 year career with Disney began opening the parking lots and bus transportation in October 1971 and concluded as EPCOT Center's Development Director will join us. Jim McCaskill was on the opening day crew in 1971 and his final role saw him overseeing relationships with corporate sponsors like MetLife and Siemens. Steve and Jim are confirmed guests for this event. More panelists to come. · It's Time To Get Things Started: The Muppets at Walt Disney World. Some of the men and women behind Muppetvision 3D and the Here Comes The Muppets stage show at Disney-MGM Studios will join us to remember the early Muppets-Disney partnership in Florida. Guest panelists to be announced. · Showtime! – From the LBVHistory Archives: We've been putting aside photographic, film and video clips that left us so gobsmacked they had to be saved to share with a live audience. Historians will join us as we look at some lesser remembered bits of Walt Disney World completely forgotten or never before seen on film. · The Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village returns for guests to peruse our archive of artifacts, set pieces, souvenirs and memorabilia from Walt Disney World's past.  Authors, artists, historians and VIP's will meet and greet attendees during the scheduled breaks · More panels, guests and experiences to be announced.   DON'T DELAY, ORDER TODAY!!! OPERATORS ARE STANDING BY!!!  

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we begin a new series of series on the independent games of the last couple of decades, starting with 2012's Fez. We set the game in its time, talk a bit about its precedents and the landscape of independent games in the middle of that console generation. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: Single-digit cubes Issues covered: our real plan or lack thereof, early games, the indie revolution, the influences back and forth, the pressure of the space we're in, a highly visible indie, games from that year, sequels vs the different stuff in the indies, democratization of the market, the console cycle, always online fiasco, getting on the Steam store, opening console store fronts to independents, limitations, the broadband market and bandwidth costs, the publicity on the store, low cost of goods, continuing power of retail, a two dimensional puzzle game in a three dimensional world, charm, great music and MIDI with an unsettling feel, rotating the world, rebooting the game, achieving the effect without perspective, the Trixel engine, having a hard time getting it, trusting the game, having a new lens on a game, taking the time to infuse the whole experience, team sizes, telling a different story with an existing language, having fewer people to get on board, independent publishers and producers, influences, glitch aesthetics, map language, climbing on the sides of things, stopping time while the world rotates, how the editor might work, games from the past, CONFIG.SYS (dang it, could not remember), skipping over generations. Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Will Wright, Indie Game: The Movie, Polytron, Phil Fish, Dishonored, Halo 4, AW American Nightmare, X-COM, Firaxis, Mass Effect 3, Forza Horizon, Far Cry (series), Counterstrike: Go, Assassin's Creed 3, Borderlands 2, Diablo III, Dragon's Dogma, Journey, The Walking Dead, Telltale Games, FTL, Spelunky, Papo y Yo, Bastion, Super Hexagon, Terry Cavanaugh, Supergiant, Hades, Transistor, UFO 50, Derek Yu, That Game Company, Sky, Sony, PlayStation, Microsoft, Steam, XBLA, Braid, Super Meat Boy, Nintendo, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Zelda (series), Super Mario (series), Metroid (series), Outer Wilds, The Sixth Sense (obliquely), Renaud Bedard, Trapdoor, Penny Arcade, blitworks, Tetris, Axiom Verge, Tron, Out of this World, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Super Mario 3D Land, Minecraft, Sam, Interstate '76, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia. Next time: More Fez! Twitch: timlongojr Discord DevGameClub@gmail.com

In today's installment of Scandalous Games Theatre, Dr. Kevin Impellizeri, PhD, recites Jack Thompson's "A Modest Video Game Proposal," delivered via open letter on October 10, 2005, in which the self proclaimed "only certified sane lawyer in the State of Florida" offered a $10,000 charitable donation in the name of then Take-Two CEO Paul Eibeler if a game company developed and distributed a game in which all Jack's personal enemies were brutally killed. However, when a company came forward to develop the game, titled I'm OK: A Murder Simulator (Thompsonsoft, PC, 2006) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_O.K_%E2%80%93_A_Murder_Simulator), Thompson reneged on the deal. When the makers of Penny Arcade, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, made the donation in his name to the Entertainment Software Association Foundation (on a check with the memo, "For Jack Thompson Because Jack Thompson Won't"), Jack faxed the Seattle police department on October 18, 2005, accusing Penny Arcade of instigating “criminal harassment of me by various means.”  For more on Jack's antics, including how his mad crusade against video games led to him getting permanently disbarred, check out our two-part series on Mr. Jack Thompson.Sources: "Paul Levinson vs. Jack Thompson on videogames and violence," Paul Levinson on YouTube, April 17, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XtWV-tIeVg.Bach - Violin Concerto in A minor - Complete - BWV1041, by GregorQuendel via Pixabay (https://pixabay.com/music/classical-string-quartet-bach-violin-concerto-in-a-minor-complete-bwv1041-289529/). JackThompson.org: http://jackthompson.org/archives/index.htm#10_10_05_01. This is also a useful source for a bunch of Jack's other open letters and public correspondence.All other sound effects in the public domain via Pixabay's license: https://pixabay.com/service/license-summary/.More info, including show notes and sources at http://scandalousgamespodcast.wordpress.com. 

Sarah McDavis is the Founder & Creator of Wonder Creek Media. She enjoys doing a lot of things, which sometimes causes problems, but most times it keeps her the right amount of busy. She is an author and illustrator of books for kids, a kids yoga instructor, and an improv cast member with the kids' comedy experience Penny Arcade. She lives in Pittsburgh with her family and books in (almost) every room!https://wondercreekmedia.comhttps://sarahmcdavis.comIG: @wondercreekmedia

