Eastbound & Down
Welcome to my presence! Here’s what’s going on with me lately.
Deal of the Month
I’m going to start offering a subscriber-only discount on a different product in each new issue of the newsletter. The discount links will be good for 1 month from the date the newsletter went out, and I request that you don’t share the links with dirty non-subscribers. This month’s deal is The Blasphemous Temple of Yargolith, which you can get for just $10 (normally it’s $15) by clicking this link.
Stuff I’m Working On
I’ve posted several new articles at The Death Cookie over the last month, thanks in part to the changes I’ve made to my workflow. I’m not committing to a particular schedule yet, but the plan is to keep posting new stuff more regularly.
My Name Is Hood and QAGS 3E are moving slowly but still on track. Since I’m trying to keep the My Name Is Hood rules as bare-bones as possible, it’s made me realize that more things than I thought can work as optional rules, which might mean I’ll have a playable draft of the core Q3E rules sooner than I expected.
I’ve got a few other things I’m hopefully going to be working on soon, but unfortunately nothing to share right now.
Reading
Finally finished Makers by Cory Doctorow. It’s based around the Doctorow trope of using old weird tech for things it was never intended for, but it’s really long and sprawling and covers a long period of time, which makes it feel more like several incomplete novels strung together than one coherent story.
Currently reading Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison’s first collection of then-groundbreaking science fiction. I’m only about fives stories in (thanks in part to nearly 50 pages of forewords and introductions from previous printings), but Frederick Pohl’s “The Day After The Martians Came” is my favorite so far.
I’ve also read a couple of Zine Month purchases that arrived recently. I reviewed Wiki Articles Are Wizards [Citation Needed] at The Death Cookie. So far nobody’s guessed the Wiki article I used to create my wizard, so if you can figure it out, you’ve got a shot at a free PDF of Magic Rules!
I also read Catch Me If You CANT: The Secret Language of Thieves and How You May Learn To Speak It by AJ Hateley. It’s a very nice little zine that includes a brief history of Thieves’ Cant (which it turns out was an actual thing and not just a Gygax brainfart), a glossary, expanded entries for types of thieves and other thief-related issues, and a pickpocketing system that I might steal for my City of Ten Thousand Daggers game when I finally get it going. I couldn’t find the zine on Drivethru, but I definitely recommend grabbing a copy if it becomes available.
Watching
I finally finished Lucifer, and I’m surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I started watching it as filler and expected it would be one of those I stopped watching and never got back to as soon as something else came along. It’s one of those shows that you watch more for the supporting cast than the leads.
One more episode of The Righteous Gemstones left. I’m going to miss that one when it’s gone.
A bunch of stuff I wanted to watch did end up coming out while I was watching Lucifer. I’ve started the news seasons of Leverage, The Last of Us, and Yellow Jackets, but I’m only a few episodes into most of them.
They Cloned Tyrone feels kind of like Netflix trying to make its own version of Sorry to Bother You, but I like the Grindhouse-meets-Cyberpunk look of the movie and Jamie Foxx seems to be enjoying the hell out of himself, so worth a watch.
Slice is a horror movie about pizza delivery drivers getting murdered when they deliver to the section of town where the ghost live. Chance the Rapper plays a werewolf. That should be everything you need to know to decide whether or not you want to watch this movie.
Since I enjoyed the last movie I saw about the glory days of Hollywood that starred Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, I decided to give Babylon a shot. It’s a very long movie with the kind of sprawling, messy plot that would make Robert Altman proud, but I enjoyed it.
Y2K is very stupid, but in a good way.
Heretic is yet another movie that makes me wonder whether Hugh Grant has always been this good and I just never knew it because he’s mostly done movies I have no interest in.
I read somewhere that you could find some weird shit on Tubi, and I found Space Truckers, which I’m not sure how I’ve gone this long without seeing. It stars Debi Mazar, Stephen Dorff (who looks like he’s about 14), and Dennis Hopper (because cocaine is expensive) as truckers…in SPACE! It’s not good by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s kind of fun.
Finally, I watched Smokey and the Bandit for the first time in years and my reaction was—let’s say unexpected. You can read my review at the Death Cookie.
That’s all I’ve got for now. Until next time, keep your feet on the ground but keep reaching for the stars. Or at least try to stay out of jail.
TYTYVM,
Steve
©2024, Steve Johnson