Shark's in the Salsa. Our Shark.
The subject line for this issue is from Clerks, and I’m using it because Shark Week starts soon. This is probably going to be a short newsletter, mainly because things have been a little scattered lately due to a lot of distractions and disruptions. The good news is that one of those disruptions was seeing Weird Al and Puddles Pity Party in Bever Dam, Kentucky. I stayed in Central City, which is home to the Everly Brother and James Best (aka Rosco P. Coltrane). The area is also the adopted home of John Prine, who sang about it in his song “Paradise.” It was a fun trip where I did almost nothing productive or useful.
Deal of the Month
In honor of Shark Week, you can get Sharktoberfest for just $5 by clicking this link. The sale runs through August 13. You’ve still got a couple days left on last month’s deal, too.
Stuff I’m Working On
My Name Is Hood: Right after sending out the last newsletter, I spent a couple of days locked holed up in a cabin at Kentucky Lake working on My Name Is Hood. I didn’t finish it, but I’m down to just some NPCs and about half a GM section left to write. It’s still on schedule for August, but probably not quite as early in August as I was hoping for.
Q3E: In the past week, I’ve been doing a lot of work on the Q3E SRD that I’m hoping to release shortly before My Name Is Hood. Except for a few optional rules that I want to add, it’s ready for editing, so I hoping to get it out around the first of August. I posted a sneak peek for Patreon followers yesterday. In addition to finishing up the writing, I made a logo:
I also ran Q3E through Google’s Notebook LM to see if it found any problems (it’s good for finding “PAGE XX” type errors), and while I was there I couldn’t resist hitting the “podcast” option to see what it said about the rules. The conversation between imaginary people that it generated was a pretty good overview of the system, so I put a slideshow of Hex art behind it and posted it to Youtube.
During Leighton’s OSE game a couple weeks ago, I did a Daz render for the first time in a while. I started it with no plan and ended up with a Cyberpunk Dance Party!
Dance Dance Revolution
Media
I haven’t had a lot of time to read or watch things recently. I’m still reading the same books as before, and not much farther along on them than last time around. Here’s what I’ve seen:
Severance: I wrote a review of this one at The Death Cookie.
Nosferatu: Since Willem Dafoe has already played Not Dracula and Not Van Helsing with good results, I say we just keep making Nosferatu remakes until he gets a chance to play every major role (including Not Mina). My biggest question about this one is whether there’s any rhyme or reason for when they switched from color to black & white. The best theory I can come up with is that maybe the B&W scenes are lifted directly from the original, but it’s been way to long since I’ve seen the original to know how likely that is.
Sinners: I enjoyed this movie, but not nearly as much as I was expecting I would. Definitely worth a watch, but it’s a pretty standard horror flick.
Poker Face: I’m a big fan of both Natasha Leone and Rian Johnson, so I’ve been wanting to see this one for a while. It’s as much fun as I was hoping, and I’ve still got a couple episodes left.
My Name Is Hood Playlist: Since I’ve been away a lot recently, my deep dive into the music collection has kind of stalled, but I do have some music for you. When I was working on My Name Is Hood, I started out listening to my Diner Punks playlist, but it wasn’t really the right vibe. Luckily, people on Spotify had already made playlists of music from My Name Is Earl, Raising Hope, Sprung, and even The Guest Book, so I combined them and added some Robin Hood-related songs to create a My Name Is Hood playlist. There is a lot of classic rock on it.
That’s all I’ve got for this issue. See you in 3 weeks.
TYTYVM,
Steve
©2024, Steve Johnson