Al and Kevin discuss their most anticipated games of 2025 Timings 00:00:00: Theme Tune 00:00:30: Intro 00:02:22: What Have We Been Up To 00:27:27: What We Are Looking Forward To In 2025 00:58:05: Outro Contact Al on Mastodon: https://mastodon.scot/@TheScotBot Email Us: https://harvestseason.club/contact/ Transcript (0:00:30) Al: Hello farmers and welcome to the first episode of the harvest season of 2025. My name is Al. (0:00:38) Kev: Wow, I’m Kevin and hmm. Did you smell that new 2025 smell that New Year’s? No (0:00:46) Al: It smells very much like 2024. We are recording this episode quite early. Four weeks early, (0:00:56) Kev: Yeah, something like that yeah, we broke a favor no (0:00:56) Al: three weeks early three weeks early three weeks early so uh (0:01:01) Al: so yeah who knows what the world will be like in three and a half weeks (0:01:06) Kev: Oh, and boy! (0:01:08) Kev: Oh, gosh, that, you know, that was a time that could have been a “haha” joke, you know, that’s a serious threat these days. (0:01:14) Al: So obviously, we will not have any news, any news that we’ve missed over the last two weeks (0:01:15) Kev: Oh, no! (0:01:24) Al: will be in the next episode. We’ll probably do a news catch-up episode. But yeah, we’re (0:01:30) Kev: Yep. So, you know, very. (0:01:31) Al: going to talk about our exciting, what we’re looking forward to for this year, our most (0:01:37) Al: anticipated games of 2025. (0:01:40) Kev: I mean, surely, you know, chocolate, or haunted chocolatier, which undoubtedly will have the release date by this point, because we’re not recording it early. (0:01:51) Kev: But yes, no. 2025, look at-looking. (0:01:53) Al: I mean, considering he just said that he hasn’t worked on it at all in the last year, (0:02:02) Kev: Yeah (0:02:03) Kev: Yeah (0:02:03) Al: basically, I don’t think that’s the case. (0:02:04) Kev: Yeah (0:02:06) Kev: Those screenshots were doctored (0:02:09) Kev: Yeah, no probably not but uh, but hey things to look forward to 2025 because boy do we need to find those especially out here in the (0:02:19) Al: So we’re going to talk about that, but first of all, Kevin, what have you been up to? (0:02:28) Kev: Okay, so all right since we already broke (0:02:32) Kev: All in um, I mean I’ve been playing a lot of the usual Marvel snap is it’s very busy right now (0:02:38) Kev: There’s a lot going on Marvel snap. I’m playing on its new season (0:02:43) Kev: I’m having fun with it (0:02:44) Al: Of course, when this comes out, it will be nearly time for another new season. (0:02:48) Kev: Probably actually the new season will be out but it’s funny though because (0:02:50) Al: No, because this is releasing on the 1st of January, so it will be another couple of days. (0:02:55) Kev: You’re right, you’re right. Okay. Well almost yeah (0:02:57) Kev: well the end of uh almost the end of that season well either way i’m having fun (0:03:02) Kev: at the start of the season I can’t say about future kevin who he’s out of my mind probably (0:03:07) Kev: um but um honestly that goes hand in hand with uh uh what i’ve really been up to uh because the (0:03:17) Kev: marvel snap season for december is a crossover season with marvel rivals which at the time of (0:03:24) Kev: recording just brought the kids to be here the day before yesterday it’s been a little more than 24 (0:03:29) Kev: hours. (0:03:32) Kev: It’s just Overwatch, but with Marvel, it is just Overwatch, and original Overwatch, (0:03:44) Kev: so I played Overwatch when it first came out in 2016, almost 10 years ago, which is wild, (0:03:50) Kev: 8 years at this point I guess, and I loved Overwatch, I adored it, I played so much Overwatch, (0:03:58) Kev: And then they basically ruined it. (0:04:02) Kev: It was two things. I mean, even before Overwatch 2, (0:04:06) Kev: they, the way they updated and patch things and balance things or whatever, (0:04:14) Kev: they started gearing it very much towards like high level competitive tournament stuff or whatever. (0:04:21) Kev: So they reworked a lot of characters and just basically they ruined a lot of it for me. (0:04:25) Kev: It was just nowhere near as fun when I dropped out. (0:04:30) Kev: which I can’t remember. (0:04:32) Kev: Pre-COVID I think when I finally kind of dropped it, but yeah. (0:04:35) Kev: And then Overwatch 2 came out, which was great because they just– (0:04:40) Kev: here’s the secret, Al, it really was just more Overwatch. (0:04:44) Kev: It was not Overwatch 2. (0:04:46) Kev: It was just the same thing, except they made it even worse (0:04:49) Kev: because I don’t think all the characters were free. (0:04:54) Kev: They changed it from 6v6 to 5v5 and just all sorts of nonsense. (0:05:02) Kev: It’s so– embarrassingly so, I would say. (0:05:06) Kev: Actually, just like the week before Rivals dropped, (0:05:08) Kev: Overwatch 2 did a mode called Overwatch Origins or something. (0:05:11) Kev: I don’t remember. (0:05:12) Kev: Basically, they had a mode where everything (0:05:15) Kev: was set back to the original Overwatch cast and abilities (0:05:19) Kev: and balances and stuff like that, which is really funny. (0:05:22) Kev: They were trying to capture that magic again (0:05:24) Kev: because Rivals was right around the corner. (0:05:28) Kev: But it doesn’t matter because Rivals is here (0:05:32) Kev: and die now. (0:05:34) Kev: So yeah, Mar– (0:05:35) Kev: OK. (0:05:37) Kev: First of all, Marvel Rivals, very stylistic. (0:05:41) Kev: It’s made by NetEase, a Chinese company. (0:05:43) Kev: They have that, what I call Chinese anime aesthetic, (0:05:47) Kev: like ancient impact and stuff. (0:05:49) Kev: Here’s this very edgy, pointy, and stylistic. (0:05:52) Kev: I like it myself. (0:05:55) Kev: But they also have– (0:05:56) Kev: I counted them where, I believe, 29 characters (0:05:59) Kev: at launch, which is insane. (0:06:02) Kev: Then when Overwatch 1 shut down, just at launch, which is wild. (0:06:07) Kev: So we have a good, healthy pick. (0:06:10) Kev: I’ve been trying to play different characters, (0:06:12) Kev: but there’s so many of them. (0:06:15) Kev: There’s– I mean, I like Squirrel Girl a lot. (0:06:19) Kev: She’s like the first one I picked. (0:06:20) Kev: And I think she still might be my favorite. (0:06:22) Kev: Penny Parker with her robot is pretty fun. (0:06:25) Kev: Captain America is really fun. (0:06:27) Kev: His shield just reflects everything. (0:06:29) Kev: I just stand there and let things hit the shield. (0:06:32) Kev: I’m contributing, yeah. (0:06:35) Kev: Hulk is fun. (0:06:37) Kev: Some characters are really hard. (0:06:39) Kev: OK, so Spider-Man played just like Spider-Man (0:06:42) Kev: from the PS4 or 5 games. (0:06:44) Kev: He has a swing. (0:06:45) Kev: He punches. (0:06:46) Kev: He does the web shoot. (0:06:47) Kev: His movement feels just like the PS5 version. (0:06:52) Kev: But that also makes him insanely difficult (0:06:54) Kev: because it’s such a chaotic game. (0:06:56) Kev: So you have to be very precise with Spider-Man. (0:07:00) Kev: and you’re trying to hit other, you know, actual… (0:07:02) Kev: players and such um it’s uh yeah it’s it’s uh it’s great great fun so you’ve never played overwatch (0:07:12) Al: I have not. I’m not a big first person game of any sort kind of person. Like, I’m struggling (0:07:18) Kev: - Mm-hmm. (0:07:19) Kev: - Okay. (0:07:20) Al: to think of any first person game that I actively enjoyed, whether it’s a shooter or anything (0:07:22) Kev: - Yeah. (0:07:24) Kev: - Short. (0:07:26) Al: else. I’m not a huge fan of the perspective, because I think the thing is that you’d think, (0:07:27) Kev: - Short. (0:07:33) Al: oh, well, first person should be the most realistic thing, right? But the problem is (0:07:38) Al: that your screen is not as wide as your (0:07:42) Al: peripheral vision is so I just feel like and this happens in a lot of games (0:07:43) Kev: Yeah, oh, that’s a good point (0:07:46) Al: with movable cameras in that I just feel almost claustrophobic is obviously (0:07:47) Kev: Uh-huh (0:07:51) Al: not a phobia but it’s that sort of idea of like I feel hemmed in and I can’t see (0:07:52) Kev: Yeah (0:07:54) Kev: I get it right yet (0:07:57) Kev: It feels busy. Yeah, I totally can get that. I’m generally not a first-person shooter person either (0:08:03) Kev: I did pick it up for overwatch and whatnot, but you know, here’s here’s the secret out. Here’s a surprise (0:08:09) Kev: Marvel Rivals is not first-person (0:08:11) Al: Oh, it’s not! (0:08:13) Kev: It’s it’s you you hold the back third-person camera. You see your full character when playing (0:08:19) Kev: So as you say you do have a much wider (0:08:23) Kev: Like scope you like how much you can see at once it is my yeah (0:08:26) Al: Oh, yeah. (0:08:29) Kev: So the camera is is focused on you like you’re always centered on it and whatnot (0:08:35) Al: Is Overwatch like this as well? (0:08:37) Kev: No, it is not (0:08:38) Al: Is Overwatch first person? (0:08:39) Kev: Overwatch is first-person. Yes, so you’re not you’re not (0:08:40) Al: Okay, so I’m not so I’m not just making I’m not just making because because people are (0:08:43) Kev: No [LAUGH] Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I know, yes, because you’re not crazy, no, right? (0:08:44) Al: just saying this is just and you did this exactly. (0:08:46) Al: It’s Overwatch, but Marvel. (0:08:48) Al: So so I’m not going crazy. (0:08:50) Al: I was thinking if it’s Overwatch like Marvel, that would mean it was first person, but it’s (0:08:54) Al: not. (0:08:55) Al: Okay, fine. (0:08:56) Al: I was like, have I just miss on miss remembered this game for like, what, 10 years? (0:09:02) Al: Is that how long since the first one came out? (0:09:04) Kev: No, yes, no, no, no, you are correct and but yeah, here’s like, that’s a big thing, right? (0:09:10) Al: Not 10 years, eight years. (0:09:11) Kev: And yeah, eight years almost ten years, but. (0:09:13) Al: 2016 that year. (0:09:13) Kev: Well, okay. And that’s a big thing because I mean, first of all, like you said, the whole camera thing, like, yeah, I can understand. And so obviously that improves that, especially like I couldn’t imagine playing that as Spider-Man, like being first person while swinging around and fly. (0:09:31) Al: No, no, I’d feel sick. (0:09:32) Kev: Oh my gosh. That would be insane. That would be unplayable. So it works well. They can do stuff like that, right? (0:09:41) Kev: And furthermore, I think (0:09:43) Kev: Because much like overwatch one of the (0:09:50) Kev: Foundations let’s say of the game the pillars is cosmetics right like different skins and emotes and so on and so forth, right? (0:09:56) Kev: so (0:09:57) Kev: When overwatch you get a cool skin well, you can’t see it most of them (0:10:01) Kev: You don’t see it when you’re actually playing the game, right? You see like the characters hand maybe but and the death camera (0:10:06) Kev: I guess but here you can actually see your costumes the whole time when you’re playing the game, which is you know, very nice (0:10:14) Kev: And so and actually on that note (0:10:17) Kev: monetization like they were very clear and (0:10:21) Kev: Transparent about it. They dropped the link a blog like actually two days before the game came out (0:10:25) Kev: we didn’t actually know what it was gonna look so right then but (0:10:29) Kev: Two things they were very adamant and clear about one the game is free to play which overwatch (0:10:34) Kev: original was not I don’t know about overwatch - but Marvel rivals is completely free to play and download and play and (0:10:40) Kev: and furthermore, every character is free to play. (0:10:43) Kev: Like I said, Overwatch, I believe that is not the case anymore. (0:10:46) Kev: In Overwatch 2, you have to buy characters or whatever. (0:10:49) Kev: But here, nope, you can pick whatever character you like. (0:10:52) Kev: They have a Season Pass, Battle Pass thing. (0:10:55) Kev: They have bundles that they call them, (0:10:58) Kev: where you can buy a skin and an emote and an animation. (0:11:01) Kev: All sorts of different things, it’s all grouped up together, right? (0:11:05) Kev: And that’s how they’re going to focus on the monetization. (0:11:08) Kev: It’s all going to be cosmetics, which is fantastic. (0:11:12) Al: And so this game is free to play, and you can play all the characters, and it’s in third (0:11:13) Kev: It is free to play, yep. (0:11:17) Kev: That’s correct. (0:11:18) Al: person, and it’s characters I like. (0:11:20) Kev: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. (0:11:22) Al: Damn it. (0:11:23) Kev: Yes, I did it, score. (0:11:26) Al: And it’s on Steam, presumably, so I can play it on Steam Deck. (0:11:26) Kev: It is on Steam, PS5, and Xbox, whatever the current one is, I’ve lost track. (0:11:32) Al: Is it cross-play? (0:11:34) Kev: Okay, actually, I think they did a very fair way of approaching that. (0:11:38) Kev: It is cross-play, if you’re playing casual matches. (0:11:41) Kev: if you’re just doing quick play. (0:11:43) Kev: It is cross play and I see that all the time if you’re playing ranked. (0:11:48) Al: what about cross save (0:11:50) Kev: I think it is cross save. (0:11:52) Kev: I haven’t looked too hard into that but that probably should be I think so. (0:11:53) Al: so if I want to if I want to start it on my steam deck and then go on to my ps5 (0:11:59) Al: presumably I can keep any settings I have (0:12:01) Kev: I I yeah, I don’t I don’t have that hard information in front of me, but I would wager that’s the case. (0:12:10) Kev: But yeah, so if you play ranked, it’s uh, yeah, I know right. (0:12:13) Kev: They’re answering all the questions correctly. (0:12:16) Kev: If you, uh, play, um, if you play ranked, you, you just play with (0:12:20) Kev: people on the same systems or whatever you’re on, which seems fair. (0:12:23) Kev: Yeah, that’s, that’s fine. (0:12:24) Kev: Um, but you can totally play cross play with other folks on slack or whatever. (0:12:28) Kev: Um, so yeah, all right. (0:12:30) Kev: There you go. (0:12:31) Kev: Al’s on board. (0:12:32) Kev: You people should try it too. (0:12:33) Al: Oh, my word, forty seven gigabytes. (0:12:37) Kev: It’s, it’s a beefy boy. (0:12:38) Al: Oh, I literally don’t have enough space on my steam deck. (0:12:39) Kev: Um, wait, 40. (0:12:43) Al: Forty seven, I’m seeing forty seven is what it’s saying on Steam. (0:12:43) Kev: seven? Really? Oh. Good times. Good times. Um, but yeah, it’s, I can’t recommend it enough. (0:12:47) Al: Forty seven gigabytes. (0:12:48) Al: I need to uninstall something or get a bigger SD card. (0:12:52) Al: Because I have forty three gigabytes free. (0:12:59) Kev: It’s, it’s fun. It’s got lots of different styles of play. Groot builds walls. He’s fun. (0:13:06) Kev: Um, Iron Man is always flying. He’s just shoots from the air. He is always lying. Like a little, (0:13:11) Kev: I don’t think he can actually run. (0:13:14) Kev: Loki creates duplicates, so on and so forth. It’s good fun. (0:13:18) Al: this feels like a game that I’m going to stick on my PS5 and use, because I am one of those suckers (0:13:25) Al: that has a PS Portal. So it feels like I’m going to stick it on my PS5, use my PS Portal, (0:13:26) Kev: There you go. (0:13:32) Al: rather than trying to fit it on my Steam tech, which is full to the brim of different games. (0:13:38) Al: Whereas my PS5 currently, I have been playing Astro Bot on it just the last few games. They’ve (0:13:45) Al: they’ve added some the like speed as. (0:13:48) Al: Speed run levels, so I’ve been doing them and I’ve just about to once I’ve finished (0:13:54) Al: playing Zelda, which I will have done by the time this episode comes out, (0:13:57) Al: but I’m not going to talk about that because I’m talking about that. (0:13:59) Al: In the second episode that I’m recording today, just a little behind the scenes. (0:14:00) Kev: that is releasing that is releasing before this episode so you’ve already (0:14:07) Al: March before, three weeks before, I will, I’m going to once I finish Zelda, I’m going to start. (0:14:09) Kev: so you’ve already talked about it actually (0:14:18) Al: Hopefully finish before the end of the year, Sonic Shadows. Sonic Shadow generations. (0:14:24) Kev: Oh I gotta get into that too. Generations, yeah. Oh man I gotta get to that too. (0:14:27) Al: Yeah, because you finished it, haven’t you? (0:14:29) Kev: Uh, no, I finished Sonic, uh, uh, Frontiers, the, the, the open world one. (0:14:33) Al: Oh, I thought you said you finish it, January. I thought you said something about that. (0:14:36) Kev: Oh, I put, uh, original, Sonic Generations, the original Sonic, mm-mm, no, no, I’ve not (0:14:38) Al: No, no, no, no, no. I’m sure I saw you saying something about Shadow. (0:14:42) Al: Did I just misread what you said? (0:14:43) Kev: gotten, maybe, because I finished Sonic Frontiers, but not, uh, I’ve not touched Shadow Generations (0:14:48) Kev: yet, um, I, I actually do have it, it is ready to open, and as soon as I… (0:14:54) Kev: probably finish up the, well, we’ll see, I don’t know, because Marvel Rivals is eating (0:14:57) Kev: my life right now, so at some point I will get to it. Um, uh, going back to, dude, I just posted, (0:15:05) Kev: uh, in the chat here, uh, a Penny Arcade comic, you gotta see it, it’s about playing Marvel (0:15:09) Kev: Rivals on the Steam Deck, just like you were talking about, good times. Um, but yeah, that’s, (0:15:14) Kev: uh, Marvel Rivals, I’m glad I sold Al on it, sick, um, big thumbs up, I’m sure it’s even better by (0:15:21) Kev: by the time this actually comes out. (0:15:21) Al: Oh, well, what I’m going to talk about. Obviously, I’ve also been playing, (0:15:24) Kev: what do you have been up to, Al? (0:15:26) Kev: other than (0:15:30) Kev: yes, other than the Zelda (0:15:32) Kev: which you’ve already talked about (0:15:33) Al: yeah, I’ve also been playing Snap, but I think I’m kind of wrapping up on that for just now, (0:15:39) Al: because I’m just getting a bit tired. I’ve been playing it every single day (0:15:43) Al: a lot, because, I mean, you know, you’ve seen the leaderboard on there. I don’t stop. (0:15:47) Kev: I you you do you I play daily but yeah you curve saw me on the leaderboard (0:15:52) Al: I would love to see, what do I play? I play it on my Mac. I don’t think it has, like, (0:15:54) Kev: every every week you do play good (0:16:00) Al: time, amount of time you’ve played on that. But, like, yeah, the amount of time I put in is just (0:16:07) Al: stupid. Like, I would be playing it for, like, what, two to three hours every single day, (0:16:16) Kev: That’s not, ha ha ha ha ha ha. (0:16:16) Al: two to three hours minimum every single day for about six months. (0:16:21) Kev: Ahhhhhh. (0:16:21) Al: I think I’m rolling back on that a little bit, just because I want to play some other things, (0:16:25) Kev: I don’t, weren’t you so high? (0:16:29) Kev: Yeah, until they bring you back in. (0:16:30) Al: and I’m just getting a little bit tired. They will, of course, because this happened last (0:16:32) Kev: It’s the ebb and flow. (0:16:35) Al: time as well. I played it from launch for a good nine months or something like that, (0:16:41) Al: and then I got tired again, and stopped for a while, and then got back into it six months ago. (0:16:48) Al: I’m sure it will get me back in again, and I’m sure I’ll be annoyed that I… (0:16:51) Al: I took the break because obviously I will be so far behind with the cards, but… (0:16:55) Kev: Well, hopefully they’ll have fixed it by then. (0:16:59) Al: We’ll see. We’ll see. (0:17:00) Kev: We’ll see. (0:17:01) Kev: Probably not. (0:17:01) Kev: It’ll probably take them a minute to fix it. (0:17:04) Al: And I’ve been playing Pocket as well, just my regular daily Pocket. (0:17:09) Al: I’m managing to actually do that as an actual how people do daily games, right? (0:17:13) Al: Of putting like 15 minutes into it a day. (0:17:18) Al: Crazy, I know. I don’t do that. (0:17:18) Kev: I don’t blame you but um well hey pocket no I would just say like I still haven’t got (0:17:19) Al: I put my entire game. (0:17:21) Al: gaming time into a game normally when I’m playing it. (0:17:23) Al: But the other thing I’ve been up to recent. Oh, sorry, are you gonna say something? (0:17:34) Kev: into it and like I don’t know something about it it just feels almost uh the more I hear (0:17:41) Kev: about it while not playing it the weirder it sounds to me which like is very much a (0:17:46) Kev: a me thing like I don’t have all the pieces (0:17:48) Kev: in the puzzle but it’s just I don’t get it I still but regardless good for you (0:17:54) Kev: enjoy your wonder pics which I just learned what is today what’s that it’s (0:17:57) Al: I enjoy it, I like collecting things, and this allows me to collect things without battling. (0:18:09) Al: The other thing I’ve been up to, because I will have talked about all the other games (0:18:13) Al: in different episodes, I’m going to talk about I have been watching the TV show Legion. (0:18:19) Kev: Okay, I have not, but I am familiar with it. First of all, who thought of that premise? (0:18:26) Kev: Let’s make a show about Legion, the Professor X’s son. (0:18:28) Al: it’s it’s yeah and it’s funny it’s funny because um that it that’s the entire link (0:18:36) Al: to marvel stuff is legion and minor spoilers for legion but if you know anything about the (0:18:44) Al: character this will not be a spoiler for you shadow king right that is that that’s it (0:18:48) Kev: yeah yeah I actually found out about shadow king just yesterday I don’t remember how I ended up (0:18:55) Kev: it was a wiki hole and somehow I ended up well I don’t know too much about legion to be honest (0:19:00) Kev: but shadow king showing up threw me for a loop i’ll say that um I guess it makes sense because (0:19:05) Kev: he’s a telepath that’s probably the entirety of it um uh I will say um shadow king actually looks (0:19:05) Al: Yeah. (0:19:13) Kev: decent like they did a good job with how it looks. And Aubrey Plaza is sha- (0:19:18) Kev: I’m not okay when I read that. I was like, “Well, she’s possessed.” I know. Yeah. (0:19:20) Al: she’s yeah I don’t want to say too much because there’s some spoilers but yeah she is acting (0:19:26) Al: shadow king for some of it yeah it is she’s fantastic I mean she’s fantastic and everything (0:19:32) Al: I think I have never been disappointed by her and she does but it’s like such a different character (0:19:32) Kev: I was about to say that “yes” in everything. (0:19:39) Al: to other characters that she’s done like I know she does weird characters like that’s her thing (0:19:44) Kev: Yeah, I was about to she’s not her weird because she has the you know that very blasé face and a lot of the characters (0:19:44) Al: she does weird characters yeah no this is (0:19:50) Kev: They run into that, right? (0:19:50) Al: this is very much she turns up the evil rather than the weird right which is what you want from (0:19:54) Kev: That is yeah, yeah, that’s that’s interesting. I can’t remember the last time I saw replaza play, you know evil (0:20:02) Al: properly evil rather than just like accidentally evil. (0:20:03) Kev: but (0:20:06) Kev: Yeah, oh, yeah, yes, okay. Yes, that’s correct (0:20:10) Kev: Or let’s it may be malicious maybe not outright evil, but (0:20:13) Al: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, for sure. (0:20:14) Kev: But yeah, but yeah like a straight evil that’s that is fascinating but hey, but look (0:20:19) Al: Straight evil and nobody said straight. (0:20:22) Kev: Yeah (0:20:24) Kev: She’s um, I mean hey good good. She’s good. She’s a great actress though. Like everyone. I’ve seen her so I’m sure she kills it (0:20:31) Al: Yeah, no, she absolutely does. (0:20:32) Al: She kills, the role is fantastic, but other than, yeah, other than Legion and Shadow (0:20:40) Al: King, every other character is like an original character for the show, which is a little (0:20:44) Kev: Okay, what about not even Charles like cuz that’s (0:20:46) Al: bit weird. (0:20:48) Al: He is, he’s hinted at, but he’s never explicitly said. (0:20:52) Kev: Okay as about this like I I don’t (0:20:54) Kev: Okay, cuz I don’t expect them on screen, but you know that’s kind of a fundamental part of Legion’s characters (0:21:01) Al: So I think they can. (0:21:02) Al: They kind of hint at the fact at some point they hint about his dad being a telepath and they have like a cartoon drawing of who is clearly Charles Xavier, obviously, but it’s just like it’s hinted at, he has never explicitly said. (0:21:17) Kev: Okay (0:21:20) Al: said. (0:21:21) Kev: Okay, so okay (0:21:24) Kev: Two questions one do they ever I’m assuming they don’t have the really stupid Legion here that you see in the comics (0:21:31) Kev: But do they ever make a joke about it? (0:21:32) Al: No, I haven’t, I haven’t noticed anything I like that he has. (0:21:33) Kev: Yeah (0:21:36) Kev: Okay, darn it (0:21:36) Al: I mean, his hair is kind of, yeah, I mean, it kind of sticks up in some way, (0:21:41) Kev: It’s vertical (0:21:42) Al: but it’s not, yeah, it’s not as tall. (0:21:44) Al: It’s nowhere near, it’s like, it looks like a normal, like a possible (0:21:47) Kev: Okay, it’s a plausible hairstyle, okay (0:21:48) Al: realistic hairstyle that is an homage to it, I think they do. (0:21:51) Kev: Okay, so they translated it. Okay. I see. All right. Okay, because yeah, his comics hair is ridiculous. It’s like taller than his head (0:21:57) Al: Yeah. (0:21:59) Al: Yeah. (0:22:02) Kev: Okay, the other question (0:22:04) Kev: how is the (0:22:06) Kev: Multiple personality stuff done right because the bar is now set at moonlight, right? How is how do (0:22:11) Al: So, the interesting thing, so I’m finished season two, and I’ve got one season left to (0:22:17) Al: go, the up until the end of season two, they don’t touch on the multiple personalities (0:22:26) Al: very much. (0:22:26) Kev: What? (0:22:26) Al: Obviously, they’d know, let me finish, let me finish, because up until that point, he’s (0:22:33) Al: almost, he’s not quite sure of what his deal is, right? (0:22:41) Al: He starts off the series being diagnosed with schizophrenia in a mental hospital, and then (0:22:48) Al: gets out of the hospital and is like, “Oh, I wasn’t mentally ill, I was just a powerful (0:22:53) Al: mutant and people didn’t understand that.” (0:22:57) Al: And by the end of season two, they’re like, “No, no, you’re not, it’s not that you’re (0:23:02) Al: not mentally ill, it’s that you’re both.” (0:23:06) Al: So that’s how they finish the second season. (0:23:09) Kev: OK. (0:23:11) Al: Up until the last episode of season two, they’ve done a thing where he’s got voices (0:23:19) Al: talking to him, but until the last episode of season two, they don’t do explicitly his (0:23:25) Al: different personalities talking to each other. (0:23:28) Kev: Okay. Well, yeah, towards. Yeah. Okay. (0:23:28) Al: So they’ve not done that very much. (0:23:32) Al: With Moon Knight, his personalities don’t talk to each other, right? (0:23:36) Al: that is dissociative. And I know that I know that legions meant to be dissociative. (0:23:41) Al: But they do seem to be talking to each other, which is interesting. (0:23:46) Al: So it’s very different from how “Moonlight” works. (0:23:51) Al: And this is probably one of these things where this is not at all what it’s like in real life, (0:23:54) Al: and I understand that, I’m not trying to say. (0:23:55) Kev: oh yeah oh yeah for sure like I have even less expectations of legion in that end because legion (0:24:03) Kev: is so over the top with everything he’s got going on so yeah okay so uh-huh okay (0:24:06) Al: It’s, yeah, it’s very much more towards schizophrenia rather than DID, because it’s like, it’s framed (0:24:16) Al: as voices talking to him in his head, and he talks back to them. And then, yeah, so (0:24:21) Al: are we interested to see what they do in season three with it? Because he’s now kind of like (0:24:26) Al: realized this and like, everybody else realizes it. And he’s kind of like moving towards a (0:24:30) Al: kind of almost villain arc, but it will be interesting to see where they take that because (0:24:34) Kev: Ah. (0:24:35) Al: ‘cause obviously he’s a complicated– (0:24:37) Al: –character who, you know, yeah. (0:24:37) Kev: Whoops. (0:24:38) Kev: Oh, just a little. (0:24:41) Al: So it’ll be interesting to see where they end up, but I’ve enjoyed it so far. (0:24:41) Kev: Just a little. (0:24:43) Kev: OK. (0:24:45) Kev: Well, that’s great. (0:24:45) Al: But yeah, it’s been very weird. (0:24:46) Al: It’s like there’s a character that’s clearly meant to be kind of like rogue, (0:24:52) Al: but not really, in that if she touches someone, she swaps bodies with them. (0:24:54) Kev: Mmm (0:24:58) Kev: Her name is bros not rogue (0:25:01) Al: No, it’s not. (0:25:02) Al: It’s Sydney. (0:25:02) Al: But no, instead of like stealing someone’s power, she literally swaps bodies. (0:25:03) Kev: Okay (0:25:05) Kev: Yeah, that’s that’s pretty cool (0:25:06) Al: With them is interesting, and they’ve very much gone in a dark way with this, rather like, you know, there’s a like, we go into her, her childhood and there’s some like really not great moments where she realizes she can do this and. (0:25:21) Kev: No, I’m sure. Oh, oh gosh. There’s a lot of bad places you can go with that. Oh, that’s not great. Oh (0:25:28) Al: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m not going to talk about them on the podcast, but I mean, I might, if you’re if you’re not going to watch it, I might tell you one of them after the podcast because it. (0:25:32) Kev: Sure, but (0:25:36) Kev: Dude I can already take a guess but do tell like mmm (0:25:37) Al: I don’t think that particularly got me. (0:25:40) Al: After the podcast. (0:25:40) Kev: Y’all you could you can yeah there is room to work with there. Absolutely (0:25:46) Al: But yeah, so everyone else, including her are like, as far as I can tell, unique characters, because I was like, I don’t recognize these characters and I went on to Wikipedia and they’re not like. (0:25:58) Al: Legion is linked as the Marvel Legion, and then obviously Shadow King is linked as Shadow King, the Marvel Shadow King and all the other ones, they’re just. (0:26:02) Kev: Yeah, no. (0:26:06) Al: So and so, as this character name, and there’s no like link to a Marvel equivalent for them, so I’m assuming they’re all original characters. (0:26:12) Kev: Uh-huh (0:26:15) Kev: Sure, sure. Okay. Okay. Well (0:26:17) Al: They also have Jermaine Clement. I don’t know if you know who I who I’m talking about. (0:26:21) Kev: That name sounds familiar, let me see. Ah, okay, okay (0:26:22) Al: He was a flight, one of the flight of the concords. No flight of the concords? Yeah, he’s excellent in it as well. So yeah, no, it’s very good. I’m enjoying it and I’m looking forward to season three. (0:26:36) Al: But I’m still finished by the time you hear this episode because I’m going to watch it this week. I’ve only got eight episodes left to go. (0:26:42) Kev: it is it’s such a fascinating thing right because he’s I mean Legion is he is a (0:26:50) Kev: character of some note but not like you know he’s not an A-lister to name in the (0:26:57) Kev: Marvel verse let’s say that right but here they are making a spin a show (0:27:04) Kev: entirely centered or out to him without any of the other Marvel connections so (0:27:09) Kev: So when you hear that, it’s such an interesting practice. (0:27:12) Kev: It’s very cool that they managed to do good with it. (0:27:14) Kev: I have heard good things about it. (0:27:18) Al: Maybe. Yeah, so that’s mostly what I’ve been up to that I haven’t talked about on other episodes. (0:27:26) Kev: All right, cool (0:27:27) Al: Shall we talk about what games we are most looking forward to in 2025? (0:27:34) Kev: “Wildflowers 2” which might be announced by the time this comes out. (0:27:38) Kev: I don’t know. (0:27:39) Al: Oh yeah, they’ve hinted at something coming, haven’t they? (0:27:42) Kev: Yeah, I think it’s coming out. (0:27:44) Kev: So I don’t remember any dates or anything, but that may actually be announced by the (0:27:49) Kev: time this comes out. (0:27:50) Al: Yeah, so I know. (0:27:51) Kev: That may not be a joke. (0:27:53) Al: I know that so I I sent you a link, didn’t I? (0:27:56) Al: Yes, here it was. (0:27:57) Al: So they’re announcing something in the wholesome snack, (0:28:00) Al: which as we’re recording, it’s happening in three days. (0:28:04) Kev: Oh, great. Wildflowers 2 is going to be announced in three days, and I’m not for– (0:28:05) Al: So. (0:28:09) Kev: I can’t confirm it, because I don’t actually know at the time of the recording. (0:28:14) Al: Like, have they hinted towards there being a Wildflowers, too, and it’s not just (0:28:17) Kev: No, okay. That’s me just being hyperbolic. I don’t know, but it’s Drydock Studios. (0:28:22) Kev: It’s from their account, isn’t it? The Wildflowers account, so… (0:28:26) Kev: I don’t know. Who knows? It could be. That would be my hope, of course. Maybe with a different art (0:28:31) Kev: style but you never know um who knows what it’ll be (0:28:35) Kev: um i’ve got my eye on it though for sure though so we’ll see (0:28:37) Al: You’ll play whatever they make, basically, is what you’re saying. (0:28:41) Kev: yeah basically (0:28:44) Al: OK, cool. So we’re going to go through. We’ve each got a list, presumably. (0:28:48) Al: I can’t see Kevin’s list, but presumably we both have a list. (0:28:52) Al: I think what we’ve previously done is talk through one each. (0:28:59) Al: I just kind of go alternately and we’ll talk through our opinions on why we’re looking (0:29:05) Al: looking forward to it, et cetera. (0:29:10) Kev: I am where I cannot find my list I do right if you have a big you had a big list on you (0:29:15) Kev: Where is it? Uh, hold on. Let me see. I’m trying to remember here. You need to go on in slack (0:29:22) Al: I don’t think I’ve posted a big long list of what’s coming out, but it should be on if you look on the notion, there’s a big long list. (0:29:23) Kev: You did yeah (0:29:34) Kev: Um, oh, here it is. Yes. Okay. Okay. Yes. Sorry. Okay. Yeah, I could not find it. Um, but alright, let’s uh, let’s um, yeah. Alright, you start it. (0:29:46) Al: All right, so my first one, and I feel like this has been on my list so many times, but (0:29:52) Al: that’s because I still haven’t properly played it. And that is Snacko because obviously Snacko (0:29:58) Al: is in early access. I haven’t played it yet because it’s been so busy. I think when it (0:30:04) Al: came out last year was a really bad time because it’s December and I’m not going to play a (0:30:08) Al: brand new farming game in December because I’m already like out of it. But. (0:30:16) Al: At some point this year, Snacko will release 1.0 unless something goes seriously wrong. (0:30:23) Al: Like they’ve posted their updated roadmap and it has four updates on it. And it sounds (0:30:29) Al: like they’re expecting that to be done kind of reasonably early next year. So I would (0:30:33) Al: be very surprised if Snacko 1.0 doesn’t come out. So I think that’s probably the thing (0:30:37) Al: I’m most looking forward to. (0:30:38) Kev: Yeah, yeah (0:30:42) Kev: All right, yeah, no, that’s fair like I (0:30:45) Kev: snako isn’t on my radar, but like I (0:30:49) Kev: this is one of those I’ve talked, you know ad nauseam like (0:30:53) Kev: Games that are in early access forever and then they get the 1.0 release like it’s uh (0:30:59) Kev: It’s I don’t know something almost perplexing unless they have a send some games do do it. We’re like a massive (0:31:06) Kev: Addition or patch change, right? (0:31:09) Kev: To list the features to 1.0 (0:31:12) Kev: But you know, we’ll see if it can’t drop. Hopefully it will drop (0:31:15) Kev: Um, I will say the art style still looks great. I will say that right like the pixel cap, but everything else is 3d (0:31:22) Al: Yeah (0:31:22) Kev: um (0:31:23) Al: They’ve they’ve done a lot of work as well (0:31:26) Al: So I’ve seen some recent screenshots and some screenshots from like when they first announced it and they’ve they’ve improved the graphics (0:31:34) Al: A huge amount while still feeling like it’s the same style, which is really impressive (0:31:40) Al: And it’s just I think the thing about snako is I have been talking about this game since we started the podcast. I’m pretty sure (0:31:46) Kev: Oh, that sounds about right. (0:31:48) Al: So, you know to to go that long (0:31:52) Al: I can’t even remember how long is it is this is this the end of year six or is this the end of you? (0:31:57) Al: I think it’s the end of year six in January. It will be six years of the podcast. So (0:32:02) Al: Yeah, just the idea of you know, I’ve been talking about this game for that long (0:32:07) Al: And I’m super excited to to finally properly played it. Obviously I played a (0:32:12) Al: demo (0:32:13) Al: Years ago now, but it’s obviously changed a huge amount since then (0:32:16) Kev: Yeah, that will be cool. Once it hits 1.0. I will say heck maybe even I’ll get on board at that point. I don’t know (0:32:26) Kev: But yeah, it’s uh (0:32:28) Kev: That’s good. Can you imagine that the finally that since it’s you finally get into it (0:32:35) Kev: I mean everything talking about it for this many years and finally we get 1.0 and you play the game proper (0:32:42) Kev: But yeah, all right, I’ll (0:32:45) Kev: I’ll, I’ll take the baton. (0:32:46) Kev: Um, my first pick, um, kind of like, I just talked about Snacko, but this is a similar boat where the game is already out, but I haven’t gotten to it. (0:32:58) Kev: And more importantly, it’s going to be the console release of Hello Kitty Island Adventure. (0:33:02) Kev: Um, ah, well, there you go. (0:33:02) Al: Ah that’s on my list as well. This I’m so excited for because yeah I really liked the game in (0:33:12) Al: general but I hated playing it on my iPad so I was like I played it as much as I needed to (0:33:18) Al: for the episode and went I will play this when it’s on something else because it is such a good (0:33:25) Al: game it is such it looks great it feels great everything about it is great I just did not want (0:33:31) Al: to do it on a touch screen! (0:33:32) Kev: It looks like it looks I know I say this knowing Hello Kitty is like one of the biggest franchises in the world just (0:33:43) Kev: monetary wise right but it looks so much better than what I expect it to be right because I’m not saying Hello Kitty is isn’t like it (0:33:52) Kev: doesn’t do quality stuff but it just does so much stuff right like it’s so everywhere that I’m just I don’t know and I don’t (0:34:00) Kev: expect, you know, super high (0:34:02) Kev: highs, let’s say that, right? But this looks incredible. Just everything going on. Like the (0:34:08) Kev: writing, you write minecarts in this game, it’s wild! And finding the Gudetama’s hidden around, (0:34:15) Kev: oh my, it just sounds incredible. And like, just the massive list of Sanrio characters. (0:34:24) Kev: Yeah, no, this, this, like ever since the, you guys talked about it on that one episode, I’ve been so (0:34:28) Kev: hype for it. You and Maddy talk about it. (0:34:32) Kev: This is probably number one, just because I mean, of course, like we know what it is more or less, right? It’s come out. (0:34:39) Kev: We know I know what to expect. So that’s probably why out of all the names here, it is the one I’m most looking forward to, I would say. (0:34:46) Al: Yeah, I wonder, here’s a question for you. (0:34:47) Kev: Yeah, good stuff. Yeah. (0:34:49) Al: Do you think this will be a Switch 2 launch title? (0:34:57) Al: So as of just now, we just know 2025 for Hello Kitty Island Adventure. (0:35:02) Al: We don’t know when in 2025 and also we’re expecting the Switch 2 to be released in (0:35:10) Al: 2025 and it was announced that it was coming to Switch. (0:35:17) Al: Or it was announced that it was coming to anything else (0:35:20) Kev: Yeah. Yeah. (0:35:21) Al: in a Nintendo Direct, you know, in 2024 this year, June 2024. (0:35:29) Al: You know for a fact that if the Switch 2 is coming out next year, (0:35:33) Al: there are developers that have a version to build against an SDK, right? (0:35:40) Al: You know for a fact that there are games (0:35:41) Al: companies that have that because there’s no way they would release the game (0:35:46) Al: Switch exclusives and this feels like it could be something, right? (0:35:51) Al: Like, do you know? (0:35:52) Kev: fact that it’s already have you know it’s already out right it’s it’s just a port as opposed to ground-up game doesn’t make it a (0:35:58) Al: Exactly, yeah. (0:35:59) Kev: Lot more likely um I I don’t know how strong lead field I’ll say it’s greater than 50% chance. It’ll be a launch title (0:36:06) Al: It’s the fact that we still don’t–it’s been six months, and we still don’t know when it’s (0:36:08) Kev: You know I don’t know (0:36:12) Al: coming out next year, you know? And there were many–like, the general assumption is (0:36:13) Kev: Yeah, you know what that’s that’s fair um (0:36:16) Kev: Umm… (0:36:22) Al: that the Switch 2 release announcement was delayed from September. So June to September (0:36:30) Kev: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah (0:36:31) Al: could be a sort of expected timeline between announcement and date. Don’t know. (0:36:54) Al: Yeah, it will be backwards compatible, but I will say, and this is the thing that people (0:36:58) Al: keep getting wrong, backwards compatible does not mean it will run better on the Switch (0:37:02) Al: 2, necessarily. That’s not how these things work, right? (0:37:04) Kev: No, you’re right, I’m not saying, you know what, that’s a good point. (0:37:10) Kev: Yeah, no, you’re right. (0:37:10) Al: So if they make, because it’s the same thing with PS4 versions on a PS5, do not run better (0:37:16) Al: than on a PS4. Well, not better than a PS4 Pro. They do run better than a PS4, but they (0:37:21) Al: don’t run better than a PS4 Pro (0:37:24) Al: They’re not compiled for the PS5, they’re compiled for the PS4 and PS4 Pro (0:37:29) Al: and then they also work on the PS5 and so like when we got, I remember when I first got a PS5 (0:37:36) Al: Fall Guys was just the PS4 version and then like a year later they released the PS5 version and it (0:37:39) Kev: yeah (0:37:43) Kev: um really oh wow I didn’t try on the ps5 i’ll have to try that (0:37:48) Kev: um (0:37:48) Al: With your ps5 that’s just sitting in the corner (0:37:51) Kev: that’s cool look ps5 was my zen the zone zero machine (0:37:56) Al: Would you have a ps5? Oh, I didn’t know that fair enough (0:37:57) Kev: it was stupid oh yeah I do (0:38:01) Kev: yeah yeah yeah I like I use it it’s not just even the ps5 like in general my playstation or (0:38:08) Kev: or non-Nintendo consoles are– (0:38:09) Kev: get used just from a handful of games, right? (0:38:11) Al: » Yeah. (0:38:11) Kev: Like, they’re games, I want them, right? (0:38:12) Al: Same. (0:38:14) Kev: Like, it’s my Street Fighter machine, (0:38:16) Kev: it’s my Send the Zone Zero machine. (0:38:18) Kev: Now my Mar– well, actually, no, (0:38:19) Kev: I’m not even playing Marvel, (0:38:20) Kev: I’m playing Marvel, I was on Steam, (0:38:21) Kev: Calvin got the– (0:38:23) Kev: ‘cause Calvin was a big Overwatch fan, too, (0:38:25) Kev: so we’re both hyped about it, (0:38:26) Kev: so I was like, okay, you know what? (0:38:27) Kev: I have a computer that can run it, (0:38:29) Kev: I’ll run Marvel, I was on Steam, (0:38:31) Kev: you play on the PlayStation, (0:38:32) Kev: and that’s how we split it up. (0:38:33) Kev: But anyways, but there’s another– (0:38:36) Kev: yeah, Fall Guys, right? (0:38:40) Kev: I probably won’t try it, actually, (0:38:41) Kev: ‘cause I don’t have too much other stuff. (0:38:44) Al: I still love fall guys. It’s great. I don’t play as much as I used to, but I still, it’s (0:38:46) Kev: Oh, yeah, Fall Guys is excellent, (0:38:48) Al: a good fun, good. They they’ve been adding, they’ve been adding loads of great, uh, what’s (0:38:49) Kev: like, there is no denying that, (0:38:51) Kev: they knocked that out of the park. (0:38:52) Kev: I wonder how far it’s come. (0:38:53) Kev: Oh, now I’m curious, maybe I will. (0:38:58) Al: the word I’m looking for? Um, skins. And I really like how they’ve been doing the skins (0:39:04) Al: in that you can quite often get a lot of skins for free. Um, so there’s, there’s a, they (0:39:09) Al: They have a, okay, okay, here’s what I really love about what they’ve been doing. (0:39:14) Al: They have a premium pass, or what do you call it, a ladder, or whatever it is you (0:39:20) Al: call it. (0:39:21) Al: I can’t never remember the terminology these games use. (0:39:24) Al: The battle pass, yeah, sure. (0:39:24) Kev: Battle pass, season pass, I don’t know. (0:39:26) Kev: Yeah. (0:39:26) Al: Season pass. (0:39:27) Al: There we go. (0:39:28) Al: Season pass. (0:39:29) Al: They’ve got a season pass. (0:39:30) Al: But the season pass gives you back the currency that you use to buy the season pass. (0:39:38) Kev: Okay (0:39:38) Al: So if you reach level 40 in the season pass, you have a sentry. (0:39:42) Kev: Yeah (0:39:44) Al: Eventually, refunded your season pass. (0:39:47) Kev: You have the next one free which is always great, yeah (0:39:48) Al: Exactly, so if you’re playing it regularly, you can get so much stuff without actually (0:39:55) Al: having to pay except that first payment, which is really good. (0:39:58) Kev: Yeah, yeah (0:40:00) Al: And they have like a whole bunch of bundles where it’s like, here’s a bunch of skins and (0:40:03) Al: the currency that you use to buy the battle pass. (0:40:04) Kev: Yeah, yeah (0:40:06) Al: So I think, obviously, it still is shoving these things in your face a lot and there’s (0:40:11) Al: a lot of stuff you can’t get without paying. (0:40:14) Kev: Yeah. (0:40:14) Al: You’re exclusive to pay money, pay 20 quid, and you’ll get these skins, but that’s fine. (0:40:20) Al: It’s skins. (0:40:21) Al: Who cares? (0:40:22) Al: You know. (0:40:24) Kev: yeah yeah yeah exactly right at the end of the day even if you don’t care like the game’s (0:40:27) Kev: free and you can still play and it’s entertaining on its own right absolutely um yeah no um so so (0:40:29) Al: Exactly, but my other point about Hello Kitty is they are releasing on PS4 and PS5, they’ve (0:40:35) Kev: there you go fall guys one of my most anticipated 2020 (0:40:44) Al: exclusively said that, so it’s not like they aren’t known to release on two generations (0:40:48) Kev: Yeah, yeah, that’s great. Oh, so there you go. Maybe we’ll get (0:40:49) Al: of the same console at the same time. (0:40:56) Kev: That’s switch to version after all then the ounces (0:41:00) Al: we’re getting close to the point where we’re going to know when the switch is coming out and we’re (0:41:04) Al: going to get the first indications of what the launch titles are. Obviously there will be some (0:41:10) Al: Nintendo stuff but there’s going to be some third-party stuff as well and I would not be surprised if (0:41:15) Al: this is one of them. All right my second one, I guess, I mean my third one was Hello Kitty (0:41:16) Kev: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, you know, yeah, I could see it. Um, okay. Okay, go ahead. Yeah. (0:41:27) Al: island adventure as well. So how many more do you have? (0:41:28) Kev: All right. Oh, god. I, wait, how many do you have? I’ll just try to match you, because I’m, I’m… (0:41:30) Al: For organizing this. I have four in total, but that included Hello Kitty. But if you have four. (0:41:38) Kev: Oh, oh, well, I could probably go, I could probably do… (0:41:42) Kev: We’ll see. I’ll see. I’m going down the list. Just double check again. (0:41:44) Al: You do another one, do another one now, then because I’ve just (0:41:47) Kev: Okay. All right. Well, first of all, stop the presses. Sorry, as I’ve been double checking all these things, I’ve been in double checking trailers. (0:41:47) Al: done alligator as well. So what’s your, what’s your next one? (0:41:56) Kev: There’s Professor Layton got an out. This is neither here nor there. This might be for the greenhouse. This is Professor Layton. Oh, my gosh. Anyways, okay. (0:42:05) Kev: Okay, here’s one. I’m going to say this not because I (0:42:13) Kev: I might not play it, but I’m just so… (0:42:16) Kev: …curious about it? (0:42:19) Kev: Uh, WANDERSTOP? (0:42:21) Kev: Because that’s the one by the Stanley Parable guy, right? (0:42:25) Kev: And it’s, like, such a wild departure from that. (0:42:30) Kev: I’m… I just wonder what it’s gonna look like, right? (0:42:33) Kev: And, like, we have a trailer, and the game looks fine and whatnot. (0:42:36) Kev: Um, it just looks like a straight, you know, straight-shooting, cozy-type game. (0:42:41) Kev: But, um, so, you know, I don’t know if it’s gonna bring anything super new, but… (0:42:46) Kev: Just the history of that developer really has me wondering what that’s gonna look like. (0:42:50) Kev: Because I’m not expecting there to be some weird Stanley Parable-esque twist, (0:42:57) Kev: but at the same time, I don’t know, maybe? (0:43:00) Al: I don’t expect it to be like a meta-commentary on games the way that Stanley Parable was, (0:43:01) Kev: Like… (0:43:05) Kev: Yeah, yeah. (0:43:06) Al: but I will say that it’s describing itself as a narrative-centric cosy game about change and T. (0:43:12) Kev: Uh-huh. (0:43:13) Al: I feel like it’s going to do something interesting, and that’s not going to be a really boring story. (0:43:16) Kev: » Yeah, it might. (0:43:21) Al: It’s going to be hard-hitting in some kind of way, like I don’t think they would make it (0:43:26) Al: just to make a cosy game. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was… (0:43:30) Al: Maybe a meta-commentary on coziness or something like that, you know, like I could see them (0:43:36) Al: like completely appending what you would expect from a cosy game. (0:43:40) Kev: Yeah, yeah, I I could see that absolutely (0:43:45) Kev: Yeah, so you know like I don’t know if I will get to it (0:43:49) Kev: Maybe it drops out and it’s amazing, but it certainly has grabbed my attention. I’ll say that (0:43:53) Kev: that. (0:43:54) Al: it will, even if you don’t play it, you’ll find out a lot about it because this is going (0:43:58) Al: to be talked about. You know, like the same way that the Stanley Parable was talked about (0:44:00) Kev: Oh, oh, absolutely, right? Like, oh, I’m sure, right. I mean, just having that pedigree alone, like, it’s gonna get talked about, absolutely. (0:44:14) Al: I just noticed the music is done by C418, the guy who did Minecraft music. (0:44:18) Kev: Oh, what? (0:44:20) Kev: Minecraft guy, yeah. Oh, I’m like, ooh. Ooh, that’s, that’s strong. That’s good music. Oh. (0:44:20) Al: » Yeah. (0:44:26) Kev: Um, alright, well, that was an honorable mention, but here, let me, uh, let me- (0:44:30) Kev: I can actually throw one. I probably will play, um, “Tales of Sekyu”? I think that’s how you pronounce it. (0:44:36) Al: say yeah I can I who knows yeah (0:44:38) Kev: I think so. Um, okay. (0:44:44) Kev: Uh, so there is, um, so it is a, you know, it’s- (0:44:50) Kev: What’s the premise? It’s- it’s farming, but it’s yokai. (0:44:51) Al: Jokai. Farming, but Jokai, yep. That’s a perfect explanation of it, really. (0:44:54) Kev: Farming but yokai, right

