White & Nerdy
The Brainfart Chronicles
Updates & Random Thoughts
- I've been busy and there hasn't been much to report lately, so once again I skipped a couple weeks. I originally meant to send this out weekly or bi-weekly, but I think I'm going to officially change the schedule to "at least once a month, at most once a week."
- American Artifacts 3 goes on sale later today on the Hex web site and Drivethru. Paizo and Indie Press Revolution have to approve it on their end, which usually happens a day or so after I upload the files. We released the first American Artifacts in 2010, so it feels good to finish out the series (if only because it means we can finally collect the PDFs into a print book).
- I decided to pick up a copy of the 5th Edition D&D players handbook, which I'm going to review on the game blog, so this week's blog is a re-post of my 3rd Edition review. I'll probably be spending several posts on the 5E review, so I apologize in advance to those of you who don't have any interest in D&D or my opinions of it.
- I'm running behind on the Weird West mini-game I'm doing for my Patreon supporters, but I made some progress last night and it's probably going to at least double or triple the promised 5-page page count, so hopefully they'll appreciate quantity (and, I hope, quality) over timeliness.
- One reason that I didn't send a newsletter last week is that I was in Lexington, where I went to road trip test the new car, visit some friends, eat food that's impossible to find in rural western Kentucky, and see Weird Al.
- Emo Philips opened for Weird Al, and he was absolutely amazing. I remembered him from the 80s, but had forgotten that his stand-up is almost like meta-comedy. In a typical joke, you set up an expectation and then subvert that expectation with the punchline. With emo's stuff, the subverted expectations are often about the structure of the joke, with the punchline being secondary. He sets it up and you're waiting for the punchline for a few seconds before you realize that he's already told you the punchline, it just wasn't where you expected it to be. Lots of people do stealth jokes, but Emo's jokes are fucking ninjas.
- For those of you who don't keep up with Weird Al news, his current tour is the "Ill-Advised Vanity Tour." Unlike his standard shows (which I haven't actually seen--this was my first Weird Al concert), there are no costume changes, no big stage effects, and no parodies. Just him and his band on stage doing whatever original songs they feel like doing that night. A lot of the original songs he did were his pastiches (songs that aren't parodies but sound like a specific artist), including a couple I hadn't even realized were pastiches until Al introduced them (Of course "When I Was Your Age" is a song written by Don Henley as a grumpy old man), but there were plenty of original songs as well. The two I was most hoping for that didn't get played were "Albuquerque" and (TMBG's pastiche) "Everything You Know Is Wrong," but I've got no complaints about the songs Al performed. I especially loved that he provided a long, rambling introduction to "Let Me Be Your Hog," a song that lasts about 20 seconds. My favorite, though, was his blues-swing version of "Dare To Be Stupid," which was part of what I call the "reminding us that Weird Al has one of the best bands in rock & roll" portion of the show. This is also where he kinda did the parodies. The band performed "Eat It" in its entirety, but instead of Michael Jackson's music the arrangement was something very close to Clapton's "Layla." He also did a medley of parody lyrics with completely different music behind them. When the band came out for the encore, they started playing "Freebird." At first this bothered me because Weird Al should be above such a hacky, overused joke. But then they continued to play "Freebird" and that made it all ok. It was a really good cover of "Freebird" (again, Weird Al's band is the best), and I would have been fine with that being the encore, but after about two verses they switched over to "Yoda," which was the only parody of the show that they played using the original music. If you get a chance to catch the tour, I highly recommend it.
- You probably already know this, but the second season of Jessica Jones was just as good as the first. While it hasn't exactly restored my faith in Netflix's Marvel stuff, it was nice to see that they can still do it right if they try. One thing that really stood out: By the end of the second episode, they'd already introduced about a dozen different subplots, any of which could have turned into the main plot of the season (and all of which were either advanced or resolved by the final episode) and all of which contributed to the feel that Jessica Jones lives in a dynamic world where the supporting cast is important. This is a huge departure from the "boring villains, plot-required supporting cast, and repeated flashbacks of people dying" structure most of the other Marvel shows have fallen into.
- It's probably less likely that you've seen Santa Clarita Diet, which just aired its second season on Netflix. It's a show where Drew Barrymore gets turned into a zombie and has to kill and eat people. Timothy Oyphant plays her not-even-remotely-cut-out-for-being-a-zombie-spouse husband, and he makes the show. He's mostly played sinister creeps and action heroes, so I wouldn't peg him as a great comedic actor, but the guy is hilarious. The episodes are only 30 minutes each, so it's also a quick watch.
- I saw Pacific Rim 2 yesterday. I enjoyed it, but it seemed kind of draggy at the beginning, rushed at the end, and generally not as epic as the first movie. Seeing robots fight monsters in full daylight was cool, though.
The Electric Team
Leighton Connor, my co-founder at Hex, has been writing a web comic called The Electric Team for several years now. He recently started a Patreon campaign for the comic, and I highly recommend giving him some money (if you haven't already, you can also give me some money while you're got your credit cart out--there's a link at the bottom of the page).
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:
Dungeons & Dragons
The world’s most popular fantasy role-playing game, in which players take on the roles of brave heroes who engage in grand, epic adventures that typically revolve around armed robbery, grave robbing, and genocide.
©2024, Steve Johnson
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