An ancient temple to Hecate restored in Turkey

Via The Mary Sue, An ancient temple to Hecate restored in Turkey. There’s no way this can bring about a witch-god apocalypse, I’m sure.

And it absolutely will not stop, ever

Stop making Terminator 3s and make a Terminator 4. Or a cartoon, I guess?

WandaVision: Previously On

That was...

Wizards expanding

Wizards Of The Coast will become its own operating division within Hasbro with new powers and responsibilities, to develop new games and digital licensing.

Also today, announcements of Magic: The Gathering “Universes Beyond” for more crossovers starting with sets for Lord Of The Rings and Warhammer 40,000, as well as new kid-friendly Transformers and My Little Pony cartoons and a first live-action G.I. Joe series starring undercover operative Lady Jaye.

Star Trek Prodigy

A first look at Star Trek: Prodigy with its cast designs mostly leaning into animation, not needing to work in live action.

Anthem's final verse

BioWare’s multiplayer mecha alternate world action game Anthem will not be getting any more development.

May The 4th Be With The Bad Batch

Star Wars Day will see the premiere of The Bad Batch, the sequel to The Clone Wars about a squad of rogue specialised clones after the fall of the Republic.

They got four episodes of the final twelve-episode season to introduce them, and while weird for the specifics of the clone army they’re a pretty classic specailised special ops group of player character types - the leader, the sniper, the Big Guy and the brain. Their situation - a Dark Times series about outcasts after the war they were created for - is what will make the show unique.

Gargoyles: Awakening board game

Stone by day, boardgame miniatures by August!

New stuff for Disney’s urban fantasy animated series Gargoyles is nice, and a board game with nice-looking miniatures is nice too.

Hopefully not a Target exclusive, as we don’t have Target in this country.

Mage: The Ascension 20 Victorian Age

Victorian Mage for short, now on Indiegogo.

Star date

Disney+ launches Star for 15 and 18 rated content, as well as lower-rated stuff from Fox and Hulu and elsewhere too.

Not much new material yet, four series including drama Big Sky, animated SF comedy Solar Opposites, the nudged-from-regular-D+ Love, Victor and the short-lived last pre-D+ Marvel series Helstrom.

It’s quite a long list all the same.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer but not Angel (apparently the reverse in NZ and both in Canada) and Firefly though not Serenity. And as an example of kid-friendly non-Disney, Titan A.E.

Futurama - the movies are chopped into episodes to make seasons six.

And Die Hard... 2-5 but not 1... And Deadpool 2 but not 1, and the back two thirds of the Omen trilogy as well. Presumably due to streaming elsewhere.

And for the same reasom not the Alien films, despite having announced an FX Alien TV series.

Magic Kingdom Universe

Disney+ looking at using some Disney properties! With Ron Moore (BSG 2004, For All Mankind) starting with The Society of Explorers and Adventurers, “which is set in a world where all the themed lands and characters of the Disney parks and classic films actually exist in another reality.”

I presume the MKU won’t include rides and areas with their own franchises like Pirates Of The Caribbean or the forthcioming Jungle Cruise, though if the latter does well and they want to do the synergy marketing thing we might get a crossover. Sadly I don’t expect Tomorrowland: A World Beyond to get a look in either.

Who's been messing up everything...?

You probably know by now, but if not, glorious WandaVision episode seven spoilers.

The Mezzotint

A very early announcement of a new new version of The Mezzotint by M.R. James as this year’s Ghost Story for Christmas on BBC Two. It was the first James story I got to know thanks to a previous BBC adaptation as an episode of Spine Chillers in 1980.

Subject To Change

From showrunner Jennifer Yale and producer JJ Abrams, Subject To Change has a student sign up to a clinical trial with reality-warping consequences. Sounds like a viable setup...

Who loves you, and who do you love?

Is remaking The Running Man a good idea? Maybe. Can it be closer to the book? Definitely. Can it be as grimdark as the book? Possibly. Would that lose the cultural cache of its satire on entertainment strongly influencing entertainment that followed it? Perhaps. Can Edgar Wright do it? Certainly. Can I imagine him using the headache-inducing video for Temple Of Dreams by Messiah as an Easter egg at some point? Totally.

Can it be less 80s? It can’t possibly not be.

Elizabeth Ann the cloned ferret

A sample from the Frozen Zoo has been cloned, producing Elizabeth Ann, a clone of the highly endangered black-footed ferret species.

Great news if a bit Blade Runner.