My guests this month are from a website that needs little introduction, Eric Benson and Jerry "Tycho" Holkins! Penny Arcade has been a force in gaming for decades, and while it had its start in the realm of video games, it's become a powerhouse in tabletop gaming. Eric and Jerry joined me ostensibly to hype up their upcoming convention PAX Unplugged, but instead we mostly just talked about the wargames they love (we did get to chat a bit about the con towards the end, including an exclusive reveal of the Official Sandwich of PAX Unplugged), but mostly we blathered about why we love different miniatures games like Warhammer 40k, The Horus Heresy, Saga, and board games like War Room, and Jerry's passion for Command & Colors, and the different itches scratched by different games.As usual, this podcast was exclusive to Brush Wielders Union members for a few days before being released to general audiences.brushwieldersunion.com

Welcome to Hit Rewind, where we dive into the comic book scene of 1998. Join hosts Michael Johns and his co-host as they explore a pivotal year for comics, marked by Marvel's bold moves, DC's seismic storylines, and notable indie releases. The episode kicks off with a deep dive into Marvel's 1998, featuring the launch of Marvel Knights, a new imprint aimed at revitalizing lesser-known characters. The hosts discuss standout stories like Kevin Smith's "Guardian Devil" and the critically acclaimed "Black Panther" run by Christopher Priest. They also humorously dissect the infamous "Punisher as a hitman for heaven" storyline. Shifting to DC, the hosts cover the groundbreaking "No Man's Land" storyline that reshaped Gotham City and its heroes. They also touch on the Elseworlds tale "JLA: The Nail" and the introduction of Young Justice, a fresh take on the Titans. Indie comics and other highlights include the debut of Frank Miller's "300" from Dark Horse, the rise of webcomics with "Penny Arcade," and the influential "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" series. The episode wraps up with a nod to the critically acclaimed "Road to Perdition" graphic novel. Tune in for a lively discussion full of insights and humor as the hosts reminisce about a transformative year in comics.

