I've had a couple of people ask about reviews or articles that I wrote at EN World before the job change, so I figured that I would throw up a link to the landing page for my articles. There are a couple of gaps, from when the site had a catastrophic database crash, but this should let people find things.
I am sorry that I haven't been as active with writing here as I would have liked. The day job is keeping me pretty busy as we prepare for some launches. I have a couple of reviews that are almost ready to go, so we'll see when I have the time again.
Update 2: I think that I have a working link to the articles that I did while I was writing for EN World. Hopefully another site update doesn't make this not work. The link above is updated to the new link.
Update: Apparently one of the site updates after I left it broke the author's search, so that link doesn't work. I'll try to update when I've figured out a work around.
A long time ago, back in the Stone Age before the internet was what it is today, there was a tool for players that was put out by White Wolf called StoryPath and Whimsy cards. Now, Nocturnal Media have relaunched the lines, and added sets of cards that were originally planned but never launched.
There's one of those memes going around Facebook where people share the ten books that have been most influential on them throughout their lives. I'm not big on the whole "tag me and I will tag someone to do the same post" thing, so I'm just going to post here to my blog instead. Here are ten books, in no particular order or anything, along with a little blurb for each.
There is a long history of the occult detective in horror fiction, starting back with characters like Carnaki and John Silence and stretching into the present with comic book characters like Doctor Occult and John Constantine. SFC Comics now brings a new character into this tradition in there comic The Gentleman: Darkness of the Void.
Oliver Solomon, the hero of The Gentleman, isn't just a Constantine of color. Like many heroes of horror, Solomon is haunted by his past. This aspect of the character is brought out in the story quickly, but it is handled in an organic manner by writer Greg Anderson Elysee. What could have been a cliched stereotype of a character is engaging and pulls you along deeper into the story, like a good antagonist should do.
Now that Gen Con is a couple of weeks in the rear view mirror, I think that I can put down some of my thoughts about the convention. This is going to be a more or less random set of impressions that I have, in no particular order of importance.
If you follow me on social media, you may have caught my big news today. I have been offered a job with Petersen Games, and I have accepted it. I will be working for them in a sales capacity, at least at first, and I am looking forward to getting things going. This also means that I will be ending my multi-year relationship with EN World. If you haven't kept up with my writing over there, you can got through the backlog by clicking here.
What does that mean going forward? Well, I am going to be busy getting used to Petersen Games, the people who work there and their games, but once I have finished that. However, eventually I will probably return to writing at this blog again. My work at EN World was important to me, and it didn't leave me a lot of time for posting here.
I won't be posting here as often as I was at EN World, I'm just not going to have the time for that. However, I do want to keep up with reviewing games and talking about games and gaming. My goal is to eventually get back to posting here a couple of times each month. When will this start? There's no real time table on that.
Based on my listening habits from the last year, I made up a list of the top ten songs that I listened to the most from 2017. I don't know if I can really rank them or not, but these would be among the top of the songs from this year that I have listened to the most.
I totally get that your list is different from mine. That's what makes music awesome.
10) Gorillaz - She's My Collar (featuring Kali Uchis)
There is a lot of good on Humanz the latest album from the Gorillaz, but She's My Collar is the one that stuck in my playlists.
9) Sir Sly - High
This is a catchy pop tune that I picked up from the radio. Like some of the early tracks by Grouplove, this song got stuck in my brain in a good way.
8) Zola Jesus - Siphon
This latest Zola Jesus album is mind-blastingly good, and a bit of a departure for her, soundwise. But still SO GOOD.
7) Lorde - Green Lights
Her first adult album, and it was really good. Melodrama got rid of a lot of the teen angst that were a big part of Heroine and replaced it with some really mature song writing. This woman has a long career ahead of her in music.
6) Bleachers - Don't Take The Money
Bleachers really grew on me. They took a chance with Terrible Thrills, Vol. 2 (spoiler alert: there was no volume one), and let a group of women singers reinterpret the music from their album Strange Desire. The gamble paid off with a record that was both familiar and innovative. Now they've come back with their fusion of rock and pop with Gone Now.
5) Alt-J - House of The Rising Sun
It really doesn't get to be much more of a deeper cut than Alt-J covering the seminal rock song, House of the Rising Sun by The Animals. Barely nosing out the track In Cold Blood, this became my favorite from Relaxer, the latest from Alt-J.
4) Portugal. The Man - Feel It
There is a whole lot of political naivete in this song, but it wraps it up in a nice sugar pill of pop music that you can almost forgive the band.
3) Arcade Fire - Everything Now
Arcade Fire had a hard time recovering from The Suburbs. To be honest, that is probably one of the best albums of the last decade. Reflekor was a hot mess compared to it. I think that the band has finally recovered with Everything Now. I went with the title track as my favorite, but there's a lot of really good cuts off of this album.
2) St. Vincent - Pills
Breakups suck, and breakup albums rarely capture the lightning in a bottle of the feelings of love, and loss that come with a breakup. Masseduction manages to give a peak into Anne Clark's head, and let's you feel some of the emotions that are spilling out of her over her breakup. Again, there's a lot of good on this album. Give New York and Los Ageless good listens too.
1) HAIM - Right Now
I wouldn't have expected HAIM to be at the top of a list like this for me, but here we are. These three sisters from Los Angeles put together some great music influenced by bands like Fleetwood Mac. Something To Tell You is their second album, and it is no sophomore slump.
There are currently few purveyors of the hardboiled noir school of pulp fiction that are as good as the Hard Case Crime imprint from Titan Books. When I want a new crime fiction book to read, I go through the crime section of the book store, looking for the familiar white and orange spine with that Hard Crime logo. I am never disappointed. When Titan Comics announced a few years ago that they would be adding a Hard Case Crime comics line, I was over the moon. There have been some great comics since: Peepland, Normandy Gold and their adaptation of the Millennium Trilogy have been some of the best crime comics of recent time. Now, add to this list the awesomely named Minky Woodcock: The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini.
There is an interesting article on (of all places) a site focused on Disney and Disney-related theme parks that asks the question Will Disney Stop Publishing Marvel Comic Books? We all know that one of the basic rules of journalism is that if your headline asks a yes/no question, the answer is typically no.
The thing is that this headline asks a pretty valid question that once would have been a resounding "no," but with the state of the comics market, and the fact that Marvel Comics has been bleeding readers for a while now, I don't know that it is that simple of a question any more. Neither Marvel Comics nor DC Comics are the powerhouses of the comics market that they were 30 or 40 years ago. In fact, the comics market itself has never really recovered from the market's speculator-lead bust of the 90s. Sales of DC Comics are up from what they were a few years ago (thanks mostly to the bump in sales that came about due to the Rebirth initiative that the company started about a year ago), but across the industry the sales numbers are no where near sustainable in the long term.
As I am sure you all know, Gen Con is coming, and it will be the 50th anniversary of the convention. I'll be there, covering things for EN World and posting here at the blog, too. My appointment schedule has filled up, but there are still a couple of ways to find me at the convention. When I'm not in meetings, I'll be wandering the exhibitor's hall plus I am going to be on a couple of panels this year.
