My seasonal world

Friday of course being Samhain/Halloween, I did my traditional daily bakes in the afternoon before heading down the street to the neighborhood's annual block party--one of the oldest and most well-established in the city. Several streets are closed to traffic (and several more de facto closed to traffic just by the number of pedestrians on them). Although a bit scaled back since covid (no bouncy castles or the like this year), there were still a ton of trick-or-treaters, and pretty much everyone of any age was in costume. Last year, the GC and I were Over The Garden Wall's Sara and Wirt, and we had such fun making those costumes that we reprised them this year.

As two of the GeekBBQ regulars now live on one of the main streets, we spent the majority of the evening handing out candy outside their place, then went in after the onslaught had wrapped up and watched:

What We Do In The Shadows an annual Halloween watch for us until it got popular enough that Kanopy lost the license to streaming services. Luckily, the GeekBBQers own a copy, so we were able to watch again. The whole movie is great, but I ride or die for the werewolves (not swearwolves! ...Seriously, I didn't think anything could ever top Adventure Time's Whywolves, but these guys absolutely do). This one is a forever classic.

The Craft I grew up with Fairuza Balk in The Worst Witch and was newly smitten with her in the melodramatic made-for-TV movie Shame a few years later, and so was very stoked when I learned that she and Melody from Hey Dude were going to be in The Craft. Then I saw The Craft. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now( Read more... ) Or rather, I like the first half of the movie a great deal, and the rest? Hard no thank you.

Dark Shadows It's a fine movie, but not one I was every particularly into, so I "watched" it during lulls in the conversation.

Music: Saturday was PorchFest. I don't know if it was because people were out late the night before, but the first two hours of the thing were dead; almost no one on the streets anywhere. It was so stark we started wondering if the thing had been postponed and we somehow had just not got the message? But there were bands playing, so that couldn't have been right. Then, at 4:00 pm a cloud of people emerged from metro like a horde of lanternflies just as we'd decided decamp for our afternoon walk; it felt like walking against the entire tide of humanity. Walk completed, we returned to find that things had picked up somewhat, although even with the new injection of humanity there were way fewer people than I've ever seen at any previous PorchFest. (I think it was a combination of Halloween being the night before, the many Halloween parties later that night, the city being under crypto-martial law, and the furlough.)

We watched a few "solo woman with an acoustic guitar" performances, a husband-and-wife duo (both veterans; the "likening everything to soldiers/combat/honor/patriotism" lyrical lens did not resonate with us personally, but they were still very, very good), and several very good punk and blues bands, and the neighborhood cover band that has played as long as I've been going to PorchFest.

Podcasts: Episodes 9 and 10 of the Grimfrost podcast, with academics Neil Price and Anders Kaliff, both fascinating guests. I enjoyed the conversation with Price a little bit more because it felt slightly more grounded in fact than academic speculation, but the speculation in the latter episode was presented as such and also very interesting.

Television: As ever, the current Last Week Tonight episode (the main segment of which was unfortunately not as nuanced as one would have hoped), and some halfhearted poking at AEW Collision and AEW Dynamite.

However, on Sunday, the GeekBBQ crew reconvened to watch episodes 2 and 3 of Dimension 20: Titan Takedown, which brings together three of my longstanding loves: Greek mythology, D&D, and pro-wrestling. Gawd, what a great freaking campaign. I love The New Day. I love Bayley. (Chelsea Green came after I'd all but stopped watching WWE but holy crap, she may just get me back into it.) When I was first trying to get the GC to dip a toe into wrestling, I plugged it as "a D&D superhero campaign with live acrobatics", and it is. Which is why this campaign in particular just works so well. Because, while some of the party members are new to D&D, they have definitely roleplayed fantasy characters with ideals, bonds, flaws, and defining personality traits in a longform improv storyline. It's incredibly funny, it's dramatic, it's more emotionally rewarding than it has any right to be, and I am very much looking forward to the final episode.

Video Games: I am very much into comfort food gaming as I wrap up my fourth week of being forced to work full time for free. And so it was that I got my hands on Suikoden I&II Remastered...

...and began a replay of Ultima IV, having ceded the console to the GC, who has never played any of the Suikodens before. ("Do you think I'd like them?" he asked. "As long as you realize going in that they are not BG, let alone BG3, yeah," I told him. And by and large, he has enjoyed them albeit with some--warranted--groaning at the most Extremely Retro elements. For my part, I have enjoyed watching him react to the game in real time, and yeah, these games still hold up.)

As does Ultima, once I'd gotten into the grove of replaying it. It still is one of the OGs of computer RPGing, and I have a renewed appreciation for how cleverly it's written given all the development constraints--graphics, sound, memory, distribution--in play when it came out. This is a game without a world map, let alone fast travel. I spawned as a mage and spent an exasperating three days grinding just to get off the island where mages spawn and to Castle Britannia so that I could get the gear, reagents, and party members necessary to get going on the actual Avatar quest. But I am well on my way now, although irritatingly grinding again along the coastline, waiting for a pirate ship to spawn so I can commandeer it and get to the other islands I need to visit. (There were a billion pirate ships when it was just me, with no spells, armor, or ranged weapon, and thus no hope of surviving an encounter with them. And now...nada. Go figure.)

これで以上です。