This week we're joined by special guest host Alyssa Cooper as we learn how the Dennison sisters revolutionized England's penny arcades and how barrel rollers in Québec pulled off the maple syrup heist of the century. A listener email explains how to best pass a kidney stone at Disneyland.Episode Tabs:Penny Arcades Would Be Nothing Without the Pioneering Dennison Sistershttps://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/penny-arcade-dennison-sistershttps://pennymachines.co.uk/Forum/viewtopic.php?p=39092Inside Quebec's Great, Multi-Million-Dollar Maple-Syrup Heisthttps://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/maple-syrup-heistListener Tabs:https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/roller-coaster-kidney-stones/https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/florida-is-home-worst-taco-bell-location-us-report-says-take-gamble-you-wishEmail your closed tab submissions to: 500opentabs@gmail.comSupport us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/500OpenTabs500 Open Roads (Google Maps episode guide): https://maps.app.goo.gl/Tg9g2HcUaFAzXGbw7Continue the conversation by joining us on Discord! https://discord.gg/8px5RJHk7aSUPPORT THE SHOW and get 40% off an annual subscription to Nebula by going to https://nebula.tv/500opentabsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today's Mystery: A woman feigns a horseriding accident to get Bulldog Drummond's help and tells him to go to a Penny Arcade and speak to a mentalist.Original Radio Broadcast Date: April 28, 1948Originating in New YorkStarring: Ned Wever as Bulldog Drummond, Luis Van Rooten as DennySupport the show monthly at https://patreon.greatdetectives.netPatreon Supporter of the Day: Jesse, Patreon Supporter since June 2016.Support the show on a one-time basis at http://support.greatdetectives.net.Mail a donation to: Adam Graham, PO Box 15913, Boise, Idaho 83715Take the listener survey…http://survey.greatdetectives.netGive us a call 208-991-4783Become one of our friends on Facebook.Follow us on Instagram at http://instagram.com/greatdetectivesFollow us on Twitter@radiodetectivesJoin us again tomorrow for another detective drama from the Golden Age of Radio.

Thank you to Factor for sponsoring this episode. Visit http://www.FactorMeals.com/KitAndKrysta50 for 50% off your first box and 20% off your second order Thank you to Hims for sponsoring this episode. Visit http://www.Hims.com/KitAndKrysta for your personalized hair loss treatment options *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Hi and welcome to episode 134 of the Kit & Krysta Podcast! We have a monster of an episode today where we tell you all about what we thought after playing The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. We also dig through all the info released during the latest Zelda trailer and see if it answers our lingering questions about the game. We also share in this episode our live panel from PAX West where we tell a special Nintendo storytime all about a Penny Arcade comic we created for The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. We dig into some news on Mario & Luigi Brothership and wrap it all up with questions from our awesome Patreon community. 0:00 - What do we REALLY think about Echoes of Wisdom 14:06 - Games we're playing (The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Super Mario Party Jamboree, Star Wars Outlaws, Emio, Ace Attorney Investigations Collection) 1:24:28 - News news news 1:42:14 - Nintendo Storytime - How a Zelda Skyward Sword Penny Arcade Comic come to be 2:03:20 - Questions from our Patreon subscribers Patreon shout-outs: - All Hail the Final Boss - Aaron Hash - Thank you Super Stars - MaruMayhem, Eigenverse, KissMyFlapjack, Mike Chin, Roy Eschke, Switchingitup_, vgmlife, Link The Hero of Winds, Angela Bycroft and her pig Molly, Thomas O'Rourke, Kyle LeBoeuf, Roberto Nieves, Fredrik Ulf Konradsson, Andrew Youhas, Chilly, Brustache, Simon, krashuri, Master Discord, Ash, Ajay Kundlas, Fortygig Follow Us! https://www.patreon.com/kitandkrysta https://twitter.com/kitandkrysta https://www.tiktok.com/@kitandkrysta https://www.instagram.com/kitandkrysta/ http://www.facebook.com/kitandkrysta/ -Kit & Krysta

Join me and let's explore the enchanting world of Main Street, U.S.A., at Disneyland! In this episode, we dive deep into the history, hidden gems, and fascinating stories behind this iconic land that serves as the gateway to the Magic Kingdom. From the nostalgic glow of authentic gas lamps to the rich history of the Main Street Bank, we'll uncover the magic behind every corner, including the lingerie shop! i'll share insider stories about the charming Magic Shop, where a young Steve Martin once honed his comedic skills, and the candy-making traditions at the Candy Palace that have delighted guests for generations. Plus, discover the significance of the Cigar Store Indian, the brick test wall, and the 1901 Indian Head penny on top of the Penny Arcade. Whether you're a Disneyland regular or planning your first visit, this episode is packed with fun facts, historical insights, and the hidden details that make Main Street, U.S.A. a place where the past comes alive. Join me for a stroll down this nostalgic avenue, and experience Disneyland like never before! Don't miss out on this magical journey through the heart of Disneyland—tune in now! Join Mix In Some Magic Patreon for $5 per month. You'll get ad free episodes, weekly episodes, Disney book club, giveaways and more! ⁠Join Mix In Some Magic Patreon Here! Disneyland Touring Plans: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Check out my YouTube videos! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the Mix In Some Magic ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Mix In Some Magic Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mixinsomemagic.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Check out my social media for Disney tips and fun! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.pinterest.com/mixinsomemagic⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/mixinsomemagic⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/mixinsomemagic⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

So many of our beloved RPG soundtracks are filled with great music, and often have songs named in the same dramatic flair as the games and their narratives. And then sometimes, we find great tracks in our RPGs with names like "No No I don't die Noooo!" or "Rouen 'But-dad-dead-bed'," and those are the songs we are showcasing in this episode. It's always entertaining coming across these songs when listening to music, so for this episode, our panelists all chose music we love with offbeat, weird, or otherwise amusing titles.Featuring: Mike Salbato, Hilary Andreff, Patrick Gann, Audra Bowling; Edited by Paul DennisTracklistThe Fantasy of Being Tall0:06:32 - A Sunbaked Throb (Masanori Osaki of Falcom Sound Team jdk) - Ys SEVEN0:09:23 - Seize the Artifact For Tallness (Motoi Sakuraba) - Eternal SonataShopping and Slaughter0:24:18 - Holy Death Strike of Slaughter (ACE) - Code of Princess0:27:49 - When We Laugh About Forgetting to Buy Something (Kazuki Yanagawa) - Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret KeyModern Villains0:46:45 - It's On Like Necronomicon (Ryan Ike) - Shadows Over Loathing 0:50:00 - Fish Force (HyperDuck SoundWorks) - Penny Arcade's On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4Science Fantasy1:09:36 - So nah, so fern (comp. Hiroyuki Sawano, vocals Mika Kobayashi) - Xenoblade Chronicles X1:14:13 - EXEC_CUTYPUMP/. (comp/arr Maiko Iuchi, vocals au) - Ar tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel1:41:12 - Pat's Bonus Track!Album links for places to buy, stream, and more are available in our post on RPGFan.Get in Touch:RPGFan.comRPGFan ShopEmail us: music@rpgfan.comTwitter: @rpgfancomInstagram: @rpgfancomThreads: @rpgfancomFacebook: rpgfancomTwitch: rpgfancom

Tonight on GeekNights, Rym and Emily review Slay the Princess. It's a graphic novel philosophical horror game in a sense. It'll give you a lot to chew on and it's definitely worth playing! From Black Tabby Games, you may recognize Abby Howard from Penny Arcade's Strip Search!Related LinksThings of the DayForum ThreadSlay the PrincessDiscord ChatSlay the Princess

Esta semana, en Islas de Robinson, nos quedamos entre 2024 y el año pasado con un puñado de preciosísimas y fantásticas canciones. Suenan: BILL MACKAY - “WHEN I WAS HERE” (“LOCUST LAND”, 2024) / ONE ELEVEN HEAVY - “THE FIRST POW” (2024) / COREY MADDEN - “THE MEANING OF COLOR” (“TASTE THE HOUR”, 2024) / LA LUZ - “POPPIES” (“NEWS OF THE UNIVERSE”, 2024) / PENNY ARCADE - “BLACK CLOUD” (“BACKWATER COLLAGE”, 2024) / LOVING - “ASK DIRECTIONS” (“ANY LIGHT”, 2024) / WAY DYNAMIC - “CANDLELIGHT” (“DUCK”, 2024) / FLORAL PORTRAIT - “WAVES” (“FLORAL PORTRAIT”, 2023) / MARINA ALLEN - “BAD EYE OPAL” (“EIGHT POINTED STAR”, 2024) / HOLLOW HAND - “I’M GOING TO LET YOU BREAK MY HEART” (“YOUR OWN ADVENTURE”, 2024) / SAM EVIAN - “JACKET” (“PLUNGE”, 2024) /BUCK MEEK - “WHERE YOU’RE COMING FROM” (“HAUNTED MOUNTAIN”, 2023) / JENNIFER CASTLE - “BLOWING KISSES” (2024) / LUKA KUPLOWSKY AND THE RYOKAN BAND - “HOW CAN I POSSIBLY SLEEP WHEN THERE IS MUSIC” (“HOW CAN I POSSIBLY SLEEP WHEN THERE IS MUSIC”, 2024) /Escuchar audio