Photographing Fairies

Unlikely as it may sound, the new online exhibition from the gallery I work at about faking photographs of the supernatural wasn’t my idea.

WandaVision 7: Breaking The Fourth Wall

Title and synopsis at airtime!

That “00s grounded sitcom” title sequence was perfect. I swear I’ve watched three of that show.

I had seen Darcy’s jacket before but not drawn any conclusions.

Photon!

A Vampire thought experiment

This started on the World Of Darkness Discord commenting on how you could play a crime lord of any clan, and how the Nosferatu work as information brokers and it assumes they get on reasonably well to function, while Chicago By Night first and second edition made them (and most clans!) a dysfunctional mess...

Anyway, I tend to have a mix of typical and odd characters, and often some typical and odd clans. I try to vary which is which. (Although my Gangrel SPCs do tend to be brooding loners in coats.)

So, the thought experiment.

A Vampire: The Masquerade city with one very standard-issue representation of one clan, and one really weird version of another that still kind of fits.

Like...

A Gangrel family of stock car racers.

A Ministry avant-garde theatre company.

A Toreador church congregation.

A Ventrue boxing club.

For examples, look to the Ten Princes in Damnation City for Vampire: The Requiem, some of them archetypes of clan or covenant and some outliers.

Perseverance has landed

And on to Mars!

Demolishing a haunted house

Via Zola Jesus on Twitter: 

“the little town i grew up in is tearing down the old haunted house built on a native american burial ground, which strangely killed everyone who has ever lived in it except a group of nuns called the sisters of mercy.”

This is both a sad commentary on respect for history and a fantastic pitch for a horror story.

D&D in a castle for Comic Relief

Comic Relief auctioning (among other things) a D&D and related activities weekend at Warwick Castle, featuring a game run by professional DM Mark Hulmes.

Auction runs till April 4th (Easter), UK residents only.

Dialogue saved for later

“How was it?”

“It was like a nightmare that I’d never had before but expect to be having regularly from now on.”

Virtual Horror Con 2021

Virtual Horror Con 2021 - RPGs to play and to watch, panels, workshops, and more, starting tomorrow.

Cruella

Am I interested in a young Cruella De Vil movie? Not particularly.

Am I interested in Siouxsie Sioux crashing masquerade balls and blowing up stately homes? Yes.

The Great British Dig

The Great British Dig is different enough from Time Team to be a different archaeology show, although Time Team started with digging up back gardens as well.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us 20

In AD 20-01 meme was beginning.

Still kind of a banger. MAKE YOUR TIME

Sam Gamgee's epilogue

An unused epilogue to The Lord Of The Rings, illustrated by comic creator Molly Knox Ostertag, shows Sam discussing what to put in the Red Book with his daughter. Thanks to Tor for spreading the word.

A wraith from Jon Hodgson

A free wraith image set from Jon Hodgson’s Patreon, suitable for Beowulf and other fantasy game art needs. Sure to life your spirits. (Sorry.)

Beowulf!

BEOWULF: Age of Heroes is upon us! Using the framework of D&D 5E for Norse-style sagas, with a focus on one-on-one games, spearheaded by Jon Hodgson.

Mardi Gras - Yardi Gras

Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans figuring out how to do Mardi Gras without parades, with Yardi Gras house float decorations. Let the good times stroll!

Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. season seven

Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. season seven has finished its weekly run on Disney+. After the season with three miniseries including a parallel universe and the season in space, this one had a lot of fun with time travel, including retro title cards and an episode in black and white, before a two-part finale with a lot of callbacks.

The Silence Of The Lambs

The Silence Of The Lambs premiered thirty years ago today, featured at the time in Empire, horror crashing Valentine’s Day like Universal’s Dracula before it. Cementing the “genius serial killer” archetype, it led to Red Dragon being remade as a prequel after the previous Manhunter took a different spin on it, and has since provided the basis for a classic TV series and a brand new one each featuring one of the main characters in the title role.

As well as non-supernatural horror, its effect on SF/F includes more than a little inspiration for The X Files, and as a result Delta Green tends to look this way in my head as well.

The Equalizer

Wondering when we might get the new reboot of The Equalizer starring Queen Latifah as McCall in the UK.

Not sold on the = sign in the E in the logo... especially when Z only has two horizontal lines.

I’m most curious to see how the cases come in. The trailer suggests a setup where she helps people who the authorities can’t or won’t, through word of mouth and/or super hacking.

