Chocolate Box Gift Exchange

Games: I am now the proud owner of Warhammer: Dawn of War Onslaught and Wyrmspan, and am going through the rulebooks ahead of playing them with Geek BBQers in the new year.

Music: Alas, I skipped both yesterday's pub session and today's house session to focus on end-of-year adulting, so didn't do much with music this week. Nor do I dare to practice at home, given how bone dry the apartment is.

Podcasts: N/A

Roleplaying: None this week, but ma soeur did get me a ridiculously funny D&D themed mug, which I have been enjoying with an obscene amount of tea.

Television: We wrapped of The American Revolution, which was excellent overall, as have been the conversations with the GC and other friends who've watched. It's amazing how differently this history--and various aspects of it--are or are not taught depending on what school district you grew up in.

We kicked off the weekend with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which was great fun to see in theaters and just as fun to watch at home. Doric and Holga are such great characters, as is Simon, but Xenk will always be my forever character from this movie.

The Fellowship of the Ring, which is a permanent winter movie for me (just as the book is a winter read). The characters look nothing like the characters in my head, but oh my god did Jackson get the look of the world down cold. And National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is one of those childhood movies that, like The Princess Bride, I could probably recite in real time.

The GC & I weren't planning on watching AEW: World's End this past Saturday, but then one of the Geek BBQers offered to host, and it turned out to be a really solid PPV with tons of good matches. I loved seeing Babes of Wrath and FTG get their wins; the Darby Allen/Gabe Kidd match was intense, Mox's storyline is coming out of the doldrums at last, and Joe, Swerve, and MJF are guaranteed fire whenever they're in the ring, let alone when they're in it together. It was a small watch group, only six people at its height, and one of them was a curiosity attendee who'd never watched wrestling before. But she is also a TRPGer and former gymnast who got it immediately, and it was a ton of fun watching her get into what AEW is about. On top of that, we got to commune with bonus cats.

The GC and I started Max Headroom: a rewatch for me and new show for the GC. Max Headroom is sadly, criminally, largely forgotten today...probably because of how freaking prescient it was. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely A Lot of vintage '80s elements in this series, but. This show really did predict the future in a lot of uncomfortable ways. Cambridge Analytica-style micro-segmenting of audiences? Yup. Novel digital technologies that literally kill people? Yup. Megacorporations covering it all up for profit? Yup.

"Wow," said the GC when we were about 15 minutes in, "this is just Cyberpunk 2077." And it is. "Wow," said the GC after Max Headroom made his first on-screen appearance, "that's just...Jim Carrey." And I'd never thought about it before, but he's right. Or more accurately, Jim Carrey stole his entire shtick from Matt Frewer's Headroom and no one acknowledges it. We started with the show (I can't find my copy of the movie) but we're already two episodes in and it still really holds up.

Video Games: It's been a bit of a rough week, so I've leaned heavily into two of my major comfort games: Botanicula and Thank Goodness You're Here. We also got--but have not started playing yet--Sea of Stars

これで以上です。