In this week's episode, I take a look back at my SILENT ORDER science fiction series, and answer twelve of the most common questions from readers about the books. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 205 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June the 14th, 2024 and today we are doing a question and answer session on my Silent Order science fiction series. Before we get to that, we will have an update on my current writing progress and then Question of the Week. My main project right now is Shield of Darkness, a sequel to Shield of Storms and the second book in the Shield War series. Progress has not been as quick as I would like, but there still has been progress and as of this recording, I am about 84,000 words into the rough draft. It really helped that I had a 10,000 word day on June 12th. That really propelled things forward. I'm not entirely sure how long the rough draft is going to be. I think it's probably going to end up around 120,000 words, maybe 115,000 words. We'll see when get there. But I'm still hoping to have it out in July, sometime after the 4th of July. After that is done, my next project will be Half-Orc Paladin, the third book in the Rivah series, and I'm currently 24,000 words into that and I think that one will be around 75,000 words (give or take) once it's done. I'm also 9,000 words into Ghost in the Tombs, but that will come out later in the year. In audiobook news, I'm pleased to report that the collection Tales of the Shield Knight, which contains sixteen stories from the Sevenfold Sword and the Dragontiarna series, is now out in audiobook, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills. You can get that at Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books at the moment, and should gradually be making its way onto the other audiobook stores as it gets through processing. Be sure to subscribe to my new release newsletter because sometimes I will give away individual audio short stories for free from that collection in my newsletter. 00:01:50 Question of the Week Now let's move on to Question of the Week. Our Question of the Week segment is designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: if you read mystery novels, what was the first mystery novel you ever read? No, wrong answers obviously, and as you'd expect, we had quite a few different responses. Justin says: A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I was 12. I had chicken pox and was confined to my room. I begged my father for something to read, and he handed me a massive book, The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Two days later, I asked for other books by him. I'm still not a fan of mysteries, but Doyle was a great author. Our next comment is from Ray, who says: Hardy Boys, also Sherlock Holmes for school. As an adult, the first I recall by choice were the Father Blackie Mysteries by Andrew Greeley. Our next comment is from Jake who says: can't remember. It had to be back in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s. But I agree with you, it's great to diversify in reading. Someone gifted me a copy of Water for Elephants. I would never have read that by choice, but I'm glad I did. Our next comment is from Jeff, who says: Tom Swift books and Hound of the Baskervilles. Tom Swift was even science fiction-ish with their far-out inventions. Our next comment is from Jonathan (not me), who says: the Hardy Boys Hunting for Hidden Gold. The reprinted Flashlight edition was my first mystery read for me by my mom when I was about 8. This would have also been my first mystery that I read independently. When I was 10 through 11, I read the original Hardy Boys While the Clock Ticked. I was too young to know about the different editions of novels until much later, but I was always dissatisfied with the Flashlight version because it lacked the ending that I remembered. It was years later that I discovered the history of the series, which led to me finding and purchasing all or most of the original novels. Our next comment is from Becca, who says: Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys in early grade school. No idea which one, but I had quite a few of them. First adult mystery series was probably middle school and was The Alphabet Series by Sue Grafton and the Joe Grey series by Murphy. My mom really encouraged me to read pretty much anything and everything. Wish you would write more mystery books. They're so great. Thanks, Becca. I am glad you liked the mystery books, so I don't think too many other people did, which is why I have not written more of them. Our next comment is from Justin who says: first mystery novel was The Hardy Boys in grade school. Michael says: not my first, but I really like the Pendergast series by Lincoln and Child. Worth the read if folks haven't tried. John says: The Three Investigators series by Alfred Hitchcock. I don't know where I got the first one. My mom probably got it at a yard sale or something, but I was hooked. Was able to check out the others in the series for my school's library. I was probably in 3rd or 4th grade. Juana says: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Our next comment is from Ann-Marie, who says: Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and The Boxcar Children. Jeremiah says: Sherlock Holmes. Andrew says: As a young'un in grade school, I read The Mystery of the Green Ghost. It has stuck with me all these years. As a little more mature reader, I got a hold of The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Quite entertaining indeed. My own answer to this was I think it was Tell No One by Harlan Coben. This was way back in 2001 and I had a long car ride coming up. At the time I didn't read anything except fantasy and science fiction, but I got Tell No One as a present and I didn't have anything else to read while in the car. So I started reading Tell No One during the ride. The book is about an ER physician whose wife was murdered eight years ago. Then one day out of the blue, the physician gets a message that could only have come from her. Suddenly people show up to kill the physician and he finds himself on the run from the agents of a sinister billionaire. I was definitely hooked, and I've read mysteries and thrillers on and off since. I think this was good for me long term since I ended up a writer and it's good for writers to read widely in different genres. You always tell what a science fiction novel, for example, was written by someone who has never heard anything but science fiction. Additionally, when I wrote out the Question of the Week, I did not have Hardy Boys in mind because I was thinking of them as you know, books for children and I was thinking about adult books, but I did indeed read a bunch of The Hardy Boys books when I was a kid, but it was that was long enough going out that I can't clearly recall the plots of any of them, I'm afraid. 00:06:04 Main Topic: Silent Order Question and Answer Time (Note: Some Spoilers for the series in this section) Now on to our main topic of the week, Silent Order question and answer time. Why talk about this now, about a year after I finished the Silent Order science fiction series? Well, the reason for that is Silent Order Omnibus One had a very successful Bookbub feature deal at the end of May. Silent Order Omnibus One was briefly the number 2 free ebook on Amazon US and the number 1 free ebook on Amazon UK. So thanks for that, everyone. As you can imagine, this resulted in a lot of new eyes on the series, which inspired many reader questions, which is funny because I've been getting most of the same questions about the series and its particular idiosyncrasies for about seven years now. So let's have some answers below. First, some basic facts about the series. I published the first five books in September and October of 2017. It ended up at about 14 books, and I published the 14th and final book in September of 2023. All books are available on all ebook platforms. I've dabbled with Kindle Unlimited for it in the past, but not anymore. It's available wide and will remain so. There are also six tie-in short stories to the series that I've given away for free to my newsletter subscribers at various times. Now, with the basic facts out of the way, let's proceed to the most common questions from the last seven years of Silent Order. Question #1: Why do the characters still use kinetic, chemically propelled firearms 100,000 years in the future? By this question, people are usually wondering why at times the characters in the Silent Order are using, you know, traditional guns that fire metal bullets as opposed to like blasters or lasers or plasma cannons or whatever. And the answer is, not to be flippant, but why wouldn't they? People forget that firearms technology has been used for military applications, at least in the West, for at least nearly 700 years. Cannons were used in the 100 Years War and the 100 Years War started in 1337. Firearms technology has been refined and improved considerably since then, and no doubt it will continue to receive refinements and improvements in the future. Additionally, chemically propelled firearms offer many advantages over more advanced weaponry like lasers, rail guns, blasters, or particle weapons, especially for handheld levels of weaponry. A chemically propelled firearm doesn't require electricity or a power source and can't be disabled by an EMP. It's also more durable and rugged than a more advanced weapon, which would almost certainly require delicate electronic components. In fact, some models of firearm can famously be exposed to harsh conditions and continue to function. There's just no way you could do the same thing with a laser. Some devices, some machines are just the apex of their technological niche. Despite all the advanced weaponry available in the 21st century, soldiers still carry combat knives because in a situation where you need a knife, it is the best tool for the job. I suspect chemically propelled firearms dominate their niche in the same way. Question #2: Why isn't the technology in Silent Order as advanced as I think it should be? Well, they do have faster than light travel, artificial gravity, inertial absorption, anti-gravity lifts, shields, plasma weaponry, and ion thrusters. You can't exactly order any of that stuff off Amazon today. Medical technology is rather more advanced as well. The average human lifespan in Calaskar and other “developed” worlds at this time period is about 160 years due to advances in genetic engineering and better understanding of mitochondrial DNA. Cloned replacement limbs and organs are common medical procedures. When a replacement limb can't be cloned, installing a cybernetic one is typically a one day medical procedure. In the back story of the series, there are five very large Terran empires that rose and collapsed before the start of the series, which is about, as I've said, 100,000 years into the future. Those Terran empires each tended to have more advanced technology in certain areas than is common at the start of the series. One was a lot better at genetic engineering, another built super advanced sentient AI (more on that later) and so forth. When the particular empire fell or disintegrated into smaller successor states, there was some technological backsliding, and some of the more super advanced technology was lost. Question #3: The protagonist Jack March has the same initials as the author, Jonathan Moeller. Was that deliberate? Oh no, it wasn't. One of the original inspirations for the series were the James Bond books, so I chose a name that was the opposite of James Bond. After all, March is kind of the opposite of Bond in the sense of movement versus stasis and stagnation. In the original books, James Bond was always a sort of self-destructive alcoholic who gets somewhat worse as the series goes along and he doesn't have much in the way of character development. By contrast, I wanted March to have much more character change and growth. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that gave Jack March the same initials as me until three or four years into writing the series. The obvious is only obvious in hindsight, alas. Occasionally people say March is an authorial self-insert, but I guarantee you that he is not. If he were, he'd be a cranky middle aged former IT worker who doesn't like to go out very much. Question #4: Why doesn't March sleep with any of the beautiful women he meets in the first four books? Because he didn't want to. Like I said, he's sort of the opposite of James Bond and doesn't like unprofessionalism like that on the job. Also, by the time the series starts, he's old enough that casual flings no longer interest him and ultimately, he would really rather be on his own. It isn't until he meets a woman who truly understands him that this starts to change and the woman understands him because she hates the Final Consciousness just as much as he does. Question #5: Why do the characters still use phones? Well, they're not “cellular telephones” in the way that we think of them. They're more like personal handheld telecommunication and computing devices that are significantly more powerful than anything available today. That said, words sometimes long outlast the original purpose. The word mile originally came from the Latin language and described the distance a Roman soldier could cover with 1,000 steps. There is no longer a Roman Empire or Roman legionaries, but the term remains in use. There's a good chance that the word phone will outlast our current civilization and continue to refer to a telecommunications device just as miles still refers to a unit of distance, even though it doesn't have anything to do with marching soldiers or the Roman Empire. Additionally, phone was the simplest word available and using a sci-fi ish term like a mobile data pad or personal communicator or handheld computer just seemed a bit try hard. I used the metric system for distance in the series because the majority of Earth's population uses it today, so I assume it will eventually win out over time by pure weight of numbers. Question #6: Why does March work for repressive government like Calaskar? Whether or not Caesar is repressive depends on one's perspective. I expect someone from the 1850s or even the 1950s United States would find the Calaskaran government rather liberal and shockingly egalitarian. But many people from 2024 America would probably find it repressive. That said, I think Calaskar is better described as conformist. If you don't criticize the king or the official doctrines of the Royal Calaskaran church, you can say pretty much anything you want, and Calaskar doesn't have anything like the social problems of the 21st century United States, though that is partly because dissidents are eventually encouraged to leave and seek their fortunes elsewhere. Some of Calaskar's neighbors like Rustaril and the Falcon Republic were originally Calaskaran worlds that split off due to ideological differences. Rustaril opted for a form of socialism that led to its stagnation and ongoing decline, while the Falcon Republic is more hyper-capitalistic and libertarian and therefore very unstable, albeit with a cloned army that steps in and takes over when things get out of hand. Calaskar claims that its government combines the best aspects of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, though opinions differ among the characters in the books whether or not this is actually true. However, the series is mostly written from the perspective of Jack March, and he doesn't much care about everything we just discussed in the previous paragraph. He primarily works for the Silent Order, which is a Calaskaran intelligence agency that answers only to its own leaders and the King. The ultimate mission of the Silent Order is to monitor the elite and upper classes of Calaskaran society, whether political, business, or entertainment elites. If they start acting in a destructive way that will harm Calaskar and civilization, the Silent Order either discredits them, sabotages their careers, or arranges an accident (depending on how severe the particular elite's brand of corruption is). Obviously, many people would have severe moral qualms about arranging the fatal extrajudicial accident of a corrupt government or judicial official. Since March's own home world of Calixtus was betrayed to the Final Consciousness by its elite classes, he has no problem doing this kind of work. For March's perspective, Calaskar opposes the Final Consciousness and has been the primary rival to the Final Consciousness for some time, which is good enough for him. The fact that life on Calaskar is vastly better than anywhere ruled by the Final Consciousness just reinforces his decision. Question #7: Was this series inspired by the computer game Starfield? I have to admit I LOLed at this question. I started writing Silent Order on New Year's Eve in 2016 and the final book in the series came out in early September 2023. In fact, if I remember it, Starfield came out like two or three days after I published the final Silent Order book. So I can confidently say that the series wasn't inspired by Starfield in any way. That said, I would say that the video games which did help shape my thinking about the books were Wing Commander: Privateer, TIE Fighter, and Master of Orion 1 and 2. All those games were from the 1990s, of course, so I suppose I'm dating myself. Question #8: What actually did inspire the Silent Order series? The video games I mentioned above, for one. Also, the original James Bond books. When I started thinking about writing a science fiction series, I decided that I wanted to do a spy thriller, but in space. The Final Consciousness was sort of the idea of cybernetic space totalitarians. James Bond originally went up against SMERSH and then SPECTRE in the books, but March would go up against the covert agents of the sinister cybernetic Final Consciousness. There are also Lovecraftian themes in the books, as is gradually revealed throughout the series, that the Final Consciousness is in fact controlled by cosmic horrors from another universe. Believe it or not, the various malfunctions of ChatGPT also helped inspire some of the later books. I had established way back in Silent Order: Iron Hand that a true AI always goes homicidally insane. So when I actually did have to run an AI supercomputer character from one of the later books, I based its behavior on some ChatGPT and Bing Chat's more hilarious public meltdowns, though if I had waited a little longer and based it on Google's AI, the AI supercomputer character could have suggested that the protagonist add glue to their pizza cheese or perhaps eats are real small rocks a day for minerals. The day I wrote this paragraph (which was June 10th, 2024), Apple announced they're adding a bunch of AI stuff to both the iPad and iPhone, and no doubt more AI will soon reach meme status on the Internet. Needless to say, my opinion of generative AI in general is quite low. Question #9: Have the covers for the series changed? They look different on Goodreads. Not only have the covers changed over the last seven years, they have changed a lot. The covers went through five different iterations. At first I did them myself in GIMP and then I tried a couple different variations. During COVID I took a Photoshop class which I admit leveled up my cover design skills significantly, so I tried some character-based covers but they never had the results I was hoping to see in terms of sales. Then in 2022, I saw a Penny Arcade comic that made a joke about how science fiction readers want to see book covers that show spaceships and planets in close proximity. And while this was a joke, I realized it was nonetheless true, so I redid the covers to the current look that features spaceships in close proximity to planets, and the series has sold the best overall with the new set of covers. Science fiction writers take heed: the readers want to see planets and spaceships in close proximity on their covers. Question #10: Why aren't there audiobooks for the series? In all honesty, it would just be too expensive. At a rough back of the envelope calculation, I think it would take about $30,000 U.S. dollars to bring the entire series into audio, and it would take years to see that money back. Plus, I think the series would end up at about 85 hours long, give or take, and that's like 2 full work weeks just to listen to the audiobook for proofing. So to sum up, it would cost too much and I don't want to take on another project of that magnitude at this time. Question #11: What is your favorite book in the series? Silent Order: Eclipse Hand, for reasons unrelated to the plot. I read an article in 2017 saying that the iPad was a better productivity computer than a Linux desktop, and I thought that was just nonsense for a variety of reasons. So I wrote, edited, and did the entire cover on a Ubuntu Linux desktop for Silent Order: Eclipse Hand just to prove a point. I work less with Linux now than I did back in 2017, though given how bad Windows 11 has gotten with all the AI integration, I might go back to writing on a Linux desktop at some point. Even though it's my favorite book for reasons other than plot, I do quite like the plot of Eclipse Hand as well. The basic idea was something that's been knocking around inside my head for a while, so I was glad I was finally able to get to write it down. And now our 12th and final question: Weren't they originally only supposed to be nine books in the series? Why are there fourteen? Yes, I had planned to stop at nine because the Silent Order books never sold quite as well as I had hoped. However, there were enough dangling plot threads, specifically the mystery around the Pulse weapon of the Final Consciousness, that I was persuaded to continue and bring the series to a more epic ending than it had in book nine. I started working on book 10 in late 2019, but then COVID happened and derailed things for a while. At the end of 2021, I was able to pick it up again and in 2023 I decided would be my “summer of finishing things” and I pushed on to the final book in the Silent Order series. Hopefully it was a suitably epic ending. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who read through to the end of the series, encouraging me to continue with it. The years 2020 through 2023 were frustrating ones for a variety of reasons (and I'm sure everyone listened to this had their own frustrations in those years as well) and one of the ways I tried to reduce those frustrations was to put Silent Order on the side for a while, but I'm glad I persevered and continued on with the series, even if it took me a while. Now that it is finished, I can look back on it with a sense of pride for all the hard work that went into it. But mostly what I feel when I look back at it is gratitude for all the readers who read the books and enjoyed them. So that's it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A remind you that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts (note: transcripts are for Episodes 140 to the present episode). If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

Tycho's a fan of the show, so I had him on to discuss how you go from webcomic to web celebrity. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/blackpantslegion/message

Stāsta mūziķis, pedagogs un datu zinātnieks Linards Kalniņš Spēļu vēsture ir tikpat sena kā mūsu civilizācija. Par senajām spēlēm un rotaļām šoreiz nerunāšu, bet digitālās jeb datorspēles parādījās neilgi pēc skaitļošanas mašīnu izgudrošanas. Digitālās spēles kā produkts eksistē nu jau vairāk nekā 50 gadus; pirmie spēļu entuziasti jau sirmām galvām spēlē videospēles kopā ar saviem mazbērniem. 1978. gadā izdotā spēle “Space invaders” jeb “Kosmosa iebrucēji” komerciālajā ziņā vairākkārt pārspēja gadu iepriekš iznākušo filmu “Zvaigžņu kari”. Spēles ir tik neatņemama populārās kultūras sastāvdaļa, ka 80. gadus vairs neviens nevar iztēloties bez arkāžu galerijām, kurās jāmet žetoni, lai spēlētu Pac-Man, tāpat kā bez Maikla Džeksona, un vēlos 90. gadus nevar iedomāties bez trīsdimensionāli kantainās Laras Kroftas, tāpat kā bez Britnijas Spīrsas. Pieminētā spēle Pac-Man, kas tika izlaista 1980. gadā, bija pirmā spēle, kas vienlīdz lielu popularitāti ieguva gan sieviešu, gan vīriešu vidū. Galvenais varonis bija dzeltens aplītis ar kāri uz dažādiem augļiem, bet spēles mehānika koncentrējās uz sistemātisku ēšanu un stratēģisku telpas apguvi, kontrastējot ar līdz tam industrijā sastopajamām citplanētiešu šaušanas un sportiskas sacensības spēlēm. Parādoties pie televizora pievienojamām videospēļu konsolēm ar maināmiem spēļu kārtridžiem un mājas datoriem ar disketēm un diskiem, uzplauka digitālo spēļu dažādība un radās pieprasījums pēc žurnālistikas, kas palīdzētu spēlētājiem orientēties arvien pieaugošajajā spēļu klāstā. Datorspēļu kritika 90. gados un divtūkstošo gadu sākumā sadzīvoja ar nozares nepārtrauktu un strauju tehnoloģisko atīstību. Arī latviski iznākošajā drukātajā žurnālā “Spēļu Pasaule”, kurš tika izdots divtūkstošo gadu sākumā, pirms vēl interneta publikāciju nospiedošās popularitātes, spēļu apskati kombinēja mobilo telefonu vai datoru apskatiem līdzīgas recenzijas par tehnoloģiskajiem jauninājumiem ar spēļu mehānikas un stāsta izvērtējumu, kā arī padomiem grūtāko uzdevumu risināšanā. Pēdējos 15 gadus digitālo spēļu kritiķi un arī paši spēlētāji mazāk pievēršas tehniskajiem aspektiem, priekšplānā izvirzot un kritiski izvērtējot spēļu saturu, kontekstu plašākā kultūras laukā un māksliniecisko līmeni. Mūsdienu spēles pat speciāli kopē dažādu aizgājušu desmitgažu vizuālos un tehniskos risinājumus, piepildot tos ar mūsdienām aktuālu saturu un izmantojot jaunas spēļu tehnikas. Spēļu saturs izaicina ne tikai spēlētāju tehnisko varēšanu, pacietību un prāta asumu, bet arī morālās un politiskās pārliecības. Jaunās paaudzes spēļu kritiķi – kā piemēram Penny Arcade, Escapist un Videogamedunkey – arī pašu kritiku un analīzi piedāvā laikmetam piemērotā formātā – kā grafiskās noveles vai arī komisku un absurdu video. Angliski runājošajā pasaulē diskusijas par spēļu vietu kultūras un mākslu pulciņā jau norimušas pirms 15 gadiem kopā ar ietekmīgā amerikāņu filmu kritiķa Rodžera Eberta nāvi, kurš pēdējais vēl turējās pretī digitālo spēļu kā mākslas formas iespējamībai. Svarīgs arī fakts, ka apgrozījuma ziņā digitālo spēļu industrija jau labu laiku vairākas reizes pārspēj filmu, seriālu un populārās mūzikas industrijas kopā ņemot. Un šajā desmitgadē biežāk labām spēlēm tiek izveidotas sliktas filmu adaptācijas, nevis otrādi. Latvijā digitālo spēļu industrija strādā ar vairāku desmitu miljonu eiro lielu apgrozījumu un tajā darbojas vismaz 300 spēļu izstrādātāju. Divtūkstošo gadu sākumā entuziastu izveidotā Latvijas spēļu gada balva Indago nu jau pārtapusi ikgadējā “Latvijas spēļu gada balvā”, ko organizē Latvijas spēļu izstrādātāju asociācija piesaistot starptautisku žūriju. Spēles Latvijā izstrādā gan “Ekonomikas un kultūras augstskolas” bakalaura studiju programmas “datorspēļu dizains” absolventi, gan matemātiķi, datorzinātnieki, arhitekti, dizaineri, animatori, mūziķi, literāti kā arī citu radošo jomu pārstāvji.  

I am joined by Jerry Holkins aka Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade to discuss some of the queer themes inherent to the Canonical Gaming Webcomic of Record. We also discuss his experiences with being a parent to a Trans kid and navigating the expectations of a younger generation that is growing up in vastly different circumstance than you. ~~~Penny Arcade LinksPenny Arcade WebsitePAXChild's PlayTycho Brahe Twitter~~~Support Haus of Decline on Patreon!Visit hausofdecline.comNostalgia is fleeting,but @hausofdecline is foreverPlease email complaints, suggestions, or requests to hausofdecline@gmail.com  Thank you for listening.Explicit Content Warning. You WERE warned.  That's what the little E signifies.    ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Loxie & Zoot is a webcomic created by Grace Crowley which ran from 2003 to 2006, during the big webcomic boom when titles like Penny Arcade, Ctrl+Alt+Del, and 8-Bit Theater rose to prominence. Its titular characters run an Australian nudist camp together called Koala Bares, populated by a diverse cast of characters including multiple men named Herb and an eccentric old man named Mungo who seems to be able to see into the future.Over the comic's run, they deal with the anti-nude politician Tex Tyler's weird schemes, college porn scams, a traveler from another dimension, and jewel thieves who aren't what you expect.These storylines are all quite elaborate, with Crowley weaving multiple plot threads together involving several cast members, plus plenty of zany, good natured gags and frank discussions of body image and other familiar nudist issues without ever sounding preachy.

