Year of the Horse

Happy lunar new year!

Babylon 5

Babylon 5 is now free on YouTube, a bold TV experiment with serialisation, CG space, riffing on and an early pitch allegedly being riffed on by Star Trek, and dialogue that I always thought nobody talked like until I read the creator'sbook on dcreenwriting.

Yellowjackets

Due to the occasional weird licensing of streaming shows, Yellowjackets is starting on ITV. Heavily Lord Of The Flies it’s also like the evil child of LOST - plane crash, possibly mystery related to flashbacks, possible supernatural stuff, but with a lot more infighting and cannibalism than the network friendly series. I hear S1 is worth watching. Knowing as much as I do by unavoidable cultural osmosis, I appreciate the ominous foreshadowing not waiting around.

Valentine's Day joke 2026 edition

Roses are red

Other options are also available

Check local stockists

Winter Olympic 2026 update

UK first gold in throwing ourselves down a mountain on a tea tray. Wonder what this says about us as a nation.

V5: Stolen 2.02

Vampire: The Masquerade

Stolen

2.02

No Good Deed

Beck

Robin

Vince

A week passes and no apparent repercussions.

Beck watches the audience at his sermons.

Robin observes his family from a distance - not sure about this girl his son has started seeing.

Vince looks into the antiquarian book trade after Beck mentioned it.

He next sees Beck at Elysium, one of the smaller locations in a private art gallery. Noting Astor is there as well, he keeps his distance as they discuss business.

“Has there been any movement on my order? Time waits for no man.”

“Yes, I did hear you had some urgent business?”

Beck and Astor size each other up.

--

And at the same time, Robin is looking for a deserving victim when approached by Morland.

Icons of the Night

A year-long monhtly pin-up art contest for World Of Darkness. Sexiness not required but encouraged in several prompts.

Erin LeCount, Don't You See Me Trying?

Erin LeCount, Don’t You See Me Trying?

Everything that I love will destroy me in the end

So I break my own heart over and over again

And that’s a WoD playlist add. Even without the video dancing on a grave.

F13

And incidentally, a happy Friday the 13th to all of you at home!

The Rockford Files with David Boreanaz?

I can kinda see it... though it does make me think of the couple times Angel went undercover as a comically exaggerated doofus.

Also Rockford has a sometime sidekick called Angel.

Prequels are tricky.

Just read a prequel comic to a film, naming no names, and didn’t like any of the decisions it made. A new Big Bad claiming responsibility for the events of the film, more reasons to target the new main characters than were needed here or in the original, a monster that doesn’t fit aesthetically, a small twist that feels out of place cosmologically, and a zero sum ending above and beyond what was required to set up the start of the story as was.

(There was a bit I liked, the attempt to remove the monster failing and inverting the classic Alien method of getting it out of the airlock.)

How to apply this to RPGs? It’s good to make big swings, but not if you have to wind them back immediately.

Unsurprising news

Wanna get back to running Buffy.

TRON: Ares

I watched TRON: Ares because its on D+ and because it got the unique boost of two of its stars, Greta Lee and Jodie Turner-Smith, having been on The Graham Norton Show the same week as Taylor Swift and therefore appearing in her new video for Opalite with Norton and all the guests because Domhnall Gleeson joked about wanting to be in one.

This is what it took.

(Added fun fact: one of the other guests and thus Opalite guest stars was Cillian Murphy, who cameoed in TRON: Legacy as a Dillinger heir and not in this one where Evan Peters plays a different Dillinger heir as the villain.)

It’s visually and musically interesting but narratively not good.

So, a TRON movie.

This still feels like a backdrop in search of stories. It would work for games if that’s not too meta.

Not helped by Jared Leto as Ares, though it only exists because of him so unavoidable.

(He will next be unrecognisable as Skeletor in Masters Of The Universe, which does feel avoidable.)

It was nice that it did a few things that weren’t revealed in the trailers, and one of those was indulgent but pretty fun.

I would have guessed the unnaturally calm F-35 pilots were a military cooperation directive but they were actually Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross VO cameos.

Some likely product placement but the biggest plug for some reason went to Depeche Mode.

I may have sworn when I saw this ad.

Infamously delayed game referencing being over a decade in development in its ad copy like that’s a good thing in this case.

No ICE in Minnesota bundle

$5000 worth of indie games for $10 including some tabletop stuff.

Super Bowl trailers

Great year for halftime show, bad year for adverts, fine year for trailers with more for The Mandalorian And Grogu (featuring halftime show guest Pedro Pascal) and Disclosure Day.

Winter Olympics nerdiness update

Amber Glenn, figure skater and Magic: The Gathering player

A murder of vampires

One of my Sunday afternoon Vampire players is now in a second game, mostly with members of the Murder Mystery Society, which is not a LARP society, really. Will this lead to a new Vampire LARP in the city? Possibly.

Star Trek: Ariel 1.03

Star Trek: Ariel

1.03

Watching all of Lower Decks in a few months may have made me nicer to the Orion pirates than intended.

Winter Olympics 2026

The Winter Olympics is here, and doing that weird thing where they have some stuff before the Opening Ceremony tonight.

A more low-key opening ceremony than the big but bitty (but masked torchbearer and Gojira) Paris summer 2024, the main tricky bit being the two city location for the athlete parade so there was regular cutting and probably some delays for teams coming in, but not huge ones. The now standard floating Olympic rings. An Italian astronaut. Nessun Dorma. A bit that had a slop sheen followed by Prisencolinensinainciusol making it better.

And many calls for peace and harmony and nice things like that, with the Ukraine team getting a big cheer. Strange to think it’s been four years.