The Spirit Moose Cometh
The Brainfart Chronicles
Welcome to the first newsletter! I started this because I'm starting to believe the growing number of people who tell me that it's necessary. Since most people nowadays use social media sites as a portal to the internet, everything you put out there is at the mercy of The Algorithm or in danger of getting lost in the sheer volume of posts, memes, pictures, videos, game invites, and other nonsense. With a newsletter, the people who are interested get all the important stuff (plus some nonsense) sent right to their email account. Also, I probably buy a book a month purely because I just read about it in Warren Ellis's newsletter and he provided a handy link to Amazon. I don't plan to use the newsletter purely to whore products, but there will be whoring.
Updates & Random Thoughts
This week's Game Blog is part 2 of the 3-part "League of Alphabetical Madmen" series. Personal favorites from this batch are DJ Jazzy Jeff and Orangu Gang. My favorites from last week were Famdoom the Fire Dancer and Invulnerable Todd, in case you were curious.
Dinerpunk is in the "brainstorm and soak" stage where I'm basically jotting down random ideas and looking for inspirational materials. So far I've watched Damnation Alley, Turbo Kid, and Battletruck. I'll probably start re-watching Jericho soon. Two Lane Blacktop, The Day After, and a re-watch of Vanishing Point, Convoy, and the Mad Max movies are also on the list.
I've also jumped back into working on the Elevator Pitch for Guardians of Aetheria, but progress is slow in part because I keep trying to make it crunchier than it needs to be. I tried watching a few episodes of He-Man for inspiration, but it's way worse than I remembered it.
Cinemechanix is currently in my least-favorite stage of development: The part where I'm waiting for other people to do stuff.
One of my revised Patreon goal levels (which has been met) is a 5-page mini-RPG every quarter. I'm probably going to start the first one soon, but haven't decided what I'm doing yet.
Three other shorter-term Hex products are currently in the pipeline: American Artifacts 3 (see below), The Comprehensive Magic-Man for Qerth, and I Psi, a new sourcebook from Ian about psychic spies in the 1950s.
Watched Altered Carbon. [Spoilers Ahead] It was tedious. Netflix shows have a bad habit of spending way too much time on every scene, and Altered Carbon upped the ante by spending way too much time on a lot of shots because they thought they were being artistic (they weren't; it's hard to make things visually stunning when most scenes are so dark you can barely tell what's happening). It's basically a mix of dated cyberpunk and anime and features bad dialog and characters so flat it's impossible to care about what happens to them. The most likable character (and the closest thing to an original idea) is a hotel who thinks he's Edgar Allen Poe, and even that's undercut by his death scene. They decided to have him go out reciting Poe, which seems like it should be a gimme given the nature of Poe's work. But they decided to go with "Annabel Lee," which is probably the most irrelevant poem they could have chosen. This might have worked if the PTSD-suffering disembodied mind that Poe helps recover (and turns into Badass Superhero Chick In Tight Leather (TM)) was named Annabel instead of Lizzie, or if Poe had a love interest, or if they'd chosen nearly any other well-known Poe work. But they didn't, and that's emblematic of the show as a whole. Just a whole bunch of "cool", "edgy", "artistic", "smart" shit thrown together with very little thought about how it fits into the overall story and world. And more endings than a goddamn hobbit movie. I don't recommend wasting your time.
Before that I watched the first season of Travelers and I enjoyed it. It's a time travel story that skips most of the tired old time travel plot points. The time travel frames the story and sets up some of the character arcs, but most episodes would work as straightforward action/thriller plots with a few minor changes. It's by no means a must see, but it's not a bad backup for when you're waiting for new seasons of the good stuff.
Weirdly, I just realized that if you replace "time travel" with "cool technological thing," the whole "just uses the weird thing as set-up" technique that I find refreshing in Travelers is almost exactly my main complaint about most William Gibson novels. Well, that and his tendency to elevate the Male Gaze to the Male Leer. I'm not sure if the guy's ever typed the name "Molly" using both hands.
Grant Gustin and facial hair is not a good combination. It makes him look like the kind of guy who has ferrets.
American Artifacts Art
Jeffrey Johnson has completed the cover art for the third installment of American Artifacts and I think it's my new favorite cover. It features Teddy Roosevelt summoning a spirit moose to scare off The Devil. Follow the link for a larger image and commentary from Jeff.
Licorice
Licorice, the new book by (Hex co-founder) Leighton Connor, is now available on Amazon. I haven't gotten a chance to read the new-and-improved version yet, but I remember really enjoying the first story he wrote about the character way back when we were in college, so I'm looking forward to it. Here's the blurb:
In a galaxy where eating is outlawed, a lost ship loaded with 900 teragrams of food has limitless value on the black market. Licorice is the only pilot skilled enough to reach this treasure, but to do so she'll have to navigate the treacherous terrain of zipspace, fight her way through killer robots, and confront the most painful secrets of her past. It will all be worth it, though, if she can achieve her ultimate goal: the legendary taste sensation know as the bacon cheeseburger.
By the way, if the cover art style looks familiar, that's because it's by frequent Hex Games writer and artist Joshua LH Burnett!
Word of the Week
Brainfart Press will eventually release a dictionary of words nobody particularly needs to know, tentatively titled (with apologies to Ambrose Bierce) "The Dumbass Dictionary." Here's one of those words:
Assmania
Fleeting public attention focused on Saskatchewan gas station employee Richard “Dick” Assman (“Assman the Gasman”) after he was featured on the Late Show with David Letterman.
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