In this week's episode, I take a look at how to make a bad book cover, and things that you should avoid on your book's cover. I also take a look back at my top 10 bestselling books of 2023. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: JANGHOSTS The coupon code is valid through January 31st, 2024, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we've got you covered! Reference links to books mentioned in the show. The Fellowship of the Ring: https://www.tolkienguide.com/modules/wiwimod/index.php?page=BREM+US+PB+FOTR My Brilliant Friend: https://www.amazon.com/My-Brilliant-Friend-Neapolitan-Novels/dp/1609450787 TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 183 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 12th, 2024, and today we're going to talk about how to make a bad book cover. We'll also take a look back at my top 10 best selling books of 2023. Before we do that, let's have this week's Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Child of the Ghosts, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Child of the Ghosts for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: JANGHOSTS. That's JANGHOSTS and that will be included in the show notes with a link. The coupon code is valid through January 31st, 2024. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we've got you covered. Let's also have an update on my current writing projects. As of right now, I am 97,000 words into Shield of Storms, which puts me on Chapter 18 of 21, though the final draft will probably have a slightly different number of chapters as I move things around. I am hoping to get to 100,000 words before the end of the day when I finish recording this. We'll see how the rest of the day goes. Once Shield of Storms is out, my next book will be Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling and I am 59,000 words into that and I will finish that up and have it come out relatively quickly after Shields of Storms is released. I'm also 12,000 words into Half-Elven Thief, but that will be a ways off yet because once Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling is finished, I want to write Ghost in the Veils first so I can make its recording slot in April. In audio news, as I mentioned last week, the audiobook of Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation is out, as excellently narrated by CJ McAllister and you can get that at all audiobook stores.   00:01:51 Top 10 Ebooks, Audiobooks, and Print Book Sales for 2023 As I mentioned before, I wanted to take a look back at my top ten books and audiobooks of 2023, and I did that because it's time to start figuring out taxes for 2023, which means checking paperwork, making sure your books are balanced, making sure all your receipts are properly organized, filing for 1099s, and all the other various little chores that go into preparing to file your taxes, at least in the United States. It also means finding out the top 10 bestselling books of 2023. So to start with, here are my Top 10 bestselling ebooks of 2023. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that 2023 was the year of the Dragonskull series: #1: Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer #2: Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock #3: Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress #4: Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods #5: Cloak of Dragonfire #6: Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians #7 Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire #8 Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight #9 Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves #10 Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs   So basically my best selling ebooks of 2023 were the Dragonskull series plus Cloak of Dragonfire. This bodes well for both Shield of Storms, which is a direct follow up to Dragonskull, and Cloak of Titans later this year. Audio, of course, has become an increasingly important format, so here are my Top 10 bestselling audiobooks across all platforms for 2023: #1: The Ghosts: Omnibus One #2: Frostborn: The Shadow Prison #3: Frostborn: The World Gate #4: Frostborn: The High Lords #5: Frostborn: The Dwarven Prince #6: Frostborn: The Dragon Knight #7: Frostborn: Excalibur #8: Frostborn: The Gorgon Spirit #9: Frostborn: The False King #10: Frostborn: The Dark Warden   So for audio, 2023 was nearly almost entirely the year of Frostborn, but people still really like the big omnibus audiobooks like The Ghosts: Omnibus One. Paperbacks for me are a much smaller sales channel than either ebooks or audiobooks. I sell more in both ebook and audio than I do in paperback, but as it turns out, it's really easy to run the report of bestselling paperbacks. So with that in mind, here are my Top 10 bestselling paperbacks of 2023: #1: The Windows Command Line Beginner's Guide #2: The Linux Command Line Beginner's Guide #3: The Ubuntu Beginner's Guide #4: Frostborn: The Gray Knight #5: Frostborn:  The Eightfold Knife #6: Sevenfold Sword: Champion #7: Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight #8: Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress #9: Malison: The Complete Series #10: Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs   So those were my top 10 bestselling paperback books of 2023. I don't really write about technology very much anymore, and I stopped shortly before I started recording this podcast in 2019. I enjoyed writing about technology quite a bit, but there are only so many hours in the day and the money is just a lot better for epic fantasy fiction, and there's less research involved, too. That said, I'm glad that people are still finding my tech books helpful enough to buy. My all-time favorite review of the Windows Command Line Beginner's Guide came from a math professor who said he hated the book, but he couldn't find a better introduction to the Windows Command Line environment, and so he still recommended it to his students. So thanks for reading those books, everyone, and as I said before, I'm still working on Shield of Storms, so hopefully we'll have a new book very soon. 00:05:34 Main Topic of the Week: What Makes a Bad Book Cover? So let's move on to our main topic this week: how to make a bad book cover (from which we hopefully will learn how to make a good book cover). Since I started doing my own covers and spending a lot more time with Photoshop in 2020, obviously this is something I have given a great deal of thought to over the last four years and throughout the entire time I've been self-publishing. So I thought it would make an interesting topic for a show. Let's start off with some specific examples of a bad book cover. One of the most famous ones is The Fellowship of the Ring cover by Barbara Remington, which Tolkien famously did not care for (I'll include a link to it in the show notes, so you can follow if you're curious). It just looks very ‘60s, very psychedelic, and just not at all related to anything connected to what the Lord of the Rings is actually about. Another fairly well-known example of a bad cover is the original cover of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, which is a 1950s story about a woman coming of age in the poor outskirts of Naples. But if you look at the cover (especially the cover linked in the show notes), it looks like kind of a romance novel or a story about a wedding. It doesn't at all reflect what the book is actually about. So as we strive to make good covers, one that will draw readers into books, what should we keep in mind? I think there are to start with three key points to keep in mind when preparing a book cover or consulting with your cover designer about what you would like your book cover to do. First, taste is highly subjective and that leads directly to the second point, which is you're not going to be able to make a book cover that everybody likes, just as you are not going to be able to write a book that everyone likes. The point is to write a book that your audience that you have in mind will enjoy and the cover by extension will be a sort of a guide that can help your audience find the book and let them know that this is the kind of book they would like, that the cover will telegraph in essence, that this is the kind of book that particular reader would like. Three, the main thing is to provide key information about the book, namely the author and the title, easily and quickly with a quick preview of the book through the design of the cover. You want, when you look at a book cover, to immediately in a fraction of a second to be able to grasp the three important points: the name of the book, the author of the book, and the genre of the book. Those should all be immediately apparent when you look at the book cover and anything that gets in the way of that is not a good design element for a book cover. So with that in mind, what shouldn't a book cover do and what design elements do you massively want to avoid on your book cover? First of all, you should avoid bad fonts or fonts that are hard to read. It's important to remember that in a book cover, two of the three things that it needs to convey at a glance are the author name and the title of the book. And if you have bad typography on your book cover, that will sink you. In fact, you can almost get away with having a bad looking image for your book cover, so long as the typography for the author name and the title is suitable. So what constitutes an unsuitable font for a book cover? Colors that are hard to read and shall we say overly artistic or overly stylized fonts that are difficult to read. You know something like wingdings or some really overly complicated font with too many flourishes. You want the font to be able to be easy to read. You want the font to be a color that is easy to read and is visible against the rest of the cover. You don't want the font to be too small either, because then that will make it difficult to read. That ideal is even once in a thumbnail on the Amazon website that you can still pretty easily get the author name and the title. You also will want to avoid design elements that clash. We can all think of examples of badly Photoshopped covers where there's like a Photoshop picture of a horse or cowboy or a Scottish Lord or something that is very badly Photoshopped in and doesn't look at all good. Part of that is avoiding images that are poor resolution. If any element of your cover looks pixelated, it's time to have a rethink and choose different elements. This can be a problem if you're getting stock photos from free stock photo sites, which is not the best idea because just because the site says the stock photos are free and licensed for commercial use doesn't mean that they actually are, because there's not really much of a safeguarding process. You're better off using a reputable stock photo site where you pay for credits and then keep a record of what you use. And that way, if there's any legal challenges or troubles you can say, well, the stock photo I got off iStock Photo in 2019. Here's the record of it and then you would be good to go. Even if you have good images, it's important to make sure that the image matches with the genre of the book. If you have an image that does not match the appropriate historical time period of the book or the fantasy aesthetics, that won't work. For example, you have a Regency romance book set in 19th century England and the woman on the cover is wearing a leather jacket and jeans, that would immediately be a bad cover design element. To return to the topic of The Lord of the Rings, you have a cover of the Lord of the Rings where Aragorn is dressed like a Wall Street broker and Frodo is wearing shorts, a t-shirt, and a backward baseball cap, that would also be a poor choice for cover design. You'll also want to avoid major inaccuracies on the cover. This is not hugely important but it can significantly annoy a subset of readers. Like for example, a cover of Anne of Green Gables where the Anne on the cover is blonde when in the book Anne quite famously has red hair (and in fact it's a plot point, if I remember right). You probably don't want to include ad copy on the cover because that is a waste of valuable real estate. Now granted, if you get, like an endorsement from like a major celebrity or some sort of significant author in your field, it's probably a good idea to put the blurb on your cover then. Like, if you are writing a mystery and say you get, like blurbs from like John Sanford or Harlan Coben or Karin Slaughter or other, you know, major mystery writers, you know, that's probably good idea to put that on the cover. However, if you're picking quotes off Goodreads or Amazon or something to put on your book cover, that's probably not a good idea. And you may not, in fact, actually have the right to do that based on U.S. law, because technically I believe the copyright for the review belongs to the person who wrote it. So that is something to avoid, you know, taking quotes from reviews from Amazon or Goodreads or TikTok or something, though you can probably make an exception if you like, get a major figure in your genre to endorse your book. Finally, you would also probably want to avoid the default templates provided by Canva or Amazon. If you self-publish a book on Amazon and you don't have a cover, you can use one of the premade ones that Amazon provides. But to be honest, these are not very good and they don't look very good, so it's probably best to avoid those if at all possible. You'll also want to avoid book cover design elements that can actively irritate people. One of those is photographs of people, especially if it's just a stock image. Generally, if you want a stock image to look good as a book cover, it needs to go through Photoshop quite a bit. It needs to, you know, make sure it matches the colors of the background. You might need some color adjustment. You might need some shading. You might need to apply a couple of masks to it to make it look properly good. This is actually one of the reasons why I started using DAZ 3D modeling because it's very hard to find a long string of stock photos with the same character you can use for book covers, whereas with DAZ, as you can generate a character who looks like how you want the character look and then use that over and over again in different poses and so forth and different shadings and different enhancements in Photoshop to keep consistent look across all the covers, which is what I've done for the Caina Ghost series and the Nadia Cloak Mage series, which would be a lot harder to do with stock images. Something else that really tends to annoy people is shirtless men or women in overly revealing outfits. From a purely a publisher's perspective, this can get you in trouble. If you have a book cover that's showing a little too much skin, the various retailers might reject it or you will be able to run ads on the book, or the system will automatically sort it as erotica, which would limit its visibility on the store and therefore its sales potential. One trend from the 2000s and 2010s that used to be popular but now no longer is, is stock photos where the character's head is chopped off and you sort of just see them from the neck down on the cover. That was very popular for a while in the 2010s. It is not popular now and people might complain about your cover if you have that on there. You may also want to avoid images are too abstract or too bland. I'm thinking about, like a lot of modern literary fiction covers have just random color swirls on the cover (it doesn't look good) or the rereleased versions of Robert Jordan's covers for the Wheel of Time. They used to have this really beautiful fantasy artwork on them. Now it's just a vaguely faded symbol from the book. It just doesn't look good compared to the older ones, and I think there was a mistake on the publisher's part. You will also, in my opinion, very much want to avoid AI art. There's a couple of good reasons for this. One is that a very significant subset of the population absolutely hates AI art, refuses to have anything to do with it, and will not buy anything that uses it. Every time a major company like Wizards of the Coast or Microsoft or somebody uses AI art in some sort of advertisement, there is an immediate backlash on social media and you will want to avoid that. More practically, the copyright status of AI art is still a massively open question. As of this recording, which is January 12th, 2024, there are many lawsuits underway to determine whether or not AI generated art and text is in fact a form of copyright infringement, and as of right now, the question is unsettled. A couple of months ago, Amazon started adding a check box to the KDP Publishing forum where you need to disclose if your book uses AI elements, and I strongly suspect part of the reason they did that was in case there's like a Supreme Court ruling in the US or a major piece of legislation that drastically changes the legality of AI generated art and text. Then they have an easy out to immediately wipe all that stuff off the store and say, well, we do our due diligence about this. You can't sue us. So for all those reasons, I do think it is a very, very good idea to avoid any AI images in any book covers or audiobook covers or anything you sell for right now.   00:17:39 What Should a Book Cover Do? So let's move on from the negative to the positive. What should a book cover do? As we mentioned earlier in the show, the book cover has three missions. At a single glance, it should convey the author name, the book title, and the genre of the book. It is in fact fairly simple to convey a genre in a book. It's just the hard part is making it look good. Like for example, if you have a book with a dragon on the cover, obviously that's going to be fantasy. If you have a book with like a spaceship flying near a planet, that is going to be a science fiction book. In fact, I redid all the covers in my Silent Order series to be a spaceship flying near a planet after I read a joke about that in a Penny Arcade comic where one of the characters of comics says they only buy books with spaceships and planets on them, and I realized that would probably be the best way to convey what the Silent Order series was about. And in fact, sales did go up after I changed all those covers. Other examples would be if you see a man and a woman looking longingly at one another, that's going to be a romance novel. If the character is wearing a long coat and has his or her back to the camera walking down a dark street, odds are you've got a mystery. If it's a highly edited photo of like the US Capitol or the White House or something, and the title is something like, you know, Patriot Fury, you're probably looking at a thriller novel. So there's lots of conventions to convey what genre book is and the best way to learn them is, you know, to read a lot and to look at a lot of different book covers, which is in the modern age, very easy to do as you scroll through Amazon or Apple or whatever. The text should also be as easy to read as possible, especially in thumbnail or smaller images, so you may have to make the text what feels like slightly ridiculously large, but so long as it's reasonably easy to read, then you'll have achieved the mission of the text. And if possible, you want to hint at the plot without telling the story. A good example of that would be like an urban fantasy book where the cover shows a woman wearing a leather jacket and you know, magic glowing things glowing around her hand. So that hints at what the plot is going to be about or like a thriller novel where you see a woman in like a tank top and combat pants holding a combat knife and a pistol that hints that is going to be a thriller novel and she'll be, you know, fighting for her life. Finally, the last point is fairly subjective and hard to do, but, if possible, you want to balance uniqueness with being familiar enough where people understand the genre at a glance. You don't want to copy someone else's design for many good reasons, but you want to have one that both expresses the genre of the book yet somehow is a little bit unique and that is something you try to strive for, if possible, with the book cover. So that's it for this week. I hope those tips were helpful. I would just like a minute to thank my transcriptionist. As you might have noticed on The Pulp Writer Show website, we now have transcriptions of the newer episodes and she helped me pull together the research for this episode, so thank you for doing that. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found this show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.

Good morning, Gus! After our trip to Talisman and finding out its a BBQ spot too, we go back and try it out. It may not be burgers this week but Gus & Geoff do mental backflips to make it work. Either way, listen to these guys talk about Restaurant pickles, Fugazi, Satanic panic, Webrings, Penny Arcade, March of technology, the 25 year timeline, and Stinkuary. Check out our shirts over at store.roosterteeth.com We like em. Sponsored by Shady Rays http://shadyrays.com and use code ANMA Fum tryfum.com/ANMA and Magic Spoon http://magicspoon.com/ANMA and use code ANMA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we begin a new series on 2009's Rocksteady breakout, Batman: Arkham Asylum. We set the game in its time, as well as introducing its principals, and talk a bit about one man's fandom. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: Roughly up to first Scarecrow encounter Issues covered: introducing the center of the madness, returning to these two, mythology and archetype, the games of 2009, some early Rocksteady history, coming out of the shadows, developing their process, taking on the superhero genre, licensed titles and not overcoming them, replicating game designs to the license, something finally living up to or exceeding expectations, a long digression into superhero cinema, seeing the attention to detail, pre-code comics and other Brett comic history, a small development team, puzzle box, comparing team sizes, a time with fewer new sorts of games, the August window, great voice cast and writing, seeing signs that they really care, narrative design and other writers, getting a lot of mileage from the voice cast, setting up the story, a big plan from the Joker, introducing Arkham as the location, constraining Batman to present the Joker, not your typical Batman universe, exaggerated characters, a simple setup/trope, establishing a new look for Harley Quinn, other influences for the art direction, "I admire its purity," the clear proof of concept in vertical slice, what a vertical slice, solving major production questions, a good tutorial room vs one that works less well, having all the elements, how Batman has stealth, using fantasy in the checkpointing, impacting later Batmen, filling a Pokedex.  Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Dungeons and Dragons, Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, Joaquin Phoenix, DC and Marvel, The Batman, Robert Pattinson, Sega, Michael Keaton, Batman: The Animated Series, PlayStation, Jamie Fristrom, Insomniac, Uncharted 2, Borderlands, Demons's Souls, Ratchet & Clank, Brutal Legend, League of Legends, Assassin's Creed II, Infamous, Eye of the Beholder, Dragon Age: Origins, Left 4 Dead 2, New Super Mario Bros Wii, Bayonetta, Rocksteady, Urban Chaos, Warner Bros, Eidos, Crystal Dynamics, Jamie Walker, Sefton Hill, Argonaut Games, Ubisoft, Star Wars, Electronic Arts, Lord of the Rings, Godfather, Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan, Tim Burton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Joel Schumacher, Peter Jackson, Superman 64, Freedom Force, Grant Morrison, Dave McKean, Sandman, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, X-Men, Ben Affleck, Metroidvania, Fallout 3, Bethesda Game Studios, Dark Souls, BioShock, Madden, Baldur's Gate III, Larian Studios, Paul Dini, Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, Arlene Sorkin, Adrienne Barbeau, Half-Life, John Cena, Steve Austin, The Rock, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns, Alex Ross, Gotham Central, Gears of War, Tomb Raider, Alien, Penny Arcade, Sam Fisher, Thief, Flight of the Conchords, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia.  Next time: More! We don't know how much more! Twitch: brettdouville or timlongojr, instagram:timlongojr, Twitter: @timlongojr and @devgameclub Discord  DevGameClub@gmail.com

