Purrs

Let's start with what you want: cat pictures. The video above shows 95 seconds of the kittens wrestling in my bedroom. During their first week in my apartment, I restricted them to that single room. This let them get used to an environment that was much larger than their cage at the vet. I should add: While…

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Spider-Man: Miles Morales

For my review of Spider-Man: Miles Morales, it may help to go back to my review from three years ago on its prequel/main game, Spider-Man. The ambiguity of "prequel/main game" depends on your perspective. SM:MM is either a short sequel or a very large expansion of the original game. At a current street price of about $50,…

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Introductions

Here we go! This time around, I'm giving my cats names in Klingon. This one is jI'IHqu', which means "I am very beautiful." The "'" signifies a glottal stop; that's what you say between the "uh" and "oh" of "uh-oh". The H signifies a hard "ch" sound, like in Bach or chutzpah. However, it's hard for cats…

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Mass Effect Legendary – some notes

I have a few games to review in my personal queue of "essays I plan to write long after a game has been released so that any review is meaningless": Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Control, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. I decided to bump Mass Effect Legendary Edition to the top of the queue because this isn't a review. The…

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Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story

If you go by the number of times her work has been reproduced, Pamela Colman Smith is probably the most popular artist in the world. She is the one who created the artwork for the so-called Rider-Waite Tarot Deck; the claim that she's the most popular artist comes from multiplying the number of Tarot decks with her…

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Hades

On the surface, Hades sounds exactly like the kind of game I wouldn't enjoy: you fight a lot; you die a lot; it looks like another pointless arcade game. It wasn't until I saw Felicia Day play the game on a YouTube video from her Twitch stream that I became interested: So what makes Hades different from…

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Sunless Skies

This game and the next game I plan to review (Hades) have been labeled "rogue-like" or "rogue-lite" games. For the folks who read this post who don't know that means, I'll describe what's generally meant by the term. Rogue was a video game from the early 1980s. The game was originally developed to use ASCII characters for…

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Staged

Staged is a clever TV series now available on Hulu. In it, Michael Sheen and David Tennant play fictionalized versions of themselves. In the first season, they're restricted by the COVID-19 pandemic but still try to rehearse for a play to open immediately after the pandemic ends. In the second season, things get meta as they deal…

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Tainted Grail Wave 2 – shaded zenithal, contrasts and washes, and Metal Color

Let's shift to an interesting topic, with lots of fun pictures: Painting the miniatures that came with the second wave of Tainted Grail. What's a "Tainted Grail Wave"? Tainted Grail is a massive role-playing board game published by Awaken Realms. The game was funded as a Kickstarter project. The overall game was so massive that Awaken Realms…

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