Kong is King

Reactor’s Science Fiction Film Club ends giant monster month with King Kong, featuring a new to me point about the racial depictions, Black studio founder Noble Johnson playing the island chief.

V5: City Of Angels 1.21

Tonight in Vampire: The Masquerade - City Of Angels we outsourced investigating one of the things an elder tried to make us do a repulsive favour so she’d just tell us.

This may mean that the investigator we hired will get our Experience Points as well as the money, but never mind.

Interview With The Vampire season three: The Vampire Lestat

A video setup for Molloy interviewing Lestat. And the full version of the first song, Long Face. They haven’t gone Queen Of The Damned metal (best thing about the film) and they havent gone 80s rock either - they’ve gone T-Rex.

Avengers: Doomsday

Avengers: Doomsday, May 2026, bringing back the Russo brothers.

And they finally picked an actor to play Doctor Doom.

Wait, what?

I Saw The TV Glow

I saw I Saw The TV Glow and it made me kinda sad but didn’t utterly wreck me. Can’t have everything, I suppose.

I feel like it’s the next step past melancholic horror, where the horror gives way entirely to melancholic could-be urban fantasy.

The 2024 Paris Olympic Opening Ceremony

Someone (probably from French comedy) takes the torch to the empty stadium, then taken by chest-headbutting footballer Zinadine Zidane and then handed to a group of skating kids.

This leads to a surprise Catacomb appearance with CG alligator, introducing the Moon Knight style masked parkour torchbearer piloting a boat to a hint of the theme from Phantom of the Opera.

Anyone can wear the mask.

GAGA

Mea Culpa:

Gojira playing with guest vocals by opera star Marina Viotti and multiple beheaded Marie Antoinettes in the Conciergerie where she was actually imprisoned. FUCK YEAH.

France with a sequence in their Olympic opening ceremony dedicated to horniness

No threesomes in the library!!!!

Faith Erin Hicks

Danse Macabre and animated paintings as the Masked Torchbearer runs through the Louvre. (The Mona Lisa has been stolen by Minions.)

Ten newly commissioned statues of remarkable women.

Beautiful version of La Marseillaise by Axelle Saint-Cirel.

Fashion section that would probably be illegal in some US states ending with an almost naked blue guy. (Unhappy update: NBC cut this whole section from the US broadcast. I am disgusted but not surprised.)

Another nice version of Imagine. And I wonder if it’s the same burning piano from Eurovision.

The flag carried by techno Ghost Rider. So that’s two characters from this event I want action figures of.

The flame going back does make that last part run on long, with the Eiffel Tower lightshow going a bit V’ger Flyover.

Robert brothers (not Montgolfier brothers apparently due to launch site) hot air balloon torch.

The Star Trek films

I’ve rewatched the original Star Trek films, plus Generations for the first time in quite a while which involved getting the DVD, due to Valiant starting.

The Motion Picture is this strange road not taken due to its general stately tone, Phase II and all that which influenced a lot of The Next Generation but at least not in the colour scheme. (Side note: as an example of not a lot of people knowing how to do Star Trek this seriously, Marvel got the comics rights and the first issue after the adaptation has the Enterprise finding a haunted house in space and the two-parter runs like a remake of Catspaw with a guest appearance by writer Marv Wolfman’s version of Dracula.) At least the theme tune got a good run.

The Wrath Of Khan is great and so set the template for almost everything else, and watching them all in a couple weeks show that this went too far with a lot of Khan wannabes to follow. And I haven’t rewatched the ultimate example yet. Composer Jerry Goldsmith went on to recycle a fair bit for Aliens. Though not as much as he recycled Aram Khachaturian’s Gayane for the theme.

The Search For Spock is fine. Killing David is harsh but that’s Klingons for you. I do love the unfortunate nervy science ship captain.

The Voyage Home is a lot of fun. The present setting is the kind of gimmick you can’t do often, but it’s particularly nice having a problem rather than a villain, and it’s a shame we never got such an outlier again.

Sybok works in The Final Frontier even if not much else (including the vagueness of his emotional mind meld) does.

I feel like Chang in The Undiscovered Country would have been more interesting as a sincere antagonist. Obviously then you would have needed someone else to be the Klingon representative of the ironic conspiracy, but having him hunting Kirk down for entirely legitimate reasons and ending with an uneasy détente and taking a reluctantly offered open hand would have been a good end for a film about Kirk hating Klingons.