The Edward Woodward original had McCall get cases through a newspaper classified ad and his answering machine, with a sideline in getting dragged back into spy business. (It also had a voiceover from Edward Woodward saying he’d be back next week over the end credits here. As well as the perfect 80s New York Is Hell credits, as I mentioned when talking about New Wave Requiem.)

The two films starring Denzel Washington had McCall stumble on his first mission, then set up an email for the same gig but mostly pick up work via Lyft driving and got his main mission through a personal connection, which works for a non-series version which needs a mission ever film rather than every week.

The new series has a hacker Batcave, not unlike Person Of Interest when it started as an ex spy doing cases of the week before it ran with the cellphone cyberpunk SF angle. (Fun fact: POI’s Kevin Chapman is in The Equalizer 2, under a different name, as one of the passengers who doesn’t require anything equalised.)

Dracula at 90

Tod Browning’s Dracula premiered in New York today in 1931, two days ahead of its full US release on Valentine’s Day. The first supernatural horror talkie in US cinema, IIRC, it shows its roots in the play and is pretty stagey compared to the Spanish version made on the same sets at night, let alone later films like James Whale’s Frankenstein, but the Bela Lugosi image of Dracula has stuck despite hundreds of screen versions since and even some before.

WandaVision 6: All-New Halloween Spooktacular!

Well, that...

Happy Lunar New Year

Happy year of the Ox!

The One Ring second edition

The One Ring Two, funded on Kickstarter in four minutes.

Art and artist

We want the creators of work we love and that affects us to be good people as well, or at most bad in an entertaining bad behaviour kind of way. When they aren’t, that hurts. Do we stop loving their existing work? Sometimes, but I don’t want to let them take it from me. Do we stop supporting their future work? That’s for us to decide.

Cthulhu rules Japan

Call Of Cthulhu is the biggest non-Japanese RPG in Japan by far, with a particularly large following among young women, and the current edition has sold more copies in Japanese than every other language combined. Popularity in AP and outside media has given it a major boost in recent years.

Space Sweepers

Space Sweepers looks fun and thoughtful.

It feels like Christmas...

A heavy snow in February, sudden unexpected modifiers to rolls for various actions.

Super Bowl 2021 trailers

Expect a list soon. In the meantime, The Falcon And The Winter Soldier and Raya and the Last Dragon.

Update: Empire provides.

The game itself was pretty rough, mostly due to a strong hand-picked receiving group on one side and a whole lot of letting people smash into the quarterback on the other.

I can’t see my house from there in Fast 9.

I realise reviving Wayne’s World in a minute-long advert sketch format depends on immediate recognition, but as an ageing grunge kid myself I feel like in the intervening years Wayne would have grown a Dave Grohl beard and/or Garth would have gotten a buzz cut to hide a receding hairline.

Power!

Game stopped due to power cut, that’s a new one. And probably would have been equally game-stopping and more generally inconvenient had I been at the usual location in the middle of town around an actual table rather than here at home, but still.

Hayley Williams, Flowers For Vases / descansos

A largely acoustic album from Hayley Williams, Flowers For Vases / descansos, written and recorded at home.

WandaVision 5

I have seen many theories advanced, and to summarise...

“I think I speak for everyone here when I say ‘huh?’”

Okay, slightly more.

Tomasz Strzalkowski

Tomasz Strzalkowski, 3D artist (interview) for Gigeresque or bleak 40Kish characters and locations. Thanks to Volk. for a first look, via Tini Howard.

Dracula, Sci-fi Western

Nomadland and Eternals director Chloé Zhao to direct a very new version of Dracula for Universal.

Consider me intrigued.

Tales Of The Aeon Society

Episode One - Deadly Eclipse! A new audio Adventure!

Mass Effect Legendary Edition

Mass Effect Legendary Edition is due May 14th, with a 4K visual upgrade, a consistent character customiser and ME3-quality female Shepard available throughout (who I note gets more of a push in the trailer than male Shep, including the biggest hero shot) so we can live in that epic space opera setting up to that letdown ending all over again.

The Nevers trailer

The first trailer for The Nevers, originally from Joss Whedon but now showrun by Philippa Goslett, really plays up the female Victorian X-Men high concept.

And once more

It’s Groundhog Day... again.

In the last year we had Palm Springs and up ahead we have The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things dropping ten days after Groundhog Day, and starring Kathryn Newton who starred in Freaky from the creator of the Happy Death Day films. So time loop films are... still happening...

February

Rinky-dink little month, can’t even decide how long it is.

Still this one has already brought news of a new Wakanda series planned for Disney+.