Metal Monday

Welcome to the too futuristic sounding 2025! We don’t have floating cars, universal services or android hookers. The future is here and it sucks.

Oh fun, it’s January 6th, nothing ominous about today at all.

YouTube Obsession

Spending the Holidays being cozy and comfortable is always a high priority of mine and Angory Tom makes the most comfy videos of Creeper World 4.

It’s a mixture of his extremely British voice and the slow progression of Creeper World that instantly calms me.

He plays a lot of different (mostly) indie games and I always enjoy his content, check him out!

Watching

I love a good anthology series so I was pretty excited for Amazon’s Secret Level. Some of them were good and others were not. My favorite was the opening D&D short: Despite some uncanny valley issues¹ , it had a great message and made magic look cool. I was, however, mainly interested for one short in particular.

Yeah it’s Warhammer 40k, surprise surprise. However, the main artist behind this short was the creator of the most famous and by far best 40k short on the internet: Astartes.

What I love about Astartes is that it does not explain anything but tells the audience everything through great visual storytelling. Does it still leave tons of questions? YES! And that’s what the best 40k stories do; They leave us filling in blanks with our imagination and wanting more.

So does the new short hold up to Astartes? No, but that’s a very high bar. The short has some excellent moments but loses that epic feeling by inserting a personal character story. Astartes shows no faces, does not personalize anyone, its is truly just one tale in a universe of horrors. No one is special because “To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable.”²

Reading

Doing a bit of a lightning-round-catch-up for the month of December ….

The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco

It’s easy to see why this is the only Eco novel that has been made into a film (Though one could make the case that The DaVinci Code is basically an extremely simplified and mainstreamed version of Foucault’s Pendulum). It is, essentially, a Sherlock Holmes story³ with the glut historical flair expected of an Eco novel.

Following other familiar tropes of Eco, the book is filled with deep conversations about philosophy and theology. Sometimes too esoteric and distracting for the pace of the story but overall, an extremely enjoyable read.

A Canticle for Lebowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.

One of the biggest questions about Nuclear waste and safety is: How are we going to ensure that future generations will stay away from these dangerous places? This area of the field is called Nuclear Semiotics. And other than this banging phrase…

…as part of a larger warning message, the field is mostly just wild theories on how to protect future civilizations from our present shortsightedness. One such theory, and the subject of this science-fiction book, is creating a religious sect around the waste sites, so that knowledge is passed down generationally with emotionally manipulative rhetoric, symbology and ceremonies.

This book, written in 1959, follows generations of the Catholic church after a nuclear apocalypse, as it acquires, subsumes and passes on knowledge about the disaster in hopes of preventing man-kind from ever destroying itself again. Over the eons chronicled; the knowledge is feared and misunderstood. Bureaucracy and egos twist meanings and stall progress while history is ultimately doomed to repeat itself.

Also, it has a rad af book cover.

Cycle of the Werewolf - Stephen King, Illustrations by Bernie Wrightson

It’s a common sentiment that Stephen King’s short stories are where his talents as a writer really shine and I typically agree. It is an incredible skill to develop a character in a few sentences by dropping small but authentic feeling details.

Cycle of the Werewolf really showcases this talent with 12 short horror stories for each full moon of the year taking place in the same small town in -you guessed it- Maine. Complete character shorts, with bursts of horrific detail. Other than King’s strange early career obsession with fat characters it’s a great quick read.

And the illustrations by Bernie Wrightson absolutely rock.

Also, the werewolf might be my favorite of the “classical monsters”: Dracula, Frankestien etc. Not only because the imagery is rad but I love the pathos of a man who loses control. As a recovering alcoholic I greatly relate to the “other me” themes often present in werewolf stories.

Playing

Started replaying Armored Core 6 because sometimes I really want to tinker with a mech. Also, there are Christmas vibes all over this game; Snow is everywhere, themes of solitude, the Santa-esq voice of Handler Walter.

Anyway, it’s still my favorite FromSoft title because of how it rewards playing the game your own way. I’ve definitely spoken on this before but the Souls games are not very forgiving if your build is even slightly sub-optimal but just about any build is viable for every mission in AC6. I love that.

**

If you have ever wanted to play a Warhammer 40k novel, you should play Rogue Trader. I tend to bounce off of fantasy CRPGS fairly quickly⁴ because of all the issues I have with fantasy as a genre. Yet, if you take the same mechanics, excellent dialog, voice acting and and a seemingly endless variation of skill combinations and put it in a 40k setting, I am all in.

Also I’m using a leveling guide for my companions just to save some of the bandwidth for my own character.

Other Notables

** "Reading A Little Life, one can get the impression that Yanagihara is somewhere high above with a magnifying glass, burning her beautiful boys like ants.”

** An amazing critique of a modern production of Romeo and Juliet from The New York Review of Books that reminds me how much I love a solid, well-informed critique of any media. Other than the last few paragraphs lapsing into a liberal reprimanding of youth-voters it’s a wonderful article.

** I think I talk about emergent stories from gameplay systems all the time and this video is exactly what I love about video games:

1  Most of the vignettes, especially the shorts that featured realistic graphics, were weirdly dark. Not content wise but like, adjust your Gamma Amazon, I can’t see shit.

2  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods."

3  I mean, The “detective” is named William of Baskerville.

4  Even the excellent Baldur’s Gate 3 annoyed me after 30 hours.