The biggest problem I have with Generations is that (and this is after seeing the deleted original) we give Kirk a great heroic death at the start and a meh one at the end. It also hugely overeggs Picard’s grief and Data’s messy emotions. (Their best scene is in the lovely Stellar Cartography set, which I’m sure gave Sir Patrick Stewart some déjà vu when he saw Cerebro in X-Men.) And pick a uniform!

Dungeons & Dragons stamps

NERDS

Infinity: Paradise Lost

Infinity gets an animated series, platform TBC, showing off the space cyberpunky wargame look. No sign of the William Wallace clone leading the Scottish faction yet.

Natural undersea batteries creating dark oxygen

DARK OXYGEN!

A Smurfs RPG

Weird - weirder than the My Little Pony ones as they have active shows - but never mind.

Star Trek Beyond at 8

Star Trek Beyond came out eight years ago today. Rewatching due to STA, going for its look for Melnyk in Valiant in the paper miniature, to not have the TOS minidress and then because the SNW dress looks more like a coat there.

Best wishes to friends in the USA, and to all.

Star Trek toyetic update

While there are of course many toys and models and the like for Star Trek, preparing for STA Valiant part two got me thinking.

Modiphius make miniatures of TOS and TNG main characters and generic types, now available through 3D printing, not that we use miniatures anyway, and not a big selection but at least we would have some. HeroClix has others, but that involves hunting individual figures online. (You wait years for an official Star Trek character miniatures range and two come along at once. And then both do TOS and TNG and stop.)

And among assorted unofficial versions the card standup maker keeps expanding.

Commander Sofia Melnyk, Star Trek Beyond style as the dress isn't as short...

Hello boys!

Trousers for use sometimes, Strange New Worlds version.
Doing Ann-Margret properly she should really be in a top and leggings anyway.

And looking at 3D printing and retro TOS stylings, I discovered that not only are there Star Fleet Battles renders and STLs -

I like swept-back nacelle struts. I am a child of my times.

... but someone has made the FASA DIY ships too, many of which were goofy but some hit me right in the 1980s expanded universe nostalgia.

This is the best angle for several of them.

I love the Chandley...

... but the Northampton looks like a bundle of sticks.

I would happily add some of the Klingon ships though. Not so many Birds of Prey of different size!

Make the D10 canon! Ironically for a d20 game.

And on the subject of 3D printing, it seems to be the only way to get a decent phaser nowadays, let alone the versions from the current shows. And communicators are rare and tricorders are rarer still. I should have bought myself the set in 2009.

The currently available phaser, a Kelvin style in white and orange.

They also make this bright blue TOS phaser (apparently an improvement over an orange one)
but it's import only and therefore about as much as a proper one you can get for about twenty pounds.

Also the dice are OOP.

Apollo 11

Look back, look forward, and look up.

Bob Newhart

The best tribute to Bob Newhart would be some of his comedy.

HEALTH and Lauren Mayberry, Ashamed

We both know you shouldn’t come here anymore

But what’s a bridge if left unburned?

Interview With The Vampire season two, August 1

Interview With The Vampire season two, Thursday August 1st on BBC Two.

V5 Nocturne 2024 1

Vampire: The Masquerade - Nocturne 2024

The characters have met. One has started a conspiracy board about the others.

Star Wars: The Acolyte

Star Wars: The Acolyte wasn’t the Dark Side Roaring Rampage the adverts promised, and also not the cheery space adventure that a High republic series could also offer, but rather a sorta-twisty mystery, realpolitik bummer and sad character study, albeit with cool lightsaber fights.

And Serious People With Lightsabers has long been not my kind of Star Wars.

Didn’t hate it, but not my bag.

Highlight: the otherwise often unrelatable Mae’s extremely relatable reaction to Bazil.

Also David Harewood in two scenes as Senator 100% Correct.

Lowlight: Torbin’s fake beard. Wow. No.

A new perspective on a setting detail

Interesting seeing a long overlooked facet of a setting used in an unexpected way. In this case the Malkavians having a tendency to meet without any real planning in Vampire: The Masquerade, from the POV of characters invited along without knowing what was going to happen.

Lucia & The Best Boys

Support act getting a boost.

Garbage, Usher Hall, 2024

Album eight coming!

