The Champions

This just in from the I was Not Expecting This Remake department: Ben Stiller to direct and co-star with Cate Blanchett in The Champions, based on the 1968 superhuman spy series about UN agents receiving superpowers after a plane crash in the Himalayas leads to them being saved by the wise people of secret Not Shangri-La. Expect the title to confuse fans of the superhero RPG spinoff comics and the L. A. based Marvel team. Also a fifty-fifty chance Stiller will play the American hero... Craig.

Hide by Kiersten White

Hide is the first adult novel by Kiersten White, author of Slayer and Chosen. This excerpt at io9 introduces the premise and the cast. Hide for up to a week in an abandoned amusement park, with the winner(s) receiving a massive payout... and then contestants start disappearing.

Important period detail

Based on two unconnected adverts I just saw in the same break, we now say “baubles” as a Christmassy fake swear. Update your records accordingly.

Nostalgic for your earlier days of gaming

From a Twitter chain:

Post a picture of something TTRPG related that makes you nostalgic for your earlier days of gaming.

Mine:

The Ghost Die from Ghostbusters.

Murder Island

Murder Island is (a) a rather glum murder mystery set in a small community with a lot of little secrets and a few big ones, with dramatic bits the audience got and the players didn’t and some characters more broadly drawn than others, and (b) a game. The game is the angle I’ll talk about most here.

After four episodes talking to various witnesses slash suspects, with a few ‘cut scenes’ where they’d time conversations in earshot or otherwise reveal clues, the clue the case actually revolves around arrived in episode five when there were only two teams left to find the key item. Their different approaches led to one team finding it and going on to the final murder-solving challenge. So like a lot of adventures it had a third act reveal that you couldn’t finish it without. Before that the players found enough to rule out some suspects at least in part, and still had to get past a wall of “no comment” interviews and the like - the actors playing the suspects had to choose when to talk.

Foo Fighters: Studio 666

Foo Fighters have secretly filmed and in February release Studio 666, a horror comedy about trying to record an album in a haunted house. As you can probably imagine I am interested.

Update: Alex Ward is in it!

Enterprise rewatch

Having made it home with Star Trek: Voyager, Keith R.A. DeCandido at Tor is taking a long road, getting from there to here.

This ghost will follow

Drat, threw away the perfect Nocturne session needle drop already.

Once More, With Feeling at 20

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Once More, With Feeling premiered in the US twenty years ago tonight. 

(Horror Queers podcast celebration)

Following the silent episode Hush as a special episode with also progressed the overall plot, it’s seen a soundtrack release, singalong screenings and live performances, and a sidebar on how to do something like it in the RPG.

(I was expressly asked not to try it in The Watch House, though I did have a couple of songs picked out.)

It could be witches! Some evil witches! Which is ridiculous cos witches they were persecuted Wicca good and love the Earth and women power andI’llbeoverhere...

My party piece

While it wasn’t the first all-original-songs musical episode of a not-normally musical show (Xena: Warrior Princess led the way) it was big enough that non-show musical fans know it.

Give me something to sing about

Please

Give me something!

Remember

Guy Fawkes, an unusual example of a character much less cool than his most famous cosplayer.

Lionel Blair was among other achievements one of the greats of Give Us A Clue, source of my own ability with charades.

The Internet That Was

What can you tell a techno-cultist of the Internet-That-Was? Do you fight with Jiff or Giff?

Who would you cast Matt Smith as?

Matt Smith is currently in cinemas in Last Night In Soho, appeared in (one shot of) the new Morbius trailer yesterday, and just talked about nearly being in The Rise Of Skywalker without saying who as. (I also saw him last week in His House but that’s totally down to me waiting a year to watch it.)

What We Do In The Shadows season 3

What We Do In The Shadows season 3 just ended in the US and just started here, two days after Halloween :( but with every episode on the BBC iPlayer :) and features that inevitable Vampire LARP event of some of the PCs ending up in the Primogen.

A.V. Club interviews for the first two episodes, revealing that Kayvan Novak did impressions in The Cloak Of Duplication. Which also features the original vampire called The Sire and a renegade vampire clan...

Morbius trailer 2

The new Morbius trailer shares an entrance with Stoker’s Dracula, a song with The Lost Boys and an attack reminiscent of Dracula Untold, sadly the swarm of bats does not become hand-shaped but you can't have everything.

Oh, and some Spider-Man references.

(And Matt Smith! In one shot. Not enough to balance the Jared Leto of it but it’s something.)

NaGaDeMon

Not sure why such a thing is national, except for the NaNoWriMo reference and the Naga Demon reference.

The Book Of Boba Fett opens on December 29th

Trailer setting up its Godfather plot with added forcefield shields and green and red Lucasfilm logo.

The Book Shop

The Book Shop is a kid-friendly introductory RPG by Adrian Barber, about an enchanted bookshop where things can escape from one book into another, created for Scottish Book Week. An RPG is an odd thing for them to be doing, part of a move to bring in people including an 8-bit computer game and a murder mystery last year, certainly an odd thing I support. There will also be a video Actual Play with some Book Week guests in mid November.

The ass-kicking CG Bride of Frankenstein

I missed this pre-Halloween: A teaser for photoreal-cutscene quality young adult action hero Bride of Frankenstein saving Dracula from swordsmen in a short film which you can officially watch in Fortnite, because why not?

It’s a very impressive tech demo, but... why is Van Helsing in black and white?

November

It’s November! Release the, um...

... St. Andrew’s Day related things?

Haggises, maybe?

what even is this month