In this week's episode, I celebrate finishing the 14th and final book of the SILENT ORDER series by looking back at the writing of the series over the last six years. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE STORM, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE STORM for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: GHOSTSTORM The coupon code is valid through September 29th, 2023, so if you find yourself needing entertainment as we proceed deeper into the school year, perhaps it's time to get a new audiobook! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Coupon of the Week Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 167 of the Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 8th, 2023, and today we're taking a look back at writing the Silent Order series and a retrospective of the last six years. First, let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Storm as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghosts in the Storm for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code GHOSTSTORM. That's GHOSTSTORM and you can find the link and the coupon code in the show notes. This coupon code will be valid through September the 29th, 2023. So if you find yourself needing entertainment as you proceed deeper into the school year, perhaps it's time to get a new audiobook. 00:00:50 Writing Updates What have I been working on? Brand new-wise, as you can probably tell from the title of this episode, Silent Order: Pulse Hand is done and it is published and you can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip. So the series is complete and the last book is now available and it's selling briskly. And thank you all for that. Now that that is done and my Summer of Finishing Things is finally finished with Dragon Skull and Silent Order being finished, I have started on the Ghost Armor series and the first book will be Ghost in the Serpent. And I am 10,000 words into it as this recording. And if all goes well, I'm hoping that will be out sometime in October and the audiobook of it before the end of the year. Starting a new series like this involves a fair bit of world building, and there's one good trick to know if you've picked a good name for a fantasy character. You Google it and you get 0 results. I do always Google character names before I commit to them. Sometimes you accidentally pick the name of someone who's been some sort of notorious criminal or controversial political figure, so it's best to avoid that, which I have to admit is less of a problem with fantasy names. However, when inventing fantasy names, you do occasionally stumble on a name that means another language, something like “very impolite term for women who sells carnal favors to the lowest echelons of society.” And you definitely don't want your character named after that, so it is always wise to Google. In audiobook news, the recording is underway for Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians. I expect we will start proofing chapters soon and I am looking forward to sharing that with all of you once it's done. We have one reader question this week from Wilson, who says: When are you coming back to the Third Soul series? Also Sevenfold Sword Online is calling you, lol. In answer to that… How to phrase this? I'm not saying no to doing more than Third Soul, but I don't have anything planned at the moment. I wrote The Third Soul, what would become The Third Soul now, 14 years ago, back in 2009? And so if I was to do it today, I would want to do many things differently. So if I did do something in The Third Soul, it'll probably be a slightly improved version of the setting with new characters, which, as I said, I'm not saying no to, but I don't have any current plans to do so. I am working on the Sevenfold Sword Online book. I'm on Chapter 2 of…actually, I don't know how many chapters it will be, but probably in the upper teens. But I am about 5,000 words into it. And I think that will probably be the either last book I published in 2023 or the first book I published in 2024, we'll see how the rest of this year goes. 00:03:40 Silent Order Retrospective Now, on to this week's main topic, a retrospective back on the Silent Order series, which seems suitable because as I said earlier, my Summer of Finishing Things has finished. The Silent Order of science fiction series is finally complete after 14 books, 769,000 words and six years. In fact, September 2023 marks the six year anniversary of when I published the first five books in the series. Like I did with Dragonskull, the other series I finished in summer 2023, I thought I would take a look back at the end of The Silent Order series in the Internet's favorite favored format, a numbered article and or podcast episode. Minor spoilers follow for The Silent Order series, but no major ones. 00:04:22 #1 The Protagonist When I started thinking about The Silent Order way back in 2016, I had just read the original James Bond books by Ian Fleming for the first time. I decided that I wanted to write about a spy, but in space. I also wanted to write a character who is essentially the opposite of James Bond, so the name was a play on that from James Bond to Jack March. The inspiration was that bond stays in place, but march is moving forward. Unfortunately though, I didn't realize it until the books were published and people started pointing it out to me, this meant that Jack March had the same initials as I do, which led to occasional accusations of him being an author avatar. This was definitely not what I had in mind. If anything, the closest match to my personality in any of my books would be The Sculptor from Frostborn: The Dwarven Prince, a curmudgeonly technician prone to occasional ranting. I did make March a contrast from James Bond, at least the literary version. Bond is gregarious, charming, drinks way too much, and has a different girl of the week. Well, every weekend, sometimes every day. March is grim, taciturn, very professional, and gets annoyed at the thought of a girl of the week. His fight against The Final Consciousness is personal in a way that various nemeses in the books rarely were. I believe Ian Fleming originally intended to make the Soviets the overarching big bad of the Bond books, but after tensions eased marginally between the West and the Soviets in the 60s, he switched to different villains and eventually settled on Specter and Blofeld. 00:05:56  #2 The Setting Specifically, Calaskar. March works for The Silent Order, part of the intelligence agency of the Interstellar Kingdom of Calaskar, which has seven core systems and several hundred minor colonies of varying sizes around the solar systems it claims. Calaskar is more culturally conservative than its neighbors, especially Rustaril and Raetia. But not terribly repressive. An American from the 1950s would find it rather relaxed, while an American from 2023 would probably find it stifling and conformist. It was a thought experiment on my part. How would a technologically advanced, yet relatively stable society look in the distant future? Of course, Calaskar isn't always stable. Where Rustaril and Raetia used to be part of the Kingdom but broke away and went in very different directions. It helped that March was born inside the empire of The Final Consciousness and so able to look at Calaskaran in society with a critical eye. He does think it tends toward the conformist and the parochial, but it doesn't have the brutality of the labor camps of The Final Consciousness, the social decay of Rustaril, or the vast gap between rich and poor of Raetia and the Falcon Republic. 00:07:08 #3 The Final Consciousness The Final Consciousness, also known half mockingly as The Machinists, is the overarching villain of the series. They're basically space communists combined with some of the crazier transhumanist ideas. The initial inspiration was the first few original James Bond books, where the Soviets and SMERSH were the chief adversaries. Further inspiration for the final consciousness came from college professors and crazy tech million. Years, sometimes college professors and academics will propose the most appalling things, like we need to reduce the Earth's population to 1 billion people, or everyone should be housed in giant cities and not allowed to leave, or children should be taken from their parents at birth to be raised in impartial institutions. The academics are always super unclear about how to do that and glide over little details like, how exactly the population will be reduced from 9 billion to one or how will they be encouraged to move into giant cities. These various tech billionaires also provided additional inspiration for The Final Consciousness. If you will forgive something of a generalization, it seems that if you become a billionaire in America, there's a non trivial chance you're going to turn into a transhumanist weirdo, like you'll want to put computer chips in people's brains, or you'll spend all your time worrying about the singularity and artificial intelligence. Or you'll spend 18 hours a day exercising and taking experimental treatments and claim to have the body of a teenager when you're 43, when to the unprejudiced eye, you actually look like a very fit 42 year old. The Final Consciousness is what you would get if all these people had unlimited resources to put their very bad ideas into practice. What they ended up with was a tyrannical hive mind ruling over an essentially enslaved population. The hive mind, believing itself to be the final stage of human consciousness and evolution, was driven to expand and destroy all the obsolete societies around it. That did not match the self perceived perfection of The Final Consciousness. Since Machinists tried and failed to militarily conquer Calaskar they turned instead to infiltration and subversion, which touches off the plot of The Silent Order series. Of course, the hive mind was built on the technology of the Great Elder Ones, an extinct alien race, who turned out to be not so extinct after all. 00:09:16 #4 The Great Elder Ones In a lot of science fiction, you have sort of elements of Lovecraftian cosmic horror working their way in, and that's where The Great Elder Ones came from. I had the original idea of The Great Elder Ones way back in the late 2000s, long before I discovered self-publishing. I was thinking about a fantasy series in a world that had an early modern level of technology. The study would have a communist revolution which would create the inevitable dictatorship and secret police state that always seems to follow communist revolutions, but the twist would be that the secret police organization was actually a cult worshipping a dark power, and they plan to use the mass loss of life associated with revolution to fuel a summoning spell to bring their dark power back to the world. I abandoned that ideas as unworkable and unlikely to sell, but I returned in the relationship between The Great Elder Ones and The Final Consciousness. Of course, Silent Order is science fiction, not fantasy, so it was cast in science fiction terms. The Final Consciousness used the surviving technology of The Great Elder Ones to build their hive mind, but that made them vulnerable to manipulation and control from The Great Elder Ones. The Great Elder Ones have been locked outside this universe by their ancient enemies, but plan to use The Final Consciousness is pawns to allow them to return and destroy the universe like they originally intended. 00:10:32 #5. The First Five Books I originally started writing Silent Order: Iron Hand on New Year's Eve in 2016. My original plan was to actually write the first four books, and once they were done, release them once a week until they were all out. I ended up writing a fifth book because of a news article I read. Originally I planned to go straight from Silent Order: Axiom End to Silent Order: Fire Hand. However, I read an article in mid 2016 arguing that an iPad made for better productivity tool than a Linux desktop. I found this implausible. In the seven years since then, the iPad has become better as a productivity tool, and since you can get a keyboard case and cast it to a bigger screen, but it's still really expensive and it's a lot easier to hook up an ergonomic keyboard and a big ‘ol monitor to a Linux System than to an iPad. It's substantially cheaper too. So to make a point, I wrote, edited and published Silent Order: Eclipse Hand entirely on Ubuntu Linux. Back then I still wrote about technology and Linux on a regular basis, so it fit neatly into my workflow. I also designed the cover entirely on GIMP on Ubuntu. More on that soon. All five books were ready to go in September 2017, and then I published the first one at the end of September, and the rest in October of that year. The initial plan was to put them in Kindle Unlimited since science fiction was very popular in Kindle Unlimited at that point. However, this disappointed enough people that I abandoned the initial plan and switched to wide distribution, which means books were on in addition to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, and Smashwords. This series had a good start and I thought that it would be an open-ended series with a new adventure of the week with every boo. More soon or why this didn't quite work out. However, moving the books out of KU proved a wise decision. For all of 2023, as of this recording, only 49.1% of Silent Order's total revenue came from Amazon, the rest came from the other retailers. If that was a parliamentary democracy, they could make a coalition against Amazon if they wanted. There's no way KU page reads could have made-up that difference, especially since the Kindle Unlimited payment rate per page is quite a bit lower than it was in 2017. 012:55 #6: History I set the Silent Order books a long, long way into the future. Like roughly 100,000 years from now. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, it's always a little painful when you read older science fiction, you come across a sentence like mankind had its first hyperspace flight in 1996, or the protagonists have a problem but need to conserve computer power because they only have so many data space/data tapes. The phenomenon of one's futuristic science fiction becoming dated is called zeerust, and something I wanted to avoid if possible in Silent Order. Second, having the series take place 100,000 years into the future left a lot of wiggle room in the setting's back story. It meant that things could be lost, forgotten, or distorted for most of the series. No one is entirely sure exactly where Earth was, because the information has been lost after 100,000 years of human expansion into space. Obviously that kind of thing can be useful for plotting. In the Silent Order back story, there were five United Terran Empires that ruled over mankind for thousands of years at a time, but they all collapsed for various reasons. It also meant there could be lost technology plots as all the Terran empires had technological expertise that was lost when they collapsed… genetic engineering and high level AI and so forth. Third, it let me disconnect Silent Order from a lot of contemporary disputes here in the early 21st century. One of the tricky parts of writing near future science fiction is that it's easy to have the books take a stance on the immediate crises of the day, which can annoy a lot of readers. Having the books set so far into the future means that from the perspective of characters, years the various concerns of the 2020s seen as academic and as dusty as, for example, the Investiture Controversy or the dispute between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines seems to us today. So to someone in Jack March's time, the 2020 election and all its upheaval, or the coronavirus pandemic would be as distant and academic as the Investiture Controversy is to us today. 00:14:55 #7 Technology One complaint about the books was that Jack March regularly used a gun, a chemically propelled kinetic firearm, or that he often used a handheld computer he called the phone. Like, why didn't he always use a laser pistol or a particle gun, or have some sort of hyper advanced neural implant that functioned as a phone? Isn't this science fiction, for heaven's sake? Of course, that's a bit like asking why in 2023 you're still using a knife to cut your bread when instead you can use a high end laser cutter. The answer, of course, is that the knife is cheap and reliable and fulfills this technological niche so perfectly that even though there are more advanced alternatives available, it would be costly and pointless to use them. I think chemically propelled firearms fulfill that niche as well. People forget this, but firearms have been around for over 800 years. King Edward the Third used cannons in the opening battles of the 100 Years War, which started in 1337 A.D., quite a long time ago. Obviously firearms have been refined and improved considerably since that time, but the basic principle remains the same: metal tube, metal projectile, chemical propellant. Even in Jack March's time, a chemically propelled firearm offers many advantages. It doesn't require electricity and can be built without computer parts, meaning the weapon is immune to an EMP effect. Additionally, it is much less fragile than a more advanced weapon. The AK47 could famously still fire even after being dragged through a stream or left in the dirt for a while. Granted, it may not be terribly accurate, but it could still fire. With 100,000 years' worth of small improvements in material science, You couldn't 3D print a working firearm in your basement. It wouldn't even be made of metal and therefore much harder to detect. When March uses a phone obviously it would be more advanced than anything available today, but the word phone is a convenient shorthand to refer to personal data, mobile computing and communication device, and I settled on that instead of using a more science fiction-esque word like data pad or personal terminal. I didn't want to call it a communicator because that brings Star Trek to mind. Besides, one the cardinal rules of writing is to never use a long word when a shorter one will suffice. 00:17:02 #8 The Covers If I remember right, I ended up redoing the covers for the Silent Order series five times in total. The first set used a combination of a stock photo spaceship and a stock photo planet along with the custom font I paid for. After a while I had stock photos of people holding weapons against space background, but that really didn't work, so I switched down for a new set of stock photos of spaceships and planets. I was bumping up against the limits of what I could do with stock photos and GIMP. The difficulty of stock photos is their limitations. What you see is what you get. Ask anyone who's done any design work of any kind, and you'll probably get stories of searches for stock photos that turned up many pictures that almost good enough, but not quite. Then the COVID hysteria came around and I used some of the free time that generated to take a Photoshop course. I managed to produce a fourth set of covers, ones that used human figures and looked quite a bit better than the previous set of covers. However, shortly after that I saw Penny Arcade cartoon that has solidified my opinion on science fiction cover. They needed planets and they needed spaceships, and they needed to be in proximity. I redid the covers one more time. Suddenly, on five years after the final look of the series, which featured a spaceship, a planet, and in close proximity planets and spaceships was indeed the way to go. The series has had its best sales with the final set of covers. 00:18:29 #9 False Ending Despite my best efforts, Silent Order never sold as well as my fantasy books, and after eight books I wanted to do something else. Originally, as I mentioned, I planned for the series to be open-ended and ongoing. However, in the years since I've learned that in fantasy and science fiction, especially indie fantasy and science fiction, that really doesn't work. Like if you're John Sanford or Jeffrey Deaver, Jonathan Kellerman, JD Robb, or CJ Box, you can write books where your protagonists essentially has an adventure of the week or year, given traditional publishing schedules, without an overarching plot to the series. However, that's a different genre than fantasy and science fiction. And in traditional publishing, it's basically a different business model. I think because of certain well-known authors in fantasy literature who haven't finished their series, readers in the indie fantasy and science fiction space expect completed series with an overarching plot that gets resolved and quite a few of them refused to read an unfinished series at all. So I decided to wrap things up with Book Nine, which was Silent Order: Ark Hand in 2018 and give the series an ending with Jack March settling down on Calaskar. I intended to stop there and did stop there for three years. But people kept asking when I was going to write more in the series and I did feel I left too much unfinished with the Pulse and the Great Elder Ones. So in 2021, I decided to pick it up again, thinking it would take one or two more books to wrap up the series with a further ending. It turned out to be 5 more books for 14 total. I thought it was going to be 15. But after I finished #13, I thought 14 and 15 would be better combined as a single book, which is how we got Pulse Hand. 00:20:00 #10. Thanks, Chat GPT It only took six years to write the series, which isn't all that long, but technology has changed quite a bit during that six years and insane AI was a feature of the books dating all the way back to Silent Order: Wraith Hand, which I wrote back in 2017. I first introduced the character of Thunderbolt, another insane AI when I wrote Silent Order: Royal Hand in 2021. Though she wouldn't appear in the books until Thunder Hand in 2023, between the writing of Royal Hand and Thunder Hand, ChatGPT, Mid Journey, Bing Chat, and all the other generative AI tools entered the mainstream. This was a tremendous boon to me. Not because I used them for the writing. My overall opinion of generative AI remains that it's bad. And if it's not meaning the strict legal definition of plagiarism, then it's at least sitting on the same couch as plagiarism, but because of all the tales of AI meltdowns that made it into the mainstream press, like when Microsoft rolled out Bing Chat AI and it famously would go on unhinged rants, threatening people, dissolve into incoherent logical loops, and insist that factually incorrect information was the truth and threatened anyone who doubted it, and otherwise have all kinds of glitches that range from hilarious to deeply disturbing. I read those articles with great amusement and delight and based Thunderbolt's personality off them. Of course, Thunderbolt has rail guns and their own automated fleet of space warships, so when she has breakdowns, it's a little more concerning. So nearly seven years after I had first had the idea, the Silent Order series has come to its conclusion, its proper conclusion this time. I do hope that you found the ending satisfying. 00:21:26 Conclusion I'd also like to thank Silent Order readers for the enthusiasm for the series in ‘22 and 2023. After I settled on the final cover design, it sold better than it ever has, but still doesn't sell nearly as well as my various fantasy books. That was one of the reasons I was going to stop after Book 9, but the sheer enthusiasm people had for the books and the nagging sense that it wasn't quite finished led me to write 5 more. So thank you all for reading and for coming along with Jack March on this long, long journey. And if you've never heard of Silent Order or if you're one of those people who only reads completed series, the first book is free on all the ebook platforms, so why not check it out? You get Silent Order: Iron Hand for free at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Kobo, Apple Book, Scribd, and Smashwords. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

Αλλάζει το πρόγραμμα, αλλάζουν και τα φώτα, με σκέψεις για φρέσκιες δηλώσεις του Shawn Layden, την αντιμετώπιση σύγχρονων RPG και το ζόρι της επένδυσης χρόνου σε εύρος παιχνιδιών. Get in touch: Email | Twitter Ι Facebook Group Hosted by: Elias Pappas - Facebook | Twitter | Instagram Manos Vezos - The Vez | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram Ι Apple Music Transmedia 'Stray' movie and 'Ice Age' director's next film a go at Annapurna Vampire: The Masquerade World of Darkness Partners with Techland, Penny Arcade, and Well Played Games for Licensed Vampire: The Masquerade Projects Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 launches in fall 2024, developed by The Chinese Room Lenovo Legion Go Lenovo's Legion Go is an iPad mini-sized portable PC with detachable controllers Cyberpunk 2077 CD Projekt confirms which new Cyberpunk 2077 features are free and which are tied to its expansion Layden Shawn Layden issues warning about non-endemics breaking into games RPGάδα Starfield Game Pass subscribers are snapping up Starfield's $35 early access offer Bethesda made Starfield's planets bare to make players "feel small" Starfield reaches 1m concurrent players | News-in-brief True Ending True Ending 69: Final Fantasy XVI | Review FU: Baldur's Gate III Larian Studio CEO Swen Vincke pushes back on Baldur's Gate III being "standard" for games

Αλλάζει το πρόγραμμα, αλλάζουν και τα φώτα, με σκέψεις για φρέσκιες δηλώσεις του Shawn Layden, την αντιμετώπιση σύγχρονων RPG και το ζόρι της επένδυσης χρόνου σε εύρος παιχνιδιών. Get in touch: Email | Twitter Ι Facebook Group Hosted by: Elias Pappas - Facebook | Twitter | Instagram Manos Vezos - The Vez | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram Ι Apple Music Transmedia 'Stray' movie and 'Ice Age' director's next film a go at Annapurna Vampire: The Masquerade World of Darkness Partners with Techland, Penny Arcade, and Well Played Games for Licensed Vampire: The Masquerade Projects Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 launches in fall 2024, developed by The Chinese Room Lenovo Legion Go Lenovo's Legion Go is an iPad mini-sized portable PC with detachable controllers Cyberpunk 2077 CD Projekt confirms which new Cyberpunk 2077 features are free and which are tied to its expansion Layden Shawn Layden issues warning about non-endemics breaking into games RPGάδα Starfield Game Pass subscribers are snapping up Starfield's $35 early access offer Bethesda made Starfield's planets bare to make players "feel small" Starfield reaches 1m concurrent players | News-in-brief True Ending True Ending 69: Final Fantasy XVI | Review FU: Baldur's Gate III Larian Studio CEO Swen Vincke pushes back on Baldur's Gate III being "standard" for games

Microsoft rebrands Xbox Live Gold, the Famicom turns 40, Jeff tells the story about that Penny Arcade comic strip and the potential job offer that came afterwards, and we're also talkin' Xenotilt, Exoprimal, and Diablo IV's upcoming Season 1 all on this week's edition of The Jeff Gerstmann Show.

We're here to have a nice time! Show Notes: Run Time: 1:26:24 Christopher's been traveling! He did some livestreams with the Penny Arcade crew last week, and here's the one of them he promised to put in the show notes! Adam and Christopher are getting ready to travel to Gen Con! It's gonna be a good time! We hope as many of you as possible can attend the Gen Con Live recording of The Letters Page! There will be at least one special musical guest! Speaking of Gen Con, it messed up our regular schedule notably. Check it out! Upcoming schedule:  Tuesday, August 1st: Episode #257 - Writers' Room: Parse in space Tuesday, August 8th: NO EPISODE BECAUSE GEN CON Tuesday, August 15th: Gen Con Live 2023! Tuesday, August 22nd: Editor's Note #70 Tuesday, August 29th: Episode #258 - Writers' Room: Tabitha Taft defeats an Alpha foe Finally, we get into questions and answers, and provide plenty of both! Join us next week for Episode #256 in which The Scholar interacts with Darkstrife & Painstake! Darkstrife AND Painstake?! In this economy?! You better believe it.

Think about your most memorable family vacation. Now let me tell you about one of ours that solidified our belief in the power of family, perseverance, and unified goals. We embarked on a road trip to Colorado Springs, a family adventure that connected four generations through God's magnificent creation. Our experiences ranged from marveling at the natural beauty of Red Rocks and Garden of the Gods to exploring the historic Manitou Cliff Dwellings. On a lighter note, we couldn't resist the charm of the Penny Arcade and indulged in some guilty pleasure at In-N-Out Burger.Now, imagine climbing a mountain, not just physically, but metaphorically. In our journey, we found that whether it's life, marriage, or parenthood, having a robust support system is crucial. This episode unpacks the significance of forming a team and drawing on the power of encouragement. Just as we relied on each other while ascending the mountain, we need to invest in those around us using God's words to ensure we can all reach our life goals.So here's the deal, we've all been tempted to take the easy way out when faced with challenges. But we firmly advocate for perseverance! We talk about the importance of setting goals, not taking the bailout and sticking to them, inspired by Dawn's recent experience of unwavering determination to climb a mountain of stairs, 2767 of them. We want to inspire you to keep moving forward, no matter how tempting it is to bail out. Because with a strong support system and an encouraging team, you can indeed make it to the finish line. So, are you ready to conquer your mountains?Travis and Dawn Rosinger are the Loving The Fight Marriage Podcast Hosts and Authors of the books, Verbalosity - 7 Steps to a Verbally Generous and More Fulfilling Marriage and their newest book, Gripping -  What Matters Most | A Life and Relationships That Hold on to YouFor more information about Travis and Dawn Rosinger go to Loving The Fight

A silly monkey and his friend go to a mountain town in Colorado to visit the penny arcade. They don't have much money, and they keep getting into trouble with security guards, but that doesn't stop them from having a great time! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/warpedbedtimestories/support

If you're not dying backstage are you REALLY doing striptease?? We are kicking Episode 1 of Show Boys off with the Original Mr. Exotic World and the Godfather of Neo-Boylesque himself, TIGGER! Tune in as we talk Penny Arcade and naked performance art, the ex-boyfriends who named us, Tempest Storm for Subway Salads, why you need to burn your boxer briefs, and of course, the art of f*cking 'em in the heart.  This episode is dedicated to the life and legacy of Bic Carrol: internationally renowned revue producer, choreographer, costumer, and the Grandfather of Boylesque. Rest in power! Follow Tigger: @Tiggerlesque on Instagram Follow Chris Harder: @TheChrisHarder on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and www.HarderChris.com Questions for Chris? Email him at ShowBoysPod@gmail.com or HarderBurlesque@gmail.com  More about Tigger: Tigger!, "The Godfather of Neo-Boylesque" has performed in New York City since 1988 & around the world since 1993. A pioneer in the 1990s burlesque renaissance who won the 1st-ever "Mr. Exotic World/King of Boylesque" title at the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas in 2006. He has won numerous Golden Pastie Awards, including "Most Likely to Get Shut Down by the Law" & "Most Unpredictable Performer." Called "a fantastically watchable naughty satyr" by The Scotsman and "the Taboo-Defying Dynamo" by NEXT Magazine. His act was banned in Rome. He has performed all around Europe, Australia, North America, and South America.