Vow, recorded by someone in front of me

A broad history set - quite a bit of No Gods No Masters, and the 2023 cover of Cities In Dust, but starting with #1 Crush.

Bastille Day

A reminder that we always have options politically.

Star Trek Valiant updates

For Star Trek Adventures: Valiant we’re semi-seriously going with an imagined late 60s to early 70s spinoff. I’m going with a Strange New Worlds look in my head, but joining in anyway.

The Wild Bunch star Robert Ryan (Gene Roddenberry’s first choice for Commodore Decker) is now our captain.

I admit a lack of knowledge of 60s-70s film and TV stars who aren’t already from genre things, so Commander Melnyk is now played by Ann-Margret.

Of course this means she can dance.

(And if the Valiant shows up in Strange New Worlds we can get Katherine McNamara for a pretty good likeness.)

I also suggested the theme for Judd For The Defense by Alexander Courage, which already sounds like a Western rather than a lawyer show so why not? Elegiac orchestral themes post The Motion Picture are much easier to come by.

Longlegs

I really liked the first two thirds of Longlegs, it’s rich in atmosphere and expert jumps, helped by Maika Monroe being a reminder to look behind her as in It Follows, but when we get to the dénouement it’s both pretty much exactly what I expected from the first teasers and less nightmarish than I thought, and in details kinda... goofy.

The kinda goofy feel extends to Nicolas Cage, who after the buildup was pretty much Nicolas Cage being creepy.

Captain America: Brave New World teaser

Captain America: Brave New World teaser a week late for the 4th of July but hey. The MCU is back baby! Well, in February.

Shelley Duvall

Thanks to Shelley Duvall for Faerie Tale Theatre among many other things.

Hansel And Gretel as an example

Games I would run and not play?

Via Chikahiro on RPGnet: There are plenty of games I’d play but not run, but not many the other way around. If I’m invested enough to GM I’d probably be up for it. Perhaps horror games with specific lines.

Time Bandits

Time Bandits, Terry Gilliam’s Not Doctor Who, being rebooted as a series by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement (trailer and talk at Tor) starring Lisa Kudrow as the gang leader, with Waititi as God and Clement as Vladislav The Poker as David Warner as Evil.

I can certainly see it being expanded to a series, because time travel plus heist comedy plus fantasy realms.

Agatha All Along trailer

Agatha All Along trailer looks like we’re going to fairly odd places starting September 18th.

Last Dance 3.04

First V5 Last Dance session after a month, and some... where are we? was inevitable.

RPGaDAY2024 prompts

RPGDaDAY2024

For the tenth anniversary, not one set of prompts or even two but three, the classic questions with one-word bold prompts and an Inktober-y alternative set!

Knowing me I’ll do all of them.

MaXXXine

After X being a pretty clever Texas Chain Saw Massacre fan film, Pearl is the best of the triptych for me as a beautiful portrait of a deeply damaged character, but I found MaXXXine the most fun as hardboiled 80s action mixed with video nasty.

The use of a true story doesn't add enough to earn it, but that's my main critique.

A couple of the familiar faces in small roles seem like a nice deliberate misdirect.

People who haven’t seen the others probably get enough VHS-smudged-style flashbacks to know where Maxine’s coming from.

D&D makes a guest spot in the Satanic Panic montage in the opening credits.

Overall: Yes I want to run New Wave Requiem again.

Things can hopefully get marginally better

Last time we kicked the Tories out I didn’t have the internet.

July 4th

Happy Independence Day to US and connected friends.

Planning

Definitely considering narrowing the next game pitch down a bit to help get a more cohesive PC group from the start, though I don’t like saying no to someone’s first idea for a new game.

The Acolyte: Bazil and Pip

Star Wars: The Acolyte asking the big questions, like “Can a chipmunk and a flashlight put aside their differences to save the Republic?”

For the record I totally support our chipmunk and flashlight heroes.

V5: City Of Angels 1.19

Tonight in Vampire: The Masquerade - City Of Angels, Paris was finally able to get a clear read on Fung (due to them ending up in the audience of an underground fighting ring, not unlike the one he died in) and is now scared for him as well as scared of him.

Terrible LARP idea of the day

A Quiet Place LARP - laser tag where the GMs have lightguns and keep their eyes shut until they hear something so then they can chase the noisy players.

July

Well, here we are.

July Talk, Paper Girl