We've got a guest this month! "Pod 'em Up superfan" (that's what we call him anyway) Rik comes along for a chat, and brings to the book club the convolutedly-named "Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness". An episodic series for XBLA, PSN and PC, though we mainly cover episode 1 here. Plus we've got other matters to discuss too, like E3's cancellation, Sega's surprise April Fools day game, "The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog", Super Kiwi 64, Plague Inc Evolved and the Mario movie. Plus, we have opinions about the Resident Evil 4 remake, and we won't let the fact that none of us have played it stand in our way! podemup.live | podemup@gmail.com | @PodEmUp

On today's episode of The Confluence:Election irregularities from years ago could cast a shadow on the primary contest for county executive. WESA government and accountability editor Chris Potter shares how the drama in Kennedy Township pitted Allegheny county executive candidates John Weinstein and Dave Fawcett against each other. Also we touch on some endorsements for the county executive race. (0:00 - 7:26) According to a 2022 report from the CDC, almost 1 in 2 women and more than 2 in 5 men in the U.S. have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking victimization by an intimate partner. To provide more resources and support for those facing domestic violence across the country, The Women's Center & Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh helped launch a multinational smartphone app called Bright Sky. The Center's CEO and president Nicole Molinaro tells us how an app can give a survivor the information they need. (7:30 - 15:31) Arcade Comedy Theater is putting on an interactive comedy experience for kids ages 4 to 8 years old called “Penny Arcade” this weekend. We catch up with Mike Rubino, director of marketing and Arcade co-founder, about how they can bring young audience members into the show. There will be four performances this weekend. (15:38 - 22:30)

Every Friday, the finest degenerate journalists on the internet serve up loud, irreverent, hilarious takes on gaming, drinking, pop culture, and everything in between. In this episode: Dom, Tiggy, and Reggie sit down to discuss all the highlights, most promising titles, and lessons learned from PAX East 2023! Plus: An interview with Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins from Dungeons & Dragons (19:19) An interview with Jerry Holkins, co-founder of PAX, Penny Arcade, and Child's Play (1:05:00) Make sure to check out all of our coverage from the show at WickedGoodGaming.com! Patreon: Support us on Patreon for exclusive content, merch, and more! Click here to subscribe.

"How the Jews Invented Hollywood - An Empire of Their Own" is a book that provides insight into the role of Eastern European Jews in the development of the American film industry. The book explores how the main players in the industry, including Karl Lemieux, Adolph Zukor, William Fox, Max Goldstein, Louis B. Mayer, Benjamin Warner, and Cecil B. DeMille, utilized Thomas Edison's inventions to create a new form of entertainment. The book also covers the influence of immigrants on the American entertainment scene and the impact they had on American culture and values. In Matthew chapter 13, Jesus tells the story of the tares and the wheat. The story is about a farmer who was supposed to watch over his field but fell asleep, allowing an enemy to come in and sow tares among the wheat. The Lord ultimately commends the unjust steward because he sowed the tares in the Kingdom of God and those who do iniquity will be cast into a furnace of fire. The righteous will then shine forth as the sun in their father's kingdom. These men found Thomas Edison's inventions such as phonographs, electric lights, peep shows, and movie pictures and began to buy and use them. American values ultimately came to be defined by the movies the Jews made. The movie industry was a result of enterprise and brains from the sweatshop and Penny Arcade game. Many present-day leaders of the movie industry were poor, hardworking immigrant Jews. However, some people, including Charles Lindbergh, believed that the Jews' large ownership and influence in the movie industry, press, radio, and government posed a danger to the country. A lot of movies can have a damaging effect on people's mental health, and this is not in line with the teachings of God. Deuteronomy 28:32 states that our sons and daughters will be given to another people, and parents will lose control of their children. In Chapter 11 of the book of Revelation, Jesus says that he will destroy those who destroyed the Earth and the Western world. It's time for Christians to take a stand and protect their culture and young people from being taken over by another group.

Penny Arcade in conversation with David Eastaugh Penny Arcade Aka Susana Ventura is an internationally respected performance artist, writer, poet and experimental theatre maker known for her magnetic stage presence, her take no prisoners wit and her content rich plays and one liners. She is the author of 16 scripted performance plays and hundreds of performance art pieces. Her work has always focused on the other and the outsider, giving voice to those marginalized by society. Her willingness to speak truth to power at the expense of career concerns has made her an international icon of artistic resistance. Her decades long focus on the creation of community and inclusion as the goals of performance and her efforts to use performance as a transformative act mark her as a true original in American theatre and performance. Since 1992 Penny has collaborated with Steve Zehentner , a former architect turned video producer. In 1999 Penny and Steve launched The Lower East Side Biography Project “Stemming The Tide Of Cultural Amnesia” an oral history video project that has broadcast and streamed weekly since its inception..introducing highly self individuated people to the general public

Bulldog Drummond-481201-The Penny Arcade http://oldtimeradiodvd.com  or Nostalgia USA PRIME Roku Channel

Cheesesteaks And Controllers is back! This week Jason speaks with Ryan Hartman, VP of Media, Content, and Events at Penny Arcade, to talk PAX Unplugged in Philly this weekend. After that, Jason previews and predicts The Game Awards 2022 coming next week.

CJ McCullough (they/them) is a Tabletop Game Designer, Storyteller, and Performer. They love to tell stories of identity, queerness, and the fantastical mundane. They're passionate about world building, and safety within games. Above all else, they love to explore and use TTRPGs as a way of telling diverse and robust stories. Teos Abadía is a Colombian-American freelance author and developer working with Wizards of the Coast, Penny Arcade, MCDM, Hasbro, and several organized play programs. Teos was a primary author on the Acquisitions Incorporated D&D book and on the vast Dungeon of Doom and Caverns Deep adventures for Dwarven Forge. For general inquiries or show messages, please email dragontalk@sirensound.co. Dragon Talk is executively produced by Greg Tito, Shelly Mazzanoble, and Wizards of the Coast. Show production by Lisa Carr & Ryan Marth of Siren Sound. Podcast recording, editing, mixing, and mastering by Ryan Marth & Siren Sound.Here's your guide to when each segment begins:Show open with Greg Tito and Shelly Mazzanoble - 0:00How To DM - 01:39Interview - 41:53Outro -1:31:23Greg Tito Twitter - twitter.com/gregtitoShelly Mazzanoble Twitter - twitter.com/shellymooCJ McCullough Twitter - twitter.com/scholasticdragnTeos Abadia Website - alphastream.orgWelcome To Dragon Talk Pre-Order - https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/welcome-dragon-talkSpelljams - https://pocp.co/spelljamsDragon Talk Show Page - https://dnd.wizards.com/dragon-talk/podcast-hubSiren Sound - www.sirensound.coRyan Marth - bio.site/ryanmarthLisa Carr - twitter.com/yelizavetacarrLatest D&D Products - https://gtly.to/SVs8W_2f8D&D Newsletter - dnd.wizards.com/newsletterDragon + - https://dnd.wizards.com/content/dragonD&D Official Discord - https://discord.com/invite/dnd

Brandi Kerns came on the podcast and we barely scratched the surface on this hockey life. We explore some of her timeline, there are plenty of laughs, and we even go off mic to a third friend who was listening to the interview. All told, enjoy what was a memorable experience for all involved. Perhaps we can find more stories to record down the line…   thegardensicehouse.com beautyunis.com

Photo By: Jasmine Hirst Penny Arcade is an internationally respected performance artist, writer, poet and experimental theatre maker known for her magnetic stage presence, her take no prisoners wit and her content rich plays and one liners. She is the author of 16 scripted plays and hundreds of performance art pieces. Penny's work has always been focused on giving voice to those marginalized by society. Her willingness to speak truth to power at the expense of her career has made her an icon of artistic resistance. Since 1992 Penny has collaborated with Steve Zehentner , a former architect turned video producer. In 1999 Penny and Steve launched The Lower East Side Biography Project Stemming The Tide Of Cultural Amnesia an oral history video project, a weekly cable series that is broadcast and streamed. The series purpose is to introduce highly self individuated people to the general public.

Savage the Musical Nicolette Blount - Creator, Composer, Book Writer, Lyricist Nicolette Blount is a producer, singer, actress, songwriter, and writer. Nicolette started Take My Shot Productions and recently coproduced the Off-Broadway hit “Regina Comet” and is an investor in the new Broadway Museum opening summer 2022 on Broadway. Savage, is based on Nicolette's Chickasaw great grandmother, Wanda Savage. Nicolette is also a member of the Chickasaw tribe. Lindel Hart - Book Writer Lindel Hart is a writer and performer whose work has led him to stages in the U.S. and in Europe in traditional and experimental theatre. His work with New York performance artists include Ping Chong's The Angels of Swedenborg (Carnegie Music Hall, Pittsburgh, PA) and Penny Arcade's Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! (New York City and tours to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, London, Ireland, and the Vienna Festival). In 2013 Lindel was commissioned to write a new adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in which he also portrayed the Creature. Rachel Klein - Director Rachel Klein (Director) is a NYC based director, whose work The New York Times has praised: "What makes this show pop is the bracing vision of its director, Rachel Klein." Off-Broadway Direction: Red Roses, Green Gold (Minetta Lane Theatre/featuring the music of the Grateful Dead, Music Supervisor: Jeff Chimenti of Dead and Company); Around the World in 80 Days (The Davenport Theatre); The Anthem (The Lynn Redgrave Theatre, starring Randy Jones, the original cowboy from the Village People); Gay Bride of Frankenstein (iStar Theatre Lab).

Legendary singer/actor Mel Carter best known for the smash Top 10 hit “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me” in 1965 (#8 on the Billboard charts) talks about his amazing career growing up in Cincinnati singing in a penny arcade booth at 4, singing with Little Jimmy Scott at 16 and had his first hit in 1963 with “When a Boy Falls in Love” plus “Band of Gold”, “All of a Sudden My Heart Sings” and more! Mel also appeared on stage playing “Sportin' Life” in “Porgy and Bess” and later became an actor appearing on “Marcus Welby MD”, “Quincy” , “Eddie Capra Mysteries”, “CHIPS, “Magnum P.I.” etc. and continues to sing in an amazing collection of songs in “The Other Standards”, “The Heart” and more! Check out the amazing Mel Carter on all streaming platforms and www.mel-carter.com ! #melcarter #singer #actor #cincinnati #pennyarcade #littlejimmyscott #holdmethrillmekissme #whenaboyfallsinlove #bandofgold #sportinlife #porgyandbess #marcuswelbymd #magnumpi #quincy #eddiecapramysteries #CHIPS #amazon #audible #iheartradio #spreaker #spotify #itunes #googleplay #applemusic #youtube #anchorfm #mikewagner #themikewagnershow #mikewagnermelcarter #themikewagnershowmelcarter

If These Walls Could Talk with Wendy Stuart & Tym MossHosts: WENDY STUART & TYM MOSSSpecial guest: PENNY ARCADEWednesday, November 17thLIVE from PANGEA Restaurant, NYCWatch LIVE on YouTube at Wendy Stuart TVPenny Arcade (born Susana Carmen Ventura, July 15, 1950) is an American performance artist, actress, and playwright based in New York City. She is known for her comedic wit, forthright delivery, and stage presence. Her performances explore topics such as gentrification, humanity, womanhood, LGBT culture, nostalgia, family history, and the life of the outsider. Additionally, Penny Arcade is known for her association with underground arts and culture.Who else but hosts Wendy Stuart and Tym Moss could “spill the tea” on their weekly show “If These Walls Could Talk” live from Pangea Restaurant on the Lower Eastside of NYC, with their unique style, of honest, and emotional interviews, sharing the fascinating backstories of celebrities, entertainers, recording artists, writers and artists and bringing their audience along for a fantastic ride.Wendy Stuart is an author, celebrity interviewer, model, filmmaker and hosts “Pandemic Cooking With Wendy,” a popular Youtube comedic cooking show born in the era of Covid-19, and TriVersity Talk, a weekly web series with featured guests discussing their lives, activism and pressing issues in the LGBTQ Community.Tym Moss is a popular NYC singer, actor, and radio/tv host who recently starred in the hit indie film “JUNK” to critical acclaim.

Hey friends,Matty Frances (Co-Host of Dial Up, Penny Arcade Member, pain in The Bi's a**) joins The Butch and The Bi to talk about our inspirations. We explore the artists, people, and passions that keep us motivated and inspired and discuss inspiration on a larger scale. It was a wonderful conversation and Matty even has us play a short form Improv game!To celebrate the holiday season we're doing a giveaway! The Butch (@ASmallFrogArt) will do a digital illustration of your family, your favorite character, a monster from the eldritch depths, or something similarly fun.  All you have to do is fill out this form and leave a review on iTunes!Contest Entry Form: https://forms.gle/d8k5SWf8QXQoBh947Leave an iTunes Review: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-butch-and-the-bi/-Featuring: Bob Rudenborg, Jon MarekSpecial Guest: Matty FrancesEditing: Jon MarekTheme: Brian Adams-Penny Arcade's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pennyarcadecomedyDial Up's Next Show: Friday December 18th @ 9PM (Arcade's YouTube)Matty's Insta: https://www.instagram.com/mattyfrances/-Find Us Across the Web: https://linktr.ee/TheButchandTheBiJon's Links: https://linktr.ee/jonklobsterBob's Links: https://linktr.ee/asmallfrogartA Pickle Lane Production

Welcome to The Geek Bracket! Today's Contestants are: Jarrod Williams - @@JarrodKWilliams Zeb Stokes - @stokescommaz D-Mo - @TriviaRewrites Follow us online! Facebook.com/geekbracketpodcast Twitter: @geekbracketpod Website: geekbracket.libsyn.com Please, leave a review for us in your favorite podcasting app as well! Today's Categories are: Boom/Bust Bubble Boys Don't Look Down Gary's Mod Gray v. Blue I Want It! L' Nouveau Like Can and Pan Out of the CircusToday's Double-Up List, in the Category of Popular Literature: Place the following webcomics in order by first strip published, from earliest to latest debut. - P.v.P., Penny Arcade, Questionable Content, xkcd

JP is joined by Tycho Brahe from Penny Arcade, ThatBronzeGirl, and Anna Prosser in this episode of The Pre-Show! Topics include:Intense segues, Are malls dead? The perfect movie experience, superstitions and much much more! Intro music by Megan Lenius! https://www.twitter.com/MeganLenius

The Soap Opera was created by Dallas Wheatley. If you liked what you heard, please rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts, or tell your friends and family about it! Spreading the word makes all the difference. PAX is a series of gaming conventions held in Seattle, Boston, Melbourne, Philadelphia, and San Antonio. Founded by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, authors of the popular web comic Penny Arcade, each PAX is a show dedicated to supporting and celebrating video and tabletop gaming. PAX Unplugged is an analog-focused extension of the already existing portfolio of PAX events. More information can be found on their website. If you have any questions about soap, tools, or ingredients, you can contact me on Patreon, on Twitter @ShireSuds, on Instagram @ShireSuds, or you can email me at shiresuds@gmail.com! Many thanks to Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com for the music (Licensed under Creative Commons 4.0). The tracks used in this episode are "Ripples" and "Finding Movement". Special thanks to Aras Sivad, who organized the panel. If you want to challenge your soapmaking skills some more, I recommend checking out Humblebee and Me, a wonderful website with tons of science-based soap, skincare, and makeup recipes! If you want to purchase any of the soap I made for this show, you can find it at shiresuds.com. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Soap Opera! Happy Sudsing! This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

A good friend of Alan’s, publisher of the online XR news publication, VR Voice, drops by the show for a general chat about the future of the space, including the potential for XR to help train workers in a future where retirement is less common, saving money by designing hospitals in VR before brick meets mortar, the video game crash of 1983, and a little Fruit Ninja. Alan: Today’s guest is a good friend of mine, Bob Fine. In 2011, Bob launched the only printed magazine covering social media, The Social Media Monthly. In January 2014, he launched his second print titled The Startup Monthly in May 2016, he launched — what I love — VRVoice.co, a content vertical on all things virtual reality. In addition to his publishing endeavors, Bob continues to provide I.T. strategic planning consulting services to both private sector and non-profit communities. Bob has over 10 years of additional work experience as a systems and sales engineer with various companies, including CMGi, Hughes Network, IOWave and Raytheon, as well as two of his own consulting companies, Geoplan and the Cool Blue Company. I want to have a warm welcome; thank you, Bob, for joining us on the show today. Bob: Alan, thanks very much for having me. I’m honored to be one of your guests. Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure and honor to have you on the show. I’ve met with you many times. You’ve actually shared some CES stories, and we’ve been in a little glass booth in CES together. That was wonderful. You have your own podcast and news outlet, talking about all things virtual reality, VRVoice. That is been amazing, and you’ve been a great influencer in the space, so thank you. Bob: Well, I appreciate that. Alan: So the first question I love to ask everybody is, what is the best VR/AR/XR experiences — or what are some of the best experiences — that you’ve had so far? Bob: You know, I guess from my perspective; I’m a longtime video gamer. I just went to PAX East on Friday, up in Boston. I was my first PAX event. And if you’re not familiar, that’s the Penny Arcade conference. Huge, huge gaming conference. It makes E3 look minuscule. And I’m old enough where I started with an Atari 2600. One my the reasons I started looking at VR again in 2016 was because of that video gaming interest. When you ask me my best experiences right now, I’m going to kind of… I’m thinking about some of the early games that that I played, that gave me that “woah” moment. As I’m thinking back to it now, this was actually on HTC VIVE — first gen, which was only maybe 3, 4 years ago now — and I was so impressed with the first generation of hardware that I was like, “well, this is ready for prime time.” The prices might still be a little bit high, but the quality of the gaming was there already. Just two off top my head is the VR version of Fruit Ninja, which I’ve personally put about 400-500 people through, because it’s one of the best and fastest experiences I think you can give somebody that’s never tried VR, but you can give to anybody whether they’re five years old or ninety five years old. Alan: Slicing fruit in VR is magical, and the fact that they have the haptic feedback to the controller is just… [implied Chef Kiss]. You’re right, it is a magical experience. Bob: The other game that I was really getting addicted to was Space Pirates, which I think is still just a brilliant early video game that demonstrates the quick and easy access to VR. It’s kind of like the space invaders of AR, I think, in terms of what those early games that caught fire and was easy to pick

Award Winning Illustrator Maki Naro joins us from New York City for Episode 56.  Maki's work has been featured on The Nib & Popular Science.  He draws the webcomic Sufficiently Remarkable and he was one of the finalists in Penny Arcade's Strip Search webseries. We talk about how he got into art and his science based comics.  We talk at length about the Penny Arcade Strip Search webseries, his time at Popular Science and what fandoms he is into. You can find Maki at: makinaro.com patreon.com/maki http://sufficientlyremarkable.com/ http://www.boxplotcomic.com/ https://twitter.com/sciencecomic You can find Penny Arcade's Strip Search webseries at: https://www.penny-arcade.com/